Below - A Cas9 molecule at work splicing a DNA string.
This past Tuesday I had my gallbladder removed. The surgery yielded a truly impressive looking gallstone.
I did my research before the surgery (as one does) and discovered that the success rate for this type of procedure is approximately 99%.
I don't gamble, ever! I have never purchased a lotto ticket. When luck determines the outcome of anything, I steer well clear because lady luck simply hates my guts.
Back to my surgery. It turns out I represent the remaining 1 percent! Something went wrong. Bile is leaking into my abdomen. I have had one of the worst weeks of my life, suffering excruciating pain, bloating and more pain. The English language falls short in aiding my verbalisation of this kind of pain.
Right now I am all dressed up in my NOT Kelvin Klein back-to-front theatre underwear, waiting for the special surgeon who mops up after the regular surgeons, to install some pipe into some duct. (Only kidding, I already know all the terms and exactly how it's done. you know me).
The word out there is she is very competent.
Where is my random mind wandering off to, oh yes Playing God.
Genetic engineering has always fascinated me. When I was a child, my mother and I spent entire road-trip holidays collecting clippings of geranium flowering plants in fantastic exotic colours and brought them home with us. She planted our finds in small pots all around the house while I spent hours unsuccessfully trying to transplant one colour geranium clipping onto another.
After many attempts and after discovering a tiny bottle of "Growth Powder" in our neighbours garage window sill, I actually managed to successfully transplant one geranium plant onto another. It grew into a healthy plant but sadly it never produced flowers.
Where was I, oh yes Playing God.
During the time this past week when the pain meds kept me sane, I watched whatever Netflix had on offer. I while ago I watched a documentary about CRISPR-Cas9. (Google it). Did you know, you can order a kit on-line for approx 250USD that will provide you with the tools to split the DNA of anything in a specific place and insert or replace any part of the DNA with something else? I shit you not, Google it.
This morning I watched a documentary called "Human Nature". This documentary discusses the possibilities offered by genetic engineering to cure disease, produce larger crops and create designer babies amongst many other topics.
Without fail, as one delves deeper into genetic engineering and you are bombarded with the seemingly limitless options that are suddenly available to human-kind, you start to feel uncomfortable.
Should one be able to choose your future children's attributes from a menu? Does it make sense to only produce genial super athletes that all live to be a hundred? Aren't we playing God?
What does it mean to play God?
Until recently, whenever human-kind could not explain a phenomenon, they labelled it as "an act of God". As human-kind's understanding of science and the world around us increased, God featured less and less.
A hundred thousand years ago, only God could make fire. Did the first human to harness fire, play God?
According to the Bible, in ancient times, God wiped out thousands with famine and plague. When modern society manage to harness and even eliminate these brutal powers, are they playing God?
Humans have discovered how to re-engineer the DNA of just about anything on earth. Never before has an advance in science made such a profound impact on us and the world we live in. By harnessing it, are we playing God or is there simply one more thing we won't blame God for when it goes horribly wrong?
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