The real and true history of synthetic life forms
Preface: you should know about the J Craig Venter Institute and what they do.
Truth: a fully complete artificial and synthetic life form was created in the laboratory by scientists from raw materials
in 2008. It is called Mycoplasma Laboratorium. It was one of the major successes of the "Minimal Genome Project".
Work on this effort began
in the 60's, at NASA. The principals were Harold J Morowitz, Mark Tourtellotte, and DC Wallace.
Two years later in 2010, there was another fully artificial and hitherto unknown version of Mycoplasma Mycoides (ie an
entirely new species not found in nature) synthesized in the laboratory from raw components. The principals were Hamilton Smith and Clyde Hutchison. Here is a picture of the fully artificial fully synthetic life form they created from scratch:
This work is already FIFTEEN YEARS OLD.
You can Google the J Craig Venter web page to find out what they're up to now.
Subsequently then, the scientists attempted to EVOLVE the minimal cell, and studied it's mutation in considerable detail. These were the results:
An engineered minimal cell evolves to escape the negative consequences of genome streamlining.
www.nature.com
The DNA for this brand new artificial species, was created in "cassettes" of 1080 base pairs each, where the 80 overlap. The entire genome was assembled in vitro and then transferred into a membrane shell, and subsequently the new organism was able to immediately reproduce.
Since the initial success in 2008,
twenty three brand new artificial life forms have been created, none of which were previously found in nature.
en.m.wikipedia.org