Biohacking

Decode-able You:

A pair of companies in San Francisco’s SOMA neighborhood and Tel Aviv are positioning themselves as the “Wintel” of the bio-hacking era. One company, called Genome Compiler, builds software for designing synthetic life forms, while the other, Cambrian Genomics, is experimenting with ways to cheaply laser print DNA.

“Wouldn’t it be nice in the future if someone could just load up a tree’s genetic code, drag another app from a file and make it glow in the dark?” said Amirav-Drory, who was a post-doc at Stanford University after completing a Ph.D. in biochemistry at Tel Aviv University in Israel.

Would it?

No matter, I suspect it will happen anyway, and sooner than we think. Eugenics is the next big thing, I'm afraid. As with all new technologies, it isn't the possibilities that scare me, it's what people will actually do with it that makes for dystopian nightmares. Being that humans are self-centered monkeys, you can be sure of only one thing: it will be for the benefit of the people who pay for it.