From Brave New World to Blade Runner artificial life has always been a staple of science fiction, so it's interesting to see the first baby steps in that direction:
Synthetic life 'advance' reported
"An important step has been taken in the quest to create a synthetic lifeform. A US team reports in Science magazine how it replicated the entire DNA code from a common bacterium in the laboratory. The group hopes eventually to use engineered genomes to make organisms that can produce clean fuels and take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere."