Yeah as if man has done such a great job with the existing heritage he has been given by God that he could create a new life form that wouldnt be an abomination!
The poet Joyce Kilmer wrote, “Poems are made by fools like me, / But only God can make a tree”. New research by Craig Venter, one of the main scientists behind the human genome sequencing project, may change all that. His latest research, published in Science, has succeeded in making a new form of life in the laboratory. The hope is that this “synthetic life” will eventually lead to custom-made organisms engineered to tackle the world’s woes.
Engineering living organisms isn’t new. Scientists have been genetically modifying microbes, plants and animals for decades. GM crops are grown on more than 2bn acres of the world’s surface. But this is a kind of genetic tinkering. What Venter and many other scientists envisage is far more revolutionary: engineering entirely new forms of life.
Synthetic life enthusiasts claim that we need new organisms to do the tasks that the existing ones are not so good at. For instance, farmers around the world are increasingly growing biofuel crops. But these crops take up land that would otherwise be used to grow food, which is at least partly why grain prices have soared. There are already efforts to exploit other resources, such as sewage or plant waste. But natural organisms have their own agenda: they want to produce descendants rather than ethanol, so aren’t so efficient at making fuel. . . . .
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