“Scientists could create the first new form of artificial life within months after a landmark breakthrough in which they turned one bacteria into another,” Roger Highfield reports for The Telegraph.
“In a development that has triggered unease and excitement in equal measure, scientists took the whole genetic makeup – or genome – of a bacterial cell and transplanted it into a closely related species,” Highfield reports.
“This then began to grow and multiply in the lab, turning into the first species in the process,” Highfield reports.
“The team that carried out the first ‘species transplant’ says it plans within months to do the same thing with a synthetic genome made from scratch in the laboratory,” Highfield reports. “If that experiment worked, it would mark the creation of a synthetic lifeform.”
“The breakthrough occurred at the J Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland, the team reports today in the journal Science. One of its editors called it “a landmark in biological engineering,'” Highfield reports.
“The team wanted to develop a way to move a complete genome into a living cell, chosing the simplest and smallest kind, a bacterium. In all, of the millions of bacteria that they tried the transplant on, it only worked one time in every 150,000,” Highfield reports. “Dr Venter likened it to ‘changing a Macintosh computer into a PC by inserting a new piece of software’ and stressed it would be more difficult in other kinds of cells, which have enzymes to snip the DNA of invaders.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “jay” for the heads up.]
Holy Bacterium Boot Camp, Batman! That poor bacterium: got turned inside-out, went from transparent to opaque, inexplicably increased in complexity, became hideously misshapen, and now it swims backwards! Change it back from a PC into a Mac, Dr. Venkman, er… Venter, change the poor thing back!
Obviously, this news is not Apple-related beyond a passing quote mentioning Mac, but we would have posted this article regardless, as we sometimes do with articles we find extremely interesting. Plus, we got to make fun of PCs while referencing Batman and Ghostbusters, so there’s no way we could pass it up. 
You know where this is all going to end up, don’t you?