Making life from scratch is now 'imminent' -- Margaret Munro -- National Post -- February 21, 2001
Scientists will soon be able to create viruses that never existed before, and bring extinct horrors such as smallpox back to life, says a leading geneticist who is working to create life from scratch.
Engineering ET: The Path to Alternate Life Forms -- Robert Roy Britt -- Space.com -- May 08, 2001
In two separate research efforts, scientists have altered the very nature of nature by creating cells that break a cardinal rule of biology, incorporating an entirely new basic building block into their cellular structures. It is a first step on a path of neogenesis -- the creation of alternate life forms.
Scientists Planning to Make New Form of Life -- Justin Gillis -- Washington Post -- November 20, 2002
A team of researchers, under the leadership of Craig J. Venter, plan to create a new form of life in a laboratory dish, a project that raises ethical and safety issues but also promises to illuminate the fundamental mechanics of living organisms.
Should scientists create new life? -- Art Caplan -- MSNBC News -- November 21, 2002
Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at the University of Pennslyvania, argues that policymakers should establish rules now to govern the creation of new life forms.
Researchers create novel life form -- Christine Suh -- United Press International -- January 13, 2003
Researchers have manipulated an organism successfully to make it produce an unnatural amino acid in addition to its natural counterparts. "It's a bona fide unnatural organism now," said lead researcher Ryan Mehl.
Expanding The Genetic Code: The World's First Artificial Organism -- Staff -- Spacedaily -- January 14, 2003
A group of scientists say they have, for the first time, created an organism that can produce a 21st amino acid and incorporate it into proteins completely on its own. The research should help probe some of the central questions of evolutionary theory.
Lab scientists may soon be shouting: It's alive -- Sue Vorenberg -- Albuquerque Tribune -- January 01, 2004
Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory are close to creating an organism completely different from any life on Earth. They have all the building blocks ready and are hoping in the next few years to create a new organism 10 million times smaller than the smallest bacteria.
Science on verge of new `Creation' -- Ronald Kotulak -- Chicago Tribune -- March 28, 2004
Scientists are working on creating new life-forms from scratch. If successful, this could could open a new age of "living technology," where harnessing the power of life to spontaneously adapt to complex situations could solve problems that now defy modern engineering.
http://www.gyre.org/news/related/Artificial+Life/Neogenesis
