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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (7881)	3/7/2001 3:04:48 PM
From: cosmicforce	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

You buy insurance to protect against the worst case (e.g., house fire). You pay every month, quarter, whatever. The ONLY comparable kind of policy you can buy for the loss of genetic information is buying habitat. With cloning, a gene bank would be good. BUT, nobody except government is going to fund one of these. In fact seed companies are actively seeking to shrink their inventories of genetic diversity. I just saw this a couple of weeks back. This leaves the management of genetic heritage in the hands of a few, dedicated amateurs. The situation is even worse with animals, because unless the animal is domesticated there is no reason for anyone to culture its DNA. This is a loss that makes the Library of Alexandria not even show up on a radar screen (if you treat bits of data to digitize to bits of data to sequence). The loss of information is disgraceful.