The ever-adventurous Craig Venter is known to announce transformational scientific achievements every now and then. So when he recently claimed that he has created the first ever artificial life, no one was surprised. The details released by him reveal that he and his team designed an artificial genome that was then placed in a natural bacterium where the synthetic DNA ( the genome is a string of DNA) outsmarted the bacterium's DNA and therefore further replication of the bacterium has a synthetic origin.
We may say that the scientist has come up with a semi-synthetic cell. Creation of a totally artificial life may be aeons away or may never occur. Nevertheless this achievement has enormous potential with weighty ethical implications. As we await Venter's next announcement, ethical ambivalence will continue to punctuate our healthy scepticism about life and its meaning.
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