Redefining Reality - The Intellectual Implications of Modern Science

We have long manipulated the genetic code of organisms to
their offspring are more likely to be fast. We have selectively
bred myriad kinds of domestic dog. But this is a slow process of breeding
members of the same species and hoping for the best. We now have several
techniques by which we can take genetic code from the same or radically
different species and splice it into the genome of an individual. We can make
glow-in-the-dark rabbits, plants that turn red when they detect a land mine,
and mice that grow human ears on their backs.
In one sense, we have been doing genetic engineering on plants and
animals for centuries. We call it selective breeding or, in animals,
husbandry. But this process takes time and has limitations. Selective
breeding allows us to accentuate properties that occur naturally,
but it doesn’t allow us to radically alter them or to introduce new
waiting for random mutations to appear in a population, researchers
seek to create particular mutations themselves.
For centuries, artists have imagined the types of entities they wanted
to create in nature. The ancient Greeks, for example, crossed the
horse with the bird and got Pegasus. The Europeans put wings on a
lizard and created dragons. But this sort of thing was well beyond
the capabilities of science until the late 20 th century, with the
invention of the polymerase chain reaction and the development of
recombinant DNA techniques.
The idea here is that we could create cross-species hybrids if we
had a means of cutting and pasting bits of the genetic sequence
from one organism’s DNA into that of another. In this way,
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