Venter's synthetic living cell contains the creator's email address and web site URL in its DNA.
Scientists at the J Craig Venter Institute have, for the first time, created a synthetic cell, completely controlled by man-made genetic instructions, which can survive and reproduce itself.
To begin, they wrote out the creature's entire genetic code as a digital computer file documenting more than one million base pairs of DNA in a biochemical alphabet of adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine.
They edited that file, adding new code, and then transformed the code into hundreds of small pieces of chemical DNA
To set this novel bacterium—and all its descendants—apart from any natural creation, Dr. Venter and his colleagues wrote their names into the creature's chemical DNA code, along with three apt quotations, an email address and the URL of a website.
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