You might want to read this (7 page PDF) twice: "Recent advances in synthetic biology enable the reconfiguration of neural circuits within live animals, making it possible to reprogram their behaviours, and create animal forms of artificial life. While fulfilling human design goals, such systems actively preserve their autonomy, self-maintenance and self-regulation, which could create a conflict disrupting the functioning and persistence of either host organism or the synthetic module incorporated in the host." In other words, if we rewire a living beetle, what happens if the beetle reasserts its own autonomous behaviour? Note that we're not asking whether we should rewire living neural networks - we're already doing that - but rather, what happens when we do. When you think about it, societies and educators face the same sort of problem with their students - what happens when the student's we've taught begin to assert their own independence (possibly subverting the system that educated them in the first place)?
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