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"It was late in 1972 — a year in which the science of genetic engineering really began to sizzle — that two California researchers announced the unusually tidy transfer of genetic information from one bacterium to another with help from a specialized enzyme. It was a scientifically heralded result, but behind the hoopla was just one small catch. The information transferred enabled a common human disease bacterium, E. coli, to resist not just one antibiotic, but two.
“Alarm bells should have rung,” writes @matthewcobb, in his deeply researched and often deeply troubling history of gene science."
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/14/books/review/as-gods-matthew-cobb.html
@cyrilpedia @matthewcobb Powerful words by @deborahblum, echoing strong insight from @matthewcobb:
"The rush to gene-editing brings Cobb to a kind of crisis of conscience. He is a scientist with deep respect for the profession; he’s worked with genetically modified organisms and knows they can be used for good. And yet, he cannot take that last step across the threshold of complete trust in a profession that he believes, especially recently, has failed “to speak clearly or act decisively” about its dangers. He dreams of a societal response — a world in which the public is better educated on the issues, in which scientists engage with the larger community, and informed regulation is possible. But in the interests of reality, he concedes something that, in fact, many of us outside the scientific community have also come to recognize: In the complicated reality that technology has built for us, far too often “dreams and nightmares must go hand in hand.”"