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.