Re: [ox-en] garage gene synthesis
- From: Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de>
- Date: Sat, 13 Dec 2003 01:17:40 +0100
Hi Graham and list!
2 months (65 days) ago Graham Seaman wrote:
Slashdot has a discussion on a paper:
http://www.molsci.org/~rcarlson/Carlson_Pace_and_Prolif.pdf
Didn't read it yet but...
predicting the ability of people in the near future to do genetic
manipulation on affordable equipment at home (crrent price for a DNA
synthesizer 10,000 dollars and dropping..)
...a similar thing came up before.
Entirely in line with oekonux discussion on fabbers etc but bringing
up a whole load of new and scary questions... looks like a very
interesting paper (which makes explicit comparisons with free software)
Actually I'm not very astonished about such ideas. I mean genetic
manipulation is to some high degree an information thing and thus a
natural subject to similar processes as we see in Free Software.
Can you explain what you think are the new and scary questions?
Of course what immediately comes to (a leftist) mind is that genetic
engineering is bad. Full stop.
However, why can't genetic engineering be seen as just another
technology with a very high potential. Such high potential is always
both dangerous and empowering. However, as far as I can see the
negative and dangerous things today mainly come from the embedding in
capitalism. I mean manipulation of corn for instance is more or less
to maximize the profits of some seed companies. On the other hand
there are these genetically modified bacteria producing insulin - is
that bad?
Mit Freien Grüßen
Stefan
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