Craig Venter announced on May 20th (a day before my birthday!) that he succeeded in creating a synthetic cell. That's right. He created artificial life.
When the human genome was just beginning to be sequenced, Dr. Venter founded Celera and used the shotgun sequencing, which he believed to be a faster method than the clone-by-clone method. He planned on sequencing the human genome before the public efforts and making a profit from charging access to the database. Public Genome Project and Craig Venter's newly founded Celera essentially began a race to completion of sequencing the human genome, and in 2000, the complete genomic sequence of humans was completed (One of the five individuals was Venter himself).
He went on to found J. Craig Venter Institute, whose focus is on synthetic biology. Mycoplasma laboratorium, say "hello world".
