Thursday, May 20, 2010

What's Next?

Anyone else catch this?

It now seems that life has been replicated synthetically.

My thoughts:

It's not so much that it proves that we are still evolving as a species when we can virtually synthesise life now.

It's not so much that it makes the belief (for some) in the existence of a supreme being a little shakier.

It's the whole idea of Big Corp owning all life forms that worries me.

Dr. Ventner is the chappie that put patents on the very genomes of life way back in the nineties.

And for some strange reason I'm reminded of that old, old song, "16 Tons". Here's the very best version by Tennessee Ernie Ford.


3 comments:

  1. My thought is that we can create life but we can't stop people all over the planet destroying life, both human and non-human. I look forward to the creation of a human being devoid of the pointless-violence gene.

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  2. One has to wonder how much hype there may be in this announcement. I remember a number of years when some scientists somewhere had claimed to create artificial life. That was the last we heard of that particular project. This may be real - who knows? In may ways, it speaks to the deification of science to the belittlement of creation. If we can't make it better, then what's the point of "it" being anyway? Scary. Ernie Ford was a master of that song ... I love his close.

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  3. Almost did a post on this myself, WWW then got side-tracked. There are several ways of considering it. If it can lead to medical advances of some kind it's not all bad. But some of the more sci-fi progressions it could lead to are certainly scary.

    Re any blow-back from the organised religions - LOL! Well, I remember years ago surmising that we all come from an original experiment very like this one, and "god" became, to us via garbled reports handed down, the person who perfected the "invention".
    ;-)

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