HUMANKIND has created a new species for the first time. Not by building it from genes, as Craig Venter said he was planning to do last week (New Scientist, 30 November, p 12). And not by millions of years of isolation, as mother nature has tended to do in the past. But instead by a simple lab experiment.
The most remarkable part of the discovery is how easy it is. The method takes just two weeks and the joint American and British team has already created 80 new kinds of yeast – the single-celled creature best known for converting…
