Synthetic Life
We are approaching a stage where synthetic life is within our reach, or at least a profound comprehension of the fundamental principles underlying life.
Considering the extensive time and effort invested in observing and studying biology and life forms since millennia, one might assume that we possess a comprehensive understanding of how life operates. However, this assumption is remarkably far from reality. We still don’t even understand the mechanisms by which a developing fetus is not rejected by the mother's immune system despite immunological differences !
Still, looks like we’re getting close. Here are some cool development in the field
- We can now create “simple” but viable cells (bacteria) with synthetic genomes (see here)
- People created a framework to recreate biological neural networks in silico called **NeuroML.** Some other folks modeled a “simple” worm’s (C. elegans) entire nervous system, and then they modeled its body and made it all open source (See project OpenWorm, here’s the code, it’s dockerized so it’s quite simple to run it yourself)
