It's Life, Jim

The goal of J. Craig Venter, the gene splicing bio-wiz whose lab recently took one step closer to developing artificial life, is to "make cells that might take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and produce methane, used as a feedstock for other fuels."

Neat. He'll probably win this.

But is reducing CO2 levels really the most exciting possibility of technology that will let humans "select and reorder the genetic machinery developed by evolution just as an engineer might assemble an efficient circuit board from existing components"? I think not.