Now fast-forward to May of last year, when Venter and his team reported in Science (The Creation of a Bacterial Cell Controlled by a Chemically Synthesized Genome in Science), the successful generation of a cell directed entirely by a synthetic genome, programmed from a computer and synthesized piece by piece.
And their task dwarfs the genome project: with perhaps 1, 000 species under investigation, the number of bacterial genes could amount to 200, 000, compared with 20, 000 human ones.