>But far more importantly, we must expose the absurdity in the phrase,
>"genetic engineering." Organisms are not machines.
But organisms can be engineered. I read something very recently about how tampering with sheep genes can lead them to produce spider silk in the sheep's milk. This might not be engineering the entire organism, but it is a kind of engineering. Modify the genes of an organism to obtain a desired characteristic or ability. Isn't that engineering?
Organisms _are_ machines. They may not be mass produced on an assembly line (at least not yet), but I don't see why you can't describe organisms as machines. To take humans as an example, you can even identify the various pieces which keep us working - we have pumps (the heart), filters (the kidneys), actuators (muscles), etc.
>And let's not
>forget that the traditional term for the private ownership of living,
>productive processes is slavery. This is the logic of life-as-machine, with
>humans as nothing more than the transition between organic machines and
>rationalized machines.
I'm in full agreement here. I'm perfectly willing to accept organisms as a special class of machine, one which shouldn't be owned or manufactured. But that is a different question, it seems to me.
>Here's an issue where we could really reverse the trend toward
>privatization. But we've got to make it clear that we're dealing with
>something much deeper than mere "engineering."
What makes organisms different? What is it that makes this much deeper than "mere engineering?"
Brett