Call him maverick scientist or genomic wizard – Craig Venter is again in the headlines with another audacious feather in his cap. Craig Venter became famous as the bad boy of genome research when he first tried to patent a human gene more than a decade ago and then entered into fierce competition with the publicly funded Human Genome Project to be the first to decode the human genome.

Now scientists of the Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland have created what is being touted as "synthetic life". Actually, what Daniel Gibson and his colleagues have done is to artificially manufacture the entire genome of the bacterium Mycoplasma mycoides. They then transplanted it into the empty cell of a different species M. capricolum which continued to survive and astonishingly multiply. On replication it produced proteins of only M. mycoides. To rephrase it, they rebooted a cell with the artificially created software of another species. On repeated replication by the process of "infinite dilution" eventually even the hardware has gotten replaced under instructions of the new software.

What are the possible gains of being able to create synthetic bacteria? First is the power to reduce environmental carbon dioxide and return oxygen to the atmosphere. Others include mass production of medicines and of course the creation of biofuels.

What could be the negative fallouts? ‘Bioerror’ and ‘bioterror,’ where new organisms either escape into the real world or are misused for warfare are what the doomsayers are warning us about.

The single-celled organism has several "watermarks" written into its DNA to identify it as synthetic and help trace its descendants back to their creator, should they go astray. These watermarks include email ids, website address and quotations. The three inspiring quotes include one by the writer James Joyce ‘To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life’; another from the biography of the great scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer: "See things not as they are, but as they might be". And from the mathematician Richard Feynman, who said: "What I cannot build, I cannot understand" (www.naturenews.com 20 May 2010, The Hindu 3 June 2010, Gibson et al. Creation of a bacterial cell controlled by a chemically synthesized genome, Science 20 May 2010).