"The BioBricks registry (check here ) is a physical repository, but it is also an online catalogue. If you want to construct an organism, or engineer it in new ways, you can go to the site as you would one that sells lumber or industrial pipes. The constituent parts of DNA—promoters, ribosome-binding sites, plasmid backbones, and thousands of other components—are catalogued, explained, and discussed. It is a kind of theoretical Wikipedia of future life forms, with the added benefit of actually providing the parts necessary to build them.
I asked Endy why he thought so many people seem to be repelled by the idea of constructing new forms of life. “Because it’s scary as hell,” he said. “It’s the coolest platform science has ever produced, but the questions it raises are the hardest to answer.” If you can sequence something properly and you possess the information for describing that organism—whether it’s a virus, a dinosaur, or a human being—you will eventually be able to construct an artificial version of it. That gives us an alternate path for propagating living organisms."
Article chronicles, starting from Jay Keasling's remarkable achievement of developing the synthetic malaria drug "Artemisinin" reverse engineered from a chinese herb to the current Carlson curve which is progressing at faster than its silicon peer Moore's law. Even the current swine flu's crisis was stopped from being an epidemic only by sequencing gene of the virus within weeks .
"The industrial age is drawing to a close, eventually to be replaced by an era of biological engineering. That won’t happen easily (or quickly), and it will never solve every problem we expect it to solve. But what worked for artemisinin can work for many of the products our species will need to survive. We are going to start doing the same thing that we do with our pets, with bacteria, the genomic futurist Juan Enriquez has said, describing our transition from a world that relied on machines to one that relies on biology. A house pet is a domesticated parasite, he noted. It is evolved to have an interaction with human beings. Same thing with corn—a crop that didn’t exist until we created it. Same thing is going to start happening with energy, he went on. We are going to start domesticating bacteria to process stuff inside enclosed reactors to produce energy in a far more clean and efficient manner. This is just the beginning stage of being able to program life.”
These kind of stories (like Exxon tie-up with Craig Venter) are already in the media, but the last line "This is just the beginning stage of being able to program life” !! , opens up a new domain to humanity.
The government, media et al missed out predicting the current economic crisis because they never understood or bothered to understand the economic models, the economist were building in the air. Citizen's cannot rely on the media soaked in cognitive dissonance and dollars, to understand the coming and probably, the beginning of the end of all revolutions.
The pro's and con's of biotech can be debated for years and some of us are even going to have a stroke or heart attack debating it (which started a while ago, like the book wars by Ronald Bailey vs Francis Fukuyama ) but all this would lead to a dead end. These debates are going to be meaningless since they are going to have a severe hangover of the current chaotic political debates. How is the government going to stop spread of nuclear weapons when every person in the world has pound of enriched uranium and a blueprint to create nuclear weapons? That pretty much sums up the impasse would be facing soon. Future depends on how we are going to take the debate to next level and how we embrace the change prudently.
As a kid, I visited (now one of my favorite places) Vivekanandha Rock Ashram in Cape Comorin (Kanyakumari) at the southern most tip of India. This is an small Island (or a big rock) where Indian Ocean, Bay of Bengal and Arabian sea meet but it is one of the most serene places.
Like wise sooner or later, there will be a consilience of Biotech, Neuroscience and Robotics. Serenity might sound like a misnomer at this juncture but if we, humans can bring these three disciplines to crossroads, then we are as well capable of bringing serenity to it.
Will Biotech bring "cognitive destruction", like the industrial revolution bought us creative destruction ? This time, not only jobs will be lost but the whole set of moral values, ethics, society, relations and pretty much everything we know might have to re-written. It doesn't matter, if we are ready for it or not and we like it or not. It's happening now and its in everyone's best interest to educate themselves.
Big question is who is going to educate the masses? Who and how to convey the message to the "Bakelite" worshiping denizens that our brain IS plastic and we as a species are becoming malleable ON-DEMAND.
Every philosopher since start time have failed create an epidemic of universal knowledge and history is telling us, it wouldn't be much different this time either.
At the end of the day, most of us might turn out be the supplier and customer of our own body, while euphemistically still calling ourselves "Humans".
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