Via TED (which neatly follows yesterday’s prominent and ubiquitous science news. More links below):

Craig Venter and team make a historic announcement: they’ve created the first fully functioning, reproducing cell controlled by synthetic DNA. He explains how they did it and why the achievement marks the beginning of a new era for science.

The interview on Skype for Science magazine:

More news:

• First ’synthetic life’: Scientists ‘boot up’ a bacterial cell with a synthetic genome (PhysOrg)
• Man-made Genetic Instructions Yield Living Cells for the First Time (SciAm)
• Do Synthetic Biologists Play God? (Discovery)
• Synthetic Biology Breakthrough: Your Questions Answered (Science)
• Sizing up the ‘synthetic cell’ (Nature, eight experts about the implications of the J. Craig Venter Institute’s latest creation)
• James Joyce’s Words Come To Life, And Are Promptly Desecrated (The Loom)
• First round of ill-informed objections to the first synthetic bacterium (Pharyngula)
• On “Creation of a bacterial cell controlled by a chemically synthesized genome” (Edge, commentary by Rodney Brooks, PZ Myers, Richard Dawkins, George Church, Nassim N. Taleb, Daniel C. Dennett, Dimitar Sasselov, Antony Hegarty, George Dyson, Kevin Kelly, Freeman Dyson)
• A New Age of Wonder (Edge, a chronology of events/news leading up to this research announcement)
• Life Made to Order, commentary by Peter Singer (philosopher, author)
• And of course the know-nothings feel obliged to chime in as well: Church warns cell scientists not to play God

And finally the paper itself:

Creation of a Bacterial Cell Controlled by a Chemically Synthesized Genome

Daniel G. Gibson¹, John I. Glass¹, Carole Lartigue¹, Vladimir N. Noskov¹, Ray-Yuan Chuang¹, Mikkel A. Algire¹, Gwynedd A. Benders², Michael G. Montague¹, Li Ma¹, Monzia M. Moodie¹, Chuck Merryman¹, Sanjay Vashee¹, Radha Krishnakumar¹, Nacyra Assad-Garcia¹, Cynthia Andrews-Pfannkoch¹, Evgeniya A. Denisova¹, Lei Young¹, Zhi-Qing Qi¹, Thomas H. Segall-Shapiro¹, Christopher H. Calvey¹, Prashanth P. Parmar, Clyde A. Hutchison III², Hamilton O. Smith², and J. Craig Venter^1,2*

¹ The J. Craig Venter Institute, 9704 Medical Center Drive, Rockville, MD 20850, USA.
² The J. Craig Venter Institute, 10355 Science Center Drive, San Diego, CA 92121, USA.
^* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: jcventer(at)jcvi.org