My latest Dissection column for Wired.com takes on the old tug-of-war between Nature and Artifice. As I write in my new book Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life, scientists began to manufacture strange versions of the microbe in the early 1970s. In 1974, for example, scientists engineered E. coli carrying DNA from a frog. The difference between such "unnatural" bacteria and "natural" ones may seem obvious, but today the dividing line is surprisingly tricky to draw, and will only get trickier. In my new column, I describe the first systematic attempt to do so. Check it out.
(Image from National Gallery of Art)
Comments
Fascinating stuff.
Sounds roughly similar to the constant updating done by the programmers of anti-virus software.
But let's be frank - all of these interesting articles are just ploys to get me to buy Microcosm as soon as it's out! :-)
And your cunning plan has worked ...
Posted by: Scott Belyea | March 21, 2008 9:59 AM
Hi...I read your article and thought it was really interesting. But there was one thing I don't really understand:
Why is the border between natural and artificial real and important?
Aren't humans part of nature? And even the manipulations we do are just piggy-backing on what happens in nature--I would have thought that genetic engineering is just much more precise than natural or artificial selection. How do you define artificial?
Your example about explorers in North America made me wonder about what we consider "artificial".
Posted by: katie | March 21, 2008 6:05 PM
That and the other version of The Human Condition are two of my all time favorite paintings.
Posted by: Hume's Ghost | March 22, 2008 1:59 PM