Check out this book review by Christine Rosen from the June 13 issue of the Weekly Standard — go here. A few quotes to whet your interest:
“Information about contemporary research initiatives, such as the Model Cell Consortium, which has embarked on a project far more ambitious than the Human Genome Project but has received much less attention, are also given their due. The Consortium is an effort to “model the logic and behavior of ‘intelligent’ cellular systems” using the E. coli bacteria.”
Woolfson discusses dispassionately the creation of animal chimeras (two dissimilar animals bred to create a new creature) and the revival of lost species like the dodo. He suggests that, eventually, “it might be possible to re-create the elusive ancestor of all human life on Earth, a hypothetical organism known as LUCA, or the ‘least universal common ancestor'” since “the remnants of LUCA should be scattered across the genomes of all living things.” We could, he claims, bring LUCA “back to life.”
Woolfson’s optimism about our synthetic future stems, in part, from his particular understanding of the human person. He returns over and over again to the metaphor of the machine: “It seems inevitable that we will have to resign ourselves to the unpalatable fact that we are nothing more than machines,” he writes. “That this troubles us is itself a construction of our brains; one day such irrational tendencies might be removed by adjusting the relevant brain circuitry.”