J. Craig Venter Institute

(Newser) - Craig Venter's creation of the first synthetic life form is a milestone discovery but patenting it will hold back science, argues a British scientist who helped sequence the human genome. John Sulston—who clashed with Venter a decade ago when he sought to restrict access to genome information—tells the...

(Newser) - It sounds a little Frankenstein-esque, but a prominent US geneticist has created what he calls the first synthetic living cell. Craig Venter built the genome of a bacterium from scratch and implanted it in a cell, a development seen as an important step toward the creation of artificial life, the...

(Newser) - Scientists have assembled the entire genome of a bacterium from basic chemicals, an important step toward creating a fully artificial organism, Reuters reports. "This entire process started with four bottles of chemicals," says Craig Venter, founder of the institute that did the work. Scientists had previously manufactured the...

(Newser) - A new map of human DNA shows just how complex we really are – so much so that scientists can’t even pin down which genes are making our eyes blue. "I found out that I have [only] a high probability of having blue eyes," says azure-eyed biologist...