Scientists create artificial life in the laboratory - from four bottles of chemicals

The bug, Mycoplasma genitalium, has the smallest known genetic make-up of any truly living organism, with 485 working genes.

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The scientists took the natural bacterium and painstakingly replaced its genetic structure, or genome, with DNA stitched together from chemicals. Eventually they had recreated all the genes that had been in the natural bacterium, effectively turning it into an identical but artificial organism.

"We consider this the second in significant steps of a three-step process in our attempts to make the first synthetic organism," US biologist Craig Venter said. "This entire process started with four bottles of chemicals."

The feat marks a historic, and controversial, milestone in the fledgling field known as synthetic biology. It uses chunks of synthetic DNA-like inter-locking bricks with the goal of creating life-forms that can be genetically programmed to perform useful tasks.

Its proponents envision making micro-organisms that gobble up pollution, produce hard-to-make drugs or pump out clean energy. At the whimsical end, it might one day be possible to produce flowers designed to bloom on your birthday. Some believe that artificially created life will be the driving force of the next industrial revolution.

The field has raised profound ethical questions about human control of creation and its potential to produce new weapons of bio-terror.

But the Venter project is also drawing criticisms from bio-ethicists, and some scientists, who claim the team has applied for such broad patents on its human-made genome that it might acquire a monopoly on the making of all synthetic life-forms.

The DNA sequences of many organisms, including humans, have been mapped in recent years. However, until now, no-one had used this knowledge to assemble a living organism out of its constituent DNA, or even stretches of genetic code nearly 20 times smaller.

But in a paper published by the journal Science yesterday - co-written by Nobel prizewinner Hamilton Smith - the Maryland-based Venter group says it has done exactly that with Mycoplasma genitalium, a bacterium common to the human reproductive tract.

"It's the largest molecule made by humans... We don't know if there is an upper limit now," said Dr Venter, the maverick US biologist and businessman who heads the not-for-profit institute.

"The broader implications of this work have not been missed by us – we could enter into a new design phase of biology."

Dr Venter said the chromosome in the bacterium had been disabled so that it could not live outside the laboratory or take over some other organism in an accident. The plan also underwent ethical review by a panel at the University of Pennsylvania.

Last June, the team announced that it had managed to change one species of bacterium called Mycoplasma capricolum into another, Mycoplasma mycoides, by replacing one genome with another.

Dr Venter said he would like to use a synthetic chromosome in a similar way, to trick one organism into acting like another.

If he is to succeed in his plan of making a streamlined, stripped-down organism from scratch, his team must identify and understand the genes that are absolutely crucial to life.

"We have 100 genes or so, which we know we can't knock out without killing the cell, that are of unknown structure," he said.