The First Artifical Life

A mind-blowing article was featured in a recent issue of the Economist…

Genesis redux
A new form of life has been created in a laboratory,
and the era of synthetic biology is dawning

http://www.economist.com/node/16163006

Some of the more profound snippets from the article:

“The result is the first creature since the beginning of creatures that has no ancestor.”

It demonstrates more forcefully than anything else to date that life’s essence is information. Heretofore that information has been passed from one living thing to another. Now it does not have to be. Non-living matter can be brought to life with no need for lightning, a vital essence or a god.

To make the new bacterium recognisably different Dr Venter and his colleagues deleted 14 genes they thought unnecessary from M. mycoides, and added some DNA designed from scratch in a process Dr Venter refers to as “watermarking”. This was an opportunity for some fun. The watermark, Dr Venter says, includes a cipher which contains the URL of a website and three quotations, if you can work out how to decode it.