Craig Venter, the controversial DNA researcher involved in the race to decipher the human genetic code, has built a synthetic chromosome out of laboratory chemicals and is poised to announce the creation of the first new artificial life form on Earth.
Researchers are trying to complete the ultimate feat of genetic engineering: to reconstruct a living thing, down to every last molecule. This would "lift biology to a new level," they argue, enabling biologists to be able to understand life as deeply as engineers understand the bridges and airplanes that they build.
Los Alamos scientist Steen Rasmussen plans to one-up nature by cobbling together a brand-new creature that reproduces and evolves.
Is "synthetic biology" on the point of making life? Unlike genetic engineering or biotechnology, the new discipline is not about tinkering with biology but about remaking it. Risks and rewards will be greater than anything yet encountered.
First it was "gray goo," the threat of self-replicating machines populating the planet. Now an environmental think tank is raising the specter of "green goo," where biology is used to create new materials and new artificial life forms.
[ Link to Full Study]
Scientists are working on creating new life-forms from scratch. If successful, this could could open a new age of "living technology," where harnessing the power of life to spontaneously adapt to complex situations could solve problems that now defy modern engineering.
Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory are close to creating an organism completely different from any life on Earth. They have all the building blocks ready and are hoping in the next few years to create a new organism 10 million times smaller than the smallest bacteria.
A group of scientists say they have, for the first time, created an organism that can produce a 21st amino acid and incorporate it into proteins completely on its own. The research should help probe some of the central questions of evolutionary theory.
Researchers have manipulated an organism successfully to make it produce an unnatural amino acid in addition to its natural counterparts. "It's a bona fide unnatural organism now," said lead researcher Ryan Mehl.
An interview with Craig J. Venter on his plans to sequence the genomes of the ocean with the goal of engineering "a new species of microorganism from scratch ? to improve metabolic function by orders of magnitude so that we can make biological CO? scrubbers for power plants."