And Man said: Let us Create!
| Humanity's fourth great transformation |
 Courtesy The Economist
"[F]or the past four billion years or so the only way for life on Earth to produce a sequence of DNA — a gene — was by copying a sequence it already had to hand," The Economist writes in its cover editorial. "[G]ene begat gene." That is no longer true. Now genes can be written from scratch and edited ... like text in a word processor. The ability to engineer living things ... represents a fundamental change in the way humans interact with the planet’s life. It permits the manufacture of all manner of things which used to be hard, even impossible, to make: pharmaceuticals, fuels, fabrics, foods and fragrances can all be built molecule by molecule. ... Immune cells can be told to follow doctors’ orders; ... fertilized eggs programmed to grow into creatures quite unlike their parents. ...
[L]ook back through history, and humanity’s relations with the living world have seen three great transformations: the exploitation of fossil fuels, the globalisation of the world’s ecosystems after the European conquest of the Americas, and the domestication of crops and animals at the dawn of agriculture.
Why it matters: "All brought prosperity and progress, but with damaging side-effects. Synthetic biology promises similar transformation." |
