I would suggest that at the present time science is more focused on manipulating life than actually creating it from scratch.  We seem to be more interested in prolonging and improving the quality of life rather than trying to generate synthetic cells.  Scientists can grow bacteria, but they cannot create an entire synthetic being like an animal or plant.  Scientists can clone animals and plants but that is not the same a creating life.

We cannot define life completely, we can prevent some one from loosing life but we cannot create a new life...

A new individual can be created in InVitro but again it is the use of one sperm cell and egg... or a individula cell But again individually sperm cell and egg cell or a individual cell has life which give rise to another new life.

There are cases where a new born baby is born dead but no clue why it is dead... and even in Invitro there are many failures...

So how life is formed is a mistery, we can conduct experiments and use technology but creation of life is beyond science...

As the post above implies, it depends on the definition of life. Life is generally defined as the ability to replicate oneself, along with the ability to grow and metabolize energy in some way. By this definition (which is contested by scientists), life has been created in laboratories, first by scientists in Britain that created very simple synthetic bacteria using chemicals. 

Supposedly on March 21, of 2010, scientists were able to create life for the first time. Combining the use of computers and bacteria, the scientists were able to create the first synthetic cell. The link below will take you to the article from CNN.

http://articles.cnn.com/2010-05-21/health/venter.qa_1_synthetic-chromosome-genetic-code-synthetic-life?_s=PM:HEALTH