I'm taking time out from my WW2 retrospective to take note of a momentous event, perhaps a history-altering one. No, nothing to do with oil spills, terrorist flotillas, or Kim Jong Il. More to do with Victor Frankenstein, actually. The event to which I'm archly referring is the creation of a living organism.As John Derbyshire tells it,
"Craig Venter and his colleagues put together a genome from scratch, using off-the-shelf chemicals, and swapped it for the genome of a living organism, a wee one-celled asexual critter named Mycoplasma capricolum (which, as its name suggests, causes goats to feel unwell). Then they put the transformed cells on dishes of jelly and waited for them to reproduce. The cells did so, very happily, and there are now several billion individuals of this new organism with its made-up genome. A cell contains much more than a genome; but all the other bits are templated in the genome, and after a few dozen generations Dr. Venter’s invented genome was calling the cell-construction shots." (Read Derb's entire article here.)
The possibilities are, literally, endless. And not necessarily good.
