Scientists said Thursday that they had trained a bacterium to eat and grow on a diet of arsenic, in place of phosphorus ”” one of six elements considered essential for life ”” opening up the possibility that organisms could exist elsewhere in the universe or even here on Earth using biochemical powers we have not yet dared to dream about.
The bacterium, scraped from the bottom of Mono Lake in California and grown for months in a lab mixture containing arsenic, gradually swapped out atoms of phosphorus in its little body for atoms of arsenic.
Scientists said the results, if confirmed, would expand the notion of what life could be and where it could be. “There is basic mystery, when you look at life,” said Dimitar Sasselov, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and director of an institute on the origins of life there, who was not involved in the work. “Nature only uses a restrictive set of molecules and chemical reactions out of many thousands available. This is our first glimmer that maybe there are other options.”
Felisa Wolfe-Simon, a NASA astrobiology fellow at the United States Geological Survey in Menlo Park, Calif., who led the experiment, said, “This is a microbe that has solved the problem of how to live in a different way.”
This microbe might be handy for helping to clean up polluted waterways – but it should be tightly controlled, in order to avoid it being released into the environment and creating a new menace.
Um, suppose we fed it a high TEC diet. Would it become a new thang?
Larry
This simply cannot be true. Scripture makes no mention of the creation of such creatures so they don’t exist. If one truth slips then the whole edifice falls.
There is literalism and then there is fundementalism. The two are different.
For those who find the theories of science threatening, I recommend
“Genesis and the Big Bang; The Discovery of Harmony Between Modern Science and the Bible” by Gerald L. Schroeder, Ph.D.,ISBN 0-553-35413-2.
I find it interesting that the researchers “trained” these microbes to use arsenic, and then concluded that it was possible for life-forms to evolve using a different set of essential elements.
Don’t they recognize that they were designers?
Scientists are unable to grasp your point, #5, but it is nonetheless sound. Is life a result of intelligent design? How can one not reach so obvious a conclusion. If we can do such things, can one argue backward from the result to the cause? Larry
I wonder if the point isn’t that this didn’t happen “naturally” and so raises very real questions about the claims being made for its implications. If it takes human engineering to force feed these little critters til they adapt, why would that have any valid implications at all for natural evolutionary patterns? “We made it happen” does not mean “so it could happen naturally.” When did they stop teaching logic?