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‘Mad scientists’ create life — well, sort of, and they aren’t really mad

Funny how you see things according to your predisposition to see them, isn't it? The title of this story demonstrates that I saw waaaaayyyy to many "mad scientist" movies when I was a kid.

I was looking around the Washington Post website and ran onto this article about scientists in Maryland who created from scratch an entire microbial chromosome. If you follow that link, you'll find a story with a headline which reads:

"Md. Scientists Build Bacterial Chromosome."

Those clever wags at the Washington Post use "Md.," an abbreviation for "Maryland." Coming just before "Scientists," of course my eye and brain made the connection to the bizarre nature of this experiment and saw "Mad" as in crazy instead of "Md." as in Maryland.

Because the story may well be worth of the old movie villain mad scientists: This news certainly raises the bar a notch closer to creating fully functioning artificial "life." Given the nature of science, the nature of human beings, and the availability of enough money, and I suppose that's inevitable. It's not a matter of "if," it's a matter of "when." (It could, of course, be "already.)

What do you think? Is artificial life, a genuinely man-made living creature, something you would feel uncomfortable with? I would -- or, rather, I do, whichever. In my thinking, this really does belong in the realm of the mad scientists of my childhood movie days. I wish we could find a way to confine it to fiction.
[tags]artificial life, mad scientists, Maryland scientists, just a guy who reads the papers[/tags]