Playing God (2012)
Adam Rutherford meets a new creature created by American scientists, the spider-goat. It is part goat, part spider, and its milk can be used to create artificial spider’s web.
It is part of a new field of research, synthetic biology, with a radical aim: to break down nature into spare parts so that we can rebuild it however we please. This technology is already being used to make bio-diesel to power cars. Other researchers are looking at how we might, one day, control human emotions by sending ‘biological machines’ into our brains.
By the end of the documentary I was disturbed by where the science was going with all this [affecting the circuitry of the brain] and the possibility of some totalitarian regime being able to placate a population synthetically. There is a host of troubling possibilities, unleashed, by accident or by design. Somehow, we need to play it safe ... and, yet, Pandora's box has been opened.
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