"This is both a baby step and a giant step," said scientist and venture capitalist Craig Venter as he revealed that his team had created the first "synthetic cell." "It's a giant step because, until this was done, it was only hypothetical that it could work. It's a baby step in terms of all the distance we have to go before you can buy fuel made from carbon dioxide or have new medicines or new sources of food."

It's a lot more of a baby step than a giant step, because the feat of synthesizing the rather simple, single chromosome of a bacteria was not new; his own team had done it. Neither was transplanting the chromosome of one kind of bacteria into a different kind of bacteria (after removing the latter cell's original chromosome), and persuading the resulting organism to reproduce. His team had already done that too, as had many other people.

Now they have done both things together, which is quite impressive, but not exactly groundbreaking. If Venter is "playing God," as the usual suspects immediately accused him of doing, it is a fairly minor god from a dead religion — Vucub Punahu, perhaps, or Bragi. But he does understand the art of self-promotion.