The real E. coli scare

As soon as we hit the year 2000, no small number of stand-up comics, chat-show hosts, weekly columnists and other contributors to society started to complain about the lack of flying cars, robot butlers etc. "I thought we were meant to be living the future!" they cried plaintively. Well, look around:

• We all carry around Star-Trek communicators, that don't just let us talk but watch videos and play games with strangers
• Disembodied voices guide us to our destinations, using info beamed to them from satellites in orbit
• There are robots which vacuum your house and mow your lawn
• We're this close to a universal jukebox which will let us listen to or watch any goddam thing we like, at any time we like
  
• We're totally meddling with the human genome to create monsters!
  

For my money, that's pretty damn sci-fi. But if you were in any doubt, comes now news that scientists (well, who else?) have created the first living computer.

If anyone from the year 4250 is reading this, I'd just like to say sorry. We didn't know what we were meddling with, and it all got a little out of hand. For your own sakes, don't make the same mistake we did. Abacuses are fine, but anything else is taking a chance. Trust me.