No.<p>They really didn't.<p>In this case the claim that it's a fully synthetic genome is fairly suspect, basically it boils down to this:<p>A codon is 3 base pairs. Giving 64 possible codons.<p>Each codon codes for an amino acid except for 3 (I think?) stop codons.<p>This results in more unique codons than there are amino acids.<p>As a result some amino acids are represented by different codons.<p>In this paper all they did (not saying it's nothing, but it's definitely not what the headline says) was remove that redundancy. Effectively they ran sed over the genome of E. Coli (I think, I read it this morning which was hours ago), and replaced every occurrence of an alternative codon with a single "standard" one. Then they plonked it into an existing cell and it reproduced.<p>The biggest challenge was probably ensuring the correct construction over the 3 million odd base pairs in their root strain. Note that of 3 million base pairs, they only made 18000 changes, far from a synthetic genome.<p>It should not be surprising that given a correct assembly the bacteria reproduced - by design the experiment only replaced codons with a different equivalent codon.
No, it is not artificial life, they synthesized life from that which already gave rise to life. This is an important distinction because what they did involves growing and manipulating existing systems. It's no more artificial than a an animal which has been bred, this is just on the level of molecular genetics. If we ever transcend, creating human/"machine" interfaces will require such technology. No you won't jack in like Neo, no we won't download our souls and thoughts to a computer, synthetics will replace organics slowly. The computers and people will meet in the middle.