New Vistas in Mapping the Genome of Life

In the continuing quest to get one step closer to making man-made life a reality, genetic engineering researcher Dr. J. Craig Venter has announced that he and his team have manufactured the entire genome of a bacterium, through a clever "stitching together" of its chemical components, a feat being heralded as "watershed" for the emerging field called synthetic biology.
This genome is more than 10 times as long as the longest piece of DNA ever previously synthesized. What it means is the possibility of scientists to be able to one day design an organism on a computer, press the “print” button to have the necessary DNA made, and then put that DNA into a cell to produce a custom-made creature, a possibility certain to raise many ethics questions in the minds of scholars and laymen alike.

See details of this emerging technology in this from the NY Times.

Creation of New Life Forms: the next step for DNA?

This article fascinated me. Scientific breakthroughs, especially revolving around the use of DNA science--and the ethics of it--always gets my attention. But this article was a mixture of fascination, awe--and fear. There also remained the lingering question in my mind of whether this could really be true--that researchers are indeed considering taking this next step--or if just simply a rumor spawned by someone's overactive imagination.

You can read the Washington Post article, and decide for yourself: whether the prospect of creating new life forms--synthetic life forms--from artificial DNA should be considered a scientific breakthrough--or a major mistake, and what questions it raises about science, religion, ethics and the very essence of genetics.