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I think you guys are missing the point a bit. The important thing here is that there's a minimal genome in a working organism that can be used as a research pla

I think you guys are missing the point a bit. The important thing here is that there's a minimal genome in a working organism that can be used as a research platform. The "from scratchness" level is purely for bragging as once the cell divides a few times and fails to maintain components, it'll be working from the set of things its genome specifies. Whether you consider that cheating isn't really relevant for the potential experiments you can run. EDIT: For a CS example, imagine trying to reverse engineer a computer system and make it do things it wasn't supposed to do. It's a lot easier to tinker with hardware from an Apple ][ than with a modern x86 chip. The advance here is that we are finding the Apple ][ in the x86 chip and doing a run of those for people who want to play with them.

jonnathanson 11y ago
Exactly. Furthermore, you don't need to build life from scratch. That's wasteful. You'll just set yourself back years, possibly a decade or more, trying and erring until you get to roughly the same place as the stripped-down bacterial genome at which Venter and his colleagues have arrived. Venter isn't explicitly trying to create life from scratch; he's trying to find the minimum viable platform from which to harness life for various useful purposes. Starting from the proverbial "pile of unrefined rock" would accomplish nothing but scoring a few vanity points.
- logfromblammo 11y ago
  You would need to build divergent life from scratch if you wanted to prove you knew everything there is to know about how life works. As the synthetic genome shows, anyone who tried that today would end up 149 genes short of viability with too few clues for how to fix it.