Playing God?

Life 2.0

A new generation of scientific mavericks is not content to merely tinker with life's genetic code. They want to rewrite it from scratch.

In the past, genetic wizardry has been confined to tinkering and tweaking what nature has already produced—taking a gene from a bacterium, say, and inserting it into the chromosomes of corn or pigs. What we're talking about is producing life that is wholly new—not in any way a genetic descendant of the primordial Mother Cell. The initial members of each newly created breed will have no ancestors at all.