Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Chuzzlewit who wrote (33606)	4/2/1999 5:24:00 PM
From: Jacques Chitte	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

>These issues have been studied for over a hundred years in excruciating detail in everything from fruit flies to fishes, from trees to birds, and from protozoans to primates.< Taken within these confines - within the "current art" - What you and he say are true. However there is the key issue of his future extrapolation - which imho relies on the current set of scientific premises. This is where I am a little baffled. The current art in gene work is primitive. We know how to breed for traits - but that is allowing the existing sexual gene sorting mechanism to do the heavy lifting. My basic premise is that one day we will have enough understanding of and control over the genetic code to deal with it as if it were a hard drive. We can't do that now. We can laboriously read a single genome - but we barely can interpret that biological Linear B. The ongoing Manhattan Project to read a human genome is a start, but it'll take an awful lot of work to divine which genes are a generic human quality and which ones confer individual traits. I'm projecting a metaphoric future of cheap, ubiquitous digital semiconductor devices, and our best geneticists are still deciding on how to build a difference engine. We'll need the sort of technical advances, mostly increments punctuated by a few entirely new ideas, to advance us from water-driven wooden gear machines to a jet aircraft. In between, the revolutions were Steam, Steel, the internal combustion engine and the turbine. This is what I mean by thinking "out of the box". Real gene technology will bypass the need to breed for traits. And I project this using sound technical and scientific ideas. No magical "faster than light drive" kind of science need be invoked. It will make getting your own personal genetic heritage adjusted or overhauled as immediate and routine as cosmetic surgery. But we're centuries from that, and I regret not living long enough to see it happen. So for now - all you say is true and good. But it is not imho a sound basis for the sort of sweeping dismissal your source made. Conservatism is a reliable casualty of invention. BWDIK :-)