Craig Venter has been at it again. This time he’s cited in the Guardian claiming to have created a synthetic chromosome and to be nearly ready to announce the first creation of artificial life. A rather breathless write-up of these claims by the paper says, as Venter has been known to, that this could even combat global warming.

Venter’s opening the meeting his institutes hold every year today, and there’s rampant speculation, including in the Guardian, that he may announce his ‘artificial life’ there. The Guardian says a team of scientists assembled by Venter and led by his long-term collaborator the Nobel laureate Hamilton Smith has used “lab-made chemicals” (presumably oligonucleotides) to build a 381-gene chromosome 580,000 base-pairs long. They plan to put this chromosome into a living cell and “it is expected to take control of the cell and in effect become a new life form”, says the paper.

In a profile piece in the paper, which is also carrying an extract from his autobiography, Venter clarifies: “It’s not like baking a cake, mixing all the ingredients and putting it in the oven, and hey presto, there’s new life. We’re not creating life, we are creating new life forms from existing ones.”

A patent on this ‘synthetic life-form’ was filed last year (detailed by Nature columnist Philip Ball).

The story is getting wide pick up, although not many people seem to know what to make of it. Venter spokeswoman (and fiancée) Heather Kowalski told AFP, “The Guardian is ahead of themselves on this. We have not achieved what some have speculated we have in synthetic life. When we do so there will be a scientific publication and we are likely months away from that.”

UPDATE 10/10/07

University of Cambridge biochemist Dr Nick Gay is not impressed with Venter’s claims (The Guardian). “On the face of it this seems to be a spectacular advance. Unfortunately the truth is rather different.”

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