As Synthetic Biology Marches On, Our First Encounter With Alien Life May Happen in the Lab
Creating Life in the Lab via NYT Should we find alien life elsewhere in the universe, what would it look like? Biologists on Earth don't even agree on how life arose here--or what the definition of life really is--but one thing biologists do seem to agree on is that it would be really useful to have a second example of life to compare with our own version. But that second example most likely won't come from some faraway planet, says the NYT's Dennis Overbye. Scientists will more likely create it right here on Earth. Synthetic biology and the idea of synthetic life aren't new by any means. Just last year, for instance, J. Craig Venter made big waves by claiming that his institute had created the world's first fully synthetic, self-replicating cell. Other researchers disputed the notion that the cell was an example of life created from scratch, but the idea...