Chapter 1454: Synthesizing Life
After Eric walked out of Mike Pence’s house, he took his phone out of his pocket, dialed a number, then put the phone close to his ear.
“He agreed.”
After a pause of about three seconds, a slightly hoarse voice came from the other end.
“The agreement?”
“Here with me. It has been signed,” Eric continued.
“Very good.” The hoarse voice carried a touch of approval, and after a moment, he ordered, “Send that thing to our usual place, and then go take a vacation.”
“Roger that.”
After Eric hung up the phone, he took the sim card out, broke it in half, then threw the pieces into the sewer nearby. After the two left the street, they parted ways, went in different directions, and disappeared into the crowd of Capital.
…
After Jiang Chen sent Trump onto the plane, he was about to return home with Ayesha, but before he could leave, he received a call from Celestial City. After the airport scheduled the runway, he got the Aerospace G100 and ascended to Celestial City.
After he arrived at Space Department, he greeted Kelvin. Under the escort of the Celestial soldiers, Jiang Chen arrived at the Special Project Research Institute which was protected by countless security measures. The once quiet and empty research institute had a few more people living inside, there were not only the two hundred researchers who had returned from Mars, but also about four to five hundred researchers involved in confidential research that came inside through a voluntary application.
Everyone was screened by the truth-telling serum after they signed the confidentiality agreement to ensure that there was no spy.
Ghost Agents had been very cautious in counterintelligence. So far, there was not a single case of data theft, but on the contrary, the spies and intelligence personnel of other countries that were dealt with by Ayesha could not even be counted with two hands.
After he arrived at Dr. Amos’s lab, his attention was immediately caught by the giant culture tank located in the center of the lab.
There was a fetus-shaped object in the cylindrical culture tank floating in the dark green culture solution. Large and small pipes were connected to the “fetus”, and bubbles continued to gush from the bottom of the culture tank.
“In order to prevent you from misunderstanding, I have to make a statement first.” After Dr. Amos walked out from the movable door on the side, he took off his glasses and hung the pair of glasses on the pocket at his chest, then he said in a lighthearted tone, “This is the fetus of a gorilla, not a human.”
“Since when did you start to look at the fetus of gorillas?” Jiang Chen felt strange.
“Except for part of the knowledge of Klein particles, the knowledge I inherited was mainly in the biological field.” As Kelvin said this, he pointed to the culture tank, “and this thing is one of my experiments.”
“That’s really a pity.” Jiang Chen expressed regret euphemistically.
Before the Flower of Memory was consumed, no one could know the content of the memory to be inherited.
Amos’ own research was focused on artificial intelligence, electronic machinery, and other related fields. Although the neural bridge system was also one of his masterpieces, his research did not involve much knowledge in the biological field. For him, the knowledge he inherited was in an area he had never touched.
“What a pity?” Amos did not show much regret, instead, he shrugged and continued, “Although my research direction involves a lot of physics, I have always held a positive attitude towards biology. The prospect of such a discipline is not narrower than that of physics. If the latter is to guide us to understand the world, then the former is to teach us how to become God.”
Jiang Chen smiled at the use of this metaphor.
Indeed, for now, creating life still belonged to the realm of God.
Even though today’s chip manufacturing process achieved below 1nm, humans were still unable to synthesize even one cell from scratch.
Even in the 22nd century, after several leaps and bounds in biology, artificial cells were still the focus of science and technology. He remembered that Lin Lin discussed this issue a long time ago. It seemed that the Nobel Prize in Biology in one of the years was when a Pan-Asia biologist used the most basic elements such as carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorous, sulfur, and potassium to synthesize a simple mycoplasma.
“As long as you think it’s okay,” Jiang Chen walked to the side of the culture tank, took a closer examination of the content inside, then casually asked. “By the way, what is this? A clone?”
“Clone? It’s not that simple.” Amos smiled and shook his head, “The materials are a piece of DNA code and a periodic table of elements. Not long ago, we created life from nothing.”
When Jiang Chen heard the phrase created life, he looked to Amos in shock.
It was unheard of in biology to use DNA data and primitive chemical elements like this to synthesize a gorilla’s fertilized egg cell from scratch, and then grow it into a mature gorilla in a culture tank that mimics the intrauterine environment.
Even as a layman, he could understand the difficulty of the process.
It was no exaggeration to say that taking any of the obstacles in this experiment to write a paper could be enough to shock the entire biology field, and the work would definitely be nominated for the Nobel Prize.
Through the self-designed DNA code to create a species that did not exist in this world, humans had never been so close to the realm of God.
“The research of the Gaia civilization in the field of biotechnology is quite advanced, because the technological span in the middle is too large, I cannot describe the gap between us and Gaia in the field of biology in detail. I’ll give you an example that’s quite interesting. Through this technology, we can take out the genetic fragments of lions, leopards, tigers, and even Martian species such as the Devil Worms to design biological soldiers, whose combat capabilities are comparable to superhumans, and then use cell synthesis technology to mass-produce them.”
At this point, Amos paused for moment, then he said in a joking tone.
“I bet that the cost to produce a Devil Worm that can adapt to the Earth’s environment is definitely much cheaper than the cost of producing a tank.”
“Will it cause problems such as biological invasion?” Jiang Chen frowned.
“This problem is actually very easy to solve. As long as the number of chromosomes in the DNA is set to an odd number when combining DNA, there shouldn’t be any issues,” Amos said.
The principle was the same as that of mules. As long as the created creatures were infertile, it would not create issues such as biological invasion.
For some odd reason, when Jiang Chen’s eyes were focused on the creature in the culture tank, his thoughts drifted to 20.5 light-years away.
Perhaps it was this technology that made the colonists who arrived at Gliese 581G finally embark on the road to biological civilization.
There was a flash of inspiration in his mind.
Jiang Chen immediately turned his head to Amos and asked another question that he suddenly thought of.
“If we use the cell synthesis technology… can we bring the disappeared Gaia civilization back to life?”