last pre-Flipside post

Have you ever wondered what it would be like if you could balance the budget yourself? Now you can. The Committee For A Responsible Federal Budget has created a simulator that gives you the information about and the dollar amounts of most of the options currently applicable to the national debt (except drug legalization). It's sort of addictive to fiddle with, if you're of a political science bent.

Recently, someone on my flist asked what could go wrong with the artificial encoding of DNA in bacteria.

What can go wrong: the same stuff that sometimes goes wrong with mutations from DNA programmed into cells the regular, haphazard way. You still have to follow rules like the inverse-square law of cell waste, and basic physics of powering the cell and maintaining cell fluidity and structure. We don't yet have the technology to re-encode mitochondrial DNA, so we can't mess with the cell's basic metabolism, and thus there is a limited amount we can do by way of genetic tampering. We can NOT make anything that breaks the laws of physics, y'all.

( We already have plagues and bacteria with amazing and extraordinary capacities. )