good thing we live in real life and not a movie

Reality is often stranger than fiction though! :-)

Less in keeping with the anti-intellectual witch-hunting political agendas of Hollywood, though.

Don’t worry, synthetic life doesn’t work very well without evolution to tune it into a useful ecological niche. Venter already did something similar.

Tampering with existing viruses and symbionts so they can escape their current minima in the fitness landscape is the more dangerous thing.

In this case, it is literally the Venter genome, just with removed tRNAs / codon sets. I'm collaborating with them on it (they're just doing the final transformation).