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The creation of a synthetic cell by a Montgomery County biotechnology research nonprofit last week could be a boon to research in the county while creating questions for government agencies and bioethicists.

Researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute, which has offices and laboratories in Rockville and in La Jolla, Calif., published their findings in Thursday's issue of the journal Science.

The article details how researchers designed a bacterial genome using a computer, made it in a laboratory using chemicals and transplanted it into a recipient cell to create a new, self-replicating cell controlled by the synthetic genome. In short, scientists inserted lab-made DNA into a cell created in nature, changing the cell's genetic makeup and causing it to replicate into new cells controlled by the lab-made genes.

Judith A. Britz, executive director of the Maryland Biotechnology Center, called the achievement a "spectacular scientific, engineering and cross-disciplinary feat" that represents the "logical evolution" of human genome research.

Venter made international news in 2001 when he and researchers at Celera Genomics, which was headquartered in Rockville at the time, sequenced the chemical base pairs that make up the human genome.

"As a scientist, my reaction to this is that it's a spectacular feat," Britz said. "As someone who is a Marylander, I view this with pride that the billions of dollars that has gone into research for sequencing the human genome has been pushed to the next level."

More than 500 life sciences companies employ about 30,000 people across Maryland, Britz said. With salaries of $75,000 to $80,000, the companies generate more than $2 billion in salaries annually.

That does not include university researchers or federal agencies that are doing life sciences research, she said.

The close proximity of those agencies, including the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, is one of the reasons Montgomery County is home to about 200 of the 500 Maryland life sciences firms, Britz said. Researchers from the National Institutes of Health led efforts to sequence the human genome, known as the Human Genome Project when it began in 1990.

Montgomery County has 20 properties — some occupied, some vacant — accounting for 702,800 square feet of life science laboratory space, according to Scheer Partners, a commercial real estate company in Rockville.

On Monday, Gov. Martin O'Malley (D) announced 14 Maryland biotechnology companies received portions of $6 million in tax credits aimed at increasing investment in biotech.

The Biotechnology Investment Incentive Tax Program is funded at $8 million for the fiscal year that begins July 1, and has provided $24 million since 2008, which has leveraged more than $50 million in private investment, according to the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development.

Attempts to reach researchers at the Venter Institute were unsuccessful.

An announcement like Venter's "bodes for the quality of people that you have in the state of Maryland and the quality of research that you have here," said Ronald L. Brown, director of research and development at Quality Biological Inc., a Gaithersburg company that custom manufactures cell and tissue cultures and other molecular biology products. "When you make a significant finding, that's one of the steps to multiple other findings."

The visibility that comes with such a finding can attract researchers and businesses to the state, said Brown, who is a consultant on research into new ways to grow stem cells that has benefited from a grant from the state's stem cell research fund.

In a tough economic climate, Maryland has turned greater focus toward fostering growth in the private sector.

A biosciences strategy for Montgomery County released in December said that the presence of federal labs such as NIH and the Food and Drug Administration "are one of Montgomery County's strongest assets."

But the report also found the federal presence created an "imbalance" of 9,200 private sector workers versus an estimated 49,000 federal agency workers and "fostered a more risk-averse and regulatory-oriented culture than in entrepreneurial, university oriented bioscience hubs like California and the Boston area."

Many of the life sciences companies in Maryland today are working on various projects building on sequencing of the human genome, Britz said, though "I would suspect there are not a lot of companies that are taking [Venter's] approach."

That approach, including the creation of genetic material in a lab, raises questions for scientists, society and government to consider.

President Barack Obama on Thursday asked the recently convened Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues to "undertake, as its first order of business, a study of the implications of this scientific milestone, as well as other advances that may lie ahead in this field of research."

Security risks are paramount, said Arthur L. Caplan, director for the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania.

"The No. 1 downside is this could fall into the hands of bad guys," Caplan said.

Experts have said the research is in its infancy. Researchers have yet to prove cells could exist outside the lab, and replicating the work done by Venter would be expensive, they said.

Meanwhile, the development could one day have "a lot of pluses" —from creating cells that secrete alternative fuels, to pollution fighting cells that eat oil, to microbes that attack cold viruses and cholesterol, Caplan said.

Although there is need for state and federal government oversight and "branding," or tagging cells so that they could be identified and tracked if they were to be developed for commercial manufacture, "I wouldn't worry about anything coming out of the faucet that's going to eat you and the kids right now," Caplan said.