Anything for a headline

This according to the Associated Press

"Artificial Life Likely in 3 to 10 Years"

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8R4H0Q00&show_article=1&catnum=-1

Sounds impressive, eh? I mean, if we can build life from scratch, who needs God?

Hold the phone. Lets look at this just a little bit closer...

"It's going to be a big deal and everybody's going to know about it," said Mark Bedau, chief operating officer of ProtoLife of Venice, Italy, one of those in the race.

Bedau figures there are three major hurdles to creating synthetic life:
—A container, or membrane, for the cell to keep bad molecules out, allow good ones, and the ability to multiply.
—A genetic system that controls the functions of the cell, enabling it to reproduce and mutate in response to environmental changes.
—A metabolism that extracts raw materials from the environment as food and then changes it into energy.

Hmm, is that all that's holding us back? Essentially all you need is, uh, everything...and a way to make it work. How stinkin' hard can that be?

Jack Szostak at Harvard Medical School is optomistic. His idea is that once the container is made, if scientists add nucleotides in the right proportions, then Darwinian evolution could simply take over.

"We aren't smart enough to design things, we just let evolution do the hard work and then we figure out what happened," Szostak said.

What? Not smart enough at Harvard to design things?

What HAS happened to our institutions of higher learning?

Sheesh...

Letting Darwinian evolution just design something? Figure out what happened later?

Is this science or the Red Green show?

I. can't. wait.