Harvard Scientists’ Discovery Opens Door to Synthetic Life

I can see the advantage to expanding the pool of potential building blocks with which we can make biomolecules. I can see how this would enable novel biomolecules to be made. I can see why you would need custom ribosomes to build these new biomolecules.

I can't see why you need to do this in artificial lifeforms rather than E.coli.

If it is possible to do this in E.coli then the hard task, modifying the ribosomes to support manufacturing these novel biomolecules, is still to come.

“It might sound scary initially, but it would almost be on life support,” he said. “It would probably be highly dependent on someone feeding it 30 or more small molecules. It wouldn’t be likely to escape into the environment and run amok.”

"almost," "probably," "wouldn't be likely" -- those words don't exactly inspire confidence.

Amazing breakthrough though.