consciousness can seem to us today. But here we are, a little over a hundred years later, with not only a deep understanding of what makes life possible, but many new tools to modify and even create it. We have gene editing techniques like CRISPR, which enables scientists to easily alter DNA sequences and change the function of genes. We even have the capability to develop fully synthetic organisms built from the ‘genes up’: in 2019, researchers in Cambridge created a variant of Escherichia coli with a fully synthetic genome. The ethics of creating new forms of life is suddenly very relevant
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