A new step toward synthetic life
CS Monitor | Playing God...

The young field of synthetic biology rests on the premise that scientists can design life from the ground up, that they can choose the traits that determine what the organism eats, where it thrives, and how fast it reproduces.

Organisms engineered entirely by human hand could have wide-ranging applications. They might be engineered to create cheap biofuels from a great variety of crops and biomass, including woody material that today is too expensive to convert profitably. They might clean up chemical spills, oil spills, and other man-made environmental disasters.