Craig Venter’s group is developing the first artificial cell in the laboratory, controlled by a synthetic genetic heritage. Venter had already conceived the Human Genome Project in the race to sequence our DNA, arriving first, and had previously chemically synthesized the genome of a bacterium and transplanted its genetic heritage into another. Now he has combined the two methods to create what the researchers themselves have called an “artificial cell,” despite only its DNA being artificial. It is “the first synthetic cell ever created, derived entirely from a synthetic chromosome, constructed with four bottles of chemical compounds on a synthesizer starting from computer-processed information.”
