Scientists have created synthetic life in the laboratory, in a feat of ingenuity that pushes the boundaries of humankinds ability to manipulate the natural world and leaves us all facing the possiblilty of extinction.
Craig Venter, the biologist who led the effort to map the human genome, apologised profusely, and said today that the first cell controlled entirely by man-made genetic instructions had been produced.
The synthetic bacterium, nicknamed Synthia, had been hailed as a step-change in biological engineering, allowing the creation of designer organisms with specialised functions that could never have evolved in nature, but that was before its effect on the human body had been studied.
The team at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland, is investigating how the artifical microbes that were designed to make vaccines have evolved over the course of just a few generations the ability to attack the central nervous system, killing victims within hours.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/biology_evolution/article7132299.ece
