People keep sending me links to stories about Craig Venter's new "synthetic cell." So let's talk about it.
(By the way, I do like it when people alert me to interesting science stories, and I often put them in the magazine. If my coworker hadn't alerted me to it, I never would have known about the recent wedding in Japan that was officiated by a robot. But if the headline is "Major Breakthrough Announced in Science Magazine and Every Other News Outlet!" then I've probably seen it already.)
This particular story definitely has a case of the inflamed headlines. To be fair, Craig Venter started it--probably around the time when he called his creation "the first self-replicating species we've had on the planet whose parent is a computer."
OK, so what is it really?
Venter's team, to start with, created the longest-ever chunk of synthesized DNA: over 1 million base ...
