Thursday, May 20, 2010

Synthetic Life Form

It broke today! Craig Venter and his team at Synthetic Genomics have succeeded in synthesising a life form in the lab. Well not really. What he did was take 15 years to learn how to synthesize the genome of a bacterium Mycoplasma mycoides(a copy really) and put it into the cell of a related bacterium without its genome, Mycoplasma capricola. This alone is big accomplishment. But already there is a growing opposition saying by creating life we are behaving as God. And the ever favorite science fiction story of creating a new life form and it escapes into the wild to destroy humanity. Whether such a thing will be possible, only time will tell. But what it allows us to do is research even more the inner workings of the cell. The more we can understand of that will help us understand ourselves even more. Stay Tuned.

Peace
Skeptical DoDo

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