I came across this link on an expected announcement by Craig Venter yesterday:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2007/oct/06/genetics.climatechange
As he prepares to bring artificially designed life into the world, without any wider philisophical debate as to the ethics or wisdom of such an act other than his own ethial review, I can’t help but thinking that a) We are stuck in a 1950s horror movie and that b) it will all end in tears for Venter.
Given there is a lot of evidence to suggest life is genetically engineered by nature to change and mutate how will they control such mutations when they inevitably go off in strange directions? What if it becomes intelligent? What if it sees us as a threat? What if it creates even more reality television? What if it turns us all into Noel Edmunds?
Who is asking these important and vital questions?
I’ve watched enough of those films to know that the maverick scientist rarely comes out well but if it turns out Venter has a goatee and crazy hair I’m gonna run for the hills.
You don’t want to trust bearded men with mad hair. Oh no.
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I feel that it would have been that little bit better if the Guardian had put this under the headline “And So It Begins”.
🙂 Spot on.
Why is there some need to control mutations in this particular microbe? It’s not as if they’re inventing an organism wholesale; they just cobbling together genes from a number of different sources. Chances are the mutations that will occur in this engineered microbe have already occurred in nature.
What’s so scary about this?
My tongue was firmly in my cheek on that one, and I mean the cheek on my face. It did/does sound like the start of an old style SF novel.
Gotcha… sometimes it’s hard to tell what people are serious about and what they aren’t serious about.
In any case, Venter does have a beard.. not a goatee, and is relatively hairless.
What are the implications of that?