"Perhaps I shouldn't have used a conditional in the title. After all, we are already creating life."

"Recently, Craig Venter, from the J. Craig Venter Institute, announced the creation of a living, self-reproducing bacterial cell with a DNA sequence produced in the laboratory. According to Laurie Garrett's article in Foreign Affairs late last year, the creature 'moved, ate, breathed, and replicated itself.'"

"Garrett quotes from an interview with Venter from 2009: 'There's not a single aspect of human life that doesn't have the potential to be totally transformed by these technologies in the future.'"

"'These technologies' refer to the world of synthetic biology, the ability to construct — at least in principle — living creatures from the assembly of different parts, as in a sort of living Lego world."