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Experts: Artificial life likely in 3 to 10 years
BY SETH BORENSTEIN The Associated Press

   WASHINGTON — Around the world, a handful of scientists are trying to create life from scratch and they’re getting closer.
   Experts expect an announcement within three to 10 years from someone in the now little-known fi eld of “wet artificial life.”
   “It’s going to be a big deal and everybody’s going to know about it,” said Mark Bedau, chief operating officer of ProtoLife of Venice, Italy, one of those in the race. “We’re talking about a technology that could change our world in pretty fundamental ways — in fact, in ways that are impossible to predict.”
   That first cell of synthetic life — made from the basic chemicals in DNA — may not seem like much to non-scientists. For one thing, you’ll have to look in a microscope to see it.
   “Creating protocells has the potential to shed new life on our place in the universe,” Bedau said. “This will remove one of the few fundamental mysteries about creation in the universe and our role.”
   And several scientists believe man-made life forms will one day offer the potential for solving a variety of problems, from fighting diseases to locking up greenhouse gases to eating toxic waste.
   Bedau figures there are three major hurdles to creating synthetic life:
   A container, or membrane, for the cell to keep bad molecules out, allow good ones, and the ability to multiply.
   A genetic system that controls the functions of the cell, enabling it to reproduce and mutate in response to environmental changes.
   A metabolism that extracts raw materials from the environment as food and then changes it into energy.
   One of the leaders in the field, Jack Szostak at Harvard Medical School, predicts that within the next six months, scientists will report evidence that the first step — creating a cell membrane — is “not a big problem.” Scientists are using fatty acids in that effort.
   Szostak is also optimistic about the next step — getting nucleotides, the building blocks of DNA, to form a working genetic system.
   His idea is that once the container is made, if scientists add nucleotides in the right proportions, then Darwinian evolution could simply take over.
   “We aren’t smart enough to design things, we just let evolution do the hard work and then we figure out what happened,” Szostak said.

PAUL SAKUMA/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
University of California, Santa Cruz, biochemist David Deamer looks at crystalization of the amino acids as part of an experiment in his lab in Santa Cruz, Calif. Researchers are “making the first pieces of life get together,” said Deamer.

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Around the world, a handful of scientists are trying to create life from scratch and they’re getting closer.

No matter what they use...it was already here....can we make dirt from air???? All we do is move things, that are here already, around and put them together....unless we can reach out and pull a 'new thing' from the air....it will NEVER be ours.....

I couldn't agree  more senders!! These people are just 'modifying' what they have to work with. They are just manipulating God's creation. And I highly  would advise against that!! We clearly can not mimick God. Humans have been trying to do that from the beginning of time. But ya know what? People are still born and people still die. Now what they do in between that time is fruitless! It just doesn't matter.