Team Claims Synthetic Life Feat 112
gertvs writes "According to the BBC scientists in the US have taken a step towards producing life from scratch in the laboratory by having successfully transplanted an entire genome from one bacterium cell to another. This technique could possibly lead to the creation of 'designer' microbes producing fuel or help cleaning toxic waste. 'The ultimate plan is to stitch together artificial chromosomes, proteins and other building blocks with the aim of jumpstarting their designer microbe to life. But Dr. [Craig] Venter concedes that this may be a long way away, but he says he has taken an important key step towards that goal. His team, essentially, snatched the body of another life-form and invaded it with a new genetic code. This, he says, will be a key tool in testing the artificial chromosomes - or DNA bundles - he plans to make. '"
So they pretty much did... (Score:3, Informative)
We'll have Artificial Intelligence (synthetic life by my standards) I think, long before we're actually engineering proteins and building an original base DNA sequence of our own making and creating the cell to run it from scratch.
At which point our machine overlords will take care of the rest.