I think the general public has become inured to, perhaps bored of, genetic engineering. Maybe we're thinking that we've been doing genetic engineering for years, still don't see the apocalypse on the horizon, so it must not be affecting us.
Reading Guns, Germs, and Steel makes me think maybe we've done enough technologically in the past 10,000 years to become agents, if not masters, of cataclysmic change: agriculture changing the ecology of whole continents, dense living patterns creating petri dish conditions for new diseases, patterns of hierarchy and bureaucracy wiping out populations and languages, and so on. So perhaps the apocalypse has been upon us anyway.
I was reading Technology Review again this morning and found something else to give me pause. A rather upbeat article on genetic engineering and ethanol production.
Two things: One, the scale of the undertaking. Just one ethanol plant will take 300 million dollars. This is no boy scout project to be sure; and two, the cavalier language used to describe the process of genetic engineering.
The ideal organism would do it all -- break down cellulose like a bacterium, ferment sugar like a yeast, tolerate high concentrations of ethanol, and devote most of its metabolic resources to producing just ethanol. There are two strategies for creating such an all-purpose bug. One is to modify an existing microbe by adding desired genetic pathways from other organisms and "knocking out" undesirable ones; the other is to start with the clean slate of a stripped-down synthetic cell and build a custom genome almost from scratch.
O.k., I'm kind of good with the first part of the description, which sounds like optimum beer-making to me. But taking the conceptual leap from tinkering with genes to inventing new life forms definitely gives me pause. I can almost imagine a Cat's Cradle story emerging from this: Instead of having an ice-nine that converts all water to ice at room temperature, you have yeast-nine that converts all sugars to really good beer.
Here's to your health!
Technorati Tags: eutechnics, biofuels, genetic engineering
Posted by mastr at July 21, 2006 08:36 AM