[ExI] Synthetic biology and the proactionary principle in The Economist

Giulio Prisco giulio at gmail.com
Mon May 24 07:03:54 UTC 2010


Also - if WE don't develop this technology at full speed, THEY (the
bad guys) will. History shows that bans on technology development only
result in pushing technology development abroad, or underground.

On Sun, May 23, 2010 at 11:34 PM, Bryan Bishop <kanzure at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, May 23, 2010 at 4:02 PM, Tristan Eversole wrote:
>> My argument against the proactionary principle would be grounded in the
>> observation that we are headed towards a world in which we are good
>> at genetics and horrendously lousy at ecology; in other words,
>> a world in which we are great at creating organisms and awful
>> at figuring out how they will interact.
>
> But here's the crux of the problem: you can attempt to clamp down,
> regulate regulate regulate, and pray that the laws will pop out of
> their pages in the books and slash down anyone (or anything- even
> natural) that goes against our wishes; or, we can work on ways to help
> us ensure that we're just as good at ecology, reliability, systems
> engineering, and making sure the human species does not
> catastrophically vanish in the night.
>
> However, such issues are broader and more comprehensive than just
> looking at synthetic biology, and need to be addressed in that same
> sort of broader context, but I haven't been able to find such avenues
> yet. Any hints? Anyone?
>
> - Bryan
> http://heybryan.org/
> 1 512 203 0507
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