Lord Martin Rees: We Are Living Through A Political And Scientific Transformation

Lord Martin Rees is an astrophysicist and the former master of Trinity College, Cambridge. He sat down with The WorldPost for a wide-ranging interview, which has been edited for clarity and brevity. Alexander Görlach: Out of all great transformations we are going through, from climate change to artificial intelligence to gene editing, what are the most consequential we are about to witness?  Martin Rees: It depends on what time scale we are thinking about. In the next 10 or 20 years, I would say it’s the rapid development in biotechnology. We are already seeing that it’s becoming easier to modify the genome, and we heard about experiments on the influenza virus to make it more virulent and transmissible. These techniques are developing very fast and have huge potential benefits but unfortunately also downsides. They are easily accessible and handled. It’s the kind of equipment that’s available at many university labs and many companies. And so the risk of error or terror in these areas is quite substantial, while regulation is very hard. It’s not like regulating nuclear activity, which requires huge special purpose facilities. Biohacking is almost a student-competitive sport. I am somewhat pessimistic, because even if we do have regulations and protocols for safety, how would we enforce them globally? Obviously we should try and minimize the risk of misuse by error or by design of these technologies and also be concerned about the ...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news