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April 4th 2019
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The Economist this week |
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Highlights from the latest issue |
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Our cover this week takes a break from the Brexit tragicomedy to ponder something far more consequential: the advent of synthetic biology. For the past four billion years or so the only way for life on Earth to produce a gene was by copying a gene it already had. No longer. Genes can now be written from scratch and edited repeatedly, like text in a word processor. The ability to engineer living things which this provides represents a fundamental change in the way humans interact with the planet’s life, potentially greater in impact than the dawn of agriculture or the exploitation of fossil fuels. Our cover leader and an accompanying Technology Quarterly
assess the promise and peril of the nascent human capacity to redesign life.
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 Zanny Minton Beddoes, Editor-in-Chief
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Business
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