quadtard wrote:
Then what exactly did they do? The way that I've heard it is that they made their own chromosome, took an empty cell with nothing in it. Injected the chromosome into the cell, fed it certain chemicals and it reproduced.
They created life, because iirc from my grade 9 science class, the three requirements for something to be considered alive is that it:
Eats (takes in energy from the environment in some way)
Craps (waste from byproducts of breaking down food into energy)
Replication.
They took an empty cell that was in all manner of speaking, dead, made their chromosome, put it in there and then the cell did all of the 3 above. Hence they created life.
The cell was alive. It was a pre-existing lifeform. They simply reprogrammed it.
It wasn't "empty". They removed the chromosomes from the nucleus and put their own in. There's ubiquitous lab machines you can buy - pretty cheaply too - that will print out a piece of DNA with the codes you type in, and it's easy enough to simply transcribe existing codes.
To actually build a cell - to create life itself - would be a vastly more challenging task. And that's just one cell, that may not even achieve homeostasis which is a necessary condition of life. Humans have never succeeded in creating anything homeostatic.
