Meet Craig Venter and his designer bugs

Last Modified: 22 Oct 2007
By: Julian Rush, Jon Snow

Channel 4 News catches up with the maverick scientist planning to turn genes into man-made life forms.

Nearly every day now, scientists announce they've deciphered the genetic code of yet another organism.

We know the DNA, the building blocks of life from a human to a humble bacterium.

So the logical next step is to go the other way: to assemble the genes into man-made life forms designed to perform a specific job.

Welcome to the world of synthetic biology.

One of the front-runners in the field is a man who's rarely described as just a scientist - Craig Venter comes with the word "maverick" attached.

It's an epithet earned after the bitter race with publicly-funded scientists to decode the human genome; Venter, from the private-sector, accused - he says unjustly - of wanting to patent the human genome for personal gain.

He now leads a team that includes a couple of Nobel prize-winners who recently demonstrated they could change the species of a bacterium by transplanting a chromosome into it. That was the difficult bit, he says, the final step is easy - and not far off.

Venter calls the synthetic bacterium he's trying to create, Mycoplasma Laboratorium.

His team started by sequencing the genome of a simple common bacterium to get its genetic code.

They dream of designer bugs, for example, that digest waste to make biofuels

Then, using standard chemistry and off-the-shelf DNA sequences, they've created artificial copies of all the genes - and he says they have already succeeded in joining them all up to make a synthetic, identical copy of the bacterium's DNA chromosome.

All he has left to do is actually insert it into a bacterial cell, and hope it takes over and reproduces itself - which would mean it was a living organism, completely artificially created.

Both Venter and British scientists in the field believe synthetic biology could help solve problems like climate change: they dream of designer bugs, for example, that digest waste to make biofuels.

As for those fears bio-terrorists could create designer bio-weapons so the science needs to be controlled and regulated - well, the debate on that has only just begun.