Is "synthetic biology" on the point of making life? Unlike genetic engineering or biotechnology, the new discipline is not about tinkering with biology but about remaking it. Risks and rewards will be greater than anything yet encountered

Two years ago American scientists created life. Or did they? It all depends on what you mean by life. More specifically, it depends on whether you are prepared to regard viruses as living entities. Viruses have genes, and they replicate, mutate and evolve, all of which sounds lifelike enough. And in August 2002, a team at the State University of New York (SUNY) announced that it had made a virus from scratch, by chemistry alone.

What this meant was that, for the first time since life began over 3.5bn years ago, a living organism had been created with genetic material that was not inherited from a progenitor.

To what did the SUNY researchers choose to award the honour of being the first synthetic organism? They selected a virus that scientists have spent decades trying to eradicate, a cause of human disability and death: polio. If you think that sounds unwise, so did some biologists. Craig Venter, former head of the privately-funded US human genome project conducted by Celera Genomics, called the work "irresponsible" and claimed that it could hurt the scientific community.

A 100-foot diameter asteroid will pass within 26,500 miles of Earth on Thursday, the closest-ever brush on record by a space rock, NASA astronomers said Wednesday.

To cope with the possibility that terrorists might someday detonate a nuclear bomb on American soil, the federal government is reviving a scientific art that was lost after the cold war: fallout analysis.

The goal, officials and weapons experts both inside and outside the government say, is to figure out quickly who exploded such a bomb and where the nuclear material came from. That would clarify the options for striking back. Officials also hope that if terrorists know a bomb can be traced, they will be less likely to try to use one.

The numbers astonish and horrify. According to the earliest estimates, 20 million people died during the flu pandemic of 1918. That figure is still used in classrooms and textbooks, but as John M. Barry tells us in ''The Great Influenza,'' it's certainly too low. Modern experts say that 20 million may have died in India alone, and they calculate the total number of victims at somewhere between 50 million and 100 million worldwide. No disease in human history has caused so many fatalities, not even the Black Death. The 1918 influenza pandemic killed more people in 24 weeks than AIDS has in 24 years.

Here's a pop quiz. Rank the following in order of the number of American lives they claim in a typical year: food, guns, terrorists, flu and cars.

Ready? The most deadly are automobiles, which kill 117 Americans a day, or nearly 43,000 a year. Then comes flu, which (along with pneumonia, its associated disease) kills 36,000 people. Third is guns: 26,000 deaths. Fourth, food-borne illness: 5,000. And finally, terrorism, which in a typical year claims virtually no U.S. lives — with horrific exceptions like 2001. But antiterrorism efforts get most of the attention and the resources.

Imagine medicine without vaccines, penicillin, antibiotics, aspirin, X-rays, heart surgery, or the contraceptive pill.

Imagine scientific theory without Newton, Galileo, quantum mechanics, or the human genome project.

Imagine transport without aeroplanes, railways, cars or bicycles; power without gas, electricity or nuclear energy; agriculture without pesticides, hybrid crops or the plough. Imagine man had never been to the moon.

This is how scientists imagine history, had past developments been subject to the constraints of the 'precautionary principle' - the assumption that experimentation should only proceed where there is a guarantee that the outcome will not be harmful.

In the run-up to spiked's conference Panic Attack: Interrogating our obsession with risk, taking place at London's Royal Institution on Friday 9 May, we asked 40 members of the international scientific community to list what significant discoveries and achievements would have been limited or prevented, if science at the time had been governed by the precautionary principle that dominates science today.

Between them, respondents came up with an A-Z of historic achievements that would have been thwarted by the precautionary principle:

* The Aeroplane; Air conditioning; All drugs with side effects; Alternating electric power; the discovery of America; Anhydrous ammonia fertiliser; Antibiotics; Aspirin; the Automobile.

* The Bicycle; Biotechnology; Blood transfusion; CAT scans; Chlorine; the Contraceptive Pill; Cultivation of rice and maize.

* Digitalis; the discovery of DNA; Electric lightbulbs; Electroconvulsive therapy.

* Fire; Gas power; GM crops; the Green Revolution; work by Galileo and Newton.

* High-voltage power grids; Hoes; Hybrid crops; the Human genome project; the Internal combustion engine; the Internet; In vitro fertilisation; Iron; the Jet engine; Knives.

* The Measles vaccine; Molecular biology; Neural lesions; NMR imaging; Nuclear fission; Nuclear power; Nuclear physics.

* Oil; Open-heart surgery; Organ transplants.

* Pasteurisation; Penicillin; the Periodic table; Pesticides; Plant domestication; Ploughs; the Polio vaccine.

* Quantum mechanics; the Rabies vaccine; Radar; Railways; Radiation; Radio; Radioisotope thermal generators; Refrigeration; Rocket power.

* The Smallpox vaccine; Space exploration; Steam power; Stem cell biology; the breaking of the Sound barrier.

* The Telephone; Water supply and distribution; the Wheel.

* X-rays.

In fact, as Adam Finn, professor of paediatrics at the Institute of Child Health, said, 'pretty much everything' would have been prevented or limited under the precautionary principle, as 'there is nothing we do that has no theoretical risk, and nearly everything carries some actual risk'.