From Frankenstein's monster to "Blade Runner" replicants, the prospect of assembling life from inert matter has long tantalised the imagination with hope and fear.

The alluring but unsettling goal of artificial life comes a step closer with Thursday's announcement by the American maverick Craig Venter, opening what experts predict will be a fierce debate on medical, ethical and safety issues.

Venter's team, reporting in the US journal Science, stripped down a species of tiny microbe, Mycoplasma genitalium, to the barest genetic components to support life. They then replicated strips of the germ's DNA code using lab chemicals and reassembled these sections to make a synthetic, pared-down version of the original, which they called M. genitalium JCVI-1.0.

"Through dedicated teamwork we have shown that building large genomes is now feasible and scalable so that important applications such as biofuels can be developed," said Hamilton Smith, from the J.Craig Venter Institute, in the study published in Science.

The paper is a bio-engineering exploit, showing that the toolkit and knowledge exist for making the world's first man-made species of micro-organism — a goal that Venter, a consummate self-promoter, sketched last year to a media frenzy.

He says artificial bugs hold the key to solving innumerable problems, including the world's energy crisis and climate-change peril.

A controversial marvel

The prospect of engineering artificial life forms is, however, highly controversial and arouses heated debate over the ethics and its potential ramifications.

It is one of the Holy Grails of science, but also one that stirs deep fears as foreseen in Aldous Huxley's 1932 novel "Brave New World" in which natural human reproduction is eschewed in favour of babies grown artificially in laboratories.

Venter said in a statement: "This extraordinary accomplishment is a technological marvel that was only made possible because of the unique and accomplished ... team."

His researchers had "dedicated the last several years to designing and perfecting new methods and techniques that we believe will become widely used to advance the field of synthetic genomics," he added.

Lead author Dan Gibson said the team had completed the second step in a three-step process to create a synthetic organism.

In the final stage of their research which they are already working on, the Maryland-based team will attempt to create a bacteria based purely on the synthetic genome sequence of the Mycoplasma genitalium bacteria.

The bacteria, which causes certain sexually transmitted diseases, has one of the least complex DNA structures of any life form, composed of just 580 genes. In contrast, the human genome has some 30 000.

Other voices, in science and also religion, say that so far Venter is way short of his goal, for cut-and-paste of DNA does not constitute the making of life.

Helen Wallace, a biologist and spokeswoman for GeneWatch UK, said that while Venter's team has managed a technical feat, it is some way from being artificial life.

"Venter is not God ... He's a long way from creating life," she told AFP.

"It's a type of genetic engineering which would allow people to make much bigger genetic changes, which means that in the future you could create organisms with new gene sequences."

Even so specialists say that, outside the lab, the world is totally unprepared for the looming dawn of synbio, as synthetic biology is called.

"If you were to poll people on synthetic biology, you would be hard put to find one in a thousand who had heard of it," Nigel Cameron, president of the Institute on Biotechnology and the Human Future, part of the Illinois Institute of Technology, told AFP last year.

Even governments and international organisations charged with monitoring and regulating major new technologies are in the dark about this new field, he said.

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