Thursday 2 June 2016

The coin is still in the air.



Crispa a name to conjure with. Bio engineering, the ability to modify the genome, an organisms complete set of DNA, including all its genes, in other words all the information needed to build and maintain an organism.
One of the targets of this new 4 years old science is the eradication of the mosquito. Not only can they modify the individual Mosquito's genome to make it impotent in the next generation. They are able to target the whole species through its proclivity to breed in this generation. In other words, in one foul swoop bish-bash-wallop the mossie is gone.
The ramifications of this are profound considering the effects of the disease and the human fatalities which the mosquito causes. In all of nature there is a balance in this giving and taking, this living and dying for whatever feeds on the mosquito will go hungry. Even the issue of illness and mortality amongst the people who become infected is an issue since the size of the population and resources available to it, one might wish away malaria only to be confronted by starvation.
Tinkering with "Gods" blueprint has profound implications regarding the modification of life forms and whilst eradication of genetic malfunction, babies born deformed, can and should be encouraged its a short step to designing the offspring for all kinds of nefarious ideas.
Brave New World or Nineteen Eighty Four come to mind. Babies bred in batches to perform specific tasks like worker ants, a caste system par excellence which even Milton Friedman might baulk at.
There seems no end to man's ingenuity. Knowledge is impossible to keep under wraps but the discovery of nuclear fusion nearly brought mankind to the brink and who knows what Kim Jong-un will do with his bomb.
Manipulating the building blocks of life such as the human genome has enormous ethical and moral consequences, we do not perform well on these finely tuned humanitarian questions since there is always two sides to the question and like the "Referendum" we are just as likely to come down on the wrong side.

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