Pack up time for Creationist

Creationist will soon be running for cover as the researchers and scientists are getting very close to creating artificial life. Some of the estimates predict that they are just 3 to 10 years away from create some form of life in a laboratory environment. And truly that would be the greatest breakthrough in the scientific world.
The ability to create a living cell from scratch, by chemically synthesizing all its components, is not far beyond present technology as it may seem.
As per Mark Bedau, chief operating officer of ProtoLife of Venice, Italy
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.

Jack Szostak of Harvard Medical School, predicts that within the next six months, scientists will report evidence that the first step—creating a cell membrane—is "not a big problem." Scientists are using fatty acids in that effort.

Szostak is also optimistic about the next step—getting nucleotides, the building blocks of DNA, to form a working genetic system.

His idea is that once the container is made, if scientists add nucleotides in the right proportions, then Darwinian evolution could simply take over.



Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution is attacking that problem by going outside of natural genetics. Normal DNA consists of four bases—adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine (known as A,C,G,T)—molecules that spell out the genetic code in pairs. Benner is trying to add eight new bases to the genetic alphabet.

Scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI), a genomic research facility, transplanted a bacterial chromosome from one type of bacteria into another, and have completely replaced an entire bacterial genome and its expression. Genome transplantation is an essential enabling step in the field of synthetic genomics as it is a key mechanism by which chemically synthesized chromosomes can be activated into viable living cells. The ability to transfer the naked DNA isolated from one species into a second microbial species paves the way for next experiments to transplant a fully synthetic bacterial chromosome into a living organism and if successful, "boot up" the new entity.
Researchers at Rockefeller University in the US have made the first tentative steps towards creating a form of artificial life.
Their creations, small synthetic vesicles that can process (express) genes, resemble a crude kind of biological cell.
The parts for their "vesicle bioreactors", as they call them, all come from diverse realms of life.
The soft cell walls are made of fat molecules taken from egg white. The cell contents are an extract of the common gut bug E. coli, stripped of all its genetic material.
This essence of life contains ready-made much of the biological machinery needed to make proteins; the researchers also added an enzyme from a virus to allow the vesicle to translate DNA code.
When they added genes, the cell fluid started to make proteins, just like a normal cell would.
With so much of activity going on around the world I would believe that we are going to see this feat being achieved soon than later.