A Real Radical Evolution Machine

George Church, the distinguished geneticist at Harvard, is developing a device that forces lifeforms to evolve in weeks in ways that historically took millennia. It is literally a radical evolution machine. Right now it is only aimed at rapidly evolving bacteria that are immune to viruses. (A pause-giving thought. Do we really want bacteria in our gut that can't be attacked by viruses? Where's the off switch?) But this process has the potential to rapidly evolve people, as Arthur Caplan, the thoughtful bioethicist at Penn, points out in this article in New Scientist. "If you learn to do this in microbes and then in animals, you'll find yourself wondering how we got to humans so fast," he says. "You've got to pay attention to what's going on in lower creatures because that's the steady march to people."
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