“… For 15 years, J. Craig Venter has chased a dream: to build a genome from scratch and use it to make synthetic life. Now, he and his team at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) in Rockville, Maryland, and San Diego, California, say they have realized that dream. In this week’s Science Express (www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/science.1190719), they describe the stepwise creation of a bacterial chromosome and the successful transfer of it into a bacterium, where it replaced the native DNA. Powered by the synthetic genome, that microbial cell began replicating and making a new set of proteins.
This is “a defining moment in the history of biology and biotechnology,” says Mark Bedau, a philosopher at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and editor of the scientific journal Artificial Life. “It represents an important technical milestone in the new field of synthetic genomics,” says yeast biologist Jef Boeke of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland….
[Life re-created. Blue colonies (top) indicate a successfully transplanted genome, with self-replicating bacteria revealed in an electron micrograph. CREDITS (TOP TO BOTTOM): J. CRAIG VENTER INSTITUTE; T. DEERINCK AND M. ELLISMAN/NCMIR, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO]
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Update: Critics rebuttals –> Its a technology feat. But not a synthetic life.