Strange Natures Conservation In The Era Of Synthetic Biology Kent H Redford by Kent H. Redford, William M. Adams 9780300230970, 0300230974 instant download after payment.

Genetically engineered algae growing in industrial vats are yielding biological products once extracted from plants or other species. Crops are being engineered to grow faster or to resist pests, and pest species themselves are being engineered to be less effective. Synthetic biology is expected to drive dramatic changes in economies and societies both as revolutionary new biological production systems take root. Such powers to rewrite the genomes of living organisms offer both threat and opportunity to nature. On the one hand, there is the potential risk to biodiversity of engineered organisms being released into the wild and affecting species and ecosystems. On the other hand, the same technologies offer previously unimagined possibilities as tools for conservationists themselves. There is discussion of the prevention of wildlife diseases that threaten the extinction of rare species, or the control of invasive species on oceanic islands. There is even discussion of bringing extinct species back from the dead.
Gene editing makes strange natures, but, perhaps most problematically,it makes the idea of nature itself strange. Nature is usually imagined asseparate from the domain of people. We think of the natural world as beautiful,diverse, valuable, and “natural,” whereas the human world is developed,artificial, and increasingly unnatural. Gene editing erodes the differencebetween what is natural and what is human-made. In doing so it
threatens to destabilize the very idea of nature that provides the foundation for conservation.
This book is about the challenge of genome editing for our idea of nature and our ideas about its conservation. It has been about ten years in the making.