Scientists in the United States revealed yesterday that they are poised to create a new form of life from scratch. The experiment - to build a simple organism from a small set of artificial genes and see if it replicates - could raise profound questions about the nature of life.
It is also sure to provoke furious reaction from churchmen, politicians, lawyers and philosophers. But the experiment will not go ahead until the moral questions raised have been studied by a team of churchmen and "bio-ethicists" at the University of Pennsylvania.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Anaheim, California, heard that the man-made microbe might be produced by Dr Craig Venter, chairman and chief scientist of the Institute for Genomic Research in Maryland.
Dr Venter said: "It is a unique point in science where we are giving the ethics and the other discussions time to catch up with what the science is potentially capable of.
"Trying to make a synthetic cell would answer a lot of questions about basic life and basic biology. We just want to make sure it doesn't have more negative implications than positive ones.
"We are trying to understand, totally for basic science purposes, what comprises a living cell. One of the astonishing things is that there are 300 genes we can get down to, theoretically at least. For 100 of those 300 genes, we, as scientists, have no clue what they do. So it is a very humbling experience."
To discover the minimum for life, geneticists would need to synthesise the genes from scratch, assemble them and see if a new living organism emerged.
Nobody knows whether the experiment is even possible: all "man-made" or genetically engineered life forms so far have been assembled from already-living creatures and from already-existing genes.
It also raises the spectre of "bio-terrorism" - the manufacture of microbes as silent, sinister new weapons of destruction. It might send a signal to terrorists that they could try to build their own Doomsday microbe. On the other hand, it could end in new treatments for genetic diseases, and new organisms that could clean up toxins poisoning the planet.
Dr Venter has already put the question to a group of churchmen. One of them, Dr Frank Young, a pastor in the Presbyterian church, was an adviser to President Clinton on bio-terrorism and bacteriological warfare before becoming ordained.
Dr Young said: "The whole programme of genetics has raised a question that has not been asked intensively since the Middle Ages, and that is: what is really the essence of life? In today's terms, are we really more than a concoction of molecules? To me, the mere trivial showing of the minimal genome is of absolutely no significance as life."