It is Aliiiiive!

Stepping a bit away from the lovely city of Ananthapuri, let me use this post to mark a seemingly obscure piece of news, which may seem academic at best and ghoulish at worst now, but may later be as significant as the midnight of August 15, 1947 or the announcement of the Theory of Relativity.

Simply put, a team of scientists in the US has managed to create the first completely synthetic genome. Goobledegook?! Well they have essentially created the DNA of a bacterium (okay, they haven't gotten around to creating Monica Bellucci's.....yet!) from simple chemicals. Although they copied the DNA blueprint of an existing organism, the technology can, in theory, create a completely new blueprint - a brand new living thing. Inventing life.....now that's quite something. As ethically controversial as the existance of God or abortion, it is nonetheless a landmark for science.

It may be nowhere as exciting as a mad-scientist running around yelling, "It is aliiiiiiveee!" (a la Frankenstein), but together with nanotechnology and quantum computing, this and other key streams of biotechnology will make the 21st century as different or more so from the 20th, as the 20th is from the 1st century BC!