Scientists Create First Synthetic Life Form!

[Carsten Wiethoff]

Here is the original article describing the creation of a "synthetic" organism:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/328/5981/958

A quote from there:

At the moment, the techniques employed by Venter's team are too difficult to appeal to any potential bioterrorists, researchers stress. Nonetheless, "this experiment will certainly reconfigure the ethical imagination," says Paul Rabinow, an anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies synthetic biology. "Over the long term, the approach will be used to synthesize increasingly novel designed genomes," says Kenneth Oye, a social scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. "Right now, we are shooting in the dark as to what the long-term benefits and long-term risks will be."