How will human life change once we have the ability to create artificial life?
A controversial scientist who led a private project to sequence the human genome has claimed that artificial life will be created within four months. Researcher Craig Venter said his team had cleared a critical hurdle to creating man-made organisms in a laboratory. “Assuming we don’t make any errors, I think it should work and we should have the first synthetic species by the end of the year,” he said. Venter, who has been chasing his goal for a decade, is already working on projects to use synthetic biology to create bacteria that transform coal into cleaner natural gas, and algae that soak up carbon dioxide and turn it into hydrocarbon fuels. Venter’s prediction came after scientists at his J Craig Venter Institute, in Rockville, Maryland, announced that they had developed a new method of transplanting DNA into bacteria, promising to solve a problem that has held up the artificial life project for two years. The team took the first step in 2007 by implanting the genome of a bacterium
