ETC Blog

Silvia Ribeiro* El pasado 11 de mayo, el Instituto Nacional de Medicina Genómica (Inmegen) presentó en un acto mediático, con la presencia entusiasta de Felipe Calderón, el llamado “Mapa del genoma de los mexicanos”. Se presentó como un gran avance científico, vinculándolo oportunistamente hasta con el estudio del virus de la gripe porcina. Obviaron sin [...]

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Written for The Ecologist – February 2009 available online at http://www.theecologist.org/pages/archive_detail.asp?content_id=2053 Somebody somewhere has to have a cunning plan to fix our environmental problems and save the world – right? Jim Thomas sorts through the big tech ideas you’ll be reading about this year  Almost every day sees new technologies being proposed to fix old problems. [...]

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Jim Thomas Written for The Ecologist – November 2008  Don’t be fooled by The Cloud – the world of the internet seems weightless, but it is leaving an increasingly heavy footprint behind it  Do you know where your email is stored and what it costs the environment to store it there? For millions of people [...]

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Written for The Ecologist 01/10/2008 Available online at http://www.theecologist.org/pages/archive_detail.asp?content_id=1978 If there is a video gamer in your life, chances are that you have heard of Spore, the latest creation from the super successful inventor of ‘The Sims’. Spore lets players digitally design and evolve new organisms ranging from single-celled microbes to intergalactic aliens. In the [...]

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Mapmaking and conquest has a disturbingly close history. As indigenous people learned, the innocuous mapmaker may be followed by weapons, property claims and exploitation. So too for the recent rash of science projects using mapping

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Written for The Ecologist – 20/06/2008 As to global annihilation, I’m stumped. Most of us wouldn’t recognise a strangelet if it casually devoured us in the street There’s a slim chance – about one in 50 million – that nobody will ever read this article. A physics experiment taking place under the French-Swiss border could [...]

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Now that you can drive your ‘nano’ car, listening to your ipod ‘nano’ while wearing ‘nano’ sunscreen and ‘nano’ clothing, the UK’s largest organic certifier has just introduced the perfect nano-antidote – a ‘nano-free’ standard for consumer products. The Soil Association – one of the world’s pioneers of organic agriculture announced today that it is [...]

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What do ocean-going yachts, space-traveling bacteria and synthetic life have in common? J. Craig Venter, of course. The self-styled genome tycoon has been busy pushing the boundaries on what may appear at first glance to be unrelated enterprises. Nothing could be further from the truth. A suite of recently uncovered patent applications lodged by Venter and his colleagues reveal not only an attempt to grab ownership over much of synthetic biology (see news release) but also a breathtakingly bold business plan for producing millions of new synthetic organisms per day. At the heart of this are plans for a new, automated process enabling rapid assembly of complete synthetic genomes – plans that, if realised, could render current genetic engineering techniques quaint and obsolete. Venter calls it “homologous in vitro recombination” or “combinatorial genomics.” ETC suggests it might be properly dubbed “shotgun synthesis” and it has the potential to blast apart current biotech practice.

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The BP-Berkeley deal, the new joint Bio Energy institute, and also the recent job hop by John Menlo of BP fuels to Amyris Biotech – are all extra strings tying the interests of the Syn Bio community as a wholeever closer to the interests of big business. It should be noted that in each of thse cases CEO Keasling plays a central role. The same man who claims to be developing Synthetic Biology to serve the worlds poor (via synthetic artemisinin) seems to be rather busy these days serving the fabulously rich.

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“I think this is going to become the foundational technology of the 21st century” – that was the triumphant message with which Tom Knight of MIT brought Synthetic Biology 3.0 to an end today. An engineering generalist who moved from artificial intelligence to artificial life, it was Knight who, along with Drew Endy, developed the [...]

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