The long awaited announcement was finally made in this week's Science magazine: Craig Venter's version of synthetic life has been "booted up." A bare-bones genome was artificially constructed and transplanted into a host bacterium, which now looks and behaves just how they engineered it to be.

This breakthrough is obviously going to bring up some timely questions - moral, ethical, and scientific - and many news outlets are already discussing this leap into what some think of as "God's territory."

But this is not the only way scientists are attempting to create life. Watch this video to learn about the many other ways synthetic biologists and engineers intend to annoy theologians in coming years.

<sub>Host: Rheanna Sand

Photo Credits: J. Craig Venter Institute; Wikimedia users Bev Sykes, Michael Linnenbach, Hao et al (BioMedCentral)


References:</sub>

_{http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/328/5981/958.pdf
http://www.jcvi.org/cms/research/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2442389/pdf/rstb20072065.pdf
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090325091809.htm
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2759422/pdf/11693_2009_Article_9029.pdf}