Writing Your Baby’s Synthetic Genome: Genetic Engineering for the Facebook Generation
In the 1990s, leading personae including Nobel Prize winner James Watson, Princeton University molecular biologist Lee Silver, and UCLA “life science entrepreneur and visionary” Gregory Stock all championed the dream of engineering the perfect human being.
That frightening techno-eugenic vision is now being “upgraded” for the digital generation. The ideological project of genetically “enhanced” post-humans appears to be reemerging – this time with a synthetic biology twist.
China: Public Has Doubts Over Modified Food
Nearly 70 percent of Chinese consumers in a recent survey expressed objections to genetically modified rice.
The survey result was released on Tuesday by Greenpeace China, which had polled 1,300 people who ranged in age from 18 to 55 and lived in six cities in the country.
”We chose Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou to sample as first-tier cities, Changsha and Wuhan as second-tier cities, and we also hired a research company to conduct the survey in Hong Kong,” said Fang Lifeng, campaigner for Greenpeace China’s food and agriculture project.
Who owns your genes? In many cases, not you
In November 2005, Runi Limary, a sixth-grade teacher in Austin, Texas, was diagnosed with invasive cancer in her right breast. "I was only 28, and I was in total shock and disbelief," she recalls. "I kept thinking the pathologist had made a mistake, that there was no way this was actually happening to me."
Because she was so young, she wondered whether she had inherited a mutation of the BRCA 1 or 2 gene, which would significantly increase her risk of developing a second breast cancer as well as ovarian cancer.
Biologist: Space Travelers Can Benefit From Genetic Engineering
MOFFETT FIELD, Calif. — NASA’s human spaceflight program might take some giant leaps forward if the agency embraces genetic engineering techniques more fully, according to genomics pioneer J. Craig Venter.
The Case of Human Reproductive and Genetic Technologies
Emerging Technologies and a Sustainable, Healthy, Just World
by Marcy Darnovsky and Jesse Reynolds,
Synthetic biology is the rapidly developing field devoted to engineering life from the ground up. It has recently generated headlines about startling applications such as the effort to artificially construct a living bacterium, molecule by molecule. But one of its leading practitioners doesn’t think the engineering of life will stop there. Stanford’ University’s Drew Endy recently told The New Yorker:
