Venter: synthetic life's prime mover
I offer this humble suggestion for Craig Venter. The next time he is asked if he is “playing God,” he might want to ask the questioner what they mean. Venter has just made headlines worldwide for the astonishing feat of creating a microorganism with a wholly synthetic, designed genome. It’s the first ever replicating organism since life on Earth began that has a genome not derived primarily from one or more parent organisms. It is in a sense the first artificial life form.
One could quibble about that, arguing for example that this synthetic bacterium, as described in the journal Science, is not really an original design but more like a slightly simplified and modified copy of a Volkswagen Golf constructed from homemade, scratch-built replica parts, instead of rolling off the Volkswagen assembly line. But that would be churlish: the technical accomplishment is stunning.
Alexandre Erler
Interesting piece, and you’re making some good points. I just find the term “meaningless” too strong in relation to the idea of “playing God”, for the reasons I present here:
http://www.practicalethicsnews.com/practicalethics/2010/05/is-playing-god-just-a-meaningless-phrase.html#more
Alex Erler
Cameron
The guts of the problem is that we want to control life on our own, without reference to the God who (in some sense) created this world. “Striving to replace God” is not an idea introduced by James Whale; it first began in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 1).