A lot of work has gone into reconstructing an entire human being in a computer. Computer scientists put in the precise dimensions of a person’s body, factor in biomechanics, mimic facial expressions and so on. This work gets huge amounts of hype in the press, but for all the effort and all the attention, the results so far have left me pretty unimpressed. Does watching Kevin Bacon running around without his skin in Hollow Man really make all that work worthwhile?

Frankly, I’m much more impressed with work going on in places such as the Genetic Circuits Research Group at the University of California at San Diego. Led by Bernhard Palsson , the group recreates life from the ground up–simulating