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Posting the entire article, just for the record:

Researchers Creating Life From Scratch

BERKELEY, Calif. -- They're called "synthetic biologists" and they boldly claim the ability to make never-before-seen living things, one genetic molecule at a time.

They're mixing, matching and stacking DNA's chemical components like microscopic Lego blocks in an effort to make biologically based computers, medicines and alternative energy sources. The rapidly expanding field is confounding the taxonomists' centuries-old system of classifying species and raising concerns about the new technology's potential for misuse.

Though scientists have been combining the genetic material of two species for 30 years now, their work has remained relatively simplistic.

Scientists might add one foreign gene to an organism to produce a drug like insulin. The technique is more art than science given the brute trial-and-error it takes to create cells that make drugs.

So a new breed of biologists is attempting to bring order to the hit-and-miss chaos of genetic engineering by bringing to biotechnology the same engineering strategies used to build computers, bridges and buildings.

The idea is to separate cells into their fundamental components and then rebuild new organisms, a much more complex way of genetic engineering.

The burgeoning movement is attracting big money and some of the biggest names in biology, many of whom are attending the "Life Engineering Symposium" that begins Friday in San Francisco.

"Synthetic biology is genetic engineering rethought," said Harvard Medical Center researcher George Church, a leader in the field. "It challenges the notion of what's natural and what's synthetic."

Already, synthetic biologists have created a polio virus and another smaller virus by stitching together individual genes purchased from biotechnology companies.

Now, researchers are getting closer to creating more complex living things with actual utility.

In Israel, scientists have created the world's smallest computer by engineering DNA to carry out mathematical functions.

J. Craig Venter, the entrepreneurial scientist who mapped the human genome, announced last month that he intends to string together genes to create from scratch novel organisms that can produce alternative fuels such as hydrogen and ethanol.

With a $42.6 million grant that originated at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Berkeley researchers are creating a new malaria drug by removing genetic material of the E. coli bacterium and replacing it with genes from wormwood and yeast.

"We're building parts that can be assembled into devices and devices that can be turned into systems," said Jay Keasling, head of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Berkeley synthetic biology department, which was created last year.

Keasling, who doubles as a chemical engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley, hopes to create never-before-seen living molecules by fusing genes from the three species - a new breed of bacteria capable of spitting out malaria-fighting artemisinin, a chemical now found only in small traces in the wormwood plant.

Artemisinin has been extracted from finely ground sweet wormwood for more than 2,000 years as a treatment for a variety of ailments, but the method is expensive, time consuming and limited by access to wormwood, which is found mainly in China and Vietnam.

Keasling has a similar project in the works to synthetically create a compound now found in Samoan trees, one that shows promise in fighting AIDS.

Such efforts are attracting more than grant money.

A group of topflight venture capitalists led by Vinod Khosla of the Menlo Park-based Perkins, Caufield & Byers invested $13 million in Codon Devices of Cambridge, Mass., which was co-founded by Keasling and Church. Keasling also co-founded Amyris Biotechnologies of Emeryville to build microbes that will produce novel or rare drugs.

Venter, meanwhile, has launched Synthetic Genomics Inc. with Nobel laureate Hamilton Smith and will compete with Codon and several other recent startups to commercialize the technology.

But with success also comes ethical questions.

For example, national security experts and even synthetic biologists themselves fret that rogue scientists or "biohackers" could create new biological weapons - like deadly viruses that lack natural foes. They also worry about innocent mistakes - organisms that could potentially create havoc if allowed to reproduce outside the lab.

"There are certainly a lot of national security implications with synthetic biology," said Gigi Kwik Gronvall, a researcher at the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Biosecurity.

Researchers are casting about for ways to self-police the field before it really takes off. One solution could be to require the few companies that sell genetic material to register with some official entity and report biologists who order DNA strains with weapons potential.

The Arthur P. Sloan Foundation in June awarded the Venter Institute, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Center for Strategic and International Studies a $570,000 grant to study the social implications of the new field.

"There are a cascade of ecological issues," said Laurie Zoloth, a bioethics professor at Northwestern University. "Synthetic biology is like iron: You can make sewing needles and you can make spears. Of course, there is going to be dual use."

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On the Net:

Lawrence Berkeley lab: http://www.lbl.gov/

Church's lab: http://arep.med.harvard.edu/

Venter Institute: http://www.venterinstitute.org/

Not what I suggested. In this case, first they have to build the molecule. From nothing. From whatever they theorize existed before the Big Bang, First Event, the moment of singularity, or whatever they choose to call the pre-born Universe.

Evolutionists have assumptions. They take many necessary steps for granted in the molecules-to-man model. Evolutionists assume that non-living chemicals gave rise to that first living cell which, in turn, evolved into ever and ever more complex forms of life. There are no scientific experiments to prove the molecules-to-man scenario.

Writing as an evolutionist, G. A. Kerkut lists the major assumptions of evolution. These are the basic theories an evolutionist takes for granted or “supposes” to be true. All of the “molecules-to-man science” is built upon these assumptions, but you rarely, if ever, see them listed in a high school or college textbook.

There are seven basic assumptions that are often not mentioned during discussions of evolution. Many evolutionists ignore the first six assumptions and only consider the seventh. The assumptions are as follows:

1. The first assumption is that non-living things gave rise to living material, i.e., spontaneous generation occurred.

2. The second assumption is that spontaneous generation occurred only once.

3. The third assumption is that viruses, bacteria, plants and animals are all related.

4. The fourth assumption is that protozoa (single-celled life forms) gave rise to metazoa (multiple-celled life forms).

5. The fifth assumption is that various invertebrate phyla are interrelated.

6. The sixth assumption is that the invertebrates gave rise to the vertebrates.

7. The seventh assumption is that within the vertebrates the fish gave rise to amphibia, the amphibia to reptiles and the reptiles to birds and mammals.

MOLECULES-TO-MAN IS ASSUMED

What Dr. Kerkut has listed as “assumptions” is the whole of evolutionary teaching. In other words, there is no factual (experimentally testable and reproducible) science which supports evolution. The process of moving from non-living things to the first living, reproducing cell to man and giant Redwood trees is all an assumption.

Grasshopper.

Doesn't count because:

A) It proves intelligent design.
B) They didn't make their own dirt.
C)Who are you to think you understand the mind of The Designer?< /ID > < /Creationist > < Brain >

So when will they claim The Origin-of-Life Prize ®?

The Origin-of-Life Prize ® definition of life;

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e. By sustained, free-living "life," the Foundation means any system which from its own inherent set of biological instructions can perform all nine of the following functions:

1. Delineate itself from its environment through the production and maintenance of a membrane equivalent, most probably a rudimentary or quasi-active-transport membrane necessary for selective absorption of nutrients, excretion of wastes, and overcoming osmotic and toxic gradients,

2. Write, store, and pass along into progeny prescriptive information (instruction) needed for organization; provide instructions for energy derivation and for needed metabolite production and function; symbolically encode and communicate functional message through a transmission channel to a receiver/decoder/destination/effector mechanism; integrate past, present and future time into its biological prescriptive information (instruction) content,

3. Bring to pass the above recipe instructions into the production or acquisition of actual catalysts, coenzymes, cofactors, etc.; physically orchestrate the biochemical processes/pathways of metabolic reality; manufacture and maintain physical cellular architecture; establish and operate a semiotic system using "signal molecules"

4. Capture, transduce, store, and call up energy for utilization (work),

5. Actively self-replicate and eventually reproduce, not just passively polymerize or crystallize; pass along the apparatus and "know-how" for homeostatic metabolism and reproduction into progeny,

6. Self-monitor and repair its constantly deteriorating physical matrix of bioinstruction retention/transmission, and of architecture,

7. Develop and grow from immaturity to reproductive maturity,

8. Productively react to environmental stimuli. Respond in an efficacious manner that is supportive of survival, development, growth, and reproduction, and

9. Possess relative genetic stability, yet sufficient diversity to allow for adaptation and potential evolution.

All classes of archaea, bacteria, and every other known free-living organism, meet all nine of the above criteria. Eliminate any one of the above nine requirements, and it remains to be demonstrated whether that system could remain "alive."

RNA strands, DNA strands, prions, viroids, and viruses shall not be considered free-living organisms, since they fail to meet many of the above well-recognized characteristics of independent "life."

Even in historical science, there must be some degree of empirical accountability to our theories. Proposing a mechanism that explains the origin of life must not consist of "defining down" the meaning and essence of the observable phenomenon of "life" to include "nonlife" in order to make our theories "work." Any scientific life-origins theory must connect with "life" as we observe it (the "continuity principle"). Science will never be able to abandon its empirical roots in favor of purely theoretical conjecture. On the other hand, science must constantly guard itself against Kuhnian paradigm ruts. We must be open-minded to the possibility that life has not always taken the form that we currently observe. We must take into consideration the problems inherent in any historical science where the observation of past realities is impossible.

Biophysicist Hubert P. Yockey makes the unique observation that "there is nothing in the physico-chemical world [apart from life] that remotely resembles reactions being determined by a sequence and codes between sequences. The existence of a genome and the genetic code divides living organisms from non-living matter." (Computers and Chemistry, 24 (2000) 105-123). This may well constitute the most concise and parsimonious dichotomization of animacy from inanimacy available in the literature. We must remember, however, that the full compliment of nucleic acid code, ribozymes, and protein enzymes are still present immediately after cell death. Life, therefore, would appear not to be reducible to coded prescriptive information (instruction) alone. Life is also not "a bag of enzymes." "Life" is characterized by ongoing homeostatic metabolic process and algorithmic function, including development, growth, and reproductive potential. The inability of mules to reproduce has no relevance to discussions of protocellular viability.

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Would the discussion here on this thread be out of place in a public school classroom?