For the past few years, Craig Venter, the human genome pioneer, has been trying to build an organism from scratch. While Venter is no shrinking wallflower (see, for example, a recent interview in Newsweek), he has been keeping his synthetic-life cards pretty close to his vest. I spoke to Venter in 2003, shortly after he announced the project, and he provided some basic details which I wrote up in a news article in the journal Science (I’ve archived it here). I was startled to find my article being cited in scientific papers about synthetic biology, but one scientist (Eugene Koonin of NIH) told me that there was no scientific paper he could cite. But now it seems