Hacker News Reader

Comment by gardenfelder | Hacker News Reader

This really is pretty amazing work. But, to the uninitiated, there's a dark side; I overheard someone commenting about an earlier post about this experiment, thinking it's possible to get out a chemistry set and just make a living thing. To be clear, they started with stem cells, and teased them into doing the right thing - they did not create a new living artifact from scratch;

> Instead, they used stem cells - the body’s master cells, which can develop into almost any cell type - and then mimicked natural processes in the lab.

View on HN

Well, to quote Carl Sagan, if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

I doubt human technology will be able to create life from organic molecules for at least several decades if not centuries.

What a great quote!

And to think he was just trying to convince a kernel developer that it would be fine to use JS, just this one time, for a simple UI he needed.

Here is a auto-tuned song of Carl Sagan [1] saying that quote so that others may have it stuck in their heads and to share the full quote.

[1] - https://amorningfilledwith400billionsuns.ytmnd.com/

Thanks for taking me back to 2009* (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSgiXGELjbc)

We already can...?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_biology

I think syntactic biology is still very far from creating lifeforms from atomic or molecular precursors.

Xenobots, for example are made using harvested stem cells

Depends on what you mean by "can". From the Wikipedia article:

"A living "artificial cell" has been defined as a completely synthetic cell that can capture energy, maintain ion gradients, contain macromolecules as well as store information and have the ability to mutate. Nobody has been able to create such a cell."

Completely synthetic, no, but I think that overlooks a lot.

> to the uninitiated, there's a dark side

to the initiated I wish there was a dark side!

> they did not create a new living artifact from scratch

that is where this is headed, that is where they want to go, that is not what they've done... till they do it. That is the dark side. Humans in a competition with one another are not capable in a broad sense of reining in every worst impulse, as we saw with recent "gain of function" experiments.

Why is that the dark side?

Not sure why the parent thinks so, but my only concern is with new lifeforms.

We constantly mess up the ecosystem, merely by introducing existing species into environments which cannot handle them.

Soon we will be able to engineer exotic forms of life, yet we cannot currently control, reign in, or manage current, naturly evolved forms of life.

For example, we have to spray deadly chemicals on crops, to kill fungus, bacteria, etc. Of we have a pest problem, we have to entice them to eat poison, or trick them into traps.

Our control of existing orgamisims is essentially non-existent. The above methods just reduce population, often very ineffectively.

This means that almost certainly, when things we create end up free, we will be incapable of removing them from the ecosystem.

We could literally destroy the biosphere more readily than nukes, or global warming ever could.

And things will get free.

aside from bad actors, i think that safe guards could prove effective.

synthetic organisms would have no natural predators, but the would also have no natural defenses. we could make them without an immune system or make it depend on a molecule that does not exist in the wild. so they would quickly die out.

Yet if wrong, what then? What if it is a mold or fungus which eats crops, yet was designed to be resilient? And cannot be killed without killing the plant?

Now you have a year or two, as it spreads, until starvarion causes total societal collapes, wars, dead, destruction.

And meanwhile all grasses around the world die, photosynthesis drops, animals, insects, and plants are dying off.

The problem is, any solution which hopes to contain, can mutate out. Cross-species genetic transfer is a thing. Mutation is a thing.

Expecting what you make, as a biological organism, to work as you wish is... not sensible.

Compared to programming languages, biological processes allow for change. Yet we can barely make secure code, and are endlessly surprised at our own lack fo security, and bugs, and issues in code due to unforeseen circumstances.

If you came to me and said you can make perfect code, make it secure, and bug free, I'd laugh and laugh until I wondered if I should fire you for incompetence.

And working with genetics, and with entirely new orgamisims, is more complex that the largest of codebases.

And at release, into the wild, there aee no issue trackers, no patches, no fixes.

It's shipped and gone.

To me, your comment highlights how unready we are.

> And at release, into the wild, there are no issue trackers, no patches, no fixes. It's shipped and gone.

Very much this.

What is a "gain of function" experiment?

This 2015 article (and its more recent discussions due to relevance) provides background on the topic and its controversial nature: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28582500

https://usrtk.org/biohazards/origin-of-sars-cov-2-gain-of-fu...

https://thebulletin.org/2021/08/covid-19-lab-leak-theory-gai...

Selective breeding/reproduction/engineering combined with evolutionary pressure in order to guide a genetic lineage in a particular direction. In the example of disease, say you wanted to make a human virus be able to infect mice.

You keep releasing a human rhinovirus into a cage with "humanized mice" (mice genetically altered to have specific receptors in common with humans). There is strong evolutionary pressure in this environment for the virus to evolve to infect these mice. A viral variant eventually catches on and begins infecting the humanized mice. Then you take that viral strain and start exposing normal mice. Now there is an evolutionary pressure for the virus to be able to infect those mice. This virus will have essentially "gained that function."

Or, you know, the bomb.

Wouldn’t the living artifact that results from this embryo just be horribly incompatible with life and die quickly or at best live for a brief time before expiring?

Possibly? I expect we'll figure out how to do this with a high chance of success within the next few decades if not sooner, unless for some reason every country capable of supporting the research bans it.

Human cloning research has similarly been banned, and quite successfully, hasn't it?

What's the point in cloning people? I'm pretty clueless about biology, but as I understand it the process to generate new semi-randomized humans using a woman is fairly well understood and straightforward

> What's the point in cloning people?

Medical treatment (availability of 100% immune-compatible spare parts) and in a possible future, life extension.

I suspect we will find out at some point in the next 25 to 50 years. Somebody, somewhere, is going to give it a good try. As in not stop at just the embryo stage, but make fully functional living beings, regardless of whatever laws exist.

The ramifications of "synthetic life", will sure to be staggering. This was covered a bit in the Blade Runner Sci-Fi, but what real Replicants would be like and what they will do with them, might be wilder than we could imagine.

> Somebody, somewhere, is going to give it a good try.

People always say this, and yet the universal ban on human cloning has, at least so far, held strong and prevented further research more or less entirely.

Primates have been cloned [1], human embryos have been cloned (supposedly) [2], and there are confirmed gene edited babies [3]. But, I doubt the existence of a ban means humans haven't been cloned, because I have trouble believing that a group that would successfully clone a human would be dumb enough to tell the world, state sponsored or not.

1. https://www.science.org/content/article/these-monkey-twins-a...

2. http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2009-02/04/content_7443166...

3. https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/11/08/cloning-crispr-he-jiank...

Primates are not humans, cloning embryos for stem cell research is different from creating human clones, and the scientist who produced the two CRISPR-edited children went to jail, and he and his associates are banned for life from working in this type of research or even providing care in this area.

Aren't primates at least similar to humans? We're both mammals, have similar physical characteristiscs. Why shouldn't cloning people work?

I come from a law background so I am not familiar with the science. I've heard biological goods such as stem cells, eggs, spermia etc. are becoming very valuable and they are not very protected. I suppose underground groups could easily get they're hands on whatever they need. Securing illegal goods from a physician doing IVF on humans could be all they need.

> Primates are not humans

Those specific primates weren't human, but humans are primates [1].

Here's a quote from the Boyalife CEO, before the ban in China [2]:

> The technology is already there," Xu said. "If this is allowed, I don't think there are other companies better than Boyalife that make better technology."

> The firm does not currently engage in human cloning activities, Xu said, adding that it has to be "self-restrained" because of possible adverse reaction.

I don't believe laws have the ability to stop greed, or the desire for longevity (organs [3] without lifelong immunosuppressant therapy is very appealing). They just add a risk factor. This is why criminals still exist in the world.

1. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-are-humans...

2.https://www.mtv.com/news/43bwd7/chinese-scientist-clone-huma...

3. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/china-forcefully-harvests...

We shall see, but illegal research is not the same as other types of crimes - it requires vastly more resources and people, and it may not pay for a long time.

Now, if animal cloning becomes commonplace, I do believe it will be way easier for someone to sneak in human cloning alongside it.

> illegal research is not the same as other types of crimes - it requires vastly more resources and people, and it may not pay for a long time.

This is my point, and exactly why I don’t think we would know if it were happening right now.

I think this is only true because people don't know how/the tools have been restricted/the freedom not given to people

I think what the above person is saying is that one day, even if people try to restrict the ability, technology will advance to a point where anybody will be able to do it.

What do we do then?

The point of banning research is exactly to prevent this eventuality. Technology doesn't advance by itself: someone has to be actively advancing it.

Technology does advance regardless of your ability to ban it, because bans only form a system that locally restricts research- but globally, research will march forward somewhere. Banning research on a topic is fundamentally like burning books- but enforcing some consistent concept of ethics within a field of research is critical.

Again, you claim that, but evidence shows that banning research on human cloning has indeed stopped it from happening, even though a sheep was successfully cloned almost 30 years ago (and the technology is not significantly different).

Why would we abuse them? We treat disabled people OK, don't we? What exactly is your fear? Some kind of prejudice against people who were born through different procedures? We already have test tube babies walking among us and nobody mistreats them.

"testube babies" have parents. These will have owners. I think it's a valid fear that once someone is able to create living things out of nothing, they'll treat them as products and tools We already do it with animals....

Oh and of course patent it. And build in copy protection meassures, meaning someone cloning your "tools" would result in not working products, aka death or disabled

There is a book by Ned and Constance Sublette called "The American Slave Coast" that goes deep into detail how slavery worked in USA. It was essentially same as what you're saying, slaves were considered a self-replicating financial product and a tool for work

Who says they'll be property and not have the same rights as normal people? Slavery was banned. If this becomes so objectionable, it'll be banned too. Why are all you people assuming laws and civilization will stop existing in the future? Are you afraid that future people might not share your current political views? Get over yourself and let them have their own sovereignty and vote for what they want.

That's the best case, even though "not abusing them" is a low hurdle.

Such life would not be limited to human forms.

Even with just human forms, if you're going to all the trouble to engineer custom life, why make that life anything other than your idea of perfect? I don't know for sure, but I suspect that a predisposition to obedience to authority figures may be engineered; some would want that in their own children, others in what may be de jure servants and de facto slaves.

Last I checked — a few years ago, and this is a fast moving field — we can't currently 3D print large complex living structures, only simple and small because of the oxygen diffusion limit; if we can engineer around that, even if you still needed to replace the brain with a computer and nerves with metal, you can have a "real life centaur ride" or dragon drones.

If you do that but deliberately replace the brain and nerves with electrical equivalents, you have remote controllable meat[0] puppets making bodyguards redundant (the person being protected can just be remote); making worthless eye witness accounts, DNA tests, and fingerprints; and what happened with DeepFake porn then happens IRL with sex workers puppeting everyone and everything from Addams Family's Thing to Westworld LARP.

The landscape of possibilities and preferences for these things may be radically altered by other related tech. For example, skin samples can be grown in vitro and transplanted back to a human (IIRC this is already done for severe burns victims), combine with suitable GM (IDK, spider silk perhaps?) and someone could become naturally bullet resistant, radically changing not only the nature of bodyguarding but also soldiering.

[0] well, not necessarily meat, it might be made from GM fungus cells or plant cells, but it could be made to look arbitrarily close to or far from any of those things

I think most people don't truly grasp how much this will change the world. IMO the advances in Synbio will be vastly more influential than the advances in AI (though AI is utilized heavily for the former)

Both are too large in scope to really grasp. One has the power to make us all permanently redundant and unable to tell fact from fantasy[0] by being too good a story teller, the other can make them indistinguishable by making the fantasies[0] real.

[0] In the broadest sense that also includes nightmares

> I suspect that a predisposition to obedience to authority figures may be engineered; some would want that in their own children, others in what may be de jure servants and de facto slaves

I'm working on a novel about this (but with a twist). I think this is exactly what's going to happen.

None of that sounds like a disaster. What's wrong with a defacto slave enjoying their life doing what makes them most satisfied? Doesn't seem all that different from a normal human who works for pleasure, or even an artist who may work without pay but only for personal satisfaction.

You seem to be forgetting that people will get things banned if they're obviously bad. If simulating another person becomes a problem, we'll just write a law for that, same as we already do for fraud. You can sign somebody else's name on a document, you know! s How do banks survive the onslaught of fraud! /s

> What's wrong with a defacto slave enjoying their life doing what makes them most satisfied?

Creating such a being in the first place when one could've been a better small-g god.

Now this may just be naturalism bias on my part, a large number of people are a lot more comfortable with a thing if it's natural rather than the same thing artificial.

> You seem to be forgetting that people will get things banned if they're obviously bad.

The American Civil War was fought over a disagreement about what the north and south thought was obvious.

> How do banks survive the onslaught of fraud!

More than just laws punishing those who do it. Sarcasm aside, a better question might be, how does the USA stop hackers from all over the world from breaking into USA hospitals, encrypting all the documents, and getting hard to trace ransom money in return for the decryption keys?

Nonsense. Farm animals are unnaturally bred and essentially slaves. We somehow have them. Are you opposed to their existence too?

Yes, people have disagreed about slavery and farm/working animals and all those grey areas of animal and human rights. But it's arrogant of you to take your personal opinion and try to impose it on an entirely different society with creatures that you know nothing about "just in case" the members of that society happen to be morally wrong by your standard. Let them make up their own mind just as we make up our own minds today. They'll be in a much better position to do so.

> Farm animals are unnaturally bred and essentially slaves. We somehow have them. Are you opposed to their existence too?

Yes, absolutely.

As virtually every situation where a human is treated as an animal is seen as abhorrent, so by symmetry I expect most animals in contact with humans to be miserable most of the time.

The only reason I am not going to go as far as to claim the meat industry is multiplicatively worse than literal Auschwitz by the degree to which literal Auschwitz is worse than a single homicide is that I am uncertain how much to value the life and suffering of non-humans.

> But it's arrogant of you to take your personal opinion and try to impose it on an entirely different society with creatures that you know nothing about "just in case" the members of that society happen to be morally wrong by your standard.

Good thing you're putting words in my mouth then.

From my POV, this thread, from root, can be summarised thusly:

"Amazing, but there is a dark side" "Don't they die really fast?" "Give it 25-50 years, and think of Blade Runner."

Then you: "Why would we abuse them", me: "<a list of things that can go wrong, or just plain weird>", you: "What's wrong with a defacto slave enjoying their life doing what makes them most satisfied?"

(As an aside: that's already abuse, so you apparently defending it, even if that wasn't your intent, should demonstrate why we may end up being awful to such life).

Me: "because we've had wars about this kind of thing where both sides thought they were right", you: "nonsense!" followed by projecting that I have (or think I have) any capacity for imposing my personal opinion as a future moral code — I clearly can't even do that imposition today with regard to meat.

In fact, it's even worse than that, because while I would support the outlawing of meat, leather, and even dairy (as they exist today, but I expect all to be vat grown by 2030 and that's fine), I don't have the strength of will to avoid cheese, and that's a failure to impose my own morality on the inside of my own head.

If you declare just about everything to be a disaster then, yea, I agree the future will probably be full of disasters. But Blade Runner iirc is about people who seem normal but have some "bad" origin which makes them eligible for abusive treatment. We wouldn't do that today any worse than we already do, of course with foreigners/etc. but I'm assuming the doomsayers are worried about something worse than what we already widely do and accept.

> (As an aside: that's already abuse, so you apparently defending it, even if that wasn't your intent, should demonstrate why we may end up being awful to such life).

I gave the example of an artist who works for personal satisfaction. You call that abuse to have allowed that person to be born? I don't. If someone is intrinsically motivated to be a slave, then being a slave may not only be the best possible life them but could even be better than the life of a normal free person. If it's actually abusive like using human slaves, then people will see than just as we can see that today.

>We treat disabled people OK, don't we?

Who are we? Disabled people treated differently in different places. In many places you'd prefer death most likely.

Brave New World gets into this a bit as well.

What do you think is going to happen?

Ok, we've put stem cells up there too. Thanks!

Now the title is arguably confusing and significantly different from that of the original linked article. It seems unnecessary to mangle the title to that extent, to create a wider difference.

It's standard for users to clamor for changes to misleading titles, and standard for moderators to accede to the clamoring. We do that because otherwise the thread fills up with ever more complaints about the title.

The OP is a press release and such titles are usually overstated and need to be changed anyhow. This is in the site guidelines: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait" (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). This one seems designed to aggrandize the study (as well a press release should, I suppose), so the complaining commenters had a point or two.

Understand, as the various situations are complex. Thanks for the explanation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com