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Douglas Rushkoff, author of Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now, offers a poignant and beautifully phrased, if exceedingly anthropocentric, concern:

We should worry less about our species losing its biosphere than losing its soul.

Our collective perceptions and cognition is our greatest evolutionary achievement. This is the activity that gives biology its meaning. Our human neural network is in the process of deteriorating and our perceptions are becoming skewed — both involuntarily and by our own hand — and all that most of us in the greater scientific community can do is hope that somehow technology picks up the slack, providing more accurate sensors, faster networks, and a new virtual home for complexity.

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Some researchers, like Steven Benner of the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Florida, are constructing and experimenting with forms of DNA that use coding alphabets of more than four letters. J. Craig Venter, who helped spearhead the decoding of the human genome and now works as president of the J. Craig Venter Institute, recently used store-bought chemicals to reconstruct the genome of a bacterial goat parasite and put it in another bacterium, where it took over, churning out copies of itself with Dr. Venter’s watermark inscribed in its gene code.
 

In a related vein, George Church and Farren Isaacs of the Harvard Medical School recently reported that they had reprogrammed the genome of an E. Coli bacterium, opening up the possibility of incorporating new features into the ubiquitous little bug. Dr. Joyce called the work “really macho molecular biotechnology.”