Gene scientist Craig Venter and Nobel laureate Hamilton O. Smith are developing a plan to create a single-celled, partially synthetic organism with the minimum number of genes necessary to sustain life. If they're successful, the tiny man-made cell would have the capability of reproducing on its own, to to create a population of cells unlike any known to exist. Venter is founder and former principal of Celera Genomics, the company that beat out publicly-funded researchers in the race to map the human genome.
The project raises philosophical, ethical and practical questions. For
instance, if a man-made organism proved able to survive and reproduce only
under a narrow range of laboratory conditions, could it really be considered
life? More broadly, do scientists have any moral right to create new organisms?
