Will genetic scientists ever have the ability a new life form?
Yes, but how soon it will happen depends how different from natural organisms it has to be in order to count as a “new life form”. Until now, genetic engineering can only be used to make minor modifications of existing organisms. Long-time breeding programs, lasting hundreds of generations, can create rather exotic organisms like all kind of crazy-looking dogs, roses etc, but genetically they are not so different from nature. A male poodle would probably still be able to make a female wolf pregnant. But we can make synthetic DNA, so in principle we could create the genome of a new species from scratch. Two obstacles still prevent us from making synthetic mars-men and such: 1: although we can make a synthetic genome, the rest of the cell must still be taken from an existing organism, which means that the new organism must have some kind of compatibility with an existing type of cell. For higher organisms, more is needed. A synthetic mammal, for example, would have to be carried by a sur
