When we think about sustainability, we are also immediately asked to reflect on diversity, or the gradual loss of it. with the millions of species of organisms existing on earth (if we include both the macro and the micro worlds) we could be guaranteed an impressive diversity. however, how is this diversity going to be maintained when genetic manipulation allows us to tie organisms to particular functions, or to perform particular tasks for our consumption or our benefits?
a controversial topic, genetic manipulation, as Emma Master puts it, is the product of an incredible amount of innovation in chemical engineering that someone has defined as the “golden age of biology”. In fact, the technology available today allows us to capture the composition of both entities and community of entities. however, such technological capacity might have consequences that unfortunately we won’t see until much later.
