
After a career studying the code of life, Dr. Venter has a new goal, the creation of life itself. Along with two veteran collaborators, Dr. Venter hopes to become the first to whip up a made-to-order bacterium by manufacturing a complete set of genes, or genome, of a single-cell bacterium in his laboratory. ( see Antonio Regaldo, "Next Dream for Venter: Create Entire Set of Genes From Scratch", The Wall Street Journal, June 29, 2005; Page A1).