http://www.carlzimmer.com/articles/2004/articles_2004_Before_DNA.html
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The question took me by surprise. I was sitting in a noisy Boston café with two biochemists who were having a straight-faced conversation about putting together a budget to create synthetic life-forms. Next to me was Jack Szostak of Harvard Medical School, and across the table was Steven Benner, who had flown up from the University of Florida to pay Szostak a visit. The conversation was thrumming along, touching on the efficiencies of chemical reactions and the like, when Benner abruptly turned to me and asked, How much do you think it would cost to create a self-replicating organism capable of Darwinian evolution?
The question was not Will we ever create life? but simply how much money creating life would cost. Twenty million dollars, I said, choosing the number completely at random.
Benner nodded:Thats what Jack says.
Szostak, whose large glasses and round face make him look like an affable owl, had been letting Benner do most of the talking. Now he smiled, nodded with a slow blink, and said, Sounds right.
Sounds right? As we strolled back to Szostaks lab, past the long lines of idling ambulettes parked by the Massachusetts General Hospital emergency room, I did some calculations in my head. Sequencing the human genome cost roughly $500 million, and essentially all that scientists had to show for the money was a long string of letters that make up human DNA. By contrast, for less money than a middling movie makes in a weekend, Szostak hopes to transform chemicals into a single-celled organism that will grow, divide, and evolveand soon. [...]
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