I wouldn't say Venter has quite made good on his claims though, its not so much that the new genome has been digitally designed as plagiarised after all.
Fair enough. Even Venter admits that.
But while we can create and develop new species, we're not creating life from scratch.
P. 51,
Life: What a Concept!.
But these are important notions that get lost in the over-simplified interpretation of what we are doing. I don't think we are creating life. We're coming up with new modified life forms, and we should be able to go from the digital world right to the analog world in the computer, and we have a team working on a program to do that, designing a species in the computer.
P. 53,
Life: What a Concept!.
He also makes a point of calling his genome "synthetic", not "artificial".
Still and all. Pretty spiffy. And synthetic chromosomes + genome transfer ...
A short while ago we published a paper in Science on genome transportation, where we took a purified chromosome from one species, made sure it was totally devoid of any protein, and put that chromosome into another bacterial species, and it's the ultimate identity theft because the new chromosome we put in completely took over the cell, and the cell converted completely into the cell dictated by the new chromosome. the new chromosome dictated everything. All the proteins changed over to that. The phenotype of the cell, everything changed, converted from the old species into the new species.
P. 48,
Life: What a Concept!.
... = extra spiffy.
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