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The anti-CRISPR research push (technologyreview.com)

submitted by fieldlilly

3 comments

[–] garbotalk 2 points

This is an interesting article. The author recognizes the danger inherent in designer people. It is how the Kayeen damaged themselves until there was no square one to go to. It is why they persecute us today, seeking the corrections and healings our bodies offer theirs.

Frankenstein was written almost 200 years ago, yet is as terrifying a prospect today. The idea of science gone wrong, even well intentioned science, is a certainty when messing with biology that has millions of years of evolution behind it. There are always trade offs. The medicine I take for my high cholesterol causes my joints to ache. The medicine I take for my blood pressure causes me to cough.

Unintended side effects, or consequences, occur when the ignorant arrogantly experiment beyond their ability to understand. Without empathy for those experimented upon, doctors can become monsters even more than the modified beings they create.

The use of splicing genes in order to create weapons of war is horrifying! Imagine a terrorist with modified DNA that causes everyone he comes in contact with to die from a plague he is immune to, like an intentional typhoid Mary. It's worse than small pox on blankets given to adversaries, as heinous as that was. It could modify or extinguish all human life. I Am Legend could become our future. Terrifying!

So yes, let's take a beat and prevent scientists from experimenting without oversight. Let's agree never to use crisper for biological weapons. Let's not do something just because we can, or we may all regret it.

[–] fieldlilly 3 points

Dr. Frankenstein in the book was trying to cheat death, with a purely mechanical and electrical theory of what life is. It was a very common theme in Mary Shelly’s lifetime that life could be derived from a purely classical physics point of view where everything is the result of a mechanical or electrical impulse.

What Mary did so well was show that that the electrical and mechanical processes are not the why or the because but were simply the mechanism for how life comes into being. LIFE FINDS A WAY. Frankenstein’s monster was arguably more human than Frankenstein himself in reflection and empathy. Emotion is a real part of humanity and without it we are lost.

These CRISPR genes are not our why, they are merely a framework for how life manifests and replicates in our unique circumstances. Too much editing and tinkering does not make us inherently better. It makes us inherently different. Our job as humans given this tool, is not to either scorn or blatantly abuse this knowledge. It is to look at it and to use it, balanced with wisdom and judgement, to progress us in a manner consistent with knowledge, love, logic and wisdom. Not with Vanity and greed in the manner that gripped, consumed and ruined the Kayeen. That definitely means having a means to arrest cases of unsolicited and unwanted gene editing.

[–] Cosmickev1086 1 points

Sadly their thought process isn't SHOULD we, only CAN we.