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"This is the first synthetic cell that's been made," said Venter. "We call it synthetic because the cell is totally derived from a synthetic chromosome, made with four bottles of chemicals on a chemical synthesizer, starting with information in a computer."

Venter and his colleagues created a special code, similar to Morse code, to "write" within the DNA itself. Instead of dots and dashes, they used the sequence of four DNA nucleotides, thymine (T), guanine (G), cytosine (C), and adenine (A), as a code for any letter, number or punctuation mark. Using the code, the team included the names of the study co-authors, a website, and even several philosophical quotes, complete with punctuation.