Illustration by Benjamin Karis-Nix
As regular readers will know, I've long been fascinated by molecular bestiality and the creation of interspecies hybrids.
And, thanks to astonishing advances in what is known as synthetic biology, the perverse fantasy of all organisms being able to promiscuously swap genes with one another - and not just fuck with their own kind - is fast becoming a reality.
Indeed, we can already marvel at the fact that we live in a world in which spider-goats are producing large quantities of incredibly strong silk in their milk thanks to a transplanted gene from an orb weaving arachnid.
Such a procedure - described by opponents as Frankenstein science, or a crime against Nature - works because of the convenient truth that all life rests upon the same fourfold protein molecule arranged in various sequences. Thus the genetic code for making silk in a spider is written in exactly the same language as the genetic code for making milk in a goat. Since we now know the language, we can splice bits of code from one species to another.
This effectively enables us not only to rewrite old forms of life, but to create previously unimagined new forms - things that Nature failed to conceive of despite having millions of years to do so.
Now, it might be the case that there are important questions concerning this issue which deserve to be carefully and intelligently addressed. But I would invite those with moral concerns and anti-scientific prejudices to examine the facts, think of the potential, and dare to become just a little more bio-curious.
