Hacker News Reader

> I've always wanted to build life from scratch, and I finally have a chance to do it.

I'm pretty sure I saw this movie... and it didn't end well for existing life on Earth, as I recall. :p

Don’t worry, synthetic life doesn’t work very well without evolution to tune it into a useful ecological niche. Venter already did something similar.

Tampering with existing viruses and symbionts so they can escape their current minima in the fitness landscape is the more dangerous thing.

In this case, it is literally the Venter genome, just with removed tRNAs / codon sets. I'm collaborating with them on it (they're just doing the final transformation).

good thing we live in real life and not a movie

Reality is often stranger than fiction though! :-)

Less in keeping with the anti-intellectual witch-hunting political agendas of Hollywood, though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com