Last time wired caught up with J. Craig Venter, he was tooling around the South Pacific, collecting microbes and dreaming of hatching life from man-made DNA (August 2004). This year, the biologist took a giant leap when his team engineered a synthetic version of a real organism's entire genetic code. Venter picked M. geni-talium, a bacterium with one of the smallest nonviral genomes on the planet-just 582,970 base pairs. Here's how they did if.
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