Hey there,
I apologize with the delay in comic posting, but I hope you like the result!
I’d type more, and I may later when it’s cooler. But for now, I need to get away from this infernal machine.
Cheers,
F
For the record, the comic is late, and that makes my post late, and that makes everything we do here late. For that, I am very sorry. Steps will be taken, blah, blah, blah. Introducing buffer zone, blah, blah, blah. Under pain of death, blah, blah, blah. Words aren’t useful here, obviously. But next weeks comic and post will be published no later than zero-hundred hours Sunday or I will personally provide the hot oil to pour on us both. To be brutally honest, though, there are more important things to distract your attention from this colossal failure.
For instance, if you have not yet heard this yet, then the news organization to which you subscribe is insufficient to your needs. The momentum of the event described will no doubt be of such scale as the invention of electricity, if not greater. Let me explain. No, too much; let me sum-up. A group of scientists have developed their own DNA from the ground up, to their specifications, and have used that DNA to create an artificial life-form based on those specifications.
Now, the life-form produced doesn’t do a whole lot. Some cell replication is about the only action it performs. It has text messages hidden in the less active bits of it’s genetic code, which is a rather round-about way to do text messaging. The skinny is, though, that they have living, replicating biological cells built entirely to human design.
At a time like this, I feel stupid. I don’t even know where to begin a discourse on this. There are many obvious applications for this technology: growing replacement tissues, cancer-fighting tissues, tissues that separate hydrogen from water, what have you. But what I find so daunting is that there is now an unprecedented link between applied science and the genesis of life. During a press conference the man at the head of the project, a J.C. Venter who has only vaguely nudged at my consciousness before this, described the "debugging" steps they went through to "boot up" their DNA in a live cell. He uses computer programming terminology to describe the act of creating a customized life. Imagine an industry there the product is designer life forms built entirely on genetic engineering.
This is big. So big, I feel my intellect dwarfed by it. I have no idea where this is going to lead, but I sure hope this guy does. Where the hell is Carl Sagan when you need him?
Ja.