I get the heebie jeebies when I hear computer technologists getting excited about gene editing. Computing and biology are opposite one another as disciplines.

I get the heebie jeebies when I hear computer technologists getting excited about gene editing. Computing and biology are opposite one another as disciplines. Computing has been built up by people from invented principles; but in biology we are working our way down from observations to try to infer the principles underlying them. It’s easy to look at our global computing infrastructure and think we are good at understanding complexity. But we built that; we should understand it. Again: not true for biology. There’s no guarantee that we will ever fully understand the full scope of how life works. And computing still has problems! Side effects are rampant in software; we usually call those bugs or vulnerabilities and there are a lot of them. And electronic computing has fewer ethical concerns. It’s generally not considered unethical to risk crashing a computer. Very different story if you are risking deforming foetuses