Craig Venter, one of the guys behind the Human Genome breakthrough, has just claimed that after a decade-long effort, his instituate is that close to creating artificial life.  Here’s how you can do it at home:

Step 1:Build the entire genetic code for a single bacteria
Step 2: Insert this code into a “host” cell
Step 3: “Reboot” host cell

Until 2007, Step 3 is where the process got stuck, the resulting bacterium just wasn’t viable.   Just recently, Craig and his Institute think they’ve cracked it using “methylation”, a way of protecting this new DNA from the cell’s defence systems. 

This breakthrough could give biology and medicine some great tools – in fact Venter is working on bacteria that transform coal into cleaner natural gas.  Pretty good for a guy who’s already helped us understand our own DNA, and is on a quest to “put everything Darwin missed into context” through his oceanographic surveys.