Artificial life: The noble vision of the scientists

Q: Scientists are trying to create artificial life. But can it be useful in any way?

Krishna: That depends on the person creating it and the person using it. I  told this long back by creating an art work. So first let me tell about my art work "THE CHOICE IS YOURS".

Art work by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa

http://www.kkartfromscience.com

Explanation: Some people complain that science also brings with it a few bad things like commercial GM crops, nuclear bombs etc. along with the good it does to the mankind. But according to the scientific community – science is like a knife. A knife can be used to cut throats and spill blood. It can also be used for good purposes like cutting fruits and vegetables. It depends on the person who uses it. Likewise science (represented by a test tube in the painting) can also be used for the benefit of living beings as well as for their destruction. Which way it goes is in the hands of the person who uses it. The choice is definitely yours, Homo sapiens.

Artificial life (often abbreviated ALife or A-Life) is a field of study wherein researchers examine systems related to natural life, its processes, and its evolution, through the use of simulations with computer models, robotics and biochemistry.

Artificial life studies the fundamental processes of living systems  in artificial environments in order to gain a deeper understanding of the complex information processing that define such systems. These topics are broad, but often include evolutionary dynamics, emergent properties of dynamic systems, biomimicry, as well as related issues about the philosophy of nature of life and the use of lifelike properties in artistic works (4).

The concept of artificial life can take different meanings. In its current usage, the term artificial life (ALife) was coined in the late 1980s by Langton (5), who originally defined it as “life made by man rather than by nature,” i.e., it is the study of man-made systems that exhibit behaviours characteristic of natural living systems. However, with time, Langton found fundamental problems with this definition, and redefined it as “the study of natural life, where nature is understood to include rather than to exclude, human beings and their artifacts” (5). He stated that human beings, and all that they do, are part of nature, and as such, a major goal of ALife should be to work toward removing “artificial life” as a phrase that differs in meaning in any fundamental way from the term “biology.” Indeed, it is now quite common for biologists to use computational models, which would have been considered as ALife 20 years ago, but now they are part of mainstream biology.

Anyway, the term mainly depends on the context. 

What role should artificial life play in our environment here on Earth, where all life forms are created by nature and have their own place and purpose?

Some scientists are thinking to use the artificial life forms as medicine! How?

 For instance, associate professor Chenguang Lou from the Department of Physics, Chemistry, and Pharmacy, University of Southern Denmark, together with Professor Hanbin Mao from Kent State University, is the parent of a special artificial hybrid molecule that could lead to the creation of artificial life forms. They have published a review (3) in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science on the state of research in the field behind their creation. The field is called "hybrid peptide-DNA nanostructures," and it is an emerging field, less than 10 years old.

Their vision is to create viral vaccines (modified and weakened versions of a virus) and artificial life forms that can be used for diagnosing and treating diseases. Their thinking process is like this: In nature, most organisms have natural enemies, but some do not. For example, some disease-causing viruses have no natural enemy. It would be a logical step to create an artificial life form that could become an enemy to them!

Isn't that a wonderful idea?

Similarly, they also envision such artificial life forms can act as vaccines against viral infection and can be used as nanorobots or nanomachines loaded with medication or diagnostic elements and sent into a patient's body. They think that an artificial viral vaccine may be about 10 years away. An artificial cell, on the other hand, is on the horizon because it consists of many elements that need to be controlled before we can start building with them. But with the knowledge we have, there is, in principle, no hindrance to produce artificial cellular organisms in the future.

What are the building blocks these scientists working in  this field will use to create viral vaccines and artificial life? DNA and peptides are some of the most important biomolecules in nature, making DNA technology and peptide technology the two most powerful molecular tools in the nanotechnological toolkit today.

DNA technology provides precise control over programming, from the atomic level to the macro level, but it can only provide limited chemical functions since it only has four bases: A, C, G, and T. Peptide technology, on the other hand, can provide sufficient chemical functions on a large scale, as there are 20 amino acids to work with. Nature uses both DNA and peptides to build various protein factories found in cells, allowing them to evolve into organisms.

Recently, Hanbin Mao and Chenguang Lou have succeeded in linking designed three-stranded DNA structures with three-stranded peptide structures, thus creating an artificial hybrid molecule that combines the strengths of both. This work was published in Nature Communications in 2022 (1).

Other researchers are also working on connecting DNA and peptides because this connection forms a strong foundation for the development of more advanced biological entities and life forms.

At Oxford University, researchers have succeeded in building a nanomachine made of DNA and peptides that can drill through a cell membrane, creating an artificial membrane channel through which small molecules can pass.

At Arizona State University, Nicholas Stephanopoulos and colleagues have enabled DNA and peptides to self-assemble into 2D and 3D structures.

At Northwest University, researchers have shown (2)  that microfibers can form in conjunction with DNA and peptides self-assembling. DNA and peptides operate at the nano level, so when considering the size differences, microfibers are huge.

At Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, scientists have used hybrid molecules to create an onion-like spherical structure containing cancer medication, which holds promise to be used in the body to target cancerous tumours.

 The overall value of all these efforts is that they can be used to improve society's ability to diagnose and treat sick people. 

The vision of all these scientists working the field: One day we can arbitrarily create hybrid nanomachines, viral vaccines and even artificial life forms from these building blocks to help the society to combat those difficult-to-cure diseases. It would be a revolution in health care.

Their intension is extremely good. Let us hope that they will succeed. 

Footnotes:

1. Chirality transmission in macromolecular domains, Nature Communications (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-27708-4

2. Ronit Freeman et al. Reversible self-assembly of superstructured networks, Science (2018). DOI: 10.1126/science.aat6141

3. Peptide-DNA conjugates as building blocks for de novo design of hybrid nanostructures, Cell Reports Physical Science (2023).

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_life#:~:text=Artificial%20....

5. Langton, C. G. (ed.) (1989). Artificial Life: Proceedings of an Interdisciplinary Workshop on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems. Los Alamos: Addison-Wesley. Complex Adaptive Systems.