ok, less impressive than waving a magic wand and bringing a rotting human corpse back to who he was before he died kind of life.

A team led by maverick U.S. geneticist Craig Venter is reporting it has successfully transferred an entirely new set of genetic machinery into a tiny microbe and "booted" it up.

Having sequenced the tiny genome of Mycoplasma genitalium, Venter Institute molecular biologists assembled a copy of a vital part of that sequence from Certifiably Not Alive off-the-shelf synthetic amino acids. Stuck inside partially eviscerated, and hence very dead, Mycoplasma capsids, the molecular assembly kick-started the nanocorpses' metabolism. The former cells are once again alive, and by the mycoplasmae's minimalist standards , frisky

another small baby step :bigthumb:

{the quote is compiled from two seperate websites, hence the slight change in what was installed.}

zooooombies!!!

Um, a decaying micro-organism was brought back to life using synthetic amino acid?
This will make Christians cry immoral. Who dares to play god and extend life farther than Noah?

worse than that, dead chemicals were brought to life by adding dust.

not so much reanimation, more direct animation of dead matter.

the part of the critter that they built from dust BECAME alive when added to the dead remains, REanimating them.



without invoking any magical intervention by any gods.

I don't expect ysr to be able to understand this, or for that matter TRY to understand this, but it demonstrates that magic is not needed to form life.

us normal folks should find it interesting.

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1490301

Viruses have been defined as obligatory intracellular parasites in need of a living cell for replication. Our work challenges this definition. After the sequence of the poliovirus genome was determined, and a protocol for the de novo test-tube replication of the virus in a cellular extract was developed, the chemical synthesis of the genome was a logical step to assert its character as a chemical.


Our experiment has thus overthrown one axiom in biology—namely, that the proliferation of cells or, for that matter, viruses depends on the physical presence of a functional genome to instruct the replication process. It was believed that without parental genomes, no daughter cells or progeny viruses would arise.


In 1828, Friedrich Wöhler, a German chemist, shattered the doctrine of vitalism by synthesizing an organic compound (urea) from an inorganic compound (ammonium cyanate; Wöhler, 1828). Vitalism states that organic compounds possess properties that cannot be explained in physical or chemical terms. Similarly to the synthesis of urea, no ‘vital force' was necessary to ‘instruct' the poliovirus genome during the chemical synthesis and transcription of the cDNA en route to infectious viral RNA. There is nothing transcendental about the sequence of the poliovirus genome shown in Fig 2. We have concluded that vitalism is not necessary to explain the properties of poliovirus or any virus

....At present, it is impossible to synthesize RNA of such length chemically. We therefore rerouted the synthesis through double-stranded DNA, using mail-ordered complementary oligonucleotides, which can be assembled in a linear fashion. After many steps of elongating the DNA strand by adding new oligonucleotides*, we obtained a genome-length double-stranded complementary DNA (cDNA) of about 7,500 base pairs that contained all the genetic information of the viral RNA genome (Fig 3A). This synthetic cDNA was transcribed into viral RNA using a specific RNA transcriptase (van der Werf et al, 1986), thereby yielding infectious viral RNA (Fig 3A). We could have simply transfected this RNA into human cells to obtain authentic poliovirus; instead, we opted to violate the normal replicative cycle of the virus by mixing the RNA with a cell-free extract of uninfected human cells that was devoid of nuclei, mitochondria and other cellular organelles. As we showed a decade earlier (Molla et al, 1991), the RNA was both translated and replicated to form viral proteins and new genomes until a critical mass of viral products was reached; at this stage, poliovirus particles spontaneously assembled (Fig 3A).

*ol·i·go·nu·cle·o·tide

Function: noun
: a short nucleic-acid chain usually consisting of up to approximately 20 nucleotides