Jeff Goldblum has made many contributions to this world, but perhaps the best is its delivery of an emblematic line in the 1993 film Jurassic. During a scene in which his character, Ian Malcolm, reprimands the creator of the Dinosaur Park, John Hammond, Goldblum pronounces the words which have become a long time: “Your scientists were so concerned about the fact that they could or not that they did not stop to think if they were to.”
Could the paradigm do, as we could call it, is an excellent way to think about the risks and awards of scientific efforts.
However, it is rare to see scientists strongly compete in their own field of research – Malcolm, as a mathematician, probably did not care about genetic developments. This is perhaps what has made recent warnings against the creation of “Mirror life” – organizations in which molecules Have the orientation opposed to everything else on earth, with the potential to wreak havoc in the biosphere – so austere, to come as they have done people working directly on the idea (see “The history of mirror life: from intriguing idea to an unprecedented threat”).
The creation of mirror life has the potential to wreak havoc through the biosphere
Although mirror life fails hard on the “should” side of the scale – there seems to be few obvious reasons to create it – in other cases, the decision is not so easy. Perhaps the most thorny recent example is research on function gain. This is where organisms, often pathogenic, are modified to improve their capacities, with risks and awards. The modification of a flu virus, let’s say, so that it can more easily infect humans, is clearly a risk. But if it helps us understand the virus and prevent a pandemic, would it be worth it?
The function gain has always been controversial, but recently, the debate around it has become explosive. The people who believe that Sars-Cov-2, the virus behind COVID-19, was created in a laboratory – A belief for which there is no evidence, it should be said – jumped on research on the gain of function like a firearm. Does this mean that such a work must be prohibited? Probably not – but, according to the words of Malcolm, we must keep in mind the distinction between “could” and “should”.
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