I watched Nova’s The Diamond Deception episode last night. It described the discoveries and processes of synthetic diamond making. The Nova program opens with a GE scientist demonstrating how he can make a diamond out of a dollop of peanut butter. Not surprisingly, De Beers has been keeping up with synthetics themselves, acquiring their own equipment to make synthetics, not for market, but to develop methods of identifying man-made diamonds. They rather people bought the Real Thing from them. I was amused when one of their spokesmen said “It’s like a Picasso versus a copy of a Picasso. The copy is worthless, but the Picasso is priceless.” I thought…well, let’s see… Picasso was an artist who put time and creativity into making a work of art. The scientists behind the synthetics have been using remarkable creativity to learn how to produce in hours what nature took billions of years to produce blindly. You’re digging rocks out of the ground. I know consumers will still desire the naturals over synthetics, and De Beers will sway the vote with their own campaign. I’m not naive enough to think everyone will think this one through like the engineer geek I am. Scientists will eventually produce diamonds which can not be distinguished from natural ones, so De Beers has plans to start etching logos onto theirs.