“Democracy among humans traces back only 2,500 years or so to Athens, Greece, so it is perhaps not surprising that we are still fumbling around.”

"From the point of view of aesthetic and intellectual elegance, it is a bad experiment. But it is nevertheless a big discovery...It proves that sequencing and synthesizing DNA give us all the tools we need to create new forms of life."

—Theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson on the Venter synthetic biology paper in Science, quoted in Edge.org.

"The price we will pay for this huge amplification of our technological prowess is probably an equal and opposite vulnerability. Welcome to the fast lane, humanity."

—Daniel C. Dennett, Tufts University philosopher on the Venter synthetic biology paper in Science, quoted in Edge.org.

...we’re facing a coalition of the heartless, the clueless and the confused.

In such an all-encompassing and fully explicable cosmos, then, what place for God?