we’re a few steps away from genetic manipulation on a wide scale
That actually happens to be within my specific area of study, and you may be overstating things. We’ve only just scratched the surface of genetic manipulation, and nobody really knows how long it will take before we can design effective genetic code deliberately. So far we have determined the nucleotides which build the basic structure of DNA, and found correlation between certain blocks and traits exhibited, but it’s not quite as simple as cutting and pasting those blocks like you’re writing computer code. We have also found further layers of ‘information storage’ within DNA which relates to how those nucleotides are arranged, called epigenetics, which we barely know anything about at all. As things stand with our current level of knowledge, we have established an extremely extensive testing regime for any novel genetic product which takes decades to complete, and which nearly every product tested so far has failed to complete, often due to unexpectedly resulting in sterility and death. It’s a very exciting science, and I have great hopes for what it can accomplish if we don’t kill ourselves first, but it’s a stretch to suggest that it’s just around the corner.
I didn’t mean that it was going to happen over night. But it only took them about 30 years to go from the Theory of Relativity to the A Bomb, and about 40 years to go from Goddard’s first rocket to Man on the Moon.
That actually happens to be within my specific area of study, and you may be overstating things. We’ve only just scratched the surface of genetic manipulation, and nobody really knows how long it will take before we can design effective genetic code deliberately. So far we have determined the nucleotides which build the basic structure of DNA, and found correlation between certain blocks and traits exhibited, but it’s not quite as simple as cutting and pasting those blocks like you’re writing computer code. We have also found further layers of ‘information storage’ within DNA which relates to how those nucleotides are arranged, called epigenetics, which we barely know anything about at all. As things stand with our current level of knowledge, we have established an extremely extensive testing regime for any novel genetic product which takes decades to complete, and which nearly every product tested so far has failed to complete, often due to unexpectedly resulting in sterility and death. It’s a very exciting science, and I have great hopes for what it can accomplish if we don’t kill ourselves first, but it’s a stretch to suggest that it’s just around the corner.
I didn’t mean that it was going to happen over night. But it only took them about 30 years to go from the Theory of Relativity to the A Bomb, and about 40 years to go from Goddard’s first rocket to Man on the Moon.