The current issue of Scientific American features a mind-blowing article by W. Wayt Gibbs about "synthetic biology," the effort to create designer organisms from the bottom up:
"This nascent field has three major goals: One, learn about life by building it, rather than by tearing it apart. Two, make genetic engineering worthy of its name–a discipline that continuously improves by standardizing its previous creations and recombining them to make new and more sophisticated systems. And three, stretch the boundaries of life and of machines until the two overlap to yield truly programmable organisms. Already TNT-detecting and artemisinin-producing microbes seem within reach. The current prototypes are relatively primitive, but the vision is undeniably grand: think of it as Life, version 2.0."
