[Moonman62]

"They used 4 different strands of pre-existing DNA to do this. They did not create the "life" from scratch. What a huge misrepresentation."

I didn't see this bit. Yes, that makes their "synthesis" a lot less than pure.

If you read the article linked in post #17 you'll see that the 1000 unit strands that were "stitched" together were created from scratch. There were about a thousand of these strands since the total base pairs put together were about a million.

[Joe Brower]

It appears safe to say that the arguments for and against will go back and forth for a while on this, since part of this problem is, really, a complete definition of the goal -- "What exactly constitutes life"? And then things tend to veer off into branches of philosophy.

For example, if your entire mind could be downloaded into a CPU, and you would retain every thought, every bit of personality, every memory, would you still be 'alive'? (That's what Kurzweil calls 'The Singularity'.) How about an artificial, totally electronic sentience, something that's been beaten to death in SciFi since the beginning. Will that qualify as 'living'? Sentient, yes, but living, no? This question will become quite valid when, not if, we create such an entity.

And I do believe it's just a matter of time. Because the larger part of my thinking makes me sympathize with the 'meat machine' idea. It just makes sense from a standpoint of how this physical universe operates. The transition from electro-mechanical to electro-chemical may just be a matter of scale. And since right now it's beyond our understanding, we attribute a magic quality to it. And maybe there is one. But it has never shown up under a microscope.

[wbarmy]

I understood that, but they intimated in the first part of the article that there were four beakers which were being combined into the final product. I assumed that the other strands were combined previously to these final four.