Science and Science Fiction: mutual influences until the 19th century

Illustration of the Sun article

In the early years of the 20th century there was a flood of titles that led to the recognition of a literary genre called science fiction.

In fact, science fiction novels, understood as works using science (especially future advances) as an essential element of the plot of a novel, are very old. Lucian of Samosata, a Syrian satirist from the 2nd century, is usually considered the creator of the genre. One of his works (Vera Historia) tells of a journey from Earth to the moon in a ship that, lifted by a waterspout, is launched into space. The moon is inhabited by an advanced civilization, which has crossed space and is at war with the inhabitants of the sun over a conflict of interest regarding the colonization of planet Venus. As he didn't know about the existence of interplanetary vacuum, Lucian never thinks of explaining how his characters could breathe during their trip.

Influence of aesthetic ideas in physics

The Birth of Venus by Botticelli

In a previous post I reviewed the new book in Spanish by Francisco José Soler Gil, entitled The enigma of the natural order. Its third chapter, whose title is Aesthetic ideas in physics, which reproduces a lecture given by the author at the Faculty of Chemistry of the University of Seville, has provided me with matter for this post in my blog.

The influence on physics of aesthetic ideas is very old, perhaps as old as physics. One of its oldest precursors is Pythagoras, who proposed the concept of the harmony of the celestial spheres, according to which the distances between the planets would reproduce harmonious musical intervals.

Synthetic life, is it possible?

Frankenstein's monster

In the previous two posts in this series we have seen that the generation of synthetic life in the laboratory is probably a process more difficult than some optimists imagine.

Let’s look at one of the latest experiments in synthetic biology: George Church and Nili Ostrov, Harvard biologists, are trying to build a strain of the bacterium Escherichia coli immune to all existing viruses. How? By changing its genetic code so that viruses do not understand it and cannot use the bacterial cellular machinery to reproduce. Since the genetic code is redundant, it is possible to replace one of the codons encoding the amino acid arginine (AGA) with another that also encodes the same amino acid (CGC), and all the genes of the bacterium would go on generating the same proteins. This would be done with several rare codons. But since viruses would continue to use the substituted codons, the bacterial cell machinery would no longer be able to understand the DNA of the virus. This part of the job is almost finished. When it is done, it would also be necessary to eliminate the transfer RNAs of the missing codons and ensure that they are not remanufactured, so that the cellular machinery can no longer use them.

Note that the work done so far is the manipulation of the data recorded in the DNA. It is equivalent to changing the information contained in the hard disk of a computer so that it stops using a certain instruction of the language of the machine, by replacing it with another equivalent instruction. We are still very far from synthetic biology in the strict sense. Will it be possible to synthesize life in the near future?