Biotech is reaching a point where many philosophical ideas are coming into play. One important development is that scientists are taking baby steps (but giant leaps for mankind) at creating artificial organisms, ones where the genetic code is designed from the ground up, ala 'designer life'. This is different than just cross-breeding corn or gene-splicing bacteria. This is the production of an organism from scratch in terms of its genetic code, the result being whatever scientists want it to be, limited only by our understanding of the process.

Craig Venter, made famous for being the lead researcher for sequencing the human genome has been a very busy guy in this effort.

One of the most practical outcomes of this type of research might soon be algae/bacteria that can consume waste products (especially CO2) and produce fuel as waste. (This isn't really a philosophical stretch since coal and oil are probably ancient waste products of life).

Craig Venter is on the verge of creating synthetic life | Video on TED.com

(the whole talk is ~20 minutes and very interesting, he gets into the fuel portion of it at about 13 minutes).

Exxon is committed to investing as much as $600 Million into this fuel producing technology (which says its probably damn near being a very real thing).

'Green goo' biofuel gets a boost - CNN.com
Exxon, DNA pioneer join on algae biofuels - CNN.com

Algae derived biodiesel is the future of personal carbon neutral energy independence.

Though I'm pretty sure we can do it with existing algae strains.

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January 21, 2013: The End of an ERROR.

"Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters."
"When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic."
"The Constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself."
---Benjamin Franklin

The biggest national security risk we face today in my opinion is dependence on foreign oil. If we can return to our roots as an energy producer and exporter (we were a major oil exporter in 1941, for example, and cut off oil to Japan) I have no doubt that this country's best years are still to come. If we continue to let the Middle East bleed us dry then I worry for our future.

Hope Exxon makes it work, without government interference or subsidies.

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Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys. ---P. J. O'Rourke

Why no subsidies?

Andrew

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“...corporations and those who run them cannot stop exploiting resources and amassing wealth until they have... .I cannot finish this sentence, because the truth is that can never stop; like cancer, they can only continue to expand until they kill the host.”

-- Derrick Jensen

I don't believe in Corporate welfare. If it's economically viable it won't need government interference.

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Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys. ---P. J. O'Rourke

this will never work out because science is wrong 99.9% of the time.

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"My country is the world, and my religion is to do good." --Thomas Paine

But, Exxon is right at least 50% of the time.

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Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys. ---P. J. O'Rourke

When I think about the amount of methane that my body produces, this doesn't seem like a stretch at all.

What?

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The intellectual journey that had began with Copernicus displacing humans from the centre of the Universe and continued with Darwin’s insistence that humans are merely modified monkeys has finally focused in on the very essence of life. And there was nothing special about it. The double helix is an elegant structure, but its message is downright prosaic: life is simply a matter of chemistry.
- James Watson

This scares the crap out of me. The "establishment" can not be trusted with creating life. Heck, they can't even transplant life already here without screwing everything up. If experiments like this continue and they will, eventually something will be created which will go out of control. Man made seaweed is devastating many sea beds. This seaweed was designed for aquariums, but has been released over the years all over the world. It has a strong foothold in parts of the Mediteranean.

ADELAIDE (Reuters) - An Australian state declared war on Wednesday on a mutant seaweed it said had the potential to wreak economic and environmental havoc and which has also infested the Mediterranean and California.

Australian State Declares War on Mutant Seaweed - The Reef Tank

There ARE MANY EXAMPLES OF ORGANIZATIONS/GOVERNMENT transporting a species to help solve a problem, only to have the transplanted species become a bigger problem that the one they were originally trying to solve. This has happened numerous times.

This was beautiful, thanks. Putting together components at will into microorganisms is something I pictured to lie far into the future. The rate of development is incredible. Eukaryotes are a different matter, of course, and I'm guessing producing viable organisms with larger genomes, with the tight regulation this requires, will be a great challenge. I wonder if they will ever be able to create organisms with chromosome base par numbers in the millions, considering how perfectly balanced it all is, especially with regards to introns. The genome is much more than coding sequences.

I guess we'll see. This alone is a lot to get my head around.

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The intellectual journey that had began with Copernicus displacing humans from the centre of the Universe and continued with Darwin’s insistence that humans are merely modified monkeys has finally focused in on the very essence of life. And there was nothing special about it. The double helix is an elegant structure, but its message is downright prosaic: life is simply a matter of chemistry.
- James Watson

I agree.

Andrew

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“...corporations and those who run them cannot stop exploiting resources and amassing wealth until they have... .I cannot finish this sentence, because the truth is that can never stop; like cancer, they can only continue to expand until they kill the host.”

-- Derrick Jensen

I'm betting the holy rollers will have a problem with this.


Oh.....and the Oil industry. :-)

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The world could use more Stan Ovshinsky's

Well, I'm a right wing Christian and an Exxon stockholder. So, exactly why should I have a problem with it?

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Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys. ---P. J. O'Rourke