Is this a good analogy: someone took all the parts needed to make an engine, assembled them, and put them in a preexisting car chassis. Would you call that "creating" an automobile?

This is an important advance, but I agree with the assessment that "artificial life" is a tad overblown, as the replicatory and other machinery of the cell-body, play an even greater role in "life" than the car chassis plays in relation to the engine.

Tobias is right at one level. This is not a conceptual breakthrough or new life. It is simply a matter of scale. Molecular biologists have for many years "reprogrammed" cells to express new or different genes (in fact, we call it "transformation" when we introduce the new DNA into the cell). We've been expressing different genes (and cross species genes) in organisms for years, as tools for understanding cell function. Google "GFP" for a common example, as we use a fluorescent jellyfish protein to label everything from yeast to mice.

Here, they simply chemically synthesized the genome from one organism and transformed it into a closely related organism. Although they replaced the host's genome, it's conceptually no different than transforming a single gene. Accurately synthesizing that large a piece of DNA is a technical tour de force, as David Baltimore notes, but one of chemistry more than anything else.

I would disagree with Tobias on another level; He writes, as the replicatory and other machinery of the cell-body, play an even greater role in "life" than the car chassis plays in relation to the engine.. Well, only in so far as the actions of the cell are driven by proteins. But the protein machinery of the cell is encoded by the genome. So it comes ultimately from the DNA. As we can see in Venter study, they did completely reprogram the cell to behave according to its new genome. This is hardly a surprise as the old proteins are turned over to be replaced by the new ones. The trick is that the host had to be sufficiently related to the donor for the starting proteins to recognize the genome, replicate it, and transcribe it. That's generally not true for more distantly related organisms.

The scientific community is generally responding to this with ".....and?" The media, as is its wont, is far more breathless.

Susan L Forsburg, PhD.

Thanks, Susan, that's what I was getting at, the importance of the bacterial proteins for both structure and energy provision to drive and enable the "life" process were supplied for the DNA. Yes, it is quite a feat to create new DNA for a whole organism from "scratch" -- but it will be much more impressive once the supporting apparatus of the protein structure is replicated from scratch too. Then they'll have the created the machinery necessary to allow the DNA to create new machinery, usw.

Is there an echo in here?

I found this useful:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2010/05/21/james-joyces-words-come-to-life-and-are-promptly-desecrated/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Loom+%28The+Loom%29

"In the growing colony of synthetic cells, now numbering in the billions, it’s almost certain that [James] Joyce’s watermark has already been defaced by a mutation. The bacteria that carry these degraded versions of Joyce presumably do not suffer from these mutations, since the watermarks don’t matter to them anyway. So they can keep replicating.By contrast, the DNA in the really useful parts of their genome is changing very little over the generations, thanks to selection.

"Inserting Joyce into the first synthetic cell was certainly a kind gesture, but not a timeless memorial. It would be fascinating to go back to the synthetic cell colony in a few years and sequence Joyce’s line again. I’d bet that it won’t even be recognizable anymore.

"The fate of Joyce’s DNA points up something important about this project. There have been lots of headlines over the past day about how the scientists who made this cell were playing God. Yet our power, even over synthetic cells, is limited."

it's something more like the work of certain german named Victorian doctor…

{snort}

The important question to ask, is whether Venter (et al) shouted "It's Alive! It's ALIVE!" [8-|

;-)

JC Fisher