In this 60 Minutes segment, Craig Venter describes his synthetic organism at the 3:40 point:

It’s alive and self-replicating. It can grow and indefinitely make copies of itself.

Did you design this to do anything in particular?

No. We designed this just to see if we could do this whole experiment using synthetic DNA, and now that we know we can do it, it’s now worth the effort to make the things that could be valuable.

What is now possible? The “ability to custom design and reprogram bacteria and other organisms to churn out new medicines, foods and clean sources of energy.”

Venter: “I see in the future bioengineered almost everything you imagine we use… Possibly next year’s flu vaccine could come from these synthetic DNA processes. Instead of months to make a new vaccine each year, we could do it in 24 hours or less.”

It’s a pretty interesting video… The shot of Venter standing in the algae farm around 5:15 is itself worth a look.

See also:

- How Cells Work
- How DNA Works

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