Well, Venter has been talking about this for years, and I actually am surprised it's taken him this long.
We've been able to create viruses from mail-order DNA for almost a decade now. This is just the same thing but big enough for a bacterium.
Since life comes from chemistry, we've now become good enough at chemistry that we can copy (not create, really) life. Single-celled, simple life. Then we might be able to put enzymes in it that would, say, piece together CO2 into alkanes, solving the greenhouse problem? That's way too facile a possibility, but this is really just the creation of a scientific "blank slate", a Procrustean microbe. Ockham's razor applied to a bacterium.
This actually bothers me much less than the virus thing, and that's been around for years now.
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Well, Venter has been talking about this for years, and I actually am surprised it's taken him this long.
We've been able to create viruses from mail-order DNA for almost a decade now. This is just the same thing but big enough for a bacterium.
Since life comes from chemistry, we've now become good enough at chemistry that we can copy (not create, really) life. Single-celled, simple life. Then we might be able to put enzymes in it that would, say, piece together CO2 into alkanes, solving the greenhouse problem? That's way too facile a possibility, but this is really just the creation of a scientific "blank slate", a Procrustean microbe. Ockham's razor applied to a bacterium.
This actually bothers me much less than the virus thing, and that's been around for years now.
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