Monday - December 17th

50 Years after scientist have created the first DNA in a test tube... now the researchers are crossing the next barrier... the creation of artificial life forms driven by artificial DNA.  In 2008 they hope to transplant the first entirely handcrafted  chromosome of DNA into a cell where it is expected to boot itself up like a file on your computer.

When this event happens, it will blue the lines between biological and artificial and force us to rethink what it means for something to truly be alive.  There will be a new era where people will write DNA programs like the early computing days where programmers wrote programs for computers.

Synthetic Life Forms or Synthetic Biology will involve the large scale rewriting of all genetic codes and create metabolic machines.

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November 2007  - Work on the world’s first human-made species is well under way at a research complex in Rockville, Md., and scientists in Canada have been quietly conducting experiments to help bring such a creature to life.

Robert Holt, head of sequencing for the Genome Science Centre at the University of British Columbia, is leading efforts at his Vancouver Canada lab to play a key role in the production of the first synthetic life form — a microbe made from scratch.

Dr Craig Venter is the man who led the private sector effort to sequence the human genome, has been working for years to create a man-made organism.  The J Craig Venter Institute filed a US patent which claims exclusive ownership of a set of essential genes and a synthetic "free-living organism that can grow and replicate" made using those genes."

That brought up the new argument:  Can you patent synthetic life forms?  According to the filed patent application, it's "a minimal set of protein-coding genes which provides the information required for replication of a free-living organism in a rich bacterial culture medium." The group sent out a press release this morning which I have to say comes off as terribly alarmist using terms like "Microbesoft," evoking Dolly the cloned sheep and naming the organism Synthia.

It was also reported that the institute filed an international patent application at the World Intellectual Property organization. Craig Venter is not named in the patent, which was filed on October 12, 2006.