The benefits are huge of the knowledge learned with knowing your genome. My fear is that it takes us one step closer to the society in Gattaca. I envision that it will start in the sports world where athlete's genomes will be used to determine their athletic potential. Its amazing that the cost is so low, but I can't help but ponder the possible negatives.
Everybody talks about the society in Gattaca as if it's a bad thing, but what was really that bad about it? It kinda sucked for those who were born unenhanced, but give it another fifty years and there probably won't be any of those any more (they'll eventually figure out you can just freeze your sperm and have a vasectomy at puberty).
For everybody else, life might not have been perfect, but it was a lot better in many ways than life is today. It wasn't shown on screen, but they'd presumably gotten rid of an awful lot of horrible genetic diseases, and probably eradicated poverty by ensuring everybody has at least the minimum intelligence level required to make a decent living.
What's bad about it is that messing with the engine of evolution without fully understanding it risks becoming a mono culture in one form or another, possibly without realizing it.
The blind watchmaker has done a pretty good job so far, my vote is on letting the guy continue without messing with the mechanism until wel really understand how it works.
The whole picture reminds me of guys with hammers that try to 'improve' a jet engine or a computer. If this is an act of reverse engineering a piece of software, and I believe there are enough parallels with the computer world to justify using that term then you're looking at the equivalent of knowing a few interesting peeks and pokes and the basic opcodes but you are still far away from 'grokking' the program as a whole, so any modifications you make can have consequences beyond what you currently understand.
What's clear that this tampering should not be fodder for a flippant response about being the "new swine flu". If we can't trust scientist to do their job without "fudging" the numbers, then who are we to trust? I want my tax money going to more research, but now I am not so sure and thats the real tragedy.
Now, its clear what you were getting at with the reference to the swine flu. As far as carbon tax, its good and bad. Good that it will supposedly encourage competitiveness. Bad that most companies will just move to a state or country that doesn't have the tax.
I'm afraid that in some parts of the world it will encourage corruption instead.
It can also hurt developing countries where better energy sources are not available or insanely expensive. I specifically mean eastern part of the EU where carbon tax is likely to be forced.
That's my point: mistrust to organizations who try to push certain conclusions in order to gain profits, in a similar way as it was swine flu & vaccines. That's the meaning of my comparison.
Btw if you care about your taxes, what about Carbon tax?
