In principle it is possible. Life doesn’t contain some divine or intrinsically spiritual element that we would have to add to our artificial organism potion to breathe life into it. At this moment we are limited by gaps in our knowledge and by the current state of technology.
We first have to better understand fundamental principles of life on a multi-level scale: from quantum mechanics, through biochemistry, structural biology, molecular evolution, to macroscopic function and behavior on the organism level. This, together with development of enabling technologies, will require decades of research but some steps have already been taken.
One of the promising approaches is re-writing, as exemplified in this work:
We redesign the genome of a natural biological system, bacteriophage T7, in order to specify an engineered surrogate that, if viable, would be easier to study and extend. (...) The resulting chimeric genome encodes a viable bacteriophage that appears to maintain key features of the original while being simpler to model and easier to manipulate. The viability of our initial design suggests that the genomes encoding natural biological systems can be systematically redesigned and built anew in service of scientific understanding or human intention.
or a minimal cell synthesis project:
Construction of a chemical system capable of replication and evolution, fed only by small molecule nutrients, is now conceivable. This could be achieved by stepwise integration of decades of work on the reconstitution of DNA, RNA and protein syntheses from pure components. (...) Completion would yield a functionally and structurally understood self-replicating biosystem. (...) Our proposed minimal genome is 113 kbp long and contains 151 genes. We detail building blocks already in place and major hurdles to overcome for completion.
So, technically it’s very difficult but definitely can be done, which is really exciting.
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