Is the creation of artificial life morally significant?A paper by Thomas Douglas, Russell Powell, and Julian Savulescu in Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Science, 2013 Dec; 44(4): 688–696.
"In 2010, the Venter lab announced that it had created the first bacterium with an entirely synthetic genome. This was reported to be the first instance of ‘artificial life,’ and in the ethical and policy discussions that followed it was widely assumed that the creation of artificial life is in itself morally significant. We cast doubt on this assumption."