Scientists Create Artificial Life

[tech_guy]

Scientists create artificial life - great that's an evolutionary step ahead of chavs and people from Norfolk then.... Scientist Creates Life. That's a Good Thing, Right? - TIME

 

[JJonas]

Oi im from Norfolk. I would come a sort yew out but it would take me a week to get there on moi tractor

[sparkeh]

Great, the first step toward our inevitable destruction at the hands of Skynet.

[SYNACK]

Pffft, new development, this is the first time the dullards at the media have caught on to it but simmilar has been done before: Life's Recipe Card that was an RNA based virus but work on larger scale DNA based stuff has been ongoing for ages.

 

The impressive bit is that this is the first time they have managed to glue together such a large code base but the title as always is a bit misleading. They may have made it up of smaller components but the actual code was copied from an existing bacteria. This kind of thing has been done for ages in the lab from an existing template copy of an organisum but this is the first time they have managed to do the same thing from a digital copy.

 

Despite all of the religious nut jobs that the media have dug up going off about how they are concerned about this 'new' bacteria spreading and wipeing everything out given the fact that it is a copy of an existing bacteria I seriously doubt it. I'm not sure if the media coverage of it everywhere else has been as slanted but here they interviewed the Christian science watch bioethics spokesperson. They would have done much better to interview a high school biology student to be honest as they would have known more than both the interviewer and interviewee put together.