Genetic engineering

[Drashner1]

I guess I'm asking: Does having a functional example to "reverse engineer" make a thing easier? It sure would in aerospace, but I don't know much about genetic engineering.

Noting first that I am not a geneticist or other bioscience person either...

At a guess, I'd say that there is a certain level of knowledge and technology after which having a functional example to reverse engineer makes things easier - but we aren't there yet. Whether we are 10yrs away from having that level of knowledge or 10,000 is also unknown - we don't know enough to know what we don't know, as it were.

To put in another way - Aerospace engineering as we currently practice it is based on a large body of theory, practice, and knowledge that was gained over the course of years and decades. It also draws on a host of other science and technologies that impact the aerospace field.

However, at some point in the past, none of that had developed yet and there wasn't even a theory as to how even basic aeronautics might be done. At that period in history, having a working model likely either wouldn't have done much good or would have advanced things no faster than history records.

I would suggest that we are somewhere in that 'very early days' phase right now. In terms of functional examples, we have a significant fraction of the entire planetary biosphere - and we are learning fast. But we still don't have the genetic equivalent of 'E=mc2' or Newton's Laws or the like to let us confidently make predictions about how something is most likely to work because we know enough of the basic principles on which we are confident it 'must' work.

My 2c worth,

Todd