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HIGH HOPES: Dr Venter's single-cell organism could be used to develop new energy sources to combat climate change.
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WASHINGTON - CONTROVERSIAL US scientist Craig Venter has announced he is on the verge of creating the first ever artificial life form which he hails as a potential remedy to illness and global warming.
Dr Venter told The Guardian newspaper on Saturday that he has built a synthetic chromosome using chemicals made in a laboratory, and is set to announce the discovery within weeks.
The breakthrough, which he hopes could help develop new energy sources to combat the negative effects of climate change, would be 'a very important philosophical step in the history of our species'. However, the prospect of engineering artificial life forms is highly controversial and likely to arouse heated debate over the ethics and potential ramifications of such an advance.
Mr Pat Mooney, director of the Canadian bioethics organisation ETC Group, said Dr Venter was creating 'a chassis on which you could build almost anything'.
'It could be a contribution to humanity such as new drugs or a huge threat to humanity such as bio-weapons,' he said.
The chromosome which Dr Venter and his team has created is known as Mycoplasma laboratorium and, in the final step of the process, will be transplanted into a living cell where it should 'take control', effectively becoming a new life form.
The single cell organism, which ETC has coined 'Synthia', is piloted by a chromosome with just 381 genes, the limit necessary to sustain the life of the bacteria so it can feed and reproduce.
The new bacteria will therefore be largely artificial, though not entirely, because it is composed of building blocks from already existing organisms.
The idea is to make it into a universal tool for biologists by according it the genes necessary to accomplish certain tasks.
The five-year project has been partially financed by the US Department of Energy in the hope that it could lead to the creation of a new environmentally friendly fuel.
'We are going from reading our genetic code to the ability to write it. That gives us the hypothetical ability to do things never contemplated before,' Dr Venter said.
His laboratory, the J. Craig Venter Institute, last year filed for a US patent on the organism, claiming exclusive ownership of a set of essential genes and a synthetic 'free-living organism that can grow and replicate'.
A Venter spokesman, however, declined to confirm any breakthrough. 'The Guardian is ahead of themselves on this,' Ms Heather Kowalski said.
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
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