A team lead by the biologist J. Craig Venter has created, in the laboratory, a species of bacteria with a genetic code smaller than any known to exist in nature–basically creating a new organism with a minimal code necessary for life.
“The goal of completely defining what it means to be considered alive has taken a giant step forward,” says Sir Richard Roberts, who won the 1993 Nobel Prize in biology and is now chief scientific officer of New England Biolabs.
