Archivo etiqueta «Biología»
Por José María Carrascal (ABC, 01/06/10):
La creación en laboratorio de la primera célula artificial nos plantea tres dilemas, a cual más complejo: uno científico, otro filosófico y otro ético. Ni siquiera la grave situación económica en que nos encontramos nos excusa de analizar lo que más de un experto ha calificado de salto científico tan importante como el de Galileo, Darwin o Einstein.
El dilema científico es el más simple: ¿ha creado Craig Venter una célula artificial? No exactamente. Se ha limitado a reproducirla, introduciendo en una bacteria (mycoplasma mycoides) a la que se le había extraído el genoma … Seguir leyendo
By Thomas E. Lovejoy, biodiversity chairman at the Heinz Center for Science, Economics and the Environment (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 01/06/10):
The third “Global Biodiversity Outlook,” an assessment of the current state of the variety of life on the Earth and the implications of its continued reduction, was recently released. Not surprisingly, the outlook, prepared by the Convention on Biological Diversity, is not pretty. But it is also not all inevitable.
Few remember the first two such reports, in part because the outlook was not so grim. This report, based on national reports from 120 countries and with substantial … Seguir leyendo
Por Jordi García Ojalvo (EL PERIÓDICO, 01/06/10):
Durante siglos, la humanidad ha perseguido construir máquinas cada vez más avanzadas. Desde la máquina de vapor hasta el ordenador, hemos desarrollado todo tipo de artefactos que han cambiado completamente nuestra manera de vivir, e incluso el aspecto de nuestro planeta. Pero existe un tipo de máquina, no diseñada por el ser humano, que supera con creces a cualquier dispositivo que la humanidad haya inventado. Es una máquina que es capaz de obtener energía a partir de muy diversas fuentes, de detectar cambios sutiles en su entorno y responder a ellos con gran … Seguir leyendo
By Steve Jones, Professor of Genetics at University College London. His new book is Darwin’s Island (THE TIMES, 28/01/09):
Anniversaries are the last refuge of the journalist and 2009 is no exception. Happy 40th, then, to the Moon landings, felice quattro centesimo compleanno to Galileo’s telescope, and glücklich vier Hundertstel Geburtstag to Kepler and his laws of planetary motion. One birthday boy gets two slices of cake, for Charles Darwin is 200 this year and his best-known book is 50 years younger. To look back on his life is to be astonished by his almost uncanny ability to predict … Seguir leyendo
By Neil Shubin, an associate dean at the University of Chicago and the provost of the Field Museum and the author of Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 24/02/08):
Dragons and virgin births are the stuff of myth and religion. Except, that is, in Kansas, where they have recently come together in a way that should alter the way many of us look at nature and demonstrate the risks in our habit of using it to help us make ethical decisions.
Keepers at Wichita’s zoo got a surprise … Seguir leyendo
By Madeleine Bunting (THE GUARDIAN, 22/10/07):
If you’ve never heard of synbio, you will hear plenty in the next decade. Synthetic biology now occupies roughly the same space on the public’s radar that computing might have done in the 1960s or genetic modification in the 1970s – it’s largely unheard of by anyone except the scientific community and its geeky observers. But as the pace of breakthrough in this area quickens, the sense of being on the edge of an extraordinary technological revolution is giving even the scientists involved vertigo.
Part of the reason why synbio has had so little … Seguir leyendo
By Edward O. Wilson, an emeritus professor of biology at Harvard and the author, most recently, of “The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth” (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 06/09/07):
In one sense we know much less about Earth than we do about Mars. The vast majority of life forms on our planet are still undiscovered, and their significance for our own species remains unknown. This gap in knowledge is a serious matter: we will never completely understand and preserve the living world around us at our present level of ignorance. We are flying blind into our environmental … Seguir leyendo