Scientists make 'artificial life'

Scientists in the US succeed in developing the first living bacterial cell to be controlled entirely by synthetic DNA.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science_and_environment/10132762.stm

 

I would like to say that cool, but I watch too many horror movies....

 

It's only a matter of time before Skynet comes on line now...

 

I think their messing were they don't belong, myself

 

I hope they are the slow ones and not like I Am Legend...

 

no shit! zombies use to be not scary at all. you could take your time, stroll to the garden shed. pick our your best ax. walk over to the zombie and get a good grip, widen your stance a little bit. take a few practice swings, the BAM! zombie head on the ground. but the new zombies are terrifying. you barely have time to finish shitting your pants before they are halfway done tearing you apart. 28 days later was the first zombie movie i saw that scared the balls off me

 

how was AIDS created again?

 

Yea, I dont wanna deal with zombies that can knock over cars and set booby traps

I need some more practice.

*turns on left 4 dead 2*

 

I think its a good breakthrough, should set the stepping stones to save lives.

 

^zombie lives

 

Hell yeah, 28 Days Later is the movie that I measure all zombie movies against.

 

ditto. they completely turned the zombie genre around. and i love the retro grainy look.

 

It's a nice advance. We don't actually have anything approaching the knowledge base to actually write genetic code from scratch though. The DNA in this case was created synthetically, but it was all but a copy of another known organism. They changed one gene so it would be blue. That way they could tell if the experiment worked.

What a refinement of this technique would mean is that it is no longer necessary to actually have a sample of the dna/rna you want in order to do experiments with it. You can actually make entire chromosomes in the lab. No shipping of samples, no starting genetic material. Just data in a computer. Should be a useful tool, but not really any more then that.