Thursday, January 24, 2008

US scientists close to creating artificial life: study

"Through dedicated teamwork we have shown that building large genomes is now feasible and scalable so that important applications such as biofuels can be developed," said Hamilton Smith, from the J. Craig Venter Institute, in the study published in Science.

The research has been carried out at the laboratories of the controversial celebrity US scientist Craig Venter, who has hailed artificial life forms as a potential remedy to illness and global warming.

However, the prospect of engineering artificial life forms is highly controversial and is likely to arouse heated debate over the ethics and potential ramifications of such an advance.


We have an utterly dysfunctional national health-care system, but we can create life, damnit!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I thought the US had already created artificial life and called it President Bush?

Bill

Mac said...

Nothing artificial about Dubbya, I'm afraid. He's baseline human.

Yeah, I know -- cold comfort.