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When I was a kid, one of the movies that scared me the most was Frankenstein. I can remember the monster being chased by crazed villagers holding torches and yelling "kill the monster". They finally chased the monster into a wind mill and set it on fire with the poor monster in it. In the story, life was created by the force of natural electricity supplied by lightning, and why not, ancient people used to believe that the Gods used lightning, so this wasn't so strange. There was also the fact that when the book was written, electricity was considered a mysterious force.

As I look at things today, I began to wonder if any type of life was ever created in the laboratory. Of course my instincts say no, but as I looked further I found that I was wrong.

A breakthrough was made this year. A scientist named Craig Venter announced that he had created an artificial virus and that he and his team had accomplished this task in less than two weeks. Wow I thought to myself, is this safe? It was a fantastic break through but a virus? Would this be able to infect us with a new disease if it ever got out? The virus began to reproduce when it was injected into a cell. I am not the only one who see danger in this type of experimentation, many scientists are worried about the consequences, while others, worried, still think that we should go ahead with this experimentation.

A break through of a different nature came from the AMA, The American Medical Association. They announced that they supported cloning of humans for research. But how would this work? DNA is put into an unfertilized egg. The resulting embryo is used to experiment on. I don't know about you, but this gives me chills. Can the embryo feel pain? Are we killing a human being to experiment on it. The moral issues are huge. The biggest question of all is can we do this experimentation some other way? Cloning for reproductive purposes is on the verge of succeeding. Is this creating life in the purest sense of the word? We need an egg to start it off so we are using something natural. What if we could make an artificial egg? This would be creating life without the help of nature, assuming we found a way to fertilize it and develop it to term without putting it into a female womb.

Right now scientists are trying to create strands of DNA. This is the beginning of creating life from scratch. There is a rumor on the Internet that what people have been calling aliens are really the government's experiments on creating life that have gone bad. I admit that this is a little too far out to even comment on, but never the less there are people who are saying it. It is also being said that the study of the human genome is enabling new weapons to be developed that will kill us quicker. Isn't it a sin, a group of scientists start out with a noble project and some how the military gets involved and even the information that is released finds its way into the hands of unfriendly nations and they develop it for use against us. Of course I have no proof that this is true but that is the talk around and it certainly wouldn't surprise me since the military gets involved in everything that has weapons potential. The terrorists are said to have their own scientists who are working very hard at trying to insert toxin genes into pathogens that would kill only people of European descent. Some countries are said to be also trying to develop this capability.

The Tissue Culture and Art Project in Australia (TC&A) is hoping to develop life some day. So far they have succeeded in creating the outside of a human ear by growing it from living cells. The ear is 1/4 the size of an adult ear. I wonder if a human could be grown from cells one day?

So far I was discussing biological life, but what if machine or electronic life is created first? If artificial intelligence becomes self aware would it be any less a life form than animal life? What about bringing someone to life that has been dead for about 30 minutes or more? Is this life creation or life restoration? If a person is dead for 30 minutes, are they really dead and if so then how can we revive them? But we do this from time to time without any ill effects. Maybe our definition of life needs to be rethought.

Can you imagine that it is some time in our extremely distant future? All natural life has gone from the planet, but there are creatures everywhere. There are clones of humans happily going about their business and there are plants and animals, all of which are also clones. New life forms that we don't recognize are also walking around, and there is machine life in the form of intelligent devices that can move around on their own and are quite capable of making decisions and holding conversations with the intelligent biological life forms. Earth is finally at peace.