but whatever they do there will always be a difference between God and Humans.

I’m a firm believer in moving ahead in life, be it personal or social, with a positive intent. Science and technology has always proved a boon for living beings, not only human beings but animals as well. Moreover, latest innovations and continuous researches have opened up new horizons of development in various fields, and synthetic life (DNA and stem-cell) is no exception. Synthetic life no doubt can prove an asset in curing different deadly ailments and betterment of life, but only with small and cautious steps instead of big wayward strides, that could even extinct life from the earth.

So, it’s just simple. Move ahead but with caution and foresightedness.

Leave it to Bush and those fundamentalists in congress to veto this because it would be regarded as a violation of the sanctity of nature and blah blah blah And btw, raKesh can u shut up and take that shit off my face for turning this into a religious debate...AGAIN

Wonderful! It’s awesome to hear such great progress being done. Makes me anxious to see how this all turns out 20 years from now :)

With Ethics? Well, there’s always Rapture. i don’t mind ur words

I suggest people and intellectuals involved in such research works to invest the time and funds in the eradication of poverty, illiteracy and several life-threatening diseases from the earth. That will be great serve to humanity rather doing such madness of synthetic life.

Cloning is the more general term for synthetic life. This has been a controversial issue since 1997 after ”Dolly,” the first mammal (sheep) was cloned from an adult sheep.

Truly, it can be a breakthrough to some, as scientists are able to create something that no other experts can. To a certain extent, synthetic lifeforms have been beneficial in genetic engineering and gene therapy. But on some cases the risks of survival among cloned animals are high.

More studies need to be researched and tested before we can say that synthetic life is indeed a great help to humanity. It is too early to brag the recent discoveries of many scientists since there are underlying legal and technological implications regarding the financial and moral aspects of pursuing this field of endeavor.

Devoting too much time on cloning is very expensive. Meanwhile, others claim that cloning should be restricted only to plants and animals and never among humans. Why do we need to clone humans if through reproduction we can create beings? Also, reproduction between a cloned and a naturally born animal is not feasible at the moment with a small percentage of chance.

The team working in this research work should be concerned with the ethical issues related to it. The creation of life by humans would definitely trigger greater controversy.

"ALL" of You people are confused" -- In the creation of synthetic life, scientists don't actually create or produce life from non-living matter. The scientists do create artificial DNA -genetic instructions and code- by intelligent design, which will be implanted into an living cell that is already existing. They are not not creating the life but changing that cell into a new form of life.

I do agree with Milind, People talking about the recreation of life and synthetic life. Both are two different concepts. Synthetic life is just another form of genetic engineering and God creates life.

Science couldn't reveal till date that how life originated and no scientist observed the process of origin of life either by chance or design. Observation and detection is the sole way to establish new things through scientific instruments..this is science. Are the people engaged in artificial life able to detect the origin of life?

You can just copy the design of life, can't create life. if you considering the vast complexity of life, it can be said that the genetic and biological similarities between all species are because of a common design rather than common evolutionary ancestry at some extent.

Absolutely...Science itself does support to keep faith in the existence of God. Science cannot prove that humans are here through evolution or through creation but scientific evidences can be used to extend both theory. Artificial life is based on the origin of life through design.

For all of your information Artificial life is something different than synthetic life. have a look on the statement made by Dr. Hamilton Smith, J Craig Venter Institute, Rockville, USA,- "We like to distinguish synthetic life from artificial life. It sets the stage for what we hope is going to be a new approach to engineering organisms. we are at present trying to create a living bacterial cell based completely on the synthetically made genome."

life is vastly complicated and it could have only been made by God. There is a 'vital force', which draws the line between inanimate objects and living things, and God is the sole source of this 'vital force'. It can't be made in laboratories.

The creation of synthetic organisms, if went out the control, may give birth to another threat -the recreation of bioweapons. The recreation of working bacteria creating a working bacteria would lift the lid on creating bacterial bioweapons like anthrax in future.

Scientist Craig Venter has clearly rejected the reports that Synthetic biology would help the production of new biological weapons rather than helping in fight against emerging infections.

Is there any need of some more synthetic material in body. People already have plastics, smoke, chemicals, particles, microwaves, radiowaves, synthetic colors, lab-food inside their bodies. The idea of nanobiobots, nanoparticles, nanoreplicants, nano-ad nauseum fusing with bio ad-nauseum can be said as repulsive, vulgar, uncontrolled and reckless ideas. These people have gone mad. Just stop experimenting this for the sake of human life.

Yeah...The race to create life 2.0 is under way. Good going all I can say here...

Dr Venter has also said that the team is trying to modify genes in the new organism to mop up greenhouse gases. New organism will be hopefully able to cleaning up oil spills or producing plastics as well. Creating such semi-synthetic minimal cells would recall the early living cells to everyone.

Every discovery, research and successful invention has both its negative and positive sides. The Artificial life will have also its both negative and positive impact. Let the scientists do the job, it will help us in several areas though its tough and will take more and more years.

Still early days to decide whether it is a step too far or not...

Looks like sci-fi to me. Having said that, most things that looked like sci-fi about a century back have become realities. If science is there for the development and betterment, why not?

we need to have androids too. program android to make eternal lovers. synthetic love is what we need. it will solve most probs. :-D

There should be some alternative and unconventional methods to check some of the situations that conventional methods have been proven failures in checking. Hence, we must not stop from doing what is urgently needed to be done.

der'z nthin lyk synthetic lyf. get real dude

This is stupidity and fantasy mongering at its best. Bring the Man-Created-Life on board. BTW are you talking 700 years hence?

u mean machines instead of entrails? small germs hel[ping us major with Cl Cn? bring em on......... lol

it depends on ppl n how they perceive things. i don't think if most or all of us would hate to live as long as given the chance. for the moralists this is again a good debate but i think it is 'a step too early' for ppl who stand other side of the thread.

@Kareem

why do u think most of us are dumb heads like u who would love to live forever. this phenomena what we call life is full of misery and if Buddha formulated the middle path to achieve Moksha i.e. freedom from the circle of life and death, it was indeed ppl like u who refrained from ideologies like this for the sake of living eternally. this is not only the pt of debate for moralists but for the humanity. we are talking of humans trying to overtake GOD or call it nature. and no i am not trying turn it into a religious debate.

step?? too far?? Centuries will go and the generations will be changed, these scientists are just want to see their name in the initiative process to create synthetic life. Who will end the process if a needless point to debate.

Kamal, it is interesting to see your comment in right side terming it great progress. It seems you are unaware of the negative consequences of the progress man..

Synthetic biologists are primarily involved in building genetic devices within living cell. After that the whole system can move, reproduce and interact and the synthetic device will be called as a parasite in cell.

Replication is far from perfect. These scientists can just copy the cells can't create it. Biologists are spending time and funds on worthless project only to gain short-term recognitions across the world.

Well said Liezel..The race to create life 2.0 is under way or we can say Beta-Testing Life 2.0 is in the process. Synthetic biologists have already built living several genetic systems as experiments in their laboratories.

I extend what Nicole said here above my comment that Artificial life is something different than synthetic life. The scientists have also said that there is need to distinguish synthetic life from artificial life. With the experiment to create synthetic life, they are just re-designing the cell chromosomes. they are certainly not creating a whole new artificial life system.

This is not too far coz Life of all species on earth come into existence from the same molecular ingredients. Five nucleotides form the building blocks for DNA and RNA. Twenty amino acids serve as building blocks for proteins. The scientists are working on the same theory. this is matter of years..

The primary aim of the process is to understand and redo how some of the genes help any bacterium to survive, feed and reproduce. Scientists just want to create a microbe that could hopefully generate hydrogen for energy. It wi