Monday, January 12, 2015

Customizing Organisms

Cambrian Genomics is a company that creates custom DNA sequences, but their founder, Austen Heinz, has recently expressed interest in another goal: he wants to produce new organisms.

However, if humans were to create entirely new organisms, and should they either mistakenly or purposely realeased into the environment, they would compete with already existing organisms for survival. They would potentially function as invasive species and  harm populations of native species by competing for resources.

Heinz explains that every organism is capable of becoming more useful to human kind: even human cells. One of his ideas mentioned in the article is to manipulate the DNA of humans to be resistent to disease. However, this raises the question who would have access to this technology? It would be unrealistic to say that they would administer this procedure to every human on the planet, so how would you choose who gets to live longer? Who would be qualified to choose who gets to live longer?

Heinz says that there would be a board of ethics for this technology where modified creatures would have to be approved, but in the field of genetic engineering there are always a way to escape regulation (an example is discussed in this article).

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