Artificial life, the stuff of dreams and nightmares, has arrived

TO CREATE life is the prerogative of gods. Deep in the human psyche, whatever the rational pleadings of physics and chemistry, there exists a sense that biology is different, is more than just the sum of atoms moving about and reacting with one another, is somehow infused with a divine spark, a vital essence. It may come as a shock, then, that mere mortals have now made artificial life.

Hacking and making is no longer just about hardware and software, increasingly it is about wetware - that's biology to the uninitiated.

Those starting to hack biology want to do for it what the web and easy to use tools such as the Arduino programmable controller have done for hardware hacking. That is make it easy to understand and fun to play around with.

Southern Research Institute-a not-for-profit scientific organization that conducts basic and applied research in the areas of preclinical drug discovery and development, advanced engineering, environmental and energy production-today announced that it has been awarded a subcontract from Black & Veatch to help support the U.S. Department of Defense's Biological Threat Reduction Program (BTRP) in the Ukraine.\r\n\r\nThe award is expected to generate up to $37 million in revenues for Southern Research over the next five years.

The list of issues that qualify as biosecurity concerns is expanding. Protecting against accidental disease outbreaks; the introduction of genetically modified crop plants, or foreign animal or plant diseases; food defense (formerly known as food safety); and controlling natural outbreaks of disease have all recently fallen under the biosecurity umbrella.