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Craig Venter, who booted up the first synthetic cell, dies at 79

Mark Frauenfelder
Apr 30, 2026
∙ Paid

Dr. J Craig Venter, founder of Celera Genomics (Christopher Halloran / Shutterstock.com)

In 2010, Craig Venter and his colleagues took a bacterial genome they had designed on a computer, assembled it from chemical building blocks, transplanted it into an empty cell, and watched the cell start dividing. The result, Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0, was the…

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