Fake Life

Life created by humans is here, well almost. Scientists have just created the first substantial genome. They also recently took a genome from one cell and inserted it into another. The next step is the last, put the engineered genome into another cell and boot it up. I was planning on calming the fears of some by saying that we are just talking about little bio-robots here, not people. Then I ran into this at the very end of the article:

But synthetic biologists are also planning to scale up from the simplest organisms to the most complex: human beings. The first bacterial genome was sequenced in 1995 and was followed by the landmark sequencing of the human genome in 2001. Based on that trajectory, Voigt estimated that a synthetic human genome — which could be used in human cloning research — could be created by 2014.

Well that would be something. Certainly would cause some heated discussions.