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Hi Leo,
I had the same reaction to the Venter stuff. It's being touted as
this enormous breakthrough but it just looks like more of the same cutting,
transplanting, splicing stuff we've been doing for centuries with living
organisms. It's just going ever smaller, as developments in technology allows.
That's not to say he won't find uses for what he "creates" and the work may
ultimately generate some useful insights into various functional capabilities
within a cell (if the data can be interpreted from a relational perspective).
But what he's achieved is nothing new as far as I can tell.
On the other hand, maybe that doesn't matter to him? Not everyone
wants to understand what's really going on underneath (the "why" of things). In
that case, they don't care how it works, as long as they figure out how to
manipulate it. Perhaps that's the "computer effect"... we don't need
to know how it works to use it. The guy is still being lauded as
a "genius", right?
Whatever!
Judith
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, July 08, 2005 6:02 AM
Subject: Re: [ROSEN] "Hard" science and
"soft" science...
The Venter video is worth a look
(http://www.edge.org/video/dsl/TED05_venter.html)
A
few comments.
Extending the search for genes from particular organisms into
the
environment is quite interesting, but it would seem to me that it
would
be an ever expanding catalogue.
There is a large emphasis on
collecting the component (gene) parts -
and an analogy is made to the
electronics industry where once all the
parts are known, you can then
build custom devices. This seems, at
face value, a profoundly
mechanistic view. We know its not the
components identity that
is important, its their (functional)
relationships - the
organisation. (This is not mentioned). Moving
from the
catalogue of parts to synthetic organisms is a leap of
extraordinary
magnitude (as stated elsewhere on this list). However,
in this case,
it appears to be a purely empirical approach.
I note the prosaic way in
which these fundamental "developments" are
delivered. Of course, one
needs to be sensitive to the context in
which the remarks are delivered,
but if there is a deeper thread at
work then it is not even hinted
at.
I find it quite
disconcerting.
Leo
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