Austen Heinz of Cambrian Genomics has been trolling hard lately, as blogger Josh Cunningham notes. That is, he’s been spouting provocative opinions to get attention. And it seems to be working, from his point of view.
Not only was Heinz involved in the vagina bio-hack nonsense, but he told the Wall Street Journal last June, “I can’t believe that after 10 or 20 years, people will not design their children digitally.” And he doubled down in the San Francisco Chronicle last week:
“Anyone in the world that has a few dollars can make a creature, and that changes the game. And that creates a whole new world. … It is the most powerful technology humans have ever created. Hydrogen bombs can destroy whole planets, but this is a technology that can create planets. This is the greatest human achievement of all time – the ability to read and write life, because that’s who we are.”
Cambrian is not actually intending to design creatures, it’s facilitating their production by “printing” DNA, and Heinz freely admits that safety is someone else’s job. But he sees that kind of quality control being delegated to an independent facility, not – heaven forfend – the government.
Read full, original article: Bad Boy Scientism
