Five
THE
GENOME WARS:
MODERN AND “MESOPOTAMIAN”
“It wasn’t hard to see that once you can slice and dice DNA and clone quantities of just the bits you want, the possibilities are endless: you can manufacture proteins in bulk, engineer crops with built-in insecticide genes, introduce healthy genes into patients who lack one needed to survive — in essence, you can redesign life.”
— James Shreeve223
“In genetic terms, this mixture was to be half Lordling and half Human; and since the former are stated to have provided the male elements, the female elements must have been taken from human women...”
— Christian and Barbara Joy O’Brien224
THERE WERE, both in
modern times, and in ancient ones, what may best be described as
“genome wars,” fought over who would control the very code of life
itself: the public sector, or the private one. While the modern
debate raged over ethical issues and the rights of private
corporations to patent various genes and processes, the race itself
pitted two powerful minds — the public Human Genome Project’s
Francis Collins, and the private corporation Celera’s Craig Venter
— in a race that came, quite literally, right down to a brokered
“tie” engineered by the administration of former American President
Bill Clinton.
Here, as elsewhere,
the modern lessons afford a template by which to interpret the
records of the past, for a similar race was apparently held in
ancient times, and if the lessons of the contemporary one are any
indicator, the ancient results are rife with a potentially
horrifying implication. But before we can state clearly what that
implication is, a closer, though necessarily cursory look, at the
modern race and all its implied technologies and legal issues is in
order.