Artificial Life Soon?
	Posted 20 Aug 2007 at 15:29 UTC by Rog-a-matic

We saw similar headlines in the 80's concerning AI, now some believe that artificial life (in the form of an active cell-like structure anyway) is likely within 10 years. The hope is that combining nucleotides in the correct proportions and environment would allow Darwinian evolution to take over and relieve scientists of the design task (and the consequences I suppose). This is being referred to as "made from scratch" by some. Jack Szostak at Harvard Medical School states: "We aren't smart enough to design things, we just let evolution do the hard work and then we figure out what happened". Steve Benner, Chemist at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Fl., is also working on this and his tactic is to create a new-and-improved DNA by adding additional bases. Benner address concerns by stating: "But them getting out and taking over, never in our imagination could this happen."