December 28, 2010 As the final remains of the year 2010 passes into a new year, it feels a fitting time to reflect a little deeper upon our existence, and the ongoing human journey of survival.
What comes over a man, is it soul or mind—
That to no limits and bounds he can stay confined?
You would say his ambition was to extend the reach
Clear to the Arctic of every living kind.
Why is his nature forever so hard to teach . . .There are roughly zones whose laws must be obeyed.
from “There Are Roughly Zones,” Robert Frost, 1936
In The Zone, an article written in Vision, a website that describes its goal:“…to give our readers a deeper understanding of the causes of problems with which humanity wrestles,” and does so, stating, “without seeking to proselytize”, but using the Bible as a source of wisdom, and moral perspective.
In this essay, the question goes underneath the surface of technology itself, whether applied to genetic engineering (now considered an older, new technology), or the new field of “synthetic biology”, where a bacterium was created by scientists in a lab, the question of how man pursues the use of new technologies— to what end, and to serve what purpose? Should the use of new technologies (by definition, whose implications are not well understood) have limits imposed upon it, or allowed to remain largely self-regulated by the scientific community, and the individual scientists directly involved with their own experiments?
The constraints that nature imposes on life itself, should any, or all, be treated as sacrosanct, or merely as obstacles to overcome on the highway of human destiny?
On a fundamental level, how these questions are answered, may establish the fate of our species.
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