EXTRA BREAKING NEWS: Researchers Create the World's First Fully Synthetic, Self-Replicating Living Cell

• Just today the J. Craig Venter institute announced that they have created "the first self-replicating species who's parent is a computer", a bacteria known as M. mycoides, whose fabrication came about through a process surprisingly dependent on yeast.
• After machines put together small chains of DNA, the snippets were implanted in yeast cells, whose enzymes are specifically geared toward repairing DNA, and the chains were snapped together.
• After repeating this process to create longer and longer chains until a full genome was created (with "watermark" DNA strands to mark the bacterium as synthetic), the entire string of DNA was implanted in a sort of "surrogate" bacterium, where the mycoides began to produce its own proteins that destroyed the surrogate proteins, creating a new bacterium made up entirely of the synthesized genes.
• Some scientists, however, are questioning whether or not this is truly synthetic life as although the DNA was completely sequenced by computer, the real creation only occurred in an existing cell, not to mention the obvious ethical issues surrounding the discovery.
• The company claims that their next project will be to create an algae capable of converting carbon dioxide into biofuel, which will require a genome chain twice as long.

Reflection:

I really must say, this article makes me absolutely ecstatic that the due date of the blogs was moved. Personally, this article is one of my favorites, and I believe that it is one of the turning points in scientific history. Just thinking about the multitude, no, the myriad of possibilities and implications that arrive from this breakthrough is just staggering. Naturally, our in depth coverage of protein synthesis and cell division greatly helped me understand the process used and I was quite surprise when I finished reading the article and though, "Wow, I actually understand what just happened." Although the author of the article notes that mammals are unlikely to be fabricated any time soon due to their immense combination of genomes, an upward of 3 billion genes, I believe that with the great rate at which science is accelerating, almost anything can become possible. Naturally, the completely human-orchestrated creation of life will definitely heat up the "should humans play God?" debate common in stem cells, but I doubt that anything will be able to stop this boulder of a discovery once it has started rolling.

Source:
Dillow, Clay. "Researchers Create the World's First Fully Synthetic, Self-Replicating Living Cell | Popular Science." Popular Science | New Technology, Science News, The Future Now. 20 May 2010. Web. 21 May 2010. .