"Life finds a way."
Posted on 06/17/2007 6:37:25 PM PDT by Flavius
Ha,ha,funny you should mention Mexicans.Judging by the numbers that are flooding over the border,I wonder if Mr.Venter has been plying his trade south of the border for a while now !!!
Look, God came up with quantum effects ~ and revealed them to us. Right?
No .. if you check out the Bible .. He destroyed the Tower of Babel .. giving all the people different languages.
So .. are you concluding He meant for us to discover how to create humans ..?? I don’t. But you can believe what you want.
He thinks he’s developed something quite a bit beyond crystalline growth.
If this happens, it’s PROOF of “INTELLIGENT DESIGN.”
With Parallels and Bootcamp... I am BOTH !
Funny, God creates life, doesn’t patent it, yet states that He is the author of life, and hardly anyone praises Him for it.
Yet man comes along, takes the building blocks of life, rearranges them, claims to have created life, and patents it.
God is truly impressed.
Now that would be be fantastic, otherwise what this guy hopes to do is to accomplish genetic modification, hardly revolutionary.
I will await his patent application.
Yet people worry about global warming? Now this is something to really worthy of worry.
What do they mean on the brink, I saw somebody named paris on TV and she looked artificial as hell.
— LTCDR Leonard McCoy, M.D.
Chief Medical Officer, USS ENTERPRISE (NCC-1701)
Microbes are not ‘life’ in a biblical sense any more than plants are. (’Life’ in the Bible is characterized by breathing and blood, and plants are never identified as ‘living’ or ‘dying’.) Microbes have been described as a kind of ‘organosubstrate’ that help maintain and supply the biosphere (in their original created context, apart from degeneration into parasites and pathogens).
I rather expect this guy is not creating genes from scratch, such that his ‘creation’ of a microbe is more like a child putting together lego blocks (genes). Just as a child is hopelessly incompetent to manufacture a lego block from scratch, we are still a long way from making a full-fledged, meaningful gene from scratch (atom by atom). We mostly just play around with the ones God has given us.
That said, there is the law of unintended consequences. Making wholesale alterations in a genome could have cascading effects throughout the biosphere that the authors never intended. If scientists can patent their creations for profit, will they also be held responsible for the damage they cause?
Perhaps if you read the article it would be clear to you that there is a huge range of "purposes" which custom-made organisms could serve. E.g. "make fuels such as ethanol or hydrogen . . . turn coal or oil below the earth's surface into cleaner fuel . . . clean up pollution . . . flash when they detect explosives". And no doubt some will eventually be developed for medical purposes. Medical researchers are already using viruses to carry substances into cells where they're needed; custom-designed viruses might do this much more efficiently.
I do not know if many people can value life less. So many are aborted for convenience or sent to be human bombs.
As for creating life from scratch, my wife and I did that twice. One is 2 1/2 years old, and the next will come out this week.
Personally, I prefer the way we created life from “scratch” (Though I thought it was called ‘sex’) over the laboratory method.
On a serious note. Say one day we create multi-cellular organisms. Say these become capable of actions and can receive stimuli input (adaptation/sensory input). Say they CAN do work. Now we have created a new species. Future society may believe they are gods for they create.
The question becomes, how will we treat our creations, these synthetic lifeforms? Will we, like our Creator, imbue them with free will and freedom? Or will we have separated ourselves from morals and values to the point where these lifeforms are slaves and disposable? If, in playing God, will we become the Devil?
Probably not a question that will affect our lives, but one for our grandchildren and great-grandchildren. We will help set the tone for debating that question today.
This is the question for our time: What is science unbound by morality?
Oh, I thought it was a Hillary thread...
"Life finds a way."
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