Dr. Craig Venter of the J. Craig Venter Institute listens to comments by lawmakers during a hearing on “Developments in Synthetic Genomics and Implications for Health and Energy” by the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, May 27, 2010.
Credit: Reuters/Jonathan Ernst

In 2010, a team of scientists announced that they had created a synthetic living cell. The team, led by Nobel laureate Ham Smith, microbiologist Clyde Hutchison III, and genomics pioneer Craig Venter, fashioned the full genome of a tiny bacterium called Mycoplasma mycoides in their lab, and implanted the DNA into the empty cell of another related microbe. They nicknamed it Synthia. Some news sources claimed that the team had, for the first time, created artificial […]