Aggregated News
Perhaps I shouldn't have used a conditional in the title. After all, we are already creating life.
Recently, Craig Venter, from the J. Craig Venter Institute, announced the creation of a living, self-reproducing bacterial cell with a DNA sequence produced in the laboratory. According to Laurie Garrett's article in Foreign Affairs late last year, the creature "moved, ate, breathed, and replicated itself."
Garrett quotes from an interview with Venter from 2009: "There's not a single aspect of human life that doesn't have the potential to be totally transformed by these technologies in the future."
"These technologies" refer to the world of synthetic biology, the ability to construct — at least in principle — living creatures from the assembly of different parts, as in a sort of living Lego world.
The prospect is as exciting as it is terrifying.
As evolutionary biologist and geneticist Richard Lewontin asked in his excellent review for The New York Review of Books: "In cases where there is a conflict between the immediate and the long-range consequences or between the public and private good, how...
Recently, Craig Venter, from the J. Craig Venter Institute, announced the creation of a living, self-reproducing bacterial cell with a DNA sequence produced in the laboratory. According to Laurie Garrett's article in Foreign Affairs late last year, the creature "moved, ate, breathed, and replicated itself."
Garrett quotes from an interview with Venter from 2009: "There's not a single aspect of human life that doesn't have the potential to be totally transformed by these technologies in the future."
"These technologies" refer to the world of synthetic biology, the ability to construct — at least in principle — living creatures from the assembly of different parts, as in a sort of living Lego world.
The prospect is as exciting as it is terrifying.
As evolutionary biologist and geneticist Richard Lewontin asked in his excellent review for The New York Review of Books: "In cases where there is a conflict between the immediate and the long-range consequences or between the public and private good, how...