Defiant Rican

WASHINGTON (AP) — Around the world, a handful of scientists are trying to create life from scratch and they’re getting closer.

Experts expect an announcement within three to 10 years from someone in the now little-known field of “wet artificial life.”

“It’s going to be a big deal and everybody’s going to know about it,” said Mark Bedau, chief operating officer of ProtoLife of Venice, Italy, one of those in the race. “We’re talking about a technology that could change our world in pretty fundamental ways — in fact, in ways that are impossible to predict.”

That first cell of synthetic life — made from the basic chemicals in DNA — may not seem like much to non-scientists. For one thing, you’ll have to look in a microscope to see it.

“Creating protocells has the potential to shed new life on our place in the universe,” Bedau said. “This will remove one of the few fundamental mysteries about creation in the universe and our role.”

And several scientists believe man-made life forms will one day offer the potential for solving a variety of problems, from fighting diseases to locking up greenhouse gases to eating toxic waste.

Bedau figures there are three major hurdles to creating synthetic life:

# A container, or membrane, for the cell to keep bad molecules out, allow good ones, and the ability to multiply.

# A genetic system that controls the functions of the cell, enabling it to reproduce and mutate in response to environmental changes.

# A metabolism that extracts raw materials from the environment as food and then changes it into energy.

One of the leaders in the field, Jack Szostak at Harvard Medical School, predicts that within the next six months, scientists will report evidence that the first step — creating a cell membrane — is “not a big problem.” Scientists are using fatty acids in that effort.

Szostak is also optimistic about the next step — getting nucleotides, the building blocks of DNA, to form a working genetic system.

His idea is that once the container is made, if scientists add nucleotides in the right proportions, then Darwinian evolution could simply take over.

“We aren’t smart enough to design things, we just let evolution do the hard work and then we figure out what happened,” Szostak said.

In Gainesville, Florida, Steve Benner, a biological chemist at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution is attacking that problem by going outside of natural genetics. Normal DNA consists of four bases — adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine (known as A,C,G,T) — molecules that spell out the genetic code in pairs. Benner is trying to add eight new bases to the genetic alphabet.

Bedau said there are legitimate worries about creating life that could “run amok,” but there are ways of addressing it, and it will be a very long time before that is a problem.

“When these things are created, they’re going to be so weak, it’ll be a huge achievement if you can keep them alive for an hour in the lab,” he said. “But them getting out and taking over, never in our imagination could this happen.”

Afghan police freed a female German hostage in Kabul and arrested a group of kidnappers on early Monday, an Interior Ministry spokesman said.The 31-year old German captive Christina Meier was abducted from a restaurant on Saturday and the operation to free her took place near the area of western Kabul where she went missing.

Earlier, a video was broadcast by a local television station where she appeared on a video pleading for help.
She said “I am OK” and then read a letter in the Afghan language, Dari, calling for the release of unknown prisoners.

She was also prompted to make remarks both in English and in Dari by a man speaking in broken English.

A male voice off-camera prompts her to say, “to help” and tells her also to use the word “urgent.”

“Please help for my release, and help me,” she says.

“We are not bad people. We are a special network,” the man says at the end of the video. He does not identify the group or say whether it is linked to the Taliban or other insurgents operating in Afghanistan.

The TV station, which broadcast the video, did not say how it obtained the material. Germany’s Foreign Ministry declined to comment on the video.

Police earlier Sunday said that the Taliban militants were not responsible for the abduction of the woman, who was seized Saturday as she dined with her husband at a restaurant in Kabul.

The woman and her husband, also a German, have worked for the Christian organization Ora International in Kabul since September 2006, said Ulf Baumann, a spokesman for the group.Abduction fears have risen after 23 South Koreans and two Germans were taken hostage in separate incidents last month in central Afghanistan.

One of the German men was shot to death. The other remains in captivity.

Two of the South Koreans were shot to death, and two were freed. A Taliban spokesman said Saturday that negotiations for their release had failed.

Violence has risen sharply during the last two months in Afghanistan. This year more than 3,700 people - most of them militants - have died, according to an Associated Press tally of casualty figures provided by Western and Afghan officials.

Aug. 16 (Bloomberg) — A small South Carolina parts supplier collected about $20.5 million over six years from the Pentagon for fraudulent shipping costs, including $998,798 for sending two 19-cent washers to a Texas base, U.S. officials said.

The company also billed and was paid $455,009 to ship three machine screws costing $1.31 each to Marines in Habbaniyah, Iraq, and $293,451 to ship an 89-cent split washer to Patrick Air Force Base in Cape Canaveral, Florida, Pentagon records show.

The owners of C&D Distributors in Lexington, South Carolina — twin sisters — exploited a flaw in an automated Defense Department purchasing system: bills for shipping to combat areas or U.S. bases that were labeled “priority” were usually paid automatically, said Cynthia Stroot, a Pentagon investigator.

C&D’s fraudulent billing started in 2000, Stroot, the Defense Criminal Investigative Service’s chief agent in Raleigh, North Carolina, said in an interview. “As time went on they got more aggressive in the amounts they put in.”

The price the military paid for each item shipped rarely reached $100 and totaled just $68,000 over the six years in contrast to the $20.5 million paid for shipping, she said.

“The majority, if not all of these parts, were going to high-priority, conflict areas — that’s why they got paid,” Stroot said. If the item was earmarked “priority,” destined for the military in Iraq, Afghanistan or certain other locations, “there was no oversight.”

Scheme Detected

The scheme unraveled in September after a purchasing agent noticed a bill for shipping two more 19-cent washers: $969,000. That order was rejected and a review turned up the $998,798 payment earlier that month for shipping two 19-cent washers to Fort Bliss, Texas, Stroot said.

The Pentagon Defense Logistics Agency orders millions of parts a year. Stroot said the agency and the Defense Finance and Accounting Service, which pays contractors, have made major changes, including thorough evaluations of the priciest shipping charges.

Dawn Dearden, a spokeswoman for the logistics agency, said finance and procurement officials immediately examined all billing records. Stroot said the review showed that fraudulent billing is “is not a widespread problem.”

“C&D was a rogue contractor,” Stroot said. While other questionable billing has been uncovered, nothing came close to C&D’s, she said. The next-highest contractor billed $2 million in questionable transport costs, she said.

Guilty Pleas

C&D and two of its officials were barred in December from receiving federal contracts. A federal judge in Columbia, South Carolina, today accepted the guilty plea of the company and one sister, Charlene Corley, to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to launder money, Assistant U.S. Attorney Kevin McDonald said.

Corley, 46, was fined $750,000. She faces a maximum prison sentence of 20 years on each count and will be sentenced in the near future, McDonald said in a telephone interview from Columbia. Stroot said her sibling died last year.

Corley didn’t immediately return a phone message left on her answering machine at her office in Lexington. Her attorney, Gregory Harris, didn’t immediately return a phone call placed to his office in Columbia.

Stroot said the Pentagon hopes to recoup most of the $20.5 million by auctioning homes, beach property, jewelry and “high- end automobiles” that the sisters spent the money on.

“They took a lot of vacations,” she said.

You decide? My feeling is the latter because they are without a doubt business partners.

Credit to Cnn.com

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