Wednesday, December 21, 2005

Move over, Victor... life imitates art..


From here:

Globe and Mail Update

Work on the world's first human-made species is well under way at a research complex in Rockville, Md., and scientists in Canada have been quietly conducting experiments to help bring such a creature to life.

Robert Holt, head of sequencing for the Genome Science Centre at the University of British Columbia, is leading efforts at his Vancouver lab to play a key role in the production of the first synthetic life form -- a microbe made from scratch.

The project is being spearheaded by U.S. scientist Craig Venter, who gained fame in his former job as head of Celera Genomics, which completed a privately-owned map of the human genome in 2000.

Dr. Venter, 59, has since shifted his focus from determining the chemical sequences that encode life to trying to design and build it: "We're going from reading to writing the genetic code," he said in an interview.

To paraphrase Jeff Goldblum's character in the movie, Jurassic Park, "They do these things because they can, without giving one thought as to whether they should." The great danger to mankind posed by science in denial of a Creator, is that in the absence of God, man himself steps in to try to fill the void--a fool's errand that can only serve to end with tragic results, given man's notoriously poor record of our performance in that role. Mary Shelley had the foresight to write about this nearly two centuries ago. It's too bad that the sage lessons of the past, even those found in what could be considered fanciful literature, are too often lost on those living in the present.

Science fiction nearly inevitably has the habit of becoming science fact; sometimes with the unfortunate side effect of being fraught with consequences amounting to much more than we bargained for.

I'm afraid that this is one of those times.