A weekly round-up of leading journals

The pantheon of living organisms is about to get some newcomers — and we’re not talking about extraterrestrials,” announces the June 4 issue of Newsweek (‘Playing God’). It takes stock of initial advances in the field of Synthetic Biology, or SynBio. “Scientists in the last couple of years have been trying to create novel forms of life from scratch. They’ve forged chemicals into synthetic DNA, the DNA into genes, genes into genomes, and built the molecular machinery of completely new organisms in the lab—organisms that are nothing like anything nature has produced. The people who are defying Nature’s monopoly on creation are a loose collection of engineers, computer scientists, physicists and chemists who look at life quite differently than traditional biologists do. Harvard professor George Church wants ‘to do for biology what Intel does for electronics’ — namely, making biological parts that can be assembled into organisms, which in turn can perform any imaginable biological activity.” Among the biodevices scientists hope to get on the finishing line by early as 2009 is a way of producing a substance to treat people with quinine-resistant malaria.

The Economist marks the 40th anniversary of the Six-Day War (‘Israel’s wasted victory’, May 26-June 1). Calling Israel’s triumph over its Arab neighbours “one of history’s Pyrrhic victories”, its cover leader notes: “Part of the problem was the completeness of the triumph.” The victor tended to see a “divine hand” in the seeming finality of result, and the losers were paralysed by humiliation: “The Arabs did not phone to sue for peace and Israel did not mind not hearing from them.” How to break from the violence and blame game that has gone in the past four decades? “Israel must give up the West Bank and share Jerusalem; the Palestinians must give up the dream of return and make Israel feel secure as a Jewish state. The rest is detail.”

There is a wealth of detail to be found in New Yorker editor David Remnick’s long look at the books on the war (‘The Seventh Day: Why the Six-Day War is still being fought’, May 28). Reviewing the work of Israeli New Historians like Tom Segev, he explains, “It was not until the nineteen-eighties, after the opening of various state archives and the coming of age of a generation more disillusioned and less beholden to the old myths than the founders, that Israeli scholars began to confront some inconvenient facts.”

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The New Statesman keeps its focus to Gaza and argues, “The world cannot afford to stand by while the Israeli army and Palestinian militias fight their unwinnable and bloody war. Already, al-Qaeda is exploiting any power vacuum” (‘Gaza: the jailed state’, May 28).

Meanwhile: Time (June 4) looks at the magnificent makeover of Singapore and notes its inevitability: “Faced with challenging long-term economic prospects and a flagging birth rate, Singapore’s leaders have determined that the future of its 4.4 million citizens depends upon attracting multinational corporations along with hundreds of thousands of ambitious, educated (and preferably wealthy) foreigners to work and live there.” Fortune (May 28) considers the entry of Generation Y into the workplace. And in the June issue of Scientific American, Kaushik Basu returns to the Traveler’s Dilemma, which is now at the heart of game theory: “The idea of behaviour generated by rationally rejecting rational behavior is a hard one to formalise. But in it lies the step that will have to be taken in the future to solve the paradoxes of rationality that plague game theory and are codified in Traveler’s Dilemma.”