It has been a rather tumultuous few months and news doesn’t easily wrestle the front page from the euro crisis, unless it is truly mind-boggling. The announcement by Craig Venter, the decoder of human DNA, that his team has created a living, replicating life form whose “parent is a computer” certainly should boggle the mind.

It is therefore telling of the state of the world, that it barely made it to the front page of some media for essentially a single day, before being relegated to more specialised sections, or worse…

Its not that Venter didn’t get his day on the front page. He got it. But that, more or less, was that. Even on the net, a medium supposedly more attuned to the World of Tomorrow,  coverage hasn’t come close to, say, that reserved for the iPad… Was creating life nothing more than an interesting aside? A fait divers that only tickled the odd molecular biology geek?

Strangely enough, the legions of moralising technophobes that usually accompany such scientific leaps with their doom-mongering, so far seem to be silent. People have been going on for a long time about how in this age of instant communications and truly mass media on every conceivable subject and platform our attention span has regressed to preteen levels. Or is there something else at play here?

Strangely enough, the legions of moralising technophobes that usually accompany such scientific leaps with their doom-mongering, so far seem to be silent. People have been going on for a long time about how in this age of instant communications and truly mass media on every conceivable subject and platform our attention span has regressed to preteen levels. Or is there something else at play here?

Maybe, just maybe, it is because, in fact, this goes way beyond “such scientific leaps”. In fact there has probably never been a scientific leap of this magnitude.

Fire? Pah, its everywhere… Sooner or later someone would have figured it out. The wheel? Well, deciding that something roundish could help with the everyday drudgery of hauling your fillet-mignon de Mammouth to the cave can’t have been that hard. Computers? 3D TV? The iPad? 22 language simultaneous translation? Not bad, but…

But life? Life?? This is something that not even those great techno – oracles of the past couple of centuries, Jules Verne in the 19th and Star Trek in the 20th, had predicted. Star-Trek, which is really what we should all aspire to has its share of artificial life forms, often entirely indistinguishable from the real kind, but they are mechanical, souped-up robots or holograms, not “life” in the biological sense of the word.

Venter et al created something entirely different. Sure, some will point out that they injected synthetic DNA into an existing, natural, cell. But what is a cell without its DNA… More or less nothing: it’s the DNA that does it and as Venter himself put it, with that strange little smile of his, this is the first organism whose parent is a computer. A computer, it has to be said, that is owned by none other than Craig Venter himself who is also said to be filing patent after patent, in order to ensure the commercial viability of the whole enterprise.

After all the puny bacterium is, indeed, just that: puny. It also seems to have no useful application. Others will, must, surely follow and the quicker they do the better. Oh of course people will say that care is needed and some safeguards are necessary. We don’t want some grey goo overtaking the planet (at least not before space colonisation begins) or who knows what other horror. Horrors will certainly be cooked-up by those who specialise in such things, but let’s be optimistic. As for those who will say that man was not meant to create life… well, sorry folks.

The real question then, is what we do with this. Like a small child given one of those fantastic but outrageously complicated 16+ Lego sets, mankind has to think hard. But not too long please. Pondering the philosophical aspects is essential, but it will only take us so far. Venter himself has spoken of creating a bacterium that will suck in pollution and spew fuel at the other end, which is a perfectly good idea. It also serves to illustrate how much damage humanity has been doing to the planet that its first use of its newfound powers should have to be something like this. We have to hope that things even more amazing will follow.

But then if one thing is already clear, it has to be that many wonderful things will indeed come of it but we don’t yet know what. Who would have told Alan Turing or the builders of the Colossus that a few decades later we would be speaking of the iPad? Who would have told Mendel, for that matter, where his tinkering with peas would lead humanity a couple of centuries later (and yes, Venter was the first to get there too).

This post was initially going to be about how technology seems stuck in a rut. About a certain anger at how the return of 3D film-making was trumpeted as the greatest technological marvel of the past decade, when the minds that created it might have been better employed elsewhere to the greater benefit of society. Then Venter spoke.

Up to now, there was only one Creation. From now on there are two.