Creating Life from Scratch

Recently I posted an entry on the AtB forum at Palladium about an article in the latest "New Scientist" magazine [issue 2846] about man made life forms.

It's been called an ambitious project. But that's an understatement. It involves creating a new form of living being from non-living chemicals. Breathing the spark of life into inanimate matter was once regarded as a divine prerogative. Now, several serious and well-funded research groups are working hard to meet this goal. If one of them succeeds, it would be the world's first introduction to alien life, and would almost certainly help us to understanding what terrestrial life really is, how it began and what it means to be alive...

This article opens a lot of possibilities in regards to the After the Bomb setting. Not only has science led us to the true capability of bending life to our will by creating human/animal hybrids, but now we are close to the capability of creating new life forms from scratch. So, if this were to be brought into the AtB universe who knows what horrors may have evolved from this science?

For good or ill, it opens a great deal of possibilities.