Pandora's Box Seen As Open Now

Any new technology becomes increasingly more accessible, cost-efficient and sophisticated. Its spread thereafter is very swift. For instance, look at photography, telephone, x-rays, radio, television and the Internet. Mostly, the proliferation is benign and makes life easier but sometimes it’s not that harmless and the danger is it can rapidly spin out of control. Nuclear weapons are a classic example. There was a time when the erstwhile Soviet Union and the US had gathered such an arsenal that the world teetered on the brink of disaster. Similarly, an area of concern right now is cloning because there are two sides to this coin. On the one hand, its therapeutic applications are undeniably valuable; on the other, there’s the fear of human cloning which society may not be prepared to deal with yet. However the really alarming development emanating from the same field is something that’s in its infancy today but can take off once the modes of technology transfer become simplified. This is the production of chimeras — organisms consisting of two or more different genetic compositions, produced as a result of bio-engineering.