Does the bacterium that Craig Venter made help us to define life?
Not really. Craig Venter’s bug is essentially the same as a bacterium that came to us through Darwinian evolution, which provided all of its genetic information. Venter’s bug is alive and is life, but it is not particularly new in either of these features. Its DNA is fully synthetic, but the information within its sequence is natural. Likewise, the casing – the cell in which it replicates and instructs protein synthesis – was taken preassembled from an existing cell. Nevertheless, this synthesis fits nicely into the century-long tradition of natural products synthetic chemistry. Natural products chemists first analyze the structure of a biomolecule to determine the arrangement of its constituent atoms, and then synthesize exactly the same biomolecule from scratch. This was first a way to confirm the structural assignment. Later, making bigger and bigger molecules was a way to set ‘grand challenges’ to test chemistry and its theories. Indeed, any field that allows synthesis of new forms
