Synthetic Life: About as exciting as synthetic piano.

For those of you who turn to this blog for all your world news, there was a breakthrough last week in the realm of synthetic life.  J. Craig Venter of the J. Craig Venter Institute, located in J. Craig Venter, Illinois, successfully synthesized DNA and inserted it into a bacterium, creating an organism with no "parent."  People, especially nerdy people, are very excited about this.  But no one thinks about this poor bacterium.  Brought into this world all alone, no parents, no relatives, no siblings.  Destined to be frozen and sent to a museum.  But, given what it would be doing if it wasn't this famous little life form, i.e. living in the respiration tract of a goat or cow like it's bacterial donors, maybe it's life isn't so bad.

I know, lots of nerds are all atwitter about this, but seriously, creating an organism that is closely related to bacteria that live in the respiratory tracts of ruminates and the genital tract of primates just doesn't do it for me.  After spending 15 years and over $40,000,000, they've created an organism that, well, lives in a petri dish... and replicates... oh, and it's blue.  That's about all there is to say about it.

This work has led to talk of producing strains of engineered life that will feed on carbon dioxide and produce bio-fuels.  Yep, still not all that excited.  Sorry, but until they come up with a large blob-like organism that lives under your sink and eats garbage and excretes... hmm, let's say cake, I'm just not that excited.  But when they do make the cake pooping blobster, I'm totally getting two.  One for home use, and one to sell poo cakes to Japan.  They've got a very unusual relationship with poo.