The BBC article 'Artificial life' comes step closer describes how scientists at the Rockefeller University have "created" a cell using soft cell walls made of fat molecules taken from egg white, while the cell contents are an extract of the common gut bug E. coli with its genetic material replaced. The cell fluid makes a flourescent kind of protein.

Ok, so here's a wild idea - would it be possible to make an artificial human organ comprising a collection of such artificial cells which could create the 20 amino acids? This would mean we could be less dependent on certain types of food sources which provide vitamins that are normally an essential part of our diet. This could in turn enable life in less habitable conditions (such as in a long running space mission) .

My wild ideas aside, it's clear that techniques like nano-needles make this kind of manipulation (or creation) of living cells easier, including the possibility to alter stem cells to control their function and operation as progenitor cells, allowing the creation of different kinds of specific cells.

All of this reminds me of Voltaire's comment: if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him; what (or perhaps who) will we be able to invent tomorrow?

Seth Godin has started a list of 1000 things everyone should know; item 26 is "How to read the media for spin and for insight"; after reading his other blog, I think Seth needs to read Michael Crichton's Caltech Michelin lecture again with this in mind.

In this lecture, Crichton critically attacks concepts such as the Drake Equation (a series of (mostly) unknowns which compute the likelihood of alien life) and Nuclear Winter (where a suspension of material in the atmosphere blocks light reaching the Earth's surface) as part of a litany of scientific "errors". But the punchline comes when Crichton finally talks about Global Warming, leaving the reader in no doubt that it will similarly be revealed as pseudo-science. However Crichton does not discuss any specific counter-evidence; he simply alludes to similarities in the growth of belief in global warming to that in the nuclear winter scenario. And when you view this part in the context of the lecture's title "Aliens Cause Global Warming", the whole thing comes across as a sponsored frame, and quite a good one at that.

Crichton ends the talk with a suggestion that scientists attempt to disprove scientific experiments or theories, in a manner which is similar to the practice of quality assurance in software development where engineers look for faults or flaws in software before it is released. This thought is so common-sensible (but so meaningless since for the most part this is already how scientists work) that I have to wonder why this kind of talk was permitted at Caltech. It's actually a shame that the practice of quality assurance does not apply to lectures by high profile authors of pseudo-scientific novels. Disclosure? Nope, zero cool.

Meanwhile the debate and analysis of global warming rages on, but it seems to me that only the pro-warming scientists offer credible evidence.