While the world's leaders gathered at Davos last month were nervously chatting about the subprime crisis, rising oil prices, and roiling stock markets, geneticist Craig Venter crammed into a Swiss phone booth and talked to National Public Radio's Science Friday and others about creating the first artificial chromosome.

How are a Swiss ski resort, economic angst, and designer DNA connected? Venter's announcement brought the world one step closer to a breakthrough that, among other things, could replace petroleum, natural gas, and coal with cheaper fuels churned out by manmade bugs.

That's right, we're talking about a bacterialike organism that could be programmed like a computer to use its cellular mechanisms to produce not only a gasoline substitute, but also drugs, plastics, and "pretty much any other chemical that DuPont can now produce," says Venter.

In other discussions Venter has told me that his synthetic bugs might provide solutions for creating cleaner fuels, and for cleaning up greenhouse gases.

"We're the disruptive wild card out there," he says with a kidlike glee in his voice, a tone that comes whenever Venter, who co-sequenced the human genome and is the essence of "disruptive," gets excited.

Venter's wild card stance is not just about science. He also has been known to be disruptive in business. In 1998 he founded Celera, a commercial effort that sought to beat out the publicly financed effort to sequence the first human genome.

Using Venter's novel technologies, the Human Genome Project was accelerated and completed early, with the public and private sectors declaring a tie as to who won the race.

Venter left Celera in 2003, but not before amassing a personal fortune that he's used to finance the J. Craig Venter Institute and other ventures. In the synthetic-life field he has already filed for patents should his team succeed; in 2005 he co-founded Synthetic Genomics with economist Juan Enriquez to commercialize whatever designer bugs emerge from the lab.

"All fuels come from biology," he explains—not from a phone booth in Davos, Switzerland, but from his office in Rockville, Maryland, home of the Venter Institute. "Fossil fuels come from ancient biology, a 100-million-year process. We're talking about speeding up this process considerably."

Venter's latest breakthrough was reported in a paper published in the journal Science. It detailed his team's creation of a full chromosome from scratch. (Genes in an organism are divided into long stretches called chromosomes.)

News of a synthetic chromosome follows word last year that Venter's lab had inserted the genome of one bacteria species into another and made the new genome function in the cell. This proved that a new set of DNA instructions could take over and function in a cell, a critical step demonstrating that it is possible to create a programmable cell.

Venter says his team has created the largest manmade chemical structure ever engineered—an exact replica of what naturally appears in the smallest known bacteria, called Mycoplasma genitalium. As the Latin suggests, this parasite lives inside human genitalia. Its single chromosome is 1/10,000th the size of the human genome, which has 23 paired chromosomes.

"Basically," Venter says, "we took bottles of A's, T's, C's and G's"—adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine, the four nucleotides that form the building blocks of DNA—"and assembled this chromosome letter by letter."

They also added anomalous DNA markers called "watermarks" so that they could differentiate their chromosome from natural ones.

Venter and his colleagues, including Nobel laureate Hamilton Smith, started by ordering short stretches of the entire chromosome built by an outside lab. They then tried to connect them. This proved exceptionally difficult, since this giant molecule is thin and long and turned out to be very brittle.

Finally they were able to assemble the chromosome into four parts, which they inserted into yeast. The yeast used its cell mechanisms to replicate and fuse the four pieces into complete chromosomes.

Venter next wants to insert a manmade chromosome into an M. genitalia that has had its DNA removed to see if it functions and activates the cell machinery. "We are two-thirds of the way there," he says. "I will be surprised and disappointed if we don't finish in the next year."

Venter could make a substantial fortune off these discoveries, if they truly become wonderbugs that can be programmed to make virtually anything. Yet so far, he is not hording the information. He's published his major findings, even as he goes after patents that could make him the master of artificial life should he succeed.

He's also held numerous meetings to discuss the ethics of creating life, though of course no one knows exactly what will happen with such powerful technology. Using the bugs for manufacturing chemicals can be made as safe as current technologies for recombinant DNA, the process used to make biologics, notably Amgen's Epogen. But fear of bioweapons and superbugs running amok are not entirely far-fetched, and must be guarded against.

"Will you be creating any new Craig Venters?" I ask.

"Sometimes I wish I could," he says, "then I could be several places at once. But a lot of people think that one Craig Venter is enough."