Craig Venter is the first person to sequence human DNA and now he seems to be the first person to create artificial life from human designed DNA.
It is not a small achievement and it seems to be opening an infinite opportunities to use human designed organisms to meet whatever needs humans have.
The discussion starts with chemical synthesis as prove of understanding of biological issue. As soon as it is achieved, the next step is to develop digital model of life, which comes down to pretty much sequencing of DNA because all life is build with DNA. As soon as DNA sequence for new organism defined on computer as blueprint, the necessary sequence could be generated from base pairs.
Obviously as everything else in the world it is a lot simpler as idea on paper then actual implementation in reality with all real life complications, but it actually was done and we now on the brink of incredibly powerful technology that will give us power to add self-replicating and self-developing organism / machines to our existing non-organic technologies.
At the end Venter looks at possibility of biological teleportation which seems to becoming real possibility, but I would not bet on it just because I do not think it would be possible to get snapshot of living organism which is changing constantly and then send and reassembly it flawlessly. However all other possibilities are more then exciting.
