Talk:Spiegelman's Monster

Untitled
It's not really "self-replicating" if it's a virus, is it? After all, viruses by definition aren't self-replicating because they need a cell to make more copies of themselves. Citizen Premier 23:14, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
 * my bad. It's actually replicating in a solution of salts and nucleotides.  I'll try to make that clearer in the article.  Citizen Premier 23:28, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

when?
when did spiegelman accomplished this?

given the first reference, it must have been in 1972 -- M1ck1 14:28, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

The Ancestor's Tale
I just came across this fascinating experiment in The Ancestor's Tale in which Dawkins describes how it had been 3600 nucleotides long originally and reduced after 74 generations (as in the article) to 550; two out of the three numbers are thuss different here. Which is right?

Dicaeopolis 02:12, 20 May 2007 (UTC)
 * You can follow the cited papers link to pubmed and retrieve his original paper (its free access), which states the 218 number Codec 21:20, 20 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Also, those aren't generations; those are iterations of the take-a-sample, put-it-in-a-new-tube process; between each new tube, there were a lot of generations. grendel|khan 21:17, 4 June 2007 (UTC)

Spontanous generation?
Paul Davies claimed:


 * Incredible though Spiegelman's results were, an even bigger surprise lay in store. In 1974, Manfred Eigen and his colleagues also experimented with a chemical broth containing Qb replication enzyme and salts, and an energized form of the four bases that make up the building blocks of RNA. They tried varying the quantity of viral RNA initially added to the mixture. As the amount of input RNA was progressively reduced, the experimenters found that, with little competition, it enjoyed untrammeled exponential growth. Even a single RNA molecule added to the broth was enough to trigger a population explosion. But then something truly amazing was discovered. Replicating strands of RNA were still produced even when not a single molecule of viral RNA was added!

I notice that we don't mention this; were these claims unrepeatable? They seem pretty out-there. grendel|khan 21:23, 4 June 2007 (UTC)
 * It is mentioned in the current version. Cesiumfrog (talk) 00:12, 22 June 2010 (UTC)