Man creates synthetic DNA
I suggest you google the discovery by Craig Venter of synthetic DNA, but here's an article about it's implications (too long to post the whole thing) so here are some highlights:
"Has Craig Venter created life? Much of the reporting last week certainly leaves that impression. One critic says Dr Venter's new technology is like "splitting the atom". Another insists that "its risks are unparalleled" because it could "be used to make the most powerful weapons imaginable. The challenge is to eat the fruit without the worm."
And yet the reality turns out to be much more prosaic. Dr Venter has created an artificial version of the DNA – the set of chemical instructions which determine what an individual cell will build and reproduce – for a very simple form of bacteria, and has inserted this into a cell from which the original DNA had been removed. The bacterium reproduced itself normally, using Dr Venter's version of the DNA (from which he had removed about 100 genes), eventually creating more than a billion copies."
While the full implications of this are still being hashed out, the fact of the matter is this man has reduced "life" and the creation of it to simply combining a series of chemicals.
What do you think the implications will be?
Here's the whole article: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/7753609/Craig-Venters-re...
There is a very interesting article in the 'Economist' for this month that covers this topic, and basically we have reached the stage where we can manufacture not only existing beings, but even new forms of life that that have never previously existed. It talked about the potential dangers of this, and how terrorist could use this sort of advanced technology to create malicious beings that could also breed, and the possibilities of new viruses etc, I recommend you guys read if you get the opportunity.
No problem WK ;)
Ouch, thanks for reminding me that I don't :-P
Sorry WK, I have a life on the weekends :P LOL.
You should log in once in a while during weekends also Olive, gets kinda boring :o)
Damn Wk, I'm too late :P
I would have thought this would have had more discussion to it, but I guess it's implications are over a lot of peoples heads.
Game over man game over :)
SOme discussion about it during the weekend.
http://www.qatarliving.com/node/1050951