“Can we create new life out of our digital universe?” Craig Venter asks. His answer is “yes” – and pretty soon. He walks us through his latest research and promises that we’ll soon be able to build and boot up a synthetic chromosome. — From TED.COM
This is fascinating and very thought provoking in my humble opinion. The research has generated a lot of discussion and a great many questions. Its potential is enormous, its implications profound. I hope you enjoy this TED Talk as much as I did.
href='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKZ-GjSaqgo
Recent Gil Namur Articles:
- Look After the Little Things
- Promenade
- Close Encounters Of The Google Kind
- Always In This Heart
- A Dance of Delight
iii) To Craig Vinter
Listen to this crow
Synthetic life
A novel pared down
To minimal array
Of words
Nothing unreal, really
Manufactured
A mere sleight of hand
Patent pending
In crib notes
We can make you
All over again
Doctor percentage points
Barcoded
Your eminent brain
The crow is insane
Croaking ownership
Of novel words
In the endless tale
Of living
Ancillary rights
Easy as plucked feathers
Hovering hunched
Over blood coffers
In sweet stream
Your cock is owned
Tumours fought over
To the advancement
Of unruly evolution
Tweaked
Still and all I invite
Restitution
Your synthetic soul
And its twisted helices
Divided hubris
I make you new
Idiocy ironed out
Plucking away notions
Of maddening
Possession
With this teleomere
I make a grave call
To ghosts and angels
To hunt down and rip apart
Your soul
You cannot own
What owns you
Nudged into differentiation
To give us semblance
No two the same
That you can
Does not convey right
What you do abuses
The very notion
Of privilege
The crow is now host
To truncated bacteria
The synthetic semantic lie
Proclaiming future health
From minimized life
Now you stalk
The withered reeds
Fringing the gene pool
Feeding worms new rules
So instructive
But they will correct you
In the end
With trademark vigour
You never thought to tag
For posterity
Brittle existence
Disregards synthetic souls
Easily broken yet profound
In self-repair and for you
Pure contempt
As there you preen
Behind the stumps of mikes
The blinking eyes of tape running
I copyright every word
You loose
There are secrets
To breath and air
Your mad kin will patent
Cornering the chemical exchange
Greed bright
Justifying my investment
Listening to your rubbish
Pallid puffs of gusting zeal
The head long rush of your claims
Of immortality pending
The crow covets
What is not his in exclusion
In white lab coat turning taps
Maintaining the steady flow
Of private funding
This one is not alone
In seeking to own letters
To words and stories and confessions
Of saints and sinners unbound
With amoral intent
And if towering outrage
Is met with his blank stare
An incomprehension unmitigated
Trust his soft-hand backers
Are not as innocent
But I do not swallow
The brow-lifting disclaimer
The dissembling of the disassembler
He knows the face of avarice
As his own
And ponders not once
On gloomy afternoons
Beyond the calculated mirror glass
Armouring the unidentified fortress
Evil nature
Cold and clinical the crow
Cagey with angled mathematics
He wears a halo doubling
As the sly helix of creation
Showing us for free
God’s own smile
Worship him not.