http://www.theguardian.com/environment/true-north/2013/jun/0...
> 116 organizations have called for a moratorium on any release of synthetic organisms. The UN convention on Biological Diversity has urged countries to exercise precaution in any release of synthetic organisms to the environment.
Well if I click on the link I find a very interesting sentence:
> With synthetic biology, instead of swapping existing genes from one species to another (as in “ traditional” genetic engineering), scientists can write entirely new genetic code on a computer, "print" it out and then insert it into living organisms — or even try to create life from scratch.
Swapping a couple genes from one species to another sounds exactly like what they typically do to make a species glow.
And yet after that sentence they seem to change their definition of synthetic biology to include both those categories.
It tastes like doublespeak to me. "Companies are doing not just X but Y! Ban Y! (also we defined Y to include X)"
Source: I work in a molecular biology lab.
Anyone who's had to muck with a giant piece of spaghetti code realizes how dicey it is to start changing things you don't really understand.
Projects like this and maybe tens of thousands of others in the future could interact to create strange changes in the wild that no one would be able to completely explain.
Maybe I'm just too much of a Luddite, or just an idiot (OK, I'm a complete fucking idiot), but projects like this and the thousands that are sure to follow give me an impending sense of doom.
