A closer look
Playing God just got a massive software update. The Craig Venter Institute did not just tweak a genome; they designed an entire living organism from scratch on a computer and booted it up in a lab. Stripping life down to its absolute bare minimum, JCVI-syn3.0 contains only 473 genes—the exact amount needed to eat, survive, and replicate. They essentially formatted a bacterial hard drive, installed a custom operating system, and proved that life can be synthetically engineered like a smartphone app.
