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

Bryan Bishop kanzure at gmail.com
Sun May 23 21:34:35 UTC 2010


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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