Scientist Creates Artificial Cell! The Beginning Of A Life

[AllPurposeAtheist]

How about starting with a creationist and creating intelligence?  Or would that be too much to expect?

Yes indeed it is to much to ask as god himself made them intentionally ignorant with that whole tree of good, evil and knowledge prohibition thing.

[Mister Agenda]

I'm looking forward to a synthetic cell. I wish this was it.

I was very pleased by the synthetic genome a few years ago, made entirely from synthetic DNA. I don't get how this qualifies as a synthetic cell though when all they did was make a new synthetic genome and again insert it into a normal denucleated cell.

It's a synthetic genome instead of a synthetic cell, unless the article got something very important wrong.

[PopeyesPappy]

This ^

From what I gather from the article the only difference between this and what the Venter Institute did the last time they were in the news is this organism works. It encodes proteins properly. Apparently their first synthetic DNA didn't?

I also want to throw out there that I kind of object to Craig Venter personally getting all the credit for this advancement. It is my understanding that he is semiretired these days. His involvement with this research is limited to a managerial role. These advancements are made by a lot of other very smart people.

[Colanth]

This article is from 2010 - which is the old announcement.

Don't expect a paper like WSJ to get the science right, though.  Science writers aren't scientists, and most of them have very little knowledge of most of the fields they write about,

[Solitary]

I'll second that! Solitary