VENICE, Italy, March 30 (UPI) -- Venice will host the world's first laboratory devoted exclusively to creating life when it opens in April, the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel reports.
Established with a $9 million grant, the European Union's European Center for Living Technology will be staffed by European and U.S. researchers.
"It's a synthetic biology revolution," said John McCaskill, professor of theoretical biochemistry at Friedrich-Schiller University in Jena, Germany, who is overseeing the European Union's artificial life program.
"We obviously don't want to be too polemic about how rapidly this is going to transform society," he said.
"But I think that we are seeing a new feature of science and technology where systems are autonomously adaptive and that this is a significant component of the design process."
