Sounds to me that all they have is the genome sequence of a very simple cell i.e. an idea of the minimum set of genes needed to sustain a free-living organism. This is a long way off being able to build your own bacterium. For one thing do they know what all those genes are actually doing? Secondly DNA alone does not make a cell, are they proposing to synthesise all the enzymes, cell wall components etc from scratch and put them together-if so this would be a pretty substantial technical challenge, if not I'd say they were cheating. On top of that being able to make a very simple cell is not the same as making a novel plant or animal there would be a lot of extra cell structures to deal with let alone getting the gene regulation right so that it developed properly into a muticellular organism with differentiated cell types and tissues.
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Sounds to me that all they have is the genome sequence of a very simple cell i.e. an idea of the minimum set of genes needed to sustain a free-living organism. This is a long way off being able to build your own bacterium. For one thing do they know what all those genes are actually doing? Secondly DNA alone does not make a cell, are they proposing to synthesise all the enzymes, cell wall components etc from scratch and put them together-if so this would be a pretty substantial technical challenge, if not I'd say they were cheating. On top of that being able to make a very simple cell is not the same as making a novel plant or animal there would be a lot of extra cell structures to deal with let alone getting the gene regulation right so that it developed properly into a muticellular organism with differentiated cell types and tissues.
Yes, the guy's name was Miller (I had to do an essay on this years ago)