Can we "enhance" humans by means of customized genes ?

I've preferred to leave the verb "enhance" in inverted commas, because geneticists are frankly playing at behaving as a divinity, and nobody knows with certainty yet whether these scientists are God or the Devil. Or maybe a bit of both. Consequently, many observers consider that it's still too early to say whether or not we have the right to perform so-called human gene editing.

A conference on these questions took place in Washington on December 1–3, sponsored by Britain’s Royal Society, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the US National Academies. Click here for a Scientific American website on this subject.

In my recent blog post about the French scientist Emmanuelle Charpentier [display], I mentioned a celebrated method known as the CRISPR–Cas9 system, for which she was a contributor. This technology has made DNA modification so simple that amateur biologists working in home laboratories are starting to fiddle with it, and to "hack genomes". Not surprisingly, the CRISPR-Cas9 method appears to have played a central role in the Washington conference.

Cameron and his team are as wet and warm as a cup of tea

David Cameron has just told his ministers that they're all free, individually, to adopt whatever attitude they like to the forthcoming referendum about whether Britain should or should not remain in Europe. In other words, with respect to this all-important question, Cameron and his team have no common policy. As on a sinking ship, it's every man for himself. What weird behavior for an alleged government! To my mind, with this lukewarm approach to decision-making, the UK is moving closer and closer to Brexit.

Click here for a BBC video : "UK and the EU — How to make a Brexit" which mentions the exit of Greenland after a referendum in 1982. Here is their conclusion : "Divorce can sometimes be painful [...] but it did not have to be messy. The secret to breaking up is the same for states as for people — good planning, good sense and an ability to learn how to live and trade together in a shrinking world."

My Internet provider wants to become a banker

This is amazing news. My French Internet provider, named Orange, is about to buy a bank, which will make it possible to carry out all the ordinary financial transactions that an Internet provider might wish to perform. At the same time that Orange is looking into the idea of acquiring a bank, they're also talking about purchasing one of their Internet rivals (Bouygues).

Culture is what remains once you’ve forgotten everything else

My 2000th  tweet. Culture is what remains once you’ve forgotten everything else. I’ve always imagined that this excellent saying was French, maybe from Ernest Renan: "La culture est ce qui reste quand on a tout oublié."

Michel Galabru has finally left us

Michel Galabru, died during his sleep this morning.

Could God be looked upon as a dangerous assassin ?

To commemorate the terrible slaughter on 7 January 2015 at Charlie Hebdo, the resuscitated weekly will be using the following cover:

It reads: "A year later, the assassin is still on the run." And we see a blood-stained God Almighty with a Kalashnikov strapped to his back, racing madly away. The message is clear. Behind the human assassins who perpetrated the slaughter at Charlie Hebdo, the ghastly cause was absurdly fanatical religious belief.

Is the assassin really still on the run? Yes, and this will remain true for as long as religious fanaticism infiltrates our societies. And that's surely for a long, long time. As we used to say in my childhood Australia: Up until the cows come home...

High-tech loo

For the first decade of my existence, I lived in a rural house in South Grafton (Australia) that did not have a so-called WC (water closet). This dull aspect of my early life has often appeared to me as exceptional: an extraordinary caveman anecdote that I'm including proudly in an autobiographical book on which I'm working. Like many lucky people, I tend to forget that, today, over two billion citizens of the planet Earth have no access to satisfactory toilets.

Click here to examine a project for a low-priced high-tech loo known as the Nano Membrane Toilet, invented at Cranfield University in England, to be put on trial soon, probably in Ghana.

For more information, click on the following video: