‘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.