Telomere length is one gauge of a cell's age, and some researchers speculated that the process of injecting DNA from an adult cell into an egg and prodding it to develop would create organisms with tissues and organs that wouldn't last long enough for use in humans.
This is an ideal way to create organisms resistant to the drugs.
Dr. Venter said he would now be able to create organisms missing dozens of genes to answer the initial question that inspired the research in 1995: What is the minimum set of genes needed for life?
But the promise is accompanied by the risks of "bio-terror" and "bio-error" — that the same techniques, either nefariously or inadvertently, might create organisms that would harm public health or the environment.
On the contrary, various genetic modifications may create organisms resistant to infectious diseases, generate safe and efficient recombinant vaccines, or provide patients with proteins which stimulate their defense mechanisms.
With the development of genetic engineering and the possibility to create organisms and products (such as cDNA) not found in nature, the patent system has now been extended to include biology and biotechnology.
It's a step on a long road to create organisms like algae, bacteria or yeasts that more directly turn energy inputs–sunlight, sugars, carbon dioxide, oxygen into fuels and chemicals.
In many respects, synthetic biology -- a field that "aims to apply standardized engineering techniques to biology and thereby create organisms or biological systems with novel or specialized functions to address countless needs," as the U.S. Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues defined it -- is still very much in its infancy.
At first Amgen tried using genetic engineering to create organisms that would extract oil from shale, man-made proteins that would make chickens grow faster and new specialty chemicals such as a cloned indigo, a substitute for the natural dye used to color blue jeans.
Researchers learned to control the expression of transgenes, and were soon racing in both academic and industrial contexts to create organisms capable of expressing human genes for the production of human hormones.
