The 2011 TIME 100 Poll

Cast your votes for the leaders, artists, innovators, icons and heroes that you think are the most influential people in the world. Though official voting for inclusion on the TIME 100 list has now closed (with Rain as the 2011 readers' choice), users can continue to vote for their favorites until the final list, selected by our editors, is revealed on Thursday, April 21st

TIME 100 Candidates

J. Craig Venter and Daniel Gibson

By TIME StaffMonday, Apr. 04, 2011
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From left: J. Craig Venter Institute; Jonathan Alcorn / Bloomberg / Getty Images

Daniel Gibson, left, and J. Craig Venter

Ages: Venter, 64; Gibson, 34
Occupations: Molecular biologists and genetic engineers
Previous TIME 100 appearances: Venter, 2; Gibson, 0

Venter and Gibson are co-leaders of the team that created the first synthetic cell at the J. Craig Venter Institute's lab in Rockville, Md. Building on earlier work, they created a synthetic copy of a bacterial chromosome and inserted it into a different species of bacterium, where it not only replaced the organism's DNA but also went to work. The process is still laborious and prohibitively expensive, but it's a solid step toward truly artificial life.

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