How artificial life could change real businesses

    For instance, big oil companies may find themselves scrambling to keep up with new super-plants grown in ponds or vats that churn out alternative fuels that rival petroleum for efficiency and cost -- and won't pollute the Gulf of Mexico. Big Pharma might also see new rivals appear -- just like Amgen (AMGN, Fortune 500) and Genentech emerged out of an earlier wave of biological innovation in the 1970s -- that will use synthetic organisms to manufacture safer and cheaper drugs that take less time to be tested and approved.

    This all remains speculative and unlikely to cause any revolutionary changes anytime soon, but this is the promise offered by synthetic biology.

    Executives of one traditional corporation had to be thrilled by the "birth" of Synthia. This would be Exxon Mobil (XOM, Fortune 500), which last year invested $600 million in Venter's company, Synthetic Genomics, to develop fuels from bioengineered algae.

    An old nemesis from the days of the race to sequence the human genome, geneticist and Nobel laureate Sir John Sulston, has decried Venter's efforts to patent the processes around his "invention." "I hope very much these patents won't be accepted because they would bring genetic engineering under the control of the J. Craig Venter Institute. They would have a monopoly on a whole range of techniques," Sulston told the BBC.

    More surprising was the response of the Vatican, which adamantly opposes embryonic stem cell research, but not necessarily genetic engineering. Last Friday, L'Osservatore Romano, the official newspaper of the Vatican, praised Venter's breakthrough, though they insisted in an editorial that it did not amount to the creation of life, but was merely "the replacement of one of its motors."

    Venter has already put a personal stamp on Synthia by embedding in its DNA his own name and those of his team written in genetic code. The permanence of these names was assured in this proto-organism by being passed on to the bacteria's offspring.

    One question that remains is whether this technique could be used one day to design complex organisms -- say, a human. This is likely decades away, if it ever occurs. Yet the possibility exists that this technology might allow a future Craig Venter, or even Venter himself, to create the first synthetic person, perhaps going by the name "Synventor."