Biotechnology, the ultimate frontier

2001-07-11 admin

Who is messing around with what, and why

12 July 2001, 5 pm GMT

Every day in laboratories around the word, doctors and scientists play with Nature, and all aspects of life itself.

Illustrious laureates a couple of decades ago started playing with the brain, dreaming one day to reproduce human intelligence, but despite amazing progress in the field of artificial intelligence, the original quest seemed abandoned in favour of more realistic targets, charming software programmes that can dream butterflies at the best of their efforts.

The human mind, largely, still eludes science. Its secrets tucked away, surrounded by the mysteries of consciousness and the soul, embedded in the complexity of the most evolved cells on the planet, neurons.

Not the same for other types of biological cells, more elementary - possibly easier to fake - like the ones that form skin and bone tissues, or even blood cells.

I’ll never forget a photograph published by the Guardian newspaper a few years ago that was showing ears being grown almost like mushrooms, in a vegetable type box, somewhere in the English countryside.

I doubted my own eyes, was it perhaps a journalistic photo trick?

I never got the chance to find out more about those ears, but as we hear about new experiments everyday, new results, new promises, new challenges, they could well be a fact.

That grotesque photograph might have been, actually, a real one. Ears, and possibly other lobes, being grown just like that.
Fertilizers, anyone?

Okay, no subject for jokes. “You would not think like that if you had your ears torn out by an accident and needed replacing them”
comments a content-wire bioteks advisor.

True. If one of my ears went missing, I’d be desperate to get a new one, fast, no questions asked. Other than some very clear guidelines about where and how to get it, please.

And public information about how it was grown (yuk), and possibly a competition law and an intellectual property framework.
(Whose ear is it, really?)

Oh, we also need policies to determine access to parts (don't know how to call them otherwise) industry standards and, I guess, suggested retail prices.

And in this weather, those ears are likely to be ready for the market well before we manage to agree all that.

* * * * * * * * *

Certain breeds of scientist live just to defeat the laws of nature. They long to win the Nobel prize for immortality, and let’s admit it, who wouldn’t go crazy at the prospect, given the chance.

Do people know what goes on inside labs? Not really.

Is there global consensus as to where to draw the line? Hardly.

Is there any trusted mechanism that can monitor activities in the field? I don’t know, does anyone?

One thing is certain, progress cannot be halted. Scientists and researchers around the world seem to get more excited by the day by their advances, and some of them may even be working at good causes. I have no doubt that some advances in biotechnology can benefit humanity. If only humanity were wise enough. But wisdom it is still a far too scarce commodity, while ambition and greed abound.

Whatzit to do with content-wire then?

When content-wire opened its virtual doors a few months ago, our mission was ‘go and find out’.

Find out all about the internet, its impact on society and economy, and use the new medium manifest our own existence, and to speak our anonymous voice, in this huge new void space that risks to be colonized by far too old, well known faces.

Humanity is undergoing many transformations, and the internet is the single innovation of greatest impact in many ways.

Another is certainly biotechnology.

We do not know how soon everybody’s life
will be affected by these transformations, and we have no idea if that’s going to be good or bad nor either.

So what can we do?

Content-wire fascination with progress and technology is a healthy one, at least that's what we like to think.

And, when possible, we are skeptical about what we are told.

At least we know that the IT industry and related information channels bank on public ignorance to thrive.

It might well be a similar situation in the biotechnology information sector. We like progress and technology, and we know that an industry left to its own devices, may well get out of hand, ruled by the greediest.

We want to know what biotechnology companies are doing, and why. We want to know what are the new opportunities and what the risks being brought about by their pioneering research.

This is why we are starting a new section, Biotech News Watch. Very ambitious, considering we know little or nothing. Very controversial, considering we want to protect life on the planet pretty much ‘as is’, (we think it's wonderful, most days)

We consider life and nature the most precious assets above all others, and yet respect our fellow humans enough – some of them anyway – to want to listen what they have to say, what they come up with.

Cure for cancer and other horrible diseases perhaps, as well as spare parts for those who really need them. Cannot be that bad.

Or can it?

So this month, we start covering the biotech sector. Our first focus outside the content industry. Content, after all, is anything that matters, anything that can be made of it.

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