by Ian Mosley

The Washington Post tells us: “It has been 50 years since scientists first created DNA in a test tube, stitching ordinary chemical ingredients together to make life’s most extraordinary molecule. Until recently, however, even the most sophisticated laboratories could make only small snippets of DNA — an extra gene or two to be inserted into corn plants, for example, to help the plants ward off insects or tolerate drought. Now researchers are poised to cross a dramatic barrier: the creation of life forms driven by completely artificial DNA.”

The Post goes on: “Scientists in Maryland have already built the world’s first entirely handcrafted chromosome — a large looping strand of DNA made from scratch in a laboratory, containing all the instructions a microbe needs to live and reproduce. In the coming year, they hope to transplant it into a cell, where it is expected to boot itself up, like software downloaded from the internet, and cajole the waiting cell to do its bidding. And while the first synthetic chromosome is a plagiarized version of a natural one, others that code for life forms that have never existed before are already under construction.”

So what will they make? A winged horse, the monster from Alien, aqua men with gills who can live at the bottom of the sea. Or maybe a whole race of elves or hobbits. Or whatever else a mad scientist wants to create or a billionaire is willing to pay to have done.

Will our politicians and capitalists create a race of sub-human slaves to fill the same role as the Mexicans and to undercut wages for unskilled and semi-skilled labor, but with no voting privileges or other rights?

Eventually there will be scientifically-engineered immortality, or a lifespan so greatly extended as to amount to the same thing. In a politically correct society: “Who gets to be immortal?” Hillary? Now we need to ask ourselves, in a politically correct society: “Who gets to play God and make new beings?” What kind of new life forms will the Hillary Clintons and Barbra Streisands and Dick Cheneys of the world order to be made?