By JOHN HORGAN [Scientific American] – Craig Venter is the Lady Gaga of science. Like her, he is a drama queen, an over-the-top performance artist with a genius for self-promotion. Hype is what Craig Venter does, and he does it extremely well, whether touting the decoding of his own genome several years ago or his construction of a hybrid bacterium this year. In a typical Venter touch sections of the bacterium’s DNA translate into portentous quotes, such as this one from James Joyce: “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, and to re-create life out of life.”
So I don’t fault Venter for hyping his recent achievement, but I do fault others who should know better, such as the bioethicist Arthur Caplan. “What seemed to be an intractable puzzle, with significant religious overtones, has been solved,” Caplan proclaims on this Web site . Venter and his colleagues have “created a novel life-form from man-made parts.” Caplan warns that “this hugely powerful technology does need oversight” (no doubt by bioethicists like Caplan).
Actually, Venter has taken just another incremental step in the human manipulation of life, which began millennia ago when our ancestors started breeding dogs and ducks and accelerated recently as a result of advances in biotechnology.
Continued at Scientific American | More Chronicle & Notices.
