Artificial Life
With the typical arrogance of certain scientists, Craig Ventor claims that he has created life in a laboratory from “four bottles of chemicals on a shelf.” He claims that he has created a self-replicating synthetic gene. He didn’t. What he did is to create a synthetic gene. But he required an already living bacterium to do his replicating for him. He didn’t create life in a test tube. He created a synthetic gene that an already living bacterium replicated for him. Recombinant genes have been inserted into bacteria for decades. The only difference here, is that the gene was synthesized in a lab. Unlike physics and chemistry, biology has few laws. One law it does have is this: only life can create life. This is the case for Ventor’s gene, too.