Synthetic DNA and New Life Forms

On December 18, 2007 in In the News, Science Related

Rick Weiss of the Washington Post wrote an article on the 17th called “Synthetic DNA on the Bring of Yielding New Life Forms“. I heard about it this morning via an email from a long-time friend.

So the basic underlying story is that Scientists are fiddling with the core-components of DNA, and creating their own instruction-lists. They feel that this may soon lead to creating fuel-alternatives, medicines, etc.

The other possibilities (which they mention too) are that we could all just kill ourselves on accident too. I can see it now, some intern is working in the underground laboratory moving the green vile over next to the yellow vile, reaches for the blue vile and “shhhhh-plat!”. The blue vile dropped and shatters! As the nervous interns hand begins to tremble he calls out to his manager, “Mr. Dorlofenchronichalder! (because smart people have hard names), I dropped the blue vile!” “Vat!? You zropped ze blue vilez? Zvun! Zvun for your live!” 24 hours later, everybody’s dead!

Okay, so forgive me for going on a “we’re all going to die” rant - I just watched “I Am Legend” a couple nights ago. The story in that movie was basically that we have engineered malaria to carry a cancer-killer and make everybody immune to cancer. The end result, well, wasn’t pretty. A small quote in the WashingtonPost made it very clear, “The danger is not just bio-terror but bio-error.” Ding ding ding! Don’t drop the blue vile!

What makes this article so interesting to me is how they constantly refer to DNA in terms of software and operating systems. I’m a software-engineer by profession, so I’m naturally interested when I hear of these analogies and comparisons.

My experience in software-development makes me a bit worried about “noobs” fiddling with an operating system of which they know little-to-nothing about. I mean, our biosphere will end up being one big crappy myspace! People bio-engineering analogous animated-backgrounds which make the foreground text impossible to read. Sixteen automatically-playing songs with 92 animated images of tinker bell saying “thanks for the add!” I mean. MySpace is a developers nightmare because it gave idiots the ability to submit their own basic code. And it all blew up. The collateral damage was enough to make me get faint. And now we’re going to do this with DNA!? Run for the hills!

Among other question, people may also wonder if we’ve gotten smart enough to “Play God”. I don’t thiink we have. I mean, I can write a program in any number of languages. I can use C# (c-sharp), PHP, VB.NET, Java, Python, etc, but that doesn’t mean I’m equal-to-or-greater-than the creators of those languages. By far. Without them first creating the language, I can’t use it. Without them first making available tools to learn the language, I can’t use it. Without them providing example of how the language is used, I can’t use it. Without them providing a compiler to build the code into an application, I can’t use it.

So there’s no telling what is going to happen with this technology if we actually figure it out well enough to do anything. Then again, I suppose we don’t need to figure it out real well, seeing how dropping the metaphorical blue vile could kill everybody in 24 hours.

My prediction, we’re all going to die. Because these idiots who couldn’t cure dandruff want to create new life-forms. What ever happened with “learn to crawl before you can walk.”

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