The Creation of Life
By the end of the decade, we’re going to have some new ethical issues to contend with. We’ll likely have industrialized lab-grown meat that’s cheaper, cleaner, and healthier than the alternative. We’ll also have some of the first lab-grown organs. At the same time, advances in CRISPR will start to yield impacts on difficult to fight diseases and cancers.
But what might be truly exciting is the combination of lab-grown cells that can be commanded from outside the body. These can be grown from the recipient and end up being like Pac Man for senescent cells. Gobble, gobble, gobble.
In the background, image-creation AI’s will be repurposed to solving complex protein folding challenges and new drugs and therapies will emerge as a result. There will be no long-term side effect studies on these and we’ll have to rely on AI simulating interactions and side-effects for us to trust using them.
While gain-of-function research might be the controversy of the 2010s, a whole new level of controversy might appear with new lab-developed species emerging and some of them having unintended harmful repercussions. They might also have unintended benefits, with new lab-developed strains of bacteria and plants able to combat atmosphere cancer.
The result is that we may need to come up with new classifications for life for the creations we make that are unable to fall under the traditional taxonomies. We might be looking at a new Domain or at the very least, a new Kingdom. As spoken in a film about messing with life (Jurassic Park), “hold onto your butts!”
