It's official: our world is science fiction

[ed_rex]

Apparently a team of American researchers have created life.

That's right. Create life, out of its constituent bits, like building brand new house of building blocks. Or so I understand it.

Nature has an article about it here and to the best of my understanding that's exactly what they're claiming to have done.

"With this approach we now have the ability to start with a DNA sequence and design organisms exactly like we want ... We can get down to the very nucleotide level and make any changes we want to a genome." (Emphases mine.)

This isn't to say that scientists (or your a-social cousin Mary) are going to be churning out designer pets or new diseases next year, but the door first pushed ajar by Watson and Crick sure as hell looks wide open to me.

In honour of this potentially [insert adjective of choice] world, a poll:

[Poll #1566999]

Comments

Re: Young Geoffrey doesn't misunderstand it.

[ed-rex.livejournal.com]

I was hoping you, in particular, what correct me if I was wrong. Thank you.

The nurse interview was very helpful, but Nurse's scepticism did kind of remind me of Clarke's(?) line about how when an elderly and respected scientist says something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

Granted that I now have a better understanding of the limitations of what Venter accomplished, it still seems like a much more significant bit of work than what nurse is suggesting.

As for "Amy's Choice", I liked it quite a lot, but am still feeling kind of upset by the "suicide". As I said elsewhere, it reminded me of how I simply refused to believe the Doctor would have abandoned Rose and Mickey to the tender mercies of killer clock-work robots for the love of Mme de Pompadour. I admit I don't know Amy well enough for it to be "out of character", but I still don't like it.

But yeah, rather good despite all that. And very well-paced.