Ron Bailey, my hero and yours, reminds people to CALM DOWN:

In any case, many lab-crafted creatures would likely be obliterated by competing organisms honed by billions of years of evolution in the wild. In the future, synthetic organisms could be equipped with suicide genes where their survival is dependent on some chemical [...]

“Do-It-Yourself Genetic Engineering” is a great article in the NYT about iGEM, the M.I.T. synthetic bio competition. It follows around a team from a two-year university (the first at iGEM) City College, and how its unlikely scientists got started. The article does a great job showing why one of the best ways to teach [...]

As with most things futuristic, synthetic biology is going to be harder than most people think:

Even if the function of each part is known, the parts may not work as expected when put together, says Keasling. Synthetic biologists are often caught in a laborious process of trial-and-error, unlike the more predictable design procedures found [...]