X-Message-Number: 19001
From: "Brett Bellmore" <>
Subject: Re: Future disease
Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2002 19:56:11 -0400

Clearly, there WILL be disease in the future, even if all naturally evolved
disease organisms have been dealt with. There will be the work of malicious
hackers, back doors left by genetic engineering companies, (Consider
Microsoft's approach to computer security!) genetic incompatability between
different enhancements which were independently developed... Life is in
large measure a form of data processing, and all the problems we see with
software will afflict our very personal code in the future.

While it might, IN PRINCIPLE, be possible to wring all the bugs out of a
mass of code as large as the human genome, especially if, as I expect, a
major effort occurs at some point to clean up all that spaghetti code, such
an effort would always come at the expense of improving performance instead,
even as it does today. Would you really want to be several revs behind your
friends, just to be sure that you'd always be healthy?

Brett Bellmore 1.0 ;)

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