It’s Life, Jim…But Not As I Baked It.

Umm…shouldn’t we be asking ourselves if creating life in a laboratory is really a good idea?

Scientists in Maryland have already built the world’s first entirely handcrafted chromosome — a large looping strand of DNA made from scratch in a laboratory, containing all the instructions a microbe needs to live and reproduce.

In the coming year, they hope to transplant it into a cell, where it is expected to “boot itself up,” like software downloaded from the Internet, and cajole the waiting cell to do its bidding. And while the first synthetic chromosome is a plagiarized version of a natural one, others that code for life forms that have never existed before are already under construction.

Oh, man. That software analogy is just great. We all know that software you download over the internet is never harmful and always of the highest quality, built by folks with the most altruistic motives and solid impulse control.

We are plenty smart enough to do this but we are nowhere near wise enough. Put me soldily on the side of “Whoa! Stop!” on this. Oh, sure. It’ll be neat for scientists to have their very own pet lifeform in the lab. But no one – not a living soul today – has any idea what maelstrom of woe could be created with one of these little inventions. No one now can even start to spin out the plausible unintended and very bad consequences that could spin off of this one hubris-intensive act of science.

More after the jump.

But my word shouldn’t be one of only a few who might say something about this. We Americans love to yak it up. Maybe instead of whinging about inconsequential things such as books that have yet to be released or whether a Presidential candidate’s photo disqualifies them from office, we could bend our minds to sorting out whether we will accept the consequences of what our scientists are doing while we’re not paying much attention to them. That’s not to say that science is either good or evil. It’s neither. Science is a tool, a means of explaining the world we see (and only the world we see), and using the information we derive from those observations. Science moves forward and progresse, sometimes down roads we can not see clearly. It’s up to each of us to decide how quickly science will move and down what roads. That is where we apply our wisdom and let’s be very clear, wisdom is what’s called for here. Without wisdom, knowledge is worse than useless. It is dangerous.

So let’s huddle together and decide whether it’s a good thing for our scientists to be creating living organisms which behaviors and development they can not predict nor fully control. And let’s do it while we still have some control over the situation. Right now, my answer is not only “No” but a pretty resounding “Hell, No!” but I could be swayed. So could a lot of folks on both sides of the issue. So let’s hash it out now. Trust me, science won’t wait for us to decide whether we want to talk about it or not.

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Category: Hey, Mr. Science Guy!