New Genesis
by Justin
Mankind may now be capable of executing the greatest and most miraculous act of divinity: creation. From chemical scratch a couple scientists managed to cross the Frankenstein threshold. Maybe. I slipped rapidly from mindblown elation into a sort of cynicism about just how devastating this news is. I’m not a frontlines reporter, so all I can do is read the work of the professionals and then form opinions. Often I rely upon journalists to articulate my own opinions and do the distillation work for me. What does one do, then, when the Atlantic, Guardian, and the Economist frame this revelation so differently? I stumbled upon this first in the Economist:
Craig Venter and Hamilton Smith, the two American biologists who unravelled the first DNA sequence of a living organism (a bacterium) in 1995, have made a bacterium that has an artificial genome—creating a living creature with no ancestor. Read the rest of this entry »