Albert Mohler: Has Man Created Life?

Humanity had better think hard about whether this is a journey we are ready to entrust to scientists alone. The most urgent question raised by this new announcement is not so much what it means, but where it leads.
Tuesday, May 25, 2010

The cover story of the June 2010 edition of Scientific American presents “12 Events That Will Change Everything.” Those events include human cloning, an asteroid colliding with the earth, a worldwide pandemic, and the creation of synthetic life. Each of the twelve proposed events is evaluated in terms of likelihood. The article on the creation of synthetic life ranks the probability of that event as “almost certain.”

Consider that a case of an argument made too late. Just days ago, Dr. Craig Venter and his associates announced the achievement of the first synthetic life form, a bacterium with DNA sequenced entirely by computer — a human-designed life form.

The international media have seized upon the news, published officially in the journal Science. In rather clinical language, Science, published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, described the achievement. The journal explained that Venter and his associates “describe the stepwise creation of a bacterial chromosome and the successful transfer of it into a bacterium, where it replaced the native DNA. Powered by the synthetic genome, that microbial cell began replicating and making a new set of proteins.” the rest