Life Made to Order

Life Made to Order "We’ve removed a billion-year-old constraint on what we can do with proteins," says a Scripps chemist, Peter Schultz. "And so we’re taking the point of view that if God had worked on Sunday, and he had more amino acids to work with, what would have been the outcome?" Would an organism with an expanded genetic code and amino acid inventory have an evolutionary advantage?

If scientists could answer such big theoretical questions, says Stephen Freeland, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Maryland, it might be possible one day to discover on other planets life that might not otherwise be recognizable. And if the synthetic-genome technologies in the works at Scripps, Egea, Venter’s institute, and elsewhere pan out, life right here on Earth could soon look a little less familiar -- and a lot more diverse.