Dawkins on Genetic Engineering

Genetic Engineering.
Richard Dawkins says that genetic engineering and computer programming are literally the same. Genes are subroutines which is why it is possible to copy and paste genes from virtually every living thing to any other living thing. Unlike computing the programming language across the living world is the same.

So you can take an 'anti-freeze' gene from an arctic fish and put it into a tomato to make it frost resistant. We now have the ability to take advantage of millions of years of Research and Development carried out by natural selection and a greater ability than ever before to pick and mix.

One of the biggest differences between mankind and nature is that we can carry out processes with an ultimate end in mind. Nature, on the other hand carries out its processes fixed on survival in the present (which did for the sabre toothed tiger). This ought to mean that we can genetically engineer our way out of potential trouble. Climate change? Why not genenetically engineer a strain of rice or wheat that can grow in the desert?

Surely it is a gift! (Echoes of Boromir in Lord of the Rings, but similarity does not stop there). Like any technology (or the Ring) it is not the technology itself that is 'good' or 'evil' but the use to which it is put. And that its the problem. Mankind, with its current aspirations cannot be trusted. Too often have corners been cut in pharmaceutical field trials with tragic results, as the Thalidomide children found to their cost. So long as the imperative to carry out genetic research is profit and not the common good, this should be a technology that should be kept in the box. The thought of having a few corporations that produce cereal plants with 'terminator genes' so that they are effectively barren which cross pollinates with plants without the gene and thereby makes them barren too, can only result in further growth of corporate superpowers to the cost of the many poor who already struggle to live.