A new form of life has been created in a laboratory, and the era of synthetic biology is dawning as reported in The Economist.

Craig Venter, Hamilton Smith have published in May 20th,issue of Science, how they had created a living creature. It isn't as impressive as generating life from a primordial soup (which would be really really big news) but its cutting edge nonetheless. To take a page from Frankenstein, they used parts of 'dead' organisms and instead of lightning they used synthesized DNA.