Scientists made a virtual microbe, complete with dozens of interconnected cell functions. But it wasn't easy. Their creation could be used in two important areas of research.

Physicists have spent enormous amounts of time and billions of dollars building supercolliders to search for fundamental particles, including the European Large Hadron Collider, which is designed to find the elusive Higgs boson.^1,2 A recent article in Nature asked what kinds of discoveries in biology would garner similar attention—"the biological Higgs."³