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If the story of the last century was the maturation of physical science, the plot of the coming decades will be thick with biology. And genetics will be a key protagonist. In our initial rush of enthusiasm, we often over-hype the promise of new sciences and technologies in the short term—but in our all-too-human myopia, we also don’t truly grasp how innovation can transform our lives.
As science becomes engineering, its transformative power is unleashed. And yet it also (eventually) becomes banal. The fact that we talk about genetic engineering with both wonderment and concern is a sign that its time is still to come. We are moving rapidly into the era where “next generation sequencing” simply becomes the norm of how one accesses genetic variation of any organism. This will allow researchers to explore the branches of the tree of life at incredibly fine scale and to gain unprecedented insights into state of life on earth in earlier epochs. And it will allow the detection of even the most subtle fluctuations in genetic variation in contemporary populations.
But we are also witnessing the first steps in the long march to the age where genetic engineering will become a ubiquitous and workaday part of humanity’s toolkit. Our species will not only gain awareness of the past of life on earth, but we will acquire the power to mould the shape of the tree deep into the future.
Read full, original post: Read/write access to your genomes? Using the past to jump to the future
