Designer Lifeforms Dawn

Floyd Romesberg and team at Scripps Research Institute have successfully added two synthetic molecules to the the DNA of E coli.

The work is the first step to eventually programming the microbe to 'read' the man-made base-pair and make new proteins.

Then quickly followed by human-designed synthetic genomes.   

Mankind is diddling with the basic building blocks of life.  So what can go wrong?

Well, how about a lab full of pod-people growing out of giant watermelons bent on replacing most of us in our sleep?  For starters...