by Mary Harrington at UnHerd The Post
Biotech is entering a new era, with massive US government support: last week the US Government signed an executive order that assigned $2 billion in government funding for ‘high risk, high reward’ biotech projects such as CRISPR gene editing, artificial meat and further development of the mRNA technology behind the Covid vaccine.
With this shift, as I noted last week, a new paradigm of “health” is emerging, not as a default state where doctors are on hand to help get us back to normal when something goes wrong. In the new, transhumanist vision, humans are a kind of meaty machine whose basic functioning can be engineered toward a vision of “health” that’s something more than the default, via biomedical interventions. And doctors are engineers we depend on in perpetuity to keep supplying new and better upgrades.
Last week’s executive order gave another signal that this dream of engineers with limitless power to upgrade nature is increasingly dominant within the world’s only superpower:
We need to develop genetic engineering technologies and techniques to be able to write circuitry for cells and predictably program biology in the same way in which we write software and program computers; unlock the power of biological data, including through computing tools and artificial intelligence; and advance the science of scale-up production while reducing the obstacles for commercialization so that innovative technologies and products can reach markets faster.
– U.S. GOVERNMENT
In the paragraphs that follow there’s plenty of throat-clearing…
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