A team of biologists and chemists is closing in on bringing non-living matter to life, moving a step closer to attempts to create life. Sourya Biswas reports

Modern science has helped man build many things, but one creation still remains elusive to his hands -- the magic of creating life. But not for long, if latest scientific reports are to be believed. A team of biologists and chemists is closing in on bringing non-living matter to life, moving a step closer to attempts to create life.

Of course, life in this case does not refer to a prancing, breathing organism, but rather a simple, single-celled organism that's capable of evolving and reproducing itself. Considering that evolution and reproduction are two of the characteristic features of any life form, these efforts, if successful, may be considered to have reached that remarkable milestone.

A team led by Jack Szostak, an artificial life investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, has taken several important steps towards realising that magic moment. In June, Szostak announced that his laboratory had constructed a model "protocell," a synthetic membrane enclosing a copy of an existing strand of genetic material. His team now is trying to synthesize the other half of the puzzle: some form of artificial DNA.

Szostak's protocells are built from fatty molecules that can trap bits of nucleic acids that contain the source code for replication. Combined with a process that harnesses external energy from the sun or chemical reactions, they could form a self-replicating, evolving system that satisfies the conditions of life, but isn't anything like life on earth now, but might represent life as it began or could exist elsewhere in the universe.

While his latest work remains unpublished, Szostak described preliminary new success in getting protocells with genetic information inside them to replicate at the XV International Conference on the Origin of Life in Florence, Italy, last week. The replication isn't wholly autonomous, so it's not quite artificial life yet, but it is as close as anyone has ever come to turning chemicals into biological organisms.

Although Szostak claims to have made considerable progress in copying limited gene sequences, he is quite candid about the present limitations of his work in copying arbitrary gene sequences. However, he is also optimistic that a synthetic cell will be created within a decade.

By doing "something useful" for the cell, these genes would launch the new form of life down the Darwinian evolutionary path similar to the one that our oldest living ancestors must have traveled. Though where selective pressure will lead the new form of life is impossible to know.

Sheref Mansy, a former member of Szostak's lab and now a chemist at Denver University, said that the team is in search of a ''replicating environment'', after which they hope to experimentally determine what can evolve under those conditions.

Protocellular work is even more radical than the other field trying to create artificial life: synthetic biology. Even J Craig Venter's work to build an artificial bacterium with the smallest number of genes necessary to live takes current life forms as a template. Protocell researchers are trying to design a completely novel form of life that humans have never seen and that may never have existed.

Over the summer, Szostak's team published major papers in the journals Nature and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that go a long way towards showing that this isn't just an idea and that his lab will be the first to create artificial life - and that it will happen soon. But while many scientists agree the protocell work is impressive, not every scientist is convinced that it contributes to a reasonable explanation for the origin of life.

What most researchers agree on is that the very first functioning life would have had three basic components: a container, a way to harvest energy and an information carrier like ribonucleic acid (RNA) or another nucleic acid.

Szostak's earlier work has shown that the container probably took the form of a layer of fatty acids that could self-assemble based on their reaction to water. One tip of the acid is hydrophilic, meaning it's attracted to water, while the other tip is hydrophobic. When researchers put a lot of these molecules together, they circle the wagons against the water and create a closed loop.

These membranes, with the right mix of chemicals, can allow nucleic acids in under some conditions and keep them trapped inside in others. That opens the possibility that one day, in the distant past, a RNA-like molecule wandered into a fatty acid and started replicating. That random event, through billions of evolutionary iterations, researchers believe, created life as we know it.

In a paper released this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Mansy and Szostak showed that the special membranes, fat bubbles essentially, were stable under a variety of temperatures and could have manipulated molecules like DNA through simple thermal cycling, just like scientists do in PCR machines.

Szostak suggested that even if life could theoretically or did begin some other way, his lab's hypothesis was (at least) experimentally plausible. "We're now pretty much convinced that growth and division could occur under perfectly reasonable pre-biotic conditions in a way that is not some artificial laboratory construction," he said.

And actually, the most intriguing possibility of all may be that the protocells in Szostak's lab do not closely model earthly life's origins. If that were true, human beings, themselves the product of evolution from the most primitive organisms, would have created an alternative path to imbuing matter with the properties of life. God creates Man and Man creates new life form. Life comes full circle.

Szostack spoke about the limitless possibilities of biology. In fact, he even discounted the importance of water in life's scheme of things - a thought many biologists may consider heretical. Szostack speculates whether it would be possible to build a life system that, instead of water, ''works in something else''.

That throws up a whole new world of possibilities. If water is not necessary for life, why is carbon so? What's to prevent silicon-based life forms from existing? Be careful, that computer you are reading this on may very well be alive and sentient.