Astronomer Fred Hoyle famously quipped in 1982 that the odds of a simple living thing assembling itself from inanimate chemicals were as slim as the chance that a tornado passing through a junkyard would leave in its wake a Boeing 747.
The statement reflects the 20th-century understanding that even pond scum was composed of cells of mind-boggling complexity. Today biologists believe that modern cells evolved from much simpler ancestors — organisms that no longer exist.
Now scientists have used genetic manipulation to create something of a throwback: a new organism, simpler than any known in nature today. They started with a relatively simple bacterium, Mycoplasma mycoides, and then pared down its genome to about half the original size. The scientists dubbed the new organism JCVI-syn3.0, after the institute started by the group's leader, J. Craig Venter. They announced it Thursday in Science.