Creation of Life

[jegs2]

When one is pulling a night shift, one is left with a lot of time for musing. Inevitably, my musing led me to a realization: Nobody has been able to create life from scratch. By that, I mean even the most simple of life at single-cell level. We know the components necessary for a single-cell living organism, and we should be capable of gathering them together in a medium and applying conditions favorable to a living thing, but has anyone, even with our technology, been able to successfully create a living thing from scratch (not from something already living)?

Edit: Was messing around with MOO3 when I thought of this...

[Sir Sirius]

So?

[jegs2]

So?

Kinda makes one wonder what the missing component is...

[BoredShirtless]

So?

Kinda makes one wonder what the missing component is...

The missing components are "techonology" and "knowledge".
http://www.msnbc.com/news/838358.asp?0si=-

[Edi]

Kinda makes one wonder what the missing component is...

Probably the environmental circumstances that were prevalent at the time it happened. The environment today is absolutely lethal to the type of life forms that the first things were like. If you want similar conditions, studying volcanic vents in the ocean floor would be a good place to start, there's some real weird shit down there.

We know enough to reconstruct a model of how things have happened and there have been observations to support the existing theories, but the problem is that what we can set up in a lab is still going to be, at best, a far cry of what things were really like. Could be anything, something in the soil, something in the water, something in the air, pH values, or any number of things, which is why trying to recreate abiogenesis is such a difficult task. Not impossible, but bloody difficult.

Edi

[BoredShirtless]

Kinda makes one wonder what the missing component is...

Probably the environmental circumstances that were prevalent at the time it happened. The environment today is absolutely lethal to the type of life forms that the first things were like. If you want similar conditions, studying volcanic vents in the ocean floor would be a good place to start, there's some real weird shit down there.

We know enough to reconstruct a model of how things have happened and there have been observations to support the existing theories, but the problem is that what we can set up in a lab is still going to be, at best, a far cry of what things were really like. Could be anything, something in the soil, something in the water, something in the air, pH values, or any number of things, which is why trying to recreate abiogenesis is such a difficult task. Not impossible, but bloody difficult.

Edi

Edi, jegs2 wasn't asking if we can recreate life as it was, but whether we can create life from scratch. Naturally, if we tried, our attempts would not have to be restricted to our environment. Scientists could create whatever environment suited their needs.

[Edi]

Ah, got you. I was thinking in terms of recreating life in the premordial soup environment.

Edi

[Sir Sirius]

Hell, why am I dodging the issue...

Jegs2 are you a creationist? That is, do you belief the god created animals (including humans) complete as they are now and/or that god created Earth (and the universe) in six days, literaly, Etc.?

Finaly, do you belief in common decent (that all life on Earth shares a common ancestor)?

[Edi]

Sirius, afaik he isn't. He does believe in God and is a devoted Christian, but I've never seen him advocate cretinism. For a person like him, it's a quite reasonable question to ask. You're jumping the gun.

Edi

[Durandal]

When one is pulling a night shift, one is left with a lot of time for musing. Inevitably, my musing led me to a realization: Nobody has been able to create life from scratch. By that, I mean even the most simple of life at single-cell level. We know the components necessary for a single-cell living organism, and we should be capable of gathering them together in a medium and applying conditions favorable to a living thing, but has anyone, even with our technology, been able to successfully create a living thing from scratch (not from something already living)?[/i]

No, but we've been able to do better. Miller took hydrogen, methane, water and ammonia, and stuck them all into a chamber. In order to "speed up" time, he boiled the water and subjected the mixture to an electrical discharge, similar to lightning, rather than ultraviolet rays. After one week, Miller had a residue of organic compounds, including amino acids. There you have it: lab confirmation that amino acids can form from conditions and components found on early Earth.

[BoredShirtless]

When one is pulling a night shift, one is left with a lot of time for musing. Inevitably, my musing led me to a realization: Nobody has been able to create life from scratch. By that, I mean even the most simple of life at single-cell level. We know the components necessary for a single-cell living organism, and we should be capable of gathering them together in a medium and applying conditions favorable to a living thing, but has anyone, even with our technology, been able to successfully create a living thing from scratch (not from something already living)?[/i]

No, but we've been able to do better. Miller took hydrogen, methane, water and ammonia, and stuck them all into a chamber. In order to "speed up" time, he boiled the water and subjected the mixture to an electrical discharge, similar to lightning, rather than ultraviolet rays. After one week, Miller had a residue of organic compounds, including amino acids. There you have it: lab confirmation that amino acids can form from conditions and components found on early Earth.

Did he ask if we can create a living thing, or amino acids?

[Lagmonster]

When one is pulling a night shift, one is left with a lot of time for musing. Inevitably, my musing led me to a realization: Nobody has been able to create life from scratch. By that, I mean even the most simple of life at single-cell level.

While this is true, it bears noting that it's important to consider what we CAN do in a lab. And what we can do is re-trace many of the more important steps, or at the very least, simulate possible routes to a living organism.

Once we get past the Miller-Urey experiments, which show how amino acids can naturally form, we head to Step Two: Macromolecules. Under the influence of an energy source (such as UV light or heat), the concentrated compounds including our 'building blocks' would have to combine to form large macromolecules, such as polypeptides (precursors of proteins) and polynucleotides (precursors of DNA). Darned if I can find an experiment to match, but my resources at present are limited to the web.

Undaunted, let's go on to Step Three: Prebionts. This is where things get shaky, since it's a bit far afield for me... one really hopeful avenue, as far as I remember, is coacervate droplets, which could be precursors to cells. From a handy text: "They are made of macromolecules surrounded by a shell of water molecules, whose rigid orientation makes them form a primitive membrane. This membrane is highly selective, allowing only certain molecules to pass though; it therefore creates a sheltered chamber in which complex chemical reactions can develop."

Have a look here for a somewhat adequate description of how coacervates can be created in the lab.

Anyway, to sum it up as vaguely as I can...at some point, self-replicating molecules would have to form, like nucleic acids, allowing for a storage medium for genetic information...which would transform our prebionts into prokaryotic cells, the simplest 'life' there is. That's when natural selection would take over. I can tell you what probably happened after that, but to reproduce it? We'd have to recreate all *kinds* of variables to simulate the competition that drove evolution...like the heterotroph famines that would have led to photosynthesis and the rise of autotrophs...and the subsequent pollution that would have allowed the first aerobic respirators to pop up. The sheer abundance of 'possible variable' influencing competition, plus time itself, makes it hard to recreate these experiments. One major problems with this kind of research is the fact that if we create life in the lab, it might not be the EXACT SAME series or life forms that existed on early earth...we might not get it 'exactly' right.

[Zoink]

We can create amino acid from simple ingredience. We then need to create enough of them, and arrange them randomly for about a billion years or so, and we might have a chance for "spontaneous" life.

The alternative is to arrange them ourselves into the desired DNA molecule.

DNA is simply a complex information storing molecule that is able to replicate itself as long as it has a net influx of material/energy. The DNA creates proteins that assist the molecule in surviving and replicating. Using the basic fact that stuff the can replicate will, and stuff that is better at replicating will be more successful: over 4 billion years the these protein structures have become rather complex.

We lack the knowledge of what the simplist possible life is. We don't know what genes are absolutely required (the minimum needed for life), and we lack the ability to create these things from scratch.

The last I read was that they were trying to create the simplist possible lifeform by removing DNA from existing bacteria.

[NapoleonGH]

i seem to recall that we have caused self replicating RNA molecules to be formed from amino acids in a Miller/Urey like experiement

[Alyrium Denryle]

Actually Jegs... You are flat out wrong
http://www.evilbible.com/Synthetic%20Life.htm

Abstract

Full-length poliovirus complementary DNA (cDNA) was synthesized by assembling oligonucleotides of plus and minus strand polarity. The synthetic poliovirus cDNA was transcribed by RNA polymerase into viral RNA, which translated and replicated in a cell-free extract, resulting in the de novo synthesis of infectious poliovirus. Experiments in tissue culture using neutralizing antibodies and CD155 receptor-specific antibodies and neurovirulence tests in CD155 transgenic mice confirmed that the synthetic virus had biochemical and pathogenic characteristics of poliovirus. Our results show that it is possible to synthesize an infectious agent by in vitro chemical-biochemical means solely by following instructions from a written sequence.


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Research on viruses is driven not only by an urgent need to understand, prevent, and cure viral disease. It is also fueled by a strong curiosity about the minute particles that we can view both as chemicals and as "living" entities. Poliovirus can be crystallized (1) and its empirical formula can be calculated (2), yet this "chemical" replicates naturally in humans with high efficiency, occasionally causing the paralyzing and lethal poliomyelitis.

Poliovirus, an enterovirus of the Picornaviridae, is a small, nonenveloped, icosahedral virus consisting of five different macromolecules: 60 copies each of capsid polypeptides VP1, -2, -3, and -4 and one copy of the positive-sense, single-stranded RNA genome (~7.5 kilobases in length) (Fig. 1A) (3). The chemical sequence (4, 5), the genetic map of the genome (4), and the three-dimensional crystal structure of the virion (6) were determined 2 decades ago. Poliovirus employs one of the simplest genetic systems known for proliferation (3, 7). The virus enters the cell after attaching to the cellular receptor CD155 (8, 9). Immediately after the virus particle uncoats inside the cell, the genomic RNA is translated under the control of the internal ribosomal entry site (IRES) into a single polypeptide, the polyprotein (10, 11). The polyprotein is then processed into functional proteins by two viral proteinases (3, 7). With the aid of viral proteins, most notably the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase 3Dpol and the genome-linked protein VPg, along with cellular components, the viral RNA is transcribed into minus-strand copies that serve as templates for the synthesis of new viral genomes (plus-strand RNA). Newly synthesized plus-strand RNA can serve as messenger RNA for more protein synthesis, engage further in RNA replication, or be encapsidated by an increasing pool of capsid proteins (7, 12). In suitable tissue culture cells (for example, HeLa cells), the entire replication cycle is complete in only 6 to 8 hours and yields 104 to 105 progeny virions per cell.

Here we describe the de novo chemical-biochemical synthesis of infectious poliovirus from basic chemical building blocks, independent of viral components previously formed in vivo and with the use of the known sequence as the only instruction for engineering the genome. The succession of macromolecular events in an infected cell was reproduced in a test tube containing a cell-free extract devoid of nuclei, mitochondria, and other cellular organelles and seeded with viral RNA. This result confirms that the genome sequence originally deciphered from virion RNA is correct (4, 5) and demonstrates the feasibility of chemical-biochemical synthesis of an infectious agent in the absence of a natural template.

The strategy of synthesizing the genome of poliovirus type 1 (Mahoney) [PV1(M)] began with the assembly of a full-length cDNA carrying a phage T7 RNA polymerase promoter at the (left) 5' end (Fig. 1) from three large, overlapping DNA fragments (F1, -2, and -3). Each DNA fragment was obtained by combining overlapping segments of 400 to 600 base pairs (bp). The segments were synthesized by assembling purified oligonucleotides [average length, 69 nucleotides (nt)] of plus and minus polarity with overlapping complementary sequences at their termini, and the segments were then ligated into a plasmid vector (13). Five to 15 clones were sequenced to identify either the correct DNA segments or the segments containing small numbers of errors that could be eliminated, either by combining the error-free portions of segments by an internal cleavage site or by standard site-directed mutagenesis (13). To ascertain the authenticity of the synthesized viral genome [sPV1(M)] and to distinguish it from the wild-type (wt) sequence of PV1(M) [wt PV1(M)] (4, 5), we engineered nucleotide substitutions into the sPV1(M) cDNA as genetic markers (13).

We have shown previously that poliovirus cDNA carrying a phage T7 promoter for the phage RNA polymerase can be transcribed with T7 RNA polymerase into highly infectious RNA (14). Accordingly, the sPV1(M) cDNA and wt PV1(M) cDNA were transcribed (13) and were found to yield transcript RNAs of the same length as virion RNA (15). De novo synthesis of poliovirus from transcript RNA of wt PV1(M) cDNA in a cell-free extract of uninfected HeLa cells has been previously described by Molla et al. (2). Therefore, the incubation of transcript RNA from sPV1(M) cDNA in cytoplasmic extracts of uninfected HeLa cells should result in the generation of poliovirus. To examine this possibility, transcript RNA derived from sPV1(M) cDNA was incubated with a cytoplasmic extract of HeLa S3 cells, and the synthesis of virus-specific proteins and infectious viruses were monitored. The products of sPV1(M) cDNA-derived RNA translation and proteolytic processing were the same as those obtained with wt PV1(M) RNA (Fig. 2), an observation suggesting that the open reading frame (ORF) of the sPV1(M)-specific RNA is intact. We then tested for the presence of infectious virus particles in the cell-free incubation mixture by adding aliquots of the incubation mixture to monolayers of HeLa cells. After 48 hours, plaques appeared [0.5 to 1 × 105 plaque-forming units (PFU) per µg of transcript RNA in 50 µl of reaction] whose heterogeneous morphology was characteristic of those produced by authentic poliovirus (Fig. 3). All together, these results indicate that the input synthetic RNA was translated and replicated in the cell-free extract and that newly synthesized RNA was encapsidated into newly synthesized coat proteins, resulting in the de novo synthesis of infectious poliovirus.

Experiments were then carried out to confirm that the infectious material isolated from the cell-free extract was indeed sPV1(M), as designated by the oligonucleotide sequence. Restriction enzyme digestion of the reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) product of the viral RNA recovered from sPV1(M)-infected HeLa cells revealed the presence of all engineered markers (fig. S1, lanes 1 and 2).

We also tested the effects of the poliovirus receptor-specific monoclonal antibody (Mab) D171 and type-specific hyperimmune sera on plaque formation by sPV1(M) (Table 1). Mab D171 has been shown to completely block infection of all three serotypes by specifically binding to CD155, the cellular receptor of poliovirus (8, 9, 16). The treatment of HeLa cells with Mab D171 before the addition of sPV1(M) completely abolished plaque formation (Table 1). Similarly, no plaques were observed when sPV1(M) was incubated with poliovirus type 1-specific rabbit hyperimmune serum [anti-PV1(M)]. Neutralization of the synthetic virus was type-specific because hyperimmune serum to poliovirus type 2 (Lansing) [PV2(L)] did not inhibit plaque formation (Table 1). These results were in full agreement with those obtained with wt PV1(M) (Table 1). They imply that the de novo poliovirus particles synthesized in the cell-free extract were serotype 1, requiring the authentic poliovirus receptor for infection.

The sPV1(M) virus was assayed to determine whether it expresses a neurovirulent phenotype in mice transgenic for the human poliovirus receptor [CD155 tg mice strain ICR.PVR.tg I (17)]. When injected with wt poliovirus strains, these animals develop a neurological disease indistinguishable, clinically and histologically, from primate poliomyelitis (17-19). Intracerebral injection of sPV1(M) caused flaccid paralysis or death in CD155 tg mice, resembling the disease produced by wt PV1(M) (13). However, a larger inoculum of sPV1(M) than PV1(M) was necessary to paralyze or kill the animals (Table 1). The increase in the magnitude of attenuation was unexpected, because all nucleotide substitutions introduced into sPV1(M) resulted in silent mutations in the ORF, except for the newly created Xma I and Stu I sites in the 5' nontranslated region (NTR) and 2B region, respectively. These latter changes had been shown previously to have no influence on viral replication in tissue culture (20, 21). However, the silent mutations that we introduced into the poliovirus genome may exert a strong influence on pathogenesis by hitherto unknown mechanisms.

The presence or absence of genetic markers in the inoculated virus and the virus isolated from the spinal cords of paralyzed mice was confirmed by amplification of the viral RNA by RT-PCR and restriction enzyme analysis. Our results show that the viruses isolated from the spinal cords of paralyzed mice resembled the inoculated virus (fig. S1). Our data also confirm that the synthetic virus was the causative agent of the flaccid paralysis observed in the sPV1(M)-infected mice.

The chemical synthesis of the viral genome, combined with de novo cell-free synthesis, has yielded a synthetic virus with biochemical and pathogenic characteristics of poliovirus. In 1828, when Wöhler synthesized urea, the theory of vitalism was shattered (22). If the ability to replicate is an attribute of life, then poliovirus is a chemical

[C332,652H492,388N98,245O131,196-P7501S2340, see (2)] with a life cycle.

As a result of the World Health Organization's vaccination campaign to eradicate poliovirus (23), the global population is better protected against poliomyelitis than ever before. Any threat from bioterrorism will arise only if mass vaccination stops (23) and herd immunity against poliomyelitis is lost. There is no doubt that technical advances will permit the rapid synthesis of the poliovirus genome, given access to sophisticated resources. The potential for virus synthesis is an important additional factor for consideration in designing the closing strategies of the poliovirus eradication campaign.

Also See Supporting Online Material Below

References and Notes

1. F. L. Schaffer, C. E. Schwerdt, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 41, 1020 (1955).

2. A. Molla, A. Paul, E. Wimmer, Science 254, 1647 (1991).

3. T. Pfister, C. Mirzayan, E. Wimmer, in The Encyclopedia of Virology, R. G. Webster, A. Granoff, Eds. (Academic Press Ltd., London, ed. 2, 1999), pp. 1330-1348.

4. N. Kitamura et al., Nature 291, 547 (1981).

5. V. R. Racaniello, D. Baltimore, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 78, 4887 (1981)

6. J. M. Hogle, M. Chow, D. J. Filman, Science 229, 1358 (1985).

7. E. Wimmer, C. U. T. Hellen, X. Cao, Annu. Rev. Genet. 27, 353 (1993).

8. C. L. Mendelsohn, E. Wimmer, V. R. Racaniello, Cell 56, 855 (1989).

9. S. Koike et al., EMBO J. 9, 3217 (1990).

10. S. K. Jang et al., J. Virol. 62, 2636 (1988).

11. J. Pelletier, N. Sonenberg, Nature 334, 320 (1988).

12. W. K. Xiang, A.V. Paul, E. Wimmer, Semin. Virol. 8, 256 (1987).

13. Materials and methods are available as supporting material on Science Online. (See below)

14. S. van der Werf, J. Bradley, E. Wimmer, F. W. Studier, J. J. Dunn, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 82, 2330 (1986).]

15. J. Cello, A. V. Paul, E. Wimmer, unpublished data.

16. P. Nobis et al., J. Gen. Virol. 66, 2563 (1985).

17. S. Koike et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 88, 951 (1991).

18. H. Horie et al., J. Virol. 68, 681 (1994).

19. M. Gromeler, H.-H. Lu, E. Wimmer, Microb. Pathog. 18, 253 (1995).

20. C. Mirzayan, E. Wimmer, Virology 189, 547 (1992).

21. W. Xiang, K. S. Harris, L. Alexander, E. Wimmer, J. Virol. 69, 3658 (1995).

22. F. Wöhler, Ann. Phys. Chem. 88, 253 (1828).

23. A. Nomoto, I. Arita, Nature Immunol. 3, 205 (2002).

24. We thank A. Wimmer and J. Benach for valuable comments on the manuscript. We are indebted to B. L. Semler for a sample of cell-free HeLa cell extract. Supported by Contracts N65236-99-C-5835 and N65236-00-M-3707 from the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency.

[Admiral Valdemar]

I was going to post that Polio article and data from NCBI but Aly beat me to it.

Though it isn't life, per se, it is a step in the right direction. Technology is the limiting factor here.

[Darth Wong]

One of the biggest problems is that people want to go straight from raw materials to complex life; an excessive requirement that is totally unreasonable.

We can't even go from raw materials to a Hot Wheels toy car; we must make raw materials into simple components first, then join those components into assemblies, then put them all together. The analogy is imperfect (to say the least), but the point is that it's unfair to expect anyone to jump from point A to point G without first establishing that such a large jump is necessary.

[Admiral Valdemar]

Darth Wong's analogy holds true for many things in biology and nanotech. Take a baby cot for instance, say it has about 30 parts and takes only half an hour to put together; a minute a part. Now take a car that has several thousand parts, probably takes hours to fully make the thing even in an automated factory. A 747, millions of parts, months to build. Now try and make a complex protein, even a simple one could take the very best part of a day up to build, to make DNA from scratch, something with more parts than any machine I can think of and to top it all, at the molecular level, that's going to be a long few decades putting together and you better hope the instructions aren't Japanese. Even something as vital as haemoglobin would take many lifetimes to form if it took even a second to make sure each amino acid fit in the right position.

The thing is, while we can "create" life as it were by IV treatment such as test-tube babies or even GM crops, we haven't tailor made our own organism that has a company's logo on it and not Mother Nature's. Even something as small as the polio virus is still incredibly hard to produce, and we have the damn technical drawings to it already.

To create a whole new organism from scratch would be hellish, not only would it have to work when the sum of all the parts are put together, but it has to be actually produced by some means, likely using other organisms to produce certain amino acid chains and so on. The complexity of reproducing an organism from zygote to newborn baby is a hurdle and a half as it is without thinking of problems that may occur with adult stages.

Like the people trying to make the first true nanoscale assembler, making the first original organism is going to be a task requiring patience by the bucketload and some fancy tech.

[jegs2]

Have to admit that it's been almost a decade since I took Microbiology in college, but the recreation of a DNA strand from scratch, which would in essence build a cell around it sounds most promising of all I've seen in the responses. Does anyone have a link to research pertaining to that?

[Admiral Valdemar]

Have to admit that it's been almost a decade since I took Microbiology in college, but the recreation of a DNA strand from scratch, which would in essence build a cell around it sounds most promising of all I've seen in the responses. Does anyone have a link to research pertaining to that?

No one's stupid or bored enough to even attempt it with current tech as it would be like making a jigsaw puzzle of the globe in 1:1 scale without a good reference image.

Maybe in a few years, but thus far the polio incident was just to show it's possible, albeit, basic. If we could do this now then we'd have nanomachines in our blood by now.

[TrailerParkJawa]

When one is pulling a night shift, one is left with a lot of time for musing. Inevitably, my musing led me to a realization: Nobody has been able to create life from scratch. By that, I mean even the most simple of life at single-cell level. We know the components necessary for a single-cell living organism, and we should be capable of gathering them together in a medium and applying conditions favorable to a living thing, but has anyone, even with our technology, been able to successfully create a living thing from scratch (not from something already living)?

Edit: Was messing around with MOO3 when I thought of this...

You were playing games while at work? Ahem....I pay your salary Mister! But since I like you I wont tell anyone.

[Sir Sirius]

Having been ignored the first time, I'll ask again.

Jegs2 are you a creationist? That is, do you belief the god created animals (including humans) complete as they are now and/or that god created Earth (and the universe) in six days, literaly, Etc.?

Finaly, do you belief in common decent (that all life on Earth shares a common ancestor)?

Why am I asking this? Well, to the best of my recollection you have never voiced your oppinion on the matter one way or the other and considering the nature of the thread starter and seeing that, in general, you disscuss your faith quite openly, I just got curious.

[Sir Sirius]

No answer, let's up the ante shall we.

Some time a go I posted a link to Fundies Say the Darndest Things!, in one of their past issues there was some mention of god commanding the killling babies. Since there had been some discussion about the subject here I decided to check the link they gave as the source of the quote out, a thread called "Christian Trap" at rr-bb.com...

http ://www.rr-bb.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=83627
(remove line space)

...it turned out that jegs2 had gotten some dabete help from there (he did admit that in the christian trap thread here). I then out of curiosity checked what else jegs2 had posted there and turned out the following posts (http address of the post at rr-bb.com, followed by a quote):

http ://www.rr-bb.com/showthread.php?s=&postid= ... post974187

I think Adam was created fully grown. There would be no reason to create him as a baby.

I'll second that.

http ://www.rr-bb.com/showthread.php?s=&postid= ... post946751

I believe a literal 6 days also.

Seconded.

Maybe the third time really is the charm.
Jegs2 are you a creationist? That is, do you belief the god created animals (including humans) complete as they are now and/or that god created Earth (and the universe) in six days, literaly, Etc.?
Finaly, do you belief in common decent (that all life on Earth shares a common ancestor)?

Just for laughs:
http ://www.rr-bb.com/showthread.php?s=&postid=851635
Extremely intelligent man who outright rejects christ and holds a great deal of influence over others by the name of Mike. Hmmm... Who ever could that be?

[Lagmonster]

Just for laughs:
http ://www.rr-bb.com/showthread.php?s=&postid=851635
Extremely intelligent man who outright rejects christ and holds a great deal of influence over others by the name of Mike. Hmmm... Who ever could that be?

Despite the fact that you're obviously baiting Jegs (Just let it go)...it is funny to see what apparently is a bunch of fundies outright praying for Mike to find Christ.

I suppose the fundies aren't quite thinking about what he might do to him if he DID find him... *laugh*

[His Divine Shadow]

Egads!
I think thats horrible.
If anyone has any thoughts of doing that for me, don't, I would take the greatest of offense you could imagine.