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"  &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re here today to announce the first synthetic cell,&amp;quot; said genetic pioneer Craig Venter at a press conference held on Thursday at Washington, D.C.&amp;#039;s Newseum. &amp;quot;This is the first self-replicating cell we&amp;#039;ve had on the planet whose parent is a computer.&amp;quot;   Venter called his work the culmination of a &amp;quot;15-year quest.&amp;quot; He was flanked by a team of scientists from the Maryland-based J. Craig Venter Institute, including Daniel Gibson, Clyde Hutchinson and Nobel laureate Hamilton Smith. Venter is best known for his work in mapping the human genome a decade ago. Details of this breakthrough, the last in a three-step process, will be published in the journal Science. Two years ago, the team chemically synthesized a bacterial genome. Next, they successfully transplanted the genome of one bacterium into another bacterium. Now, they have combined those two steps, &amp;quot;starting with a digital code in a computer, building the chromosome from four bottles of chemicals, assembling that chromosome in yeast and transplanting it into a recipient bacterial cell,&amp;quot; Venter explained.  The scientists did not create a synthetic genome from scratch, though that is their ultimate goal. Instead, they copied an existing genome from the simple bacterium Mycoplasma mycoides. They wrote out its entire genetic code as a digital computer file. Using a biochemical alphabet of adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine\u2014the building blocks of DNA\u2014they translated the computer file into many small pieces of chemical DNA, stitching those together until they had a synthetic copy of the entire genome, with minor changes. The manmade genome &amp;quot;booted up&amp;quot; the new cell and produced daughter cells through replication\u2014more than 1 billion to date. That original colony is now in a freezer in Maryland awaiting regeneration.  Venter hesitates to call his creation a new species, even though he removed 14 genes from the original M. mycoides. Instead, the team gave their new strain a name that, aptly, sounds like a computer software program: M. mycoides JCVI-syn1.0. To make the manmade distinguishable from the natural, they imbedded DNA sequences that &amp;quot;watermark&amp;quot; the synthetic genome. Venter would not reveal the secret behind the code, but hinted that &amp;quot;this is the first species to have its own website encoded in its genetic code.&amp;quot; Other watermarks spell out complete sentences, including a quote by the physicist Richard Feynman: &amp;quot;What I cannot build, I cannot understand.&amp;quot; Now that they&amp;#039;ve figured out how to create a synthetic cell, Venter and company hope to apply it to useful technologies, such as fuel production or environmental cleanup. The majority of the $40 million spent on the project to date has come from Venter&amp;#039;s for-profit San Diego-based company, Synthetic Genomics. Venter said his company is working with Exxon Mobile to develop a new strain of algae that captures carbon dioxide and uses it to make diesel fuel. He has funding from the National Institutes of Health to develop a future flu vaccine. One benefit of synthetic biology is speed. &amp;quot;Instead of taking weeks to months, teams might be able to make them in less than 24 hours.&amp;quot; This might also help create vaccines for viruses that rapidly evolve, like the virus that causes the common cold. Eric Gaucher, who runs a synthetic biology lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology, calls the Venter Institute&amp;#039;s breakthrough &amp;quot;extremely new and extraordinarily valuable.&amp;quot; He has never worked with Venter or his scientists, but he is familiar with their research and is helpful in putting this find into context: &amp;quot;When Monsanto sells Roundup-ready soy beans, all they&amp;#039;ve done is inserted one or two genes into the soybean genome to allow that plant to be resistant to a particular drug, called glyphosate. A researcher like Jay Keasling [a leading UCal Berkeley synthetic biologist, who has altered a strain of bacteria to produce a malaria drug] has gone a step further. He&amp;#039;s said he will engineer an organism, but he&amp;#039;s not going to just do it with one or two genes, he&amp;#039;s going to do it with a whole pathway of genes.&amp;quot; The Venter Institute has said, &amp;quot;Let&amp;#039;s no longer think about one gene or two genes or a five-gene pathway. We can now do whatever we want to do with a genome. It exponentially expands what others have been able to do.&amp;quot;  Creating synthetic life brings up difficult moral and ethical questions, as well as more practical concerns about the potential misuse of this new technology. At the press conference, Venter was quick to point out &amp;quot;the extensive work we have done asking for ethical reviews\u2014pushing the envelope on that side as well as the technical side.&amp;quot; They acknowledge that this technology could be used as a shortcut to creating a harmful pathogen, one a terrorist group might otherwise have to find in nature or steal from a government-controlled lab. They are looking into safeguard measures, such as a screening process for anyone trying to order DNA that could be used to synthesize a pathogen. Venter says he has briefed the White House and along with the research has tried to &amp;quot;push policy issues in parallel.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;This is as much a philosophical advance as it is an advance in science,&amp;quot; he says. Indeed, the larger-than-life Venter seemed humbled by the implications of this achievement. &amp;quot;This has changed my views about how life works.&amp;quot; Logan Ward is a contributing editor to Popular Mechanics and author of See You in a Hundred Years. For more on Ward&amp;#039;s adventures with 19th century technology, visit his website here. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/a5761/synthetic-cell-breakthrough/>