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Harvard scientists have created a biological machine in the lab that manufactures proteins, mimicking the activity of a cellular structure, called a ribosome, that is critical for life.
If it is verified by other scientists, the work by Harvard Medical School professor George Church would be an important step in the quest to create life from scratch.
"The reason it's a step toward artificial life is that the key component of all living systems - the one component that's basically shared by all living systems - is the ribosome," Church said in an interview Friday. "If you're going to make synthetic life that's anything like current life . . . you've got to have this highly conserved, highly complicated biological machine."
Church said he is still writing a manuscript to describe the results in a scientific journal, but that the experiment has been successfully repeated several times in his lab over the past few weeks. Publication in a journal ensures that research is properly vetted by independent scientists.
He was scheduled to describe the work to a gathering of Harvard...
If it is verified by other scientists, the work by Harvard Medical School professor George Church would be an important step in the quest to create life from scratch.
"The reason it's a step toward artificial life is that the key component of all living systems - the one component that's basically shared by all living systems - is the ribosome," Church said in an interview Friday. "If you're going to make synthetic life that's anything like current life . . . you've got to have this highly conserved, highly complicated biological machine."
Church said he is still writing a manuscript to describe the results in a scientific journal, but that the experiment has been successfully repeated several times in his lab over the past few weeks. Publication in a journal ensures that research is properly vetted by independent scientists.
He was scheduled to describe the work to a gathering of Harvard...