Reproduction - Life Without Reproduction

Life Without Reproduction

The existence of life without reproduction is the subject of some speculation. The biological study of how the origin of life led from non-reproducing elements to reproducing organisms is called abiogenesis. Whether or not there were several independent abiogenetic events, biologists believe that the last universal ancestor to all present life on earth lived about 3.5 billion years ago.

Today, some scientists have speculated about the possibility of creating life non-reproductively in the laboratory. Several scientists have succeeded in producing simple viruses from entirely non-living materials. The virus is often regarded as not alive. Being nothing more than a bit of RNA or DNA in a protein capsule, they have no metabolism and can only replicate with the assistance of a hijacked cell's metabolic machinery.

The production of a truly living organism (e.g., a simple bacterium) with no ancestors would be a much more complex task, but may well be possible according to current biological knowledge. A synthetic genome has been transferred into an existing bacterium where it replaced the native DNA, resulting in the artificial production of a new M. mycoides organism.

Read more about this topic:  Reproduction

Famous quotes containing the words life and/or reproduction:

    I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched seabeams glitter in the dark near the Tennhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain. Time to die.
    David Webb Peoples, U.S. screenwriter, and Ridley Scott. Roy Batty, Blade Runner, final words before dying—as an android he had a built-in life span that expired (1982)

    The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.
    Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)