#bioengeneering

[vallabhk]

Bioengineered Foods Market Size & Growth Analysis 2032

In 2023, Bioengineered Food Market Size was valued at USD 20.7 Billion and is expected to reach USD 90 Billion by the end of 2032 with a CAG

[mattheusswinkels-blog]

Artificial muscles at MIT

MIT researchers at the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research have developed a new material that changes its shape after absorbing water vapor.

[mycrystalpalace-blog]

Outsourcing Responsibility

On July 22, 2012, the international weekly journal of science, Nature, reports: 'Artificial Jellyfish made from rat cells. Bioengineers have made an artificial jellyfish using silicone and muscle cells from a rat’s heart. The synthetic creature, dubbed a medusoid, looks like a flower with eight petals. When placed in an electric field, it pulses and swims exactly like its living counterpart. "Morphologically, we’ve built a jellyfish. Functionally, we’ve built a jellyfish. Genetically, this thing is a rat," says Kit Parker, a biophysicist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who led the work. The project is described today in Nature Biotechnology.'

Act first, think about it later? Or rather let others do the thinking, and then let society deal with the consequences. They're just scientist, doing their job, right? Building a career and outsourcing responsibility ...

Science is unbiased and has no need to heed any moral concerns? What's feasible will be done sooner or later one way or the other. If Harvard doesn't do it, somebody else will. Won't make any difference, except that others are being credited, enabling them to raise the funds everybody's craving. Money makes the world go round, not least of all does it spin the wheels and minds of science ... 

Those same scientists would work just as efficiently and unencumbered by moral concerns under a new Hitler, Stalin or Mao Tsedong. Just doing their job, fiddling with the controls of their machines. Building their careers. If they don't do it somebody else will ...

Why is it so hard to refrain from doing something once we've conceived its possibility? Our mind is a whore. It will always find reasons that seem to justify whatever we're doing. Just a matter of perspective, of whose purposes you're serving ...

And secretly our mind's whispering that it won't be us who'll have to deal with the consequences. Neither Einstein nor Fermi or anybody else involved in actually developing the first nuclear weapons had to deal with Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Never mind dealing with the nuclear waste we're piling up ...

Just doing their job, fiddling with the controls and outsourcing responsibility. Oh, wow, what's that? Kaboom! ...