The Year We Become Gods

Staff

This is the projected time when mankind will take its next leap forward in the advancement of science, the creation of man-made life, also known as synthetic life. DNA sequencing pioneer, Craig Venter is building a synthetic bacterium known cutely as Synthia. It is being built, not completely from scratch but from the DNA of a microbe called Mycoplasma genitalium.

Venter announced the creation of a synthetic M. genitalium genome in January of 2008 and the birth of Synthia was thought to be imminent. Just months before, his team had demonstrated the technology for smuggling the DNA into a living bacterial cell, by performing a "genome transplant" between two different Mycoplasma species.

In other life-creation news researchers are working on the component parts of an entirely synthetic cell. Harvard University researcher George Church expects to get synthetic ribosomes to self-replicate this year.