Playing God - or FSM - creating artificial life
Fear and controversy - among those who don't get
it.
Yesterday the news broke, and it broke big: Genome pioneer Craig Venter and his team of scientists at his eponymous institute had created a microbe’s genome from scratch. Massive stories ran in newspapers and magazines, tingling with the sense that we were on the edge of a revolution. Time’s piece was accompanied by a foreboding picture of Venter in a forest, wearing a dark coat and scarf, his beard giving his scowl a particularly dire look. The picture matched the story’s ominous mood: “He has gone beyond merely sequencing a genome and has designed and built one. In other words, he may have created life,” the article intoned. The Economist promised that when Venter is done, he will “have erased one of the last mythic distinctions in science — that between living and non-living matter.”
I get the impression that I am supposed to be tingling, my heart racing with exaltation or terror or … something. And yet I feel like I have a lesion in my amygdala, unable to respond to the threat of an electric shock. In some ways, this is actually old news. And in other ways, it’s news that hasn’t yet been written, and won’t be for decades…
But what does doing this really signify? What does it teach us about life that we didn’t know before? There was indeed a time when scientists believed there was something fundamentally different about living matter and nonliving matter.
It’s called the Middle Ages.
Pretty much all the headlines ran with the God story. Fear and excitement - and controversy.
The controversy only lives in the minds of those who fear science.
Posted: Fri - January 25, 2008 at 08:55 AM