Wired and Reuters are reporting on the latest work by Craig Venter published in Science this week. Venter’s synthetic life program completed the second of three steps in creating a synthetic organism.

“We consider this the second in our three-step process to create the first synthetic organism,” said J. Craig Venter, president of the J. Craig Venter Institute where scientists performed the study, on Thursday during a teleconference. “What remains now that we have this complete synthetic chromosome … is to boot this up in a cell.”

Venter will be speaking on Monday, February 25th as part of our Seminars About Long-term Thinking series.