Synthetic life ..........are we ready ?

J. Craig Venter announces the boot up of the first artificial genetic sequence:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/21/science/21cell.html

Regarding the ethical issues of doing this now, he is right for TODAY...

but when the costs come down dramatically in the next 10 years (as they did for pc programming)

as the knowledge continues to be refined with bulletproof techniques...

as GDE 's(genetic development environment) are developed to allow a high level genetic language syntax to be used to build organisms using an abstraction (like coding applications but with a "maker" step) there will be a huge potential for trouble as any "gene kiddie" (analog of script kiddies today) will be able to tinker together something "for fun" that I don't know, invades all pigs and causes their intestines to shut down, or causes cows to die on the field after eating grass...who knows...as varied and nefarious as malware methods and vectors are in software coding, expect the same ecosystem of miscreants to exist for programming living things...be they synthetic or not. Venter's comment is incredibly naive and full of hubris...people like myself and Bill Joy who's expressed similar concerns feel differently.

I hope I am wrong.

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