So scientists have created life in the lab, holding out new hopes for humanity while threatening vast and unknown dangers that . . .
Except no. That is what you might think if you read about this in the average newspaper. But that's because most science coverage is utter crap. Truth is, science does not sell papers. (Or keep you watching the news or make you follow links to blogs or whatever medium you're using.) Fear sells newspapers. We could call this the Frankenstein Factor. What editors seem to look for is the greatest possible symmetry with the Frankenstein myth.

Without ever actually putting it into words, the perfect science news story says ‘Scientists can do this now. Shouldn't you feel worried?’ People like big worries. They distract them pleasantly from their petty everyday worries, like the fact that they drive too fast, that their children are growing up to be vicious, and that they will never, ever be able to pay off their credit cards.

In these circumstances, horrors that crawl out of a lab and terrorise downtown Tokyo come as a positive relief. You saw it with the Large Hadron Collider. OK, there was a slight exception in that it had the reclusive rock star of subatomic particles, the Higgs boson. So we could run stories about crazy scientists spending billions to find something they don't even know exists. But mostly people wanted to hear that it might create a black hole that would swallow the world.

That's great copy. And so though interesting and important things happen in science all the time, the public rarely gets to hear about them unless they have Frankenstein Factor. Is it any wonder that the general perception of science is that it's dangerous stuff strange people do for unfathomable reasons?

And you don't get any more Frankenstein Factor than an honest-to-goodness story about life being created in a laboratory. I mean that's it, the big one. Humans are now definitely playing God here. It's the perfect science story. Except that . . . scientists did not actually create new life in a laboratory. But apart from that, it's perfect.

What they did essentially is take a living cell – a bacterium in this case – take the DNA out of its nucleus, and replace it with identical DNA that they built themselves. The bacterium with their DNA continued to work just as it had before. At what point was new life created? The cell was alive before and afterwards. In many ways this was no more creating life than performing a heart transplant is.

But this is exactly why it's interesting – because it forces us to think about what we mean when we say ‘create life’. As the experiment inadvertently demonstrates, life is fundamentally a chemical reaction. No divine essence needs to be breathed in, you need no special ingredients. The lab-created DNA, if it's identical, works the same as the one found in nature. All that's necessary for a ‘lifeless’ set of chemical reactions to become alive is for it to be complex enough to maintain and reproduce itself.

If life exists in essence at all, then it is in everything, inherent in the universe itself.