No doubt you’ve heard it all over the news. Craig Venter and his teams have created another press storm, this time about “synthetic life”, although I wonder a bit about the meaning of the term. I’ve no particularly insightful things to say about it all, other than to do like everyone else and watch and wonder where it’s all going to lead (probably not exactly where people currently think… is one thing we can say for sure). There’s coverage everywhere so I don’t need to point, but for future reference, here’s a Guardian link to a video of the man himself talking about it in some detail, and a link to a story by Ian Sample in the same paper. There you can find links to the research paper too. (Image at right is of a pithos, the kind of vessel Pandora opened in the Greek myth. The image is from the online component of the Michael C. Carlos museum at Emory university. Click image to jump there.)
Truly fascinating stuff to say the least.
-cvj
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As a biochemist I must say that this ‘synthetic cell’ is not even close to making synthetic or novel life forms. it is a standard bacteria minus its pathogenic genes plus some addedsequence without funcion. Her you can read why I think this is NOT a synthetic cell:
http://whatislife.com/issues/issues-synthetic-cell2.html
I hope this leads some day to the colonisation of other planets by preparing them first with synthetic life!