On May 20, 2010, President Barack Obama, responding to the creation of synthetic bacteria by the J. Craig Venter Institute, asked the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues for a report on this development, covering findings, recommendations, and suggestions, to be completed within six months.  A week later the U. S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce held hearings entitled "Developments in Synthetic Genomics and Implications for Health and Energy."


"Given the importance of this issue, I request that the Commission consult with a range of constituencies, including scientific and medical communities, faith communities, and business and nonprofit organizations." - President Barack Obama.

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"The greatest discoveries of science have always been those that forced us to rethink our beliefs about the universe and our place in it." - Robert L. Park, University of Maryland (in The New York Times, 7 December 1999).

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"Craig Venter's successful implantation of a digitally determined genome sequence into a bacterium has been widely reported (29 May, p 6). Now imagine a future where a successor to Venter is able to digitally reconstruct a set of the best possible sequences of human genomes and incorporate them, in pieces, into bacteria that could autonomously reproduce the sequences.
If these bacteria were then launched into space, the fragmented genome could be reassembled on countless habitable planets in the galaxy. This would be a process similar to that outlined in the theory of directed panspermia proposed in 1973 by Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel (Icarus, vol 19, p 341).
Carried on comets, these bacteria could travel from one planetary system to the next, where the genome could reproduce. The legacy of human life could then be thought to have been given an eternal existence in the cosmos."  -  Intergalactic Legacy (New Scientist, 9 June 2010) by Chandra Wickramasinghe, Director, Cardiff Centre for Astrobiology.
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"The first message from an intelligent extraterrestrial civilisation may not emerge from a radio telescope but, instead, from a DNA sequencing machine."  - John Walker, Fourmilab Switzerland.
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"Life comes from space because life comes life." - Brig Klyce, Astrobiology Research Trust.

 

Reverence for life - underlying evolutionary panaltruism and intelligent life reciprocally propagated from infinity to infinity by intelligent life - highlights the intrinsic unity of all intelligent life, expressly defining the cosmic community of intelligent life and the age of cosmic genealogy on Earth.  www.forelawsonboard.net/

In forelawsship on board,

Robert E. Cobb


Forelaws on Board