Monicks: Unleashed

Tag: news

  • Atheists can be ethical: Anglican archbishop

    Amanda O’Brien
    From: The Australian
    July 31, 2010 12:00AM

    PERTH Anglican Archbishop Roger Herft has clashed with his Catholic counterpart over Julia Gillard’s atheism.

    He warned it was “unhelpful and untrue” to suggest the Christian faith had a monopoly on moral integrity.

    The Anglican leader cautioned against making simplistic assessments of religious beliefs in an election context and said Ms Gillard had assured the electorate she would respect people with religious convictions.

    “Any statement which portrays the Christian faith as having some type of exclusivity to be the sole arbiter on matters of moral integrity and just policy-making are unhelpful and untrue,” Archbishop Herft told The Weekend Australian.

    “Christians need to remind themselves that those who do not profess the Christian faith are still capable of adopting an ethical and moral framework which assists in public policy decision-making for the common good.”

    The comments follow controversial statements this week by Perth Catholic Archbishop Barry Hickey, who suggested Ms Gillard’s atheism could cost her votes.

    The Catholic Church leader said he was not telling people not to vote for Ms Gillard, but some would wonder what the future held under an atheist and it might influence their votes.

    “Many Christians are concerned that someone who does not believe in God may not endorse the Christian traditions of respect for human life, for the sanctity of marriage and the independence of churches, church schools and church social welfare agencies,” Archbishop Hickey said. But Archbishop Herft — who believes election campaigns have become so vicious they may tarnish the nation’s soul — said believers and non-believers alike should be embraced by the church.

    He said politicians were influenced by a range of factors, both religious and secular, when making cabinet and parliamentary decisions, but they were drawn to the job out of a desire to serve the common good.

    “It is interesting that in the context of an election, those who profess a certain faith and, indeed, those who do not, have their beliefs assessed very simplistically as either a positive or negative influence based on the whim of the day or the policy area to which it is being applied,” he said.

    via theaustralian.com.au

  • Dr Craig Venter Announces First Synthetic Living Cell. Never did god look smaller and pettier.

    Can we say that we’re just a step away from disproving the existence of god? 

    The least we can say is that god and religion are getting smaller and pettier by the minute.

    [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoqBSNmYJYI&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0x006699&color2=0x54abd6&border=1]

    Dr Craig Venter, of the J Craig Venter Institute, explained how they created what he described as “the first species…. to have its parents be a computer”.

     

     

    Figure 1

    Man-made DNA has booted up a cell for the first time.

    In a feat that is the culmination of two and a half years of tests and adjustments, researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute inserted artificial genetic material — chemically printed, synthesized and assembled — into cells that were then able to grow naturally.

    “We all had a very good feeling that it was going to work this time,” said Venter Institute synthetic biologist Daniel Gibson, co-author of the study published May 20 in Science. “But we were cautiously optimistic because we had so many letdowns following the previous experiments.”

    On a Friday in March, scientists inserted over 1 million base pairs of synthetic DNA into Mycoplasma capricolum cells before leaving for the weekend. When they returned on Monday, their cells had bloomed into colonies.

     

    “When we look at life forms, we see fixed entities,” said J. Craig Venter, president of the Institute, in a recent podcast. “But this shows in fact how dynamic they are. They change from second to second. And that life is basically the result of an information process. Our genetic code is our software.”

    Coaxing the software to power a cell proved harder than expected.

    Figure 5 [Converted]

    After the Venter Institute announced in early 2008 that it had assembled a synthetic Mycoplasma genitalium genome, the assumption was that it would be running cells in no time. But this particular cell type, despite its minimal size, was not an ideal research partner. One problem was speed.

    “We had to deal with the fact that M. genitalium had an extremely slow growth rate,” Gibson said. “For every experiment that was done, it took more than a month to get results.”

    Moreover, transplanting the code into recipient cells was failing. So researchers cut their losses and called in a substitute, opting for the larger, speedier and less finicky Mycoplasma mycoides. The choice was a good one.

    “Over the last five years the field has seen a 100-fold increase in the length of genetic material wholly constructed from raw chemicals,” said synthetic biologist Drew Endy of Stanford University. “This is over six doublings in the max length of a genome that can be constructed.”

    Plunging costs of synthesis allowed a leap past the 1 million base-pair mark, from code to assembly. “Imagine doubling the diameter of a silicon wafer that can be manufactured that much, going from 1 cm to 1 meter [fabrications] in just five years,” Endy said. “That would have been an incredible achievement.”

    “They rebuilt a natural sequence and they put in some poetry,” said University of California at San Francisco synthetic biologist Chris Voigt. “They recreated some quotes in the genome sequence as watermarks.”

    It’s an impressive trick, no doubt, but replicating a natural genome with a little panache is also the limit of our present design capabilities.

    Researchers, for instance, figure yeast can handle the assembly of 2 million base pairs, but they’re not sure about more. And an energy-producing cyanobacteria that sequesters carbon, Gibson says, is still several years off.

    The ultimate goal, of course, is a brand-new genome from the ground up. Now, Voigt said, “what do you do with all that design capacity?”

    Images: 1) Schematic demonstrating the assembly of a synthetic M. mycoides genome in yeast./Science/AAAS. 2) Images of the phenotype of the JCVI-syn1.0 and WT strains./Science/AAAS.

    via wired.com

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