Biology is approaching its Frankenstein moment – the creation of life from scratch. Sometime within the next few months, scientists are likely to announce that they have made a living cell from chemical ingredients that can be bought off the shelf.
Researchers led by Craig Venter, the most prominent figure in molecular biology, last year synthesised an entire bacterial genome – all the genetic instructions the cell needs to live and reproduce – from laboratory chemicals. They also converted one species of bacterium into another through a “genome transplant”. The next step is to insert the artificial genome into an empty cell and “boot it up”, creating the world's first fully synthetic microbe.
This “turns out to be a much more complicated problem than we thought – but we know how to solve it”, Dr Venter says.