This has been achieved in the laboratories of multimillionaire scientist Craig Venter, who became famous and multimillionaire thanks to the Genome Project. This biologist has been investigating for some time what can be the simplest way to generate life in a synthetic way. Until now it was known like mycoplasma genitalium, a bacterium that is parasitic to the human body and has up to 525 genes.
From this bacterium, what they're trying to do now is to create the simplest expression of life, in a synthetic way and with as few genes as possible. This take many years and even Craig Venter start from the idea that the DNA is like a computer program, the genome would be the operating system and what it tries is to rewrite the genetic code.
He tries to reproduce his genome in this minimal genome in the laboratory and then transplant it to a cell that has previously been emptied of all its genetic content, in this way the cell would restart and begin a new programming, a new life.
In 2010 a series of previous experiments were done to reach this, in that occasion what they did was modify the DNA of a bacterium and they also introduced an email and the following sentence by James Joyce:
To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life
This phrase was introduced as a safety measure in case the bacteria disappeared from the laboratory at some point.
In year 1995 the technology to sequence the genome was already available but it was not very effective because in those year it took up to 5 years and a lot of scientists to be able to synthesize a single gene with its basic ingredients. Today this technology is much more advanced and it's easier to access it. This fact has facilitated that in the laboratory we can create a cell with a synthetic genome in just three weeks.
