View from a Rhino House: “It’s alive…”

Craig (“Baron Frankenstein”) Venter, famous for creating the first cell with a synthetic genome, claims that he is about to create an artificial life-form from scratch, another significant “first”.

“We think we’re close, but we’ve not submitted a paper yet,” he said at the Global Grand Challenges summit in London.

Venter announced in 2010 that he had brought to life an almost completely synthetic version of the bacterium Mycoplasma mycoides, by transplanting it into the vacant shell of another bacterium. Venter’s latest creation, which he calls the “Hail Mary Genome,” will be made entirely with genetic material he & his institute colleagues, Clyde Hutchison & Hamilton Smith, consider necessary for life.

The team is using computer simulations to understand more fully what is needed to create a simple, self-replicating cell. “Once we have a basic “chassis”, we can add anything else to it,” he says.

Venter’s quest to engineer algae to produce oil is also going well. “We’ve been able to increase photosynthesis by 300%, meaning that we get three times as much energy per photon as from natural algae,” he says. He also announced that his program to scour the oceans for new microscopic life has so far turned up 80 million genes new to biology.

I think I can already hear the villagers at the lab door with torches & pitchforks.

“Dont’ be such an alarmist. What harm can 1 little self-replicationg organism do? I think we should change its name to “Tribble”, that sounds friendly…..”