Monday 23 January 2017

Let There Be (Artificial) Life

Science obviously doesn't think we have enough organisms on the planet so they have managed to create some synthetic artificial ones.
An excited person in glasses and a white lab coat has been explaining how organisms have been created with synthetic DNA which paves the way for entirely new life forms although the only new life-forms they have created so far are E coli microbes so we are not ready to grant them human rights so far.    
The initial work was aimed at making bugs that churn out new kinds of proteins which can be harvested and turned into drugs to treat a range of diseases but the same technology had also lead to the ability to 'create organisms with wholly unnatural attributes and traits not found elsewhere in nature' which all sounds a bit concerning.
The scientific explanation used the letters X and Y a lot and what looked like pictures of tiny ladders but ended with a stern looking professor type saying: 'This will lead to the concept of semi-synthetic living systems'.
Humans creating new forms of life? What could possibly go wrong or maybe i have just seen too many films where scary things escape from scientific labs and ravage all human life.

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