THE CREATION of new life forms – such as the synthetic cells unveiled by scientists in California last week – is going to be what drives our economy over the next generation, according to a leading Danish physicist.
Dr Steen Rasmussen, director of the Fundamental Living Technology Centre, forecast that such radical technology will become more and more life-like, creating systems that are smarter and “capable of repairing themselves, as we do”.
This convergence between biotechnology, information technology and artificial intelligence would result in the creation of new living things that would become an integral part of biodiversity and the future of the planet, he predicted.
Dr Rasmussen was speaking at a symposium to mark International Biodiversity Day, hosted by the European Environment Agency (EEA). Its executive director, Prof Jacqueline McGlade, said citizens needed to be engaged more directly in “difficult decisions”.
Much of the focus was on dangers to species and natural ecosystems. Nicolas Perritaz, a beekeeper from the countryside near Geneva, said he had never experienced in 13 years of pursuing his hobby the loss of honeybee colonies that was now taking place.
Switzerland alone had lost 100,000 bee colonies and the latest annual survey, just published, had shown further losses of 30 per cent on average.
“We don’t have any explanation of what’s going wrong, whether it is a virus or the result of chemicals in agriculture.” Mr Perritaz speculated that it could be due to the replacement of small Alpine bees with more aggressive ones from central Europe. Whatever the reason, it was serious as one-third of human food is dependent on pollination, and honeybees perform 60 per cent of this.
Like the canary in a coal mine, kept to alert miners if the air filled with gas, he suggested that honeybees were indicators of the state of the environment and that “colony collapse syndrome”, as it has been termed, was their message that all was not well.
Caroline Bennett, founder of Pisces, the responsible fish restaurants organisation, said taking bluefin tuna off the menu was “just the tip of the iceberg because up to 70 per cent of the fish we eat – including the iconic fish and chips – are endangered”.
Referring to her own restaurant, Moshi Moshi, she said nature “now dictates what we’re serving. We no longer get on to our fishermen and say we want five kilos of sea bass or five kilos of plaice, we just say we’ll take whatever you have today”.
Prof Robert Kenward likened the task of halting biodiversity loss to turning around an oil tanker at sea. “Change will happen through a very large number of individual actions, so it’s really about turning around a whole lot of smaller boats,” he said.
Liz Hosken, of the Gaia Foundation, said people needed to reconnect with nature, “instead of running around like teenagers, destroying the planet”.
- A new DVD, Nature Watch, has been produced by the EEA. It shows how people are working with nature and makes the economic case for living more sustainably. See www.eea.europa.eu.