"Artificial life is what people do on the computer. This is real life. This is a living cell. It's a self-replicating cell. So any microbiologist looking at the cell would not be able to distinguish it from any other microbiological species. The only way you would know is by reading the genetic code and finding that it was synthetically made, that it has all these names, quotations, websites built into its genetic code.
"We need to distinguish synthetic organisms from natural ones so we don't confuse people studying evolution to thinking this is somehow a naturally evolved process. This is now human evolution, and it's going to change how we look at species, what we have on this planet. So it is important to label them."
-- biologist Craig Venter (b. 1946-10-14), on the PBS television program Charlie Rose 2010-05-21 ( video, transcript), discussing his team's recent success in synthetic biology, creating "the first species on our planet whose parent is a computer [...] the first species on the planet to have a website encoded into its genetic code".