Abstract
The topic of synthetic life has long been a subject for science fiction writers, philosophers, and even scientists. With the announcement in 2010 by renowned biologist J. Craig Venter that he and a team of scientists from the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) had created a bacterial cell with chemically synthesized genome, discussions of synthetic life were no longer just conjecture.Humans had assembled nonliving components to make a living cell (Gibson et al. 2010). I was one of the leaders of that endeavor, and this article will be a first-person account of how we made our cell, along with my conjectures about what will come next in the new fields of synthetic biology and synthetic genomics.Scanning electron ..