With the news of the successful creation of a functioning synthetic genome, the New Zealand Herald sums up some of the opinions circulating regarding the news.
An excerpt: (read in full here)
“A bioethics blogger, Dr Art Caplan, asks the question: “What does it mean to be alive?”, saying oversight of such this sort of research is “vital”.
…
“The New York Times took a more conservative view on the developments, quoting a Caltech researcher that similar research had already been done and that Dr Venter’s was only larger in scale.”