There have been a fair few interesting stories in the press of late, one that particularly stood out was scientists have created artificial life, which on the surface seems quite an advance .... which it is but I have a feeling this discovery will be mercilessly exploited for profit.... The human genome was opened up for everybody to use .... this discovery smacks of profit...But the really worrying thing is what it can be used for.... there is already talk about engineering the cells to absorb CO2 ... to make massive CO2 suckers .... the only worrying thing about that is what "if" this artificial life gets loose ? just "what if" it gets into the world and multiplies doing whatever it was designed to do.... "what if" it runs completely unchecked in the natural environment ? the effects could be an end game scenario for mankind and any life on this planet... No Co2 .... no plants.... no plants.... no oxygen...hmmmmm... Man can't even contain Pig flu let alone a synthetic bacteria/virus.....
I'm all for scientific experimentation but this recent discovery is quite frightening... no matter what safeguards the scientists say they will put in place there is always a chance it could make it into the real world.... you only have to look at the last outbreak of foot and mouth that originated in a research lab which "had" the highest standards of containment..... obviously not.....
I'm not an alarmist but more time has to be set aside testing to exhaustion before we attempt to use biological synthetic material or at least have a fail safe built into it ... much like the synthetics of "Bladerunner" which is slowly becoming science fact it seems.....
If anything is going to kill mankind.... it's not going to be how clever he is..... it's going to be his ignorance....
2 comments:
They all have code written in to their genes... Clever thing is, there is a bloody email address in the DNA, kinda like a "If found, please return to..." :)
I'm also pretty sure for every one made, there'll be an anti-organism made too :)
Hmmmm pretty sure isn't quite good enough for me ....
but I see where you're going on this.... I've no doubt it will reap fantastic rewards .... but synthetic life isn't like a bit of microcode on a CPU especially when they are manufactured from a virus/bacteria which are THE most successful organisms on the planet.... hmmmmm
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