‘A long time coming but worth the wait’

DOCTOR Craig Venter’s bold step in the enduring quest to create artificial life has produced a living cell powered by manmade DNA.

But while such work can evoke images of Frankenstein-like scientific tinkering, it also is exciting hopes it could eventually lead to new fuels, better ways to clean polluted water and faster vaccine production.

But is it really an artificial life form? The inventors call it the world’s first synthetic cell, although this initial step is more a re-creation of existing life — changing one simple type of bacterium into another — than a built-from-scratch kind.

But J Craig Venter said his team’s project paves the way for the ultimate, much harder goal: designing organisms that work differently from the way nature intended for a wide range of uses.

Already he’s working with ExxonMobil in hopes of turning algae into fuel.

“This is the first self-replicating species we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a computer,” Venter said.

And the report is triggering excitement in this growing field of synthetic biology.

“It’s been a long time coming, and it was worth the wait,” said Dr George Church, a Harvard Medical School genetics professor.

Following the announcement, President Barack Obama directed the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues to make its first order of business a study of the milestone.

“The commission should consider the potential medical, environmental, security and other benefits of this field of research, as well as any potential health, security or other risks,” Obama wrote to the commission’s chairwoman, Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania.

Scientists for years have moved single genes and even large chunks of DNA from one species to another. At his J Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland, and San Diego, Venter’s team aimed to go further.

A few years ago, the researchers transplanted an entire natural genome of one bacterium into another and watched it take over, turning a goat germ into a cattle germ. Next, the researchers built from scratch another, smaller bacterium’s genome, using off-the-shelf laboratory-made DNA fragments.

The report combines those two achievements to test a big question: Could synthetic DNA really take over and drive a living cell? Somehow, it did.

“This is transforming life totally from one species into another by changing the software,” said Venter, using a computer analogy to explain the DNA’s role.