The big idea: will we ever make life in the lab?

Intriguing advances hold out the possibility - but first we have to agree on what life' means

Creation of Life", read the headline of the Boston Herald in 1899. Lower Animals Produced by Chemical Means." The report described the work of the German-American marine biologist Jacques Loeb, who later wrote: The idea is now hovering before me that man himself can act as a creator, even in living nature."

In fact, Loeb had merely made an unfertilised sea urchin egg divide by exposing it to a mixture of salts - he was not even close to creating life in the lab. No scientist has ever done that. But that ancient dream hovers today over the discipline called synthetic biology, the very name of which seems to promise the creation of artificial life forms. Take one of the most dramatic results in this field: in 2010, scientists at the J Craig Venter Institutes in Maryland and California announced they had made the first self-replicating synthetic bacterial cell".