GENOMICON

Well people have been doing it for years of course… what with Crufts dog show, and those little yapper-type dogs (who are bastards) and the RSPCA finally coming out and saying that they’re boycotting Crufts from now on because the whole thing is a freak show and some of the specially bred variations are possibly a bit cruel…

(from)

But the point is we’ve been making toy animals for years. I’m quite interested in the notion that when a new technology breaks, it quit often turns up as toys first… so naturally this caught my eye… the first geneticaly engineered pets:

(Glofish : Wikipedia)

Which look like this, pre-tinkering

And the Jazz-Purists of the animal world are already expressing concern over the toyification of animals… as per this article from a hermit-crab blog with regards painting/modifying their shells which alerted me to the fact that there’s actually a severe hermit-crab shell-shortage (christ, is anything going right on this planet?) and a voluntary ban that many pet stores impose on “painting fish“, ie: injecting them with dye, which sounds slightly insane to me and the sort of thing Hitler would do, but there you go.

The toyification of weapons, the toyification of animals. I think we need a subtle redesign of our ethical systems – not that I have a problem with creating new species per se, but I think that the revolution in human dignity that has taken place over the last couple of hundred years needs to extend to animals.

Ok, that was the bad news, now the reasons why I think DIYbio is probably going to become the biggest driver for just about everything, from here to the singularity.

Imagine all of these videos as one of those overlapping circle charts that people always use in powerpoint presentation. There’s an overlapping bit in the middle… and out of this I suspect will emerge, what Craig Venter in the second video describes as a new version of the Cambrian Explosion. The biggest challenge in the next 30 years, may not be climate change, it may be surviving this explosion, but that minor worry belongs (for the moment) elsewhere.

There’s a couple of hours worth of videos here, which is about 4 Gilligans, (A Gilligan being a measure of time spent doing something other than watching a sitcom. (from here (kindof)))

Ok. I’ve mentioned this one elsewhere, but it’s an easy-in, as it were. Short, simple and to the point, and I really like the design.

 

Now a talk by one of the people who sequenced the genome. Everyone claps at the end, and not without reason. This is why we ought to do this.

 

Then this one… more on possibility etc, but the imperative kicks in at about 17.00. This is why we need to do this.

 

Then this one on crowd-sourced innovation. This is why it has to be us that does this.

 

And finally a guy talking about mushrooms. It’s not actually about genetic engineering, but I like him and it does show what can be achieved with what we’ve already got.

 

So there you go. I’d also add, that seeing what centrally owned energy/pharma/(etc) industries did to the 20th century, it’s absolutely vital that this technology is democratised. We need this.