Welcome to artificial life Synthia

[WingedWolfPsion]

I'm fairly sure that Smith and Wesson's products won't be any real help to you against a bacterium.

However, I think this is a truly awesome achievement, personally, and it's about time they managed it. Sounds like they're still working out the bugs, though. The problem is that, without understanding the proteome, we're really shooting blind with this sort of thing.

There are a bunch of people who are all paranoid about this new organism going rogue and turning into a super-plague or something, but those folks really just failed High School Biology...of course the synthetic bacterium is harmless, it's not even working properly yet. Bacteria are very primitive things, and they simply eat, reproduce, and excrete--that's all. With such a simple genome, this one isn't going to be mutating into a form that eats people anytime soon. It's much less likely to do so than the bacteria living on your computer desk.

As for an 'off switch' for bacteria--bleach works.

The future implications of this technology are vast...how about a line of bacteria that eat oil, and excrete water? You could tailor bacteria to deal with most any harmful substance, and produce something harmless as a waste product (you may have to use several strains, converting the substance several times, but you can get there).
If you need a bacterium that does just one thing...this is a good way to go about it.

We need to learn more, but part of learning is doing--the whimsical addition of poetry into a DNA code also amuses me.
I'm waiting for someone to put the Bible into one of these things next, that should have people yelling, lol.

Is this life? Of course it's life--it's a bacterium, and it does what other bacteria do. They took the shell of a bacterium and put artificially created DNA into it. We are not yet at the point where we can build the WHOLE THING from scratch...but honestly, since the very first organism on Earth, no other living thing does that either.

You can't disenfranchise the little guys as life forms just because a computer wrote their DNA code. DNA is DNA...they eat, they excrete, they reproduce--they're alive.