…hahaha! (cue lightning, scooby-doo music)

For good old-fashioned mad science, nothing beats creating life.

Ok, the Venter Institute didn’t create a new bacteria, it is the “second step” on their way to creating a bacterium with synthetic DNA. Of course, the press release/Science Daily article is a little fuzzy on the “first step” and my eyes began to hurt after a while…

Venter and his crew didn’t entirely synthesize their own bacteria, but they are reproducing  the smallest known bacteria, m. genitalium Their version will be called m. laboratorium. It would be unfair to say that they’re building a better venereal disease, but that’s the headline you’ll see when they’re done.

They’re not actually building a bacteria from scratch, either, but “merely” synthesizing an existing genome. The idea, I’d gather, is that if you can do that, then you can start fiddling with the genome to get the engineered bacteria to do what you want.

I like the idea of growing bacteria as colonies of little factories to produce biofuels or suck CO2 out of the air. Has Crichton written the book where man-made bacteria go out of control? I’ve lost track.