The other day, the J. Craig Venter Institute announced that it had created a man-made copy of the genome of Mycoplasma mycoides. A bacteria.
After painstakingly linking over a million nucleotides in the right places to create the complete genome, they implanted this into a different bacterial cell. Not only did it begin to immediately reprogram the recipient cell, but it began to reproduce those new cells. Naturally.
This is, quite honestly, the coolest thing. Ever.
