blog 19

My fourth article is called “Unmasking the Secret of Life”. It is an excerpt written by Craig J. Venter, a doctor and writer for the British Medical Journal. The main argument is that Venter has cracked the human genome and has discovered the secret to creating life. He has studied genomes so thoroughly and has experimented so often that he was comfortable enough to post his own DNA online for everyone to see. He talks of each new born baby leaving the maternity ward having pre-determined and set profiling genes right then and there. He claims he can not only create life from pre-existing life using his studies and the genome, but also that he can grow and create life with pre-determined genes. This is a bold claim for an ordinary man; however he is confident he could do it. This project would be extremely costly both money wise and ethics wise due to the resources and controversy it would cause. Venter also proposes an intriguing idea about how our CO2 emissions are ruining the ozone and deteriorating our planet. His idea is to create an organism that creates large amounts of carbon to use as an alternative green energy source. Sounds great, but really think about it. He wants to create some sort of new organism. How do we know if it thinks? Would it be more animal or human? Could it possibly evolve into something bad, like something that emits poison instead of hydrogen, or even become a predator to humans? More and more technological advances are coming. Didn’t most of those lead to all of the CO2 emissions anyway? Maybe we shouldn’t just keep throwing more science at the problem.