The Guardian reports today that J. Craig Venter, runner-​up in the race to map the genome, has “built a syn­thetic chro­mo­some out of lab­o­ra­tory chem­i­cals and is poised to announce the cre­ation of the first new arti­fi­cial life form on Earth.”

Accord­ing to the arti­cle, Venter and his team have built from scratch a chro­mo­some of 381 genes for a new bac­terium they’re call­ing Mycoplasma lab­o­ra­to­rium. With tech­niques invented by Venter’s team, they’re able to insert the chro­mo­some into living bac­te­ria and encour­age it to take over for the host’s DNA. In this way, a bac­terium based entirely on Venter’s syn­thetic genome may be born. He has already filed a patent for the new organism.

With char­ac­ter­is­tic immod­esty Venter calls the step “a very impor­tant philo­soph­i­cal step in the his­tory of our species.” “We are deal­ing in big ideas,” he said, “We are trying to create a new value system for life.”

Venter’s rhetoric is pitched to land him back in the only place he’s ever really happy: center stage in the media spot­light. And if the Guardian arti­cle is any indication—the sub­head for the arti­cle reads “Breakthrough could combat global warming”—the world’s media stands ready to help. In the coming weeks we can expect a spate of hand-​wringing edi­to­ri­als and wax­ings both opti­mistic and dismal that will pro­nounce on the new sci­ence. Brave New Juras­sic Park, here we come.

I don’t mean to deny that the news is sig­nif­i­cant. Like him or not, Venter is one of the most impor­tant sci­en­tists of the day. His project has invented and devel­oped sev­eral extremely impor­tant new tech­niques. But it’s a mis­take to con­sider this a dis­cov­ery of epochal philo­soph­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance. In fact, the philo­soph­i­cal and eth­i­cal issues raised by Venter’s project aren’t much dif­fer­ent than those cre­ated by Paul Berg’s dis­cov­ery of recom­bi­nant DNA in the mid 1970s.

Humans have been cre­at­ing new life forms for centuries—as the corn on your plate and the dog on your street attest—but using recom­bi­nant DNA freed sci­en­tists from a depen­dence on nat­ural processes for that cre­ation. Berg’s dis­cov­ery made it pos­si­ble to create new genetic mate­r­ial by com­bin­ing smaller strands of DNA. With Berg’s process, how­ever, sci­en­tists still had to depend on extant genomes for their source mate­r­ial. Venter’s tech­nol­ogy allows sci­en­tists to skip that step: now they can build new DNA from the bases up.

Men­tion of Paul Berg gives us an oppor­tu­nity to recall just how dif­fer­ent these two men are. When Berg dis­cov­ered recom­bi­nant DNA he wrote in a famous letter, “There is seri­ous con­cern that some of these arti­fi­cial recom­bi­nant DNA mol­e­cules could prove bio­log­i­cally hazardous.” He called for a vol­un­tary mora­to­rium on all research until a panel of sci­en­tists, physi­cians, and lawyers could work out the impli­ca­tions. The Asilo­mar Con­fer­ence devel­oped a series of guide­lines and pro­ce­dures to make sure that their cre­ations would cause no imme­di­ate harm to human beings. When Craig Venter makes a dis­cov­ery, on the other hand, he files a patent and calls a press conference.

Sci­ence aside, the most char­i­ta­ble thing one can say about Venter’s gen­eral ori­en­ta­tion is that it reminds us that the myth of the humble sci­en­tist usu­ally is just that: a myth. At worst, one can pre­dict that the “new value system for life” that Venter wants to push is one we already know all too well, the same system that rules every other corner of our dollar-​denominated lives.