A senior US-based British genetics expert has told The Slog that the latest ‘artificial life breakthrough’ was only made possible by the ejection of George Bush from the White House.

A team of Maryland scientists yesterday brought to life the world’s first synthetic cells. The microbes reached what can be classed as ‘life’ about a month ago. They are controlled by a chromosome made by a team led by maverick geneticist Craig Venter, who has dreamed of creating artificial life for 15 years.

But had the Republicans retained the White House, the project would’ve been either opposed by law or canned through lack of funds. Said our source:

“I came over to join things here within a month of Obama winning the White House. The born-again nutters around Bush were always the obstacle…now they’ve gone, it’s full steam ahead”.

So good news for genetic life-creators everywhere, but most other folks have doubts about the project. For while Craig Venter insists that the uses for this development are nothing to do with playing God, no doubt those on the Manhattan Project said similar things.

“This could be as transformative as the computer revolution” says Andrew Hessel, of the Pink Army Cooperative, an Alberta-based initiative promoting DIY bioengineering. Hessel believes Venter deserves the Nobel Prize for his pioneering work in creating “a new branch on the evolutionary tree”.

It is indeed a mould-breaking development, and at a stroke solves the problem of how the human gene pool could evolve with artificial help. (At the moment we’d have to mate with another species to achieve that result). However,

Dr Helen Wallace from Genewatch UK told BBCNews that synthetic bacteria could be dangerous.

“If you release new organisms into the environment, you can do more harm than good,” she said.”By releasing them into areas of pollution you’re actually releasing a new kind of pollution.We don’t know how these organisms will behave in the environment.”

Yes, but apart from that Mrs Lincoln….

The bottom line is that while the breakthrough looks and sounds magical, this is the sorcerer’s apprentice at work here, not Merlin. Once the pointy-heads get the smell of Nobel fame in their nostrils, they are capable of the most ignoble motives. As Canadian expert Pat Mooney commented:

“Like splitting the atom or cloning Dolly, the world is now going to have to deal with the social, economic and political fallout from commercially-driven scientific hubris in ways we can’t yet imagine.”

Oh I think we can, Mr Mooney -its just that scientists can’t. Fair enough, the Bush fundamentalists oppose doing this kind of stuff on the same basis that Ayatollahs think women cause earthquakes, but that still leaves the top off Pandora’s box….and an enormous maze of moral dilemmas to come.

That said, it does fascinate me. There was no life – and then there was. How does that work? And will the Papacy now find itself in a bit of a tizz: that is, attacking Dr Venter’s programme, but perhaps having to insist that it is a mortal sin to stop the creation of any life anywhere? That’ll be a hard circle to square.