Читать книгу The Shape of Shit to Come - Steve Lowe - Страница 5

This was no ordinary mouse. In January 2012, Japanese scientists announced they had genetically engineered a new kind of mouse. A mouse unlike other mice. Those mice squeaked. Not this mouse. This mouse went where no other mouse had, sonically speaking, gone before. This mouse tweeted, like a bird.

Lead researcher Arikuni Uchimura of Osaka University’s well-named School of Frontier Biosciences said of the process that led to this fantastical creation: ‘We have cross-bred the genetically modified mice for generations to see what would happen.’

That’s right: they wanted to see what would happen. And what did happen? A mouse tweeted like a bird. It’s fucked up.

Biotech – which is short for biotechnology, which is short for biological technology, which is not short for anything – is running wild. The building blocks of nature are a minefield. And the minefield is on fire. Not a day goes by without a headline like ‘Genetic breakthrough could slow – or halt – the ageing process’ or ‘Why hating brussels sprouts could be in your DNA’ or ‘Glowing Cats Shed Light On AIDS’. (I deliberately didn’t look at that last story – preferring my own reverie.)

The mysteries of life itself are being unravelled before our eyes. Think of the ramifications, and also the implications. We are gaining the ability to mess with human genes – possibly changing characteristics, for good or ill, for generations to come.

Some call this playing God. But why should we not play God? Why should He have all the fun? Maybe He was wrong in having the mice squeak and birds tweet. Maybe it’s time to mix that whole game right up. From now on, maybe we should treat mice that merely squeak with the disdain they deserve.

But who gets to play God? Many bleeding-edge geneticists have a sort of punk-rock DIY libertarian aesthetic that favours posting gene codes on the Internet so anyone can knock up new strains in the garage. It’s a world of out-there ideas. Veteran future-watcher and renowned Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson believes the biotech revolution will be fun, and educative: he believes we should welcome gene-splicing kits in the homeplace. He even joyfully envisages biotech kids’ games ‘where you give the child some eggs and seeds and a kit for writing the genomes and see what comes out’.

See what comes out? See what comes out? I’ll tell you what’ll ‘come out’ of giving children the power to bend nature: a catalogue of horrors, that’s what. Jurassic Park? Jurassic Fucking Reindeer-Shark, more like.