The yahoos have not paid much attention to Gulliver’s Travels.

6-1-2006  Thirty-three years after the invention of gene-splicing, the reality of biotechnology is still far short of what many once dreamed it would be, partly because the tools for manipulating genes have been crude.  That is about to change. As nine scientists explain in "Engineering Life," beginning on page 44, new "bio fab" approaches to assembling complete genetic circuits promise to advance biotechnology in much the same way that the invention of integrated circuits transfigured electronics.  They should enable workers to reengineer cells more ambitiously, to create organisms programmed at the genetic level to behave as desired. Colossal payoffs could accrue to medicine, agriculture, manufacturing, energy production and other fields.  It is the birth of synthetic biology.

  But like every newborn, synthetic biology is still intensely vulnerable.  There are many ways to kill this young science….As Gary Stix reviewed in "Owning the Stuff of Life," in the February issue, companies and universities have been on a spree of patenting not only whole genes but also genetic fragments of unknown utility.    The yahoos have not paid much attention to Gulliver’s Travels. 

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  As with “scientific” Marxism, as with CO2 “science”, as with an AI world of smart everything, so it is with central banking worldwide with their financial instrument electronic-entry transfers, so it is with synthetic viruses, synthetic vaccines, synthetic DNA and synthetic biology (with its nanotech branch).  The yahoos have not paid much attention to Gulliver’s Travels.  They hurry to ride the fashionable wave but don’t check the signposts deeply.

  But with maya one doesn’t kill it so much as see through it, fathom its root and take the careful steps such as that guy in Greek myth who got his assistant to torch the place of the heads he was cutting off  before the beast began to grow  multiple replacements.

  Of course there is a battle within science—as within economics, politics, religion, communications and anywhere one goes amid the yahoos.  Will there be a semi-cloned society or vastly cloned one?  Or, Well.  The Doctor Will See You Now.