This is surprisingly like the first step you'd take if you were about to start hacking the firmware on an embedded board: before you change bits, you upload a known good firmware to prove your programming process is working correctly.
Gripe: "artificial life" already has a somewhat lengthy history of usage, referring to emulating biological activity or traits in software or hardware. It's often shortened to just alife or a-life.<p>It's related to genetic algorithms, genetic programming, and the like.<p>It would be nice if the using-real-chemicals-and-alive-stuff hacking were called "synthetic life", or something to distinguish it from existing terminology.
Announcement here <a href="http://www.jcvi.org/cms/research/projects/first-self-replicating-synthetic-bacterial-cell/overview/" rel="nofollow">http://www.jcvi.org/cms/research/projects/first-self-replica...</a> with the press release, a FAQ and some fact sheets (and the video is promised to be available soon)
Here are my questions about this, hope you smart folks don't mind chiming in:<p>How do you physically put DNA into a cell? A very small needle? Or is there something fancier?<p>How were the synthesized pieces of DNA produced? Very tiny robotic hands pushing the molecules together in the right sequence?<p>How did they stitch together the synthesized pieces of DNA? What would say which pieces go with which?
Perspective:
<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2010/05/ventners-not-all-that/57046/" rel="nofollow">http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2010/05/ventners-...</a><p>(I am not currently well-informed enough in this area to either advocate or not this perspective, just providing it.)
very informative video on guardian from Craig Venter: <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/may/20/craig-venter-synthetic-life-form" rel="nofollow">http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/may/20/craig-venter-s...</a>