It's fairly likely that every life-form that currently exists in this planet has a common ancestor that self-assembled billions of years ago. Your genetic code

It's fairly likely that every life-form that currently exists in this planet has a common ancestor that self-assembled billions of years ago. Your genetic code is the result of a huge amount of cycles of copies (and mutations) of that common ancestor's DNA. The life form that Venter created is separate from that lineage - its genetic code was synthesized from basic building blocks, not copied from an ancestor (at least in a biochemical sense; the information content was indeed copied, but that's another hurdle). Whether or not this makes it "artificial life" depends on your definition of "life", and there's a surprising amount of controversy there.