Free Republic

For 15 years, J. Craig Venter has chased a dream: to build a genome from scratch and use it to make synthetic life. Now, he and his team at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) in Rockville, Maryland, and San Diego, California, say they have realized that dream. In this week's Science Express (www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/science.1190719), they describe the stepwise creation of a bacterial chromosome and the successful transfer of it into a bacterium, where it replaced the native DNA. Powered by the synthetic genome, that microbial cell began replicating and making a new set of proteins. This is "a defining moment...

President Bush has issued a statement on "Ten Years of Democracy in South Africa," conveniently ignoring the fact that South African President Thabo Mbeki is a Marxist who has surrounded himself with followers of radical Islam. The other curious omission is that while the president complimented "South Africa's commitment to progress at home and around the world," evidence is emerging that South Africa has played a role in nuclear weapons proliferation, including to Iran. The evidence is contained in a hot new book, Iran's Nuclear Option: Tehran's Quest for the Atom Bomb, by journalist Al Venter. Some people forget that...

LONDON (Reuters Health) - A service to map a person's entire genetic code is being offered by America's genome entrepreneur Craig Venter, according to the Sunday Times. The newspaper said that for 400,000 (US$621,500), a person would get details of their entire genetic code within 1 week. "Armed with such information, the individual would be able to check for mutations linked with illnesses such as cancer and Alzheimer's," the Sunday Times reported. The article noted that, at present, scientists know the genetic abnormalities associated with only a few dozen diseases, but it pointed out thousands more were expected to be...