Synthetic biology is the rapidly developing field devoted to engineering life from the ground up. It has recently generated headlines about startling applications such as the effort to artificially construct a living bacterium, molecule by molecule. But one of its leading practitioners doesn’t think the engineering of life will stop there. Stanford’ University’s Drew Endy recently told The New Yorker:
“What if we could liberate ourselves from the tyranny of evolution by being able to design our own offspring? Think about what happens when you really can print the genome of your offspring. You could start with your own sequence, of course, and mash it up with your partner, or as many partners as you like.”
Synthetic biology is just one of a set of powerful emerging technologies challenging efforts toward environmental sustainability, human health, and social justice. The on-going controversies surrounding genetically-modified crops are just the beginning. Biotech companies are now deploying cloned and genetically modified farm animals.
Nanotechnology, or manufacturing at the atomic scale, proposes to remake the world “from the bottom-up” and simple forms of nanotechnology...
The U.S. government must move “quickly and decisively” to avert substantial national security risks stemming from artificial intelligence (AI) which could, in the worst case, cause an “extinction-level threat to the human species,” says a report commissioned by the U.S...
By Nada Hassanein, New Jersey Monitor | 03.14.2024
Aggregated News
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration late last year approved two breakthrough gene therapies for sickle cell disease patients. Now a new federal program seeks to make these life-changing treatments available to patients with low incomes — and it could...
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