www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge215.html#jcv just released this tantalizing tidbit from Craig Venter on his estimated timeframe for the first artificial life form:
Now we know we can boot up a chromosome system. It doesn’t matter if the DNA is chemically made in a cell or made in a test tube. Until this development, if you made a synthetic chomosome you had the question of what do you do with it. Replacing the chomosome with existing cells, if it works, seems the most effective to way to replace one already in an existing cell systems. We didn’t know if it would work or not. Now we do. This is a major advance in the field of synthetic genomics. We now know we can create a synthetic organism. It’s not a question of ‘if’, or ‘how’, but ‘when’, and in this regard, think weeks and months, not years.
Full Disclosure: I am on the Board of Venter’s company, Synthetic Genomics (more info). On a related note, we are investing in a new project that tightly couples microbial metabolic pathways necessary to their survival to the production of biofuels of interest. By knocking out the other metabolic paths, the designer organism starts out doing OK at biofuels production, but then it naturally evolves in its bio-refinery environment to do a better and better job over time. It’s an interesting way to fuse the power of purposeful design and evolutionary search.
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