There is, of course, the terrible spectre of something going terribly wrong. We could all die. The world could end. Horror.
But there’s always the terrible spectre of something going terrible wrong. That’s nothing new.

No scientific achievement has promised so much, and none has come with greater risks or clearer possibilities for deliberate abuse. The benefits of new technologies—from genetically engineered food to the wonders of pharmaceuticals—often have been oversold. If the tools of synthetic biology succeed, though, they could turn specialized molecules into tiny, self-contained factories, creating cheap drugs, clean fuels, and new organisms to siphon carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

My favourite bit though is when the auuthor points out that

Little more than a hundred years have passed, however, since Gregor Mendel demonstrated that the defining characteristics of a pea plant—its shape, its size, and the color of the seeds, for example—are transmitted from one generation to the next in ways that can be
predicted, repeated, and codified.

Now they’re working on a living organism built from non-living componente. They will call this organism Synthia.

Found via an interview with the author on Gizmodo.

Then I came upon this story about the upcoming announcement of the prize for economics. At the end there was mention of the 2009 prize for chemistry:

Americans Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas Steitz and Ada Yonath of Israel shared the chemistry prize for their atom-by-atom description of ribosomes.

A release from the medical research counsel reported that

Ramakrishnan, Steitz and Yonath demonstrated what the ribosome looks like and how it functions at an atomic level using a visualisation method called X-ray crystallography to map the position of each of the hundreds of thousands of atoms that make up the ribosome.

which, aside from being an astounding technical achievement, is cool because ribosomes are the parts of you which make proteins, which make up all the main parts of you. Ribosomes are like the first order nanoassemblers of terrestrial life.

Also there are movies

short video from the ramakrishnan lab

and images.

on the laboratory website.