[Joe Brower]

Here is another article on this.

If this is indeed true, then the long-range implications could shake our basic worldview. It is easy to see life as magic of a sort. This finding, if correct, means that Steven Weinberg's quip about life being "just a disease of matter" is correct. And that makes life, all life, us included, just "meat machines".

[AdmSmith]

Dr. Venter and his colleagues wrote their names into its chemical DNA code, along with three apt quotations from James Joyce and others. These genetic watermarks will, eventually, allow the researchers to assert ownership of the cells. "You have to have a way of tracking it," said Stanford ethicist Mildred Cho, who has studied the issues posed by the creation of such organisms.

This reminds me of my days in a lab when I, and probably many others, did similar things with small strings of DNA in plasmids. You are restricted to the alphabet with A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W and Z. No J, nor X. If you want to do it perfect and enable replication without destroying something it takes time.