J. Craig Venter, the La Jolla biologist who played a key role in decoding the human genome, said Thursday that his team has made the world’s first “synthetic cell.” Venter and his colleagues basically figured out how to design a bacterial cell on a computer. Then they used genetic engineering and chemicals that are essential for life to produce an entity that’s novel but not yet a truly living version of anything that occurs naturally.
First Synthetic Cell Created by Scientists
May 21, 2010