Perhaps more than anyone else working in synthetic biology, [researcher Drew] Endy has tried to hold the community to account.
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[He] suggested that scientists needed to be as transparent as possible when discussing the possibility of writing and engineering human genomes.…
I spoke to Endy in his airy, high-ceilinged lab at Stanford about why he does this work and what troubles him. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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I wish for humanity to transition from living on Earth to living with the Earth — for our civilization to be flourishing in partnership with the planet by the time that we’re synthesizing human genomes routinely. One of the failures of [global effort called Genome Project-write, or GP-write, whose goal is to redesign gene systems and entire genomes in various organisms] is that it reinforces attention on humans, on ourselves, as opposed to the rest of the world.
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I wish for us to think about changing that T to that A, or whatever, in the same way we feel about our kids and our family.
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I’m going to be super excited about synthesizing human genomes. But if those conditions aren’t met, I’m going to be really nervous because I feel like it’s going to amplify a bunch of disasters looming from our human-centric thinking in our cultural, political, and economic systems.
Read full, original post: Is the World Ready for Synthetic People?
