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My understanding is that this has already been done: smallpox has been sequenced, and if all samples were destroyed and then for some reason we really needed to have smallpox again, we could reconstruct it. It eight years since scientists created a synthetic bacterial genome of 580,000 base pairs. Smallpox is (according to Wikipedia) 186,000 base pairs.

Last you checked was before they actually did it.

http://jcvi.org/cms/research/projects/synthetic-bacterial-genome/press-release/

Oh, "That's not from scratch.", you say? Well neither is what the main discussion is talking about.

We can't create life, even the simplest of life

Your information appears to be out of date: http://www.jcvi.org/cms/resear...

The indian mars orbiter, a vehicle with a lander module, and designed for interplanetary flight, cost less to manufacture and launch than the sandra bullock movie Gravity.

Source
http://money.cnn.com/2014/09/2...

So, there's the cost of a suitable vehicle. About 74 million dollars.

Then we have the designer microbe end. Most designer microbes are intended for biofuel production, using fully synthetic biological pathways, designed by humans.
http://www.hindawi.com/journal...

Other sources of interest are the biodegredation of toxic agents:
http://www.nature.com/nchembio...

And of course, Plastics.
http://garj.org/garjm/pdf/2013...

Feel free to order some of those researcher's samples!

Perhaps you would want some that are sporting a fully 100% human created genome?
http://www.jcvi.org/cms/press/...

Microbes are tenacious things. Once cultured in the lab, and loaded into a delivery system, sending them to venus would cost about 80 million dollars.

Cost of R&D of modifying a suitable sulfur cycle microbe for venusian atmospheric conditions would cost around 100 to 200 million.

So, for around the 300 million dollar mark, we could be initiating the end of the hellish environment on venus-- OR-- we could pay for a few military airplanes.

You are a delusional moron.

fully synthetic biology is closer than you realize.

This is from 2 years ago-- Researchers succeed in creating fully artificial cell membranes

This from about 4 years ago-- First fully reproducing bacterium with fully synthetic genome

This is from last year-- Creating synthetic ribisomes

For real, being able to fully engineer a cell from the ground, all the way up, is fast leaving the exclusive realm of science fiction, and entering the realm of science fact.

Actually we're already at the threshold of creating life in any form we wish - I believe it was a year or so ago that someone successfully implanted a fully synthetic genome into a bacteria...

That's the impression you'd get from skimming the headlines. I fear it's a bit sensationalist.

The experiment you refer to involved a synthesized -copy- of an existing organism's genome. An impressive feat, but not quite "creating life in any form we wish."

We've learned to copy-and-paste DNA. Right now that's about all we can do. Protein-folding is a hard problem, so we can't easily predict what a given DNA sequence will do, let alone invent new sequences. We can do a bit of remixing, copying a gene from here to there, but we can't create new genes yet.

We'll get there, I don't doubt that. But at this stage, our "synthetic genome" is just a xerox copy.

Informative link about the "synthetic genome" experiment: http://www.jcvi.org/cms/research/%20projects/synthetic-bacterial-genome/press-release/

And most of those species have a half-dozen or more strains with different levels of toxicity. For example in B.Anthracis (NCBI taxon:1392) has almost a dozen strains. Strain Stern (NCBI taxon: 260799) is mostly harmless because it's missing the two plasmids found in some other strains like Ames and Ames Ancestor (NCBI taxon: 261594) which produces very deadly toxins from plasmid px01.
Ames was the variant released in the Antrax Attacks of 2001.
http://pathema.jcvi.org/pathema/anthrax_resources.shtml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_anthrax_attacks

Yahknow, I tried to figure this one out myself when I was writing the submission. Physorg doesn't elaborate, but their article has since been updated with the release of an official press release by JCVI Curiously, E. coli doesn't appear to be mentioned anywhere on their release. Nor is it on the project's site, at least at casual glance. Perhaps additional information on the process may be found in one of their fact sheets (PDF WARNING!)

Yahknow, I tried to figure this one out myself when I was writing the submission. Physorg doesn't elaborate, but their article has since been updated with the release of an official press release by JCVI Curiously, E. coli doesn't appear to be mentioned anywhere on their release. Nor is it on the project's site, at least at casual glance. Perhaps additional information on the process may be found in one of their fact sheets (PDF WARNING!)

Yahknow, I tried to figure this one out myself when I was writing the submission. Physorg doesn't elaborate, but their article has since been updated with the release of an official press release by JCVI Curiously, E. coli doesn't appear to be mentioned anywhere on their release. Nor is it on the project's site, at least at casual glance. Perhaps additional information on the process may be found in one of their fact sheets (PDF WARNING!)

Did we read the same article? Because my reading of it was very different than yours. And you even suggest I didn't read it. Anyway, I'll try to be constructive to the rest of the /. readers while schooling you in your credulous reading of science journalism and hollow admonishment of my comments.

TFA is a ScienceNOW Daily news brief summarizing information from the investigation, relying heavily on what can be implied from the content of an affidavit released in late 2007 and just recently unsealed. What followed was a bunch of speculation by a professional scientific journalist, Martin Enserink, who did a rather good job lining everything up for us with good old fashioned journalism. His well-informed speculation is based on interviews and 4 paragraphs of the affidavit.

Your criticisms don't even make sense or are completely false. What were the 4 markers? Were they SNPs? Tandem repeats? Where? Tell me where I can download that data you talked about? If you know, I think you could really break this story open. As a matter of fact, the work referenced in TFA is not published nor was it peer reviewed. Perhaps you can start here and get back to me when you've found anything informative: http://pathema.jcvi.org/pathema/anthrax_resources.shtml

For your information, genomics is my field, and I'm published in the area of studying genetic markers in populations. I stand by my suggestion that there is something sloppy here. If you'd read either TFA or MFC (my comment) then you'd know a major issue discussed was the opaqueness of what little we know. Either the FBI's organizing of the work was sloppy (perhaps due to it being "highly compartmentalized" according to TFA) or their release of the information was sloppy. No, I don't believe my suggestion that this was sloppy work is insulting to my field, nor do I think that what I do as a career is just dice throwing without hope for knowledge.

Before casting aspersions on others who have read TFA, you might actually try R-ing TFA yourself. And hiding behind anonymity? Classy.

It's a bool that returns true if the person has their personal genome fully decoded:

isVentor() // http://www.jcvi.org/ // Spelled wrong, I know... Maybe this:

isVentor() // is relatively unknown geriatric Jedi http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Halagad_Ventor