The video of Craig Venter’s talk on creating synthetic life just went <a href="http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/227" rel="nofollow">online</a> along with this fireside chat with TED curator Chris Anderson.

"We've been digitizing biology, and now we're trying to go from that code to designing biology. Can we regenerate life or create new life out of this digital universe?

In a biological system, the software builds its own hardware. We can do a transplant of a chromosome from one cell to another and activate it. We may be about to create a new version of the Cambrian explosion, with massive new speciation (the formation of new and distinct species) based on this digital design. We have a database with about 20 million genes, and we like to think of them as the design components of the future.

We now have techniques to do combinatorial genomics, to build a robot that can make a million chromosomes a day.

We're now focusing on fourth-generation designer fuels. Current biofuels aren't the solution. To have an impact on fuel without increasing the price of food, we start with CO2 as the feedstock – to create new fuels out of CO2.”