A Recipe for Life?
J. Craig Venter wants to forge life in a lab. He’s getting very close. Using chemicals that could be found in any college lab, the maverick biologist and his team constructed from scratch the entire genome of a bacterium. The feat marked the penultimate step toward creating “the first synthetic organism,” says Venter, 62, a Vietnam vet, surfing lover, multimillionaire entrepreneur, founder of a high-powered research institute, and a visiting scholar at Harvard. The Mycoplasma genitalium bacterium was selected for its simplicity – it has only 582,970 units in its DNA composition, compared with 3 billion in humans. Next step: transplanting the artificial genome into a microbe, then tweaking it to full life.
J. Craig Venter wants to forge life in a lab. He’s getting very close. Using chemicals that could be found in any college lab, the maverick biologist and his team constructed from scratch the entire genome of a bacterium. The feat marked the penultimate step toward creating “the first synthetic organism,” says Venter, 62, a Vietnam vet, surfing lover, multimillionaire entrepreneur, founder of a high-powered research institute, and a visiting scholar at Harvard. The Mycoplasma genitalium bacterium was selected for its simplicity – it has only 582,970 units in its DNA composition, compared with 3 billion in humans. Next step: transplanting the artificial genome into a microbe, then tweaking it to full life.
(AP Photo/Michel Euler)
