Evolution has traditionally been portrayed as slow and steady, but a breakthrough study in 2011 showed that nothing could be further from the truth. Charles Darwin would be amazed by recent discoveries.

Scientists started looking for examples of “rapid evolution” and wherever they looked they found examples of fast change that occurred in very short periods.

Now a gene has been isolated that is specifically responsible for rapid evolution. During the past ten months more than US$ 50 billion has been poured into new business ventures and the large pharmaceutical firms have been quick to capitalize on the unbounded promise of this technology.

Designer animals (and people!) are of course the #1 target, but in the meantime new vegetables, milk and food products have been produced that would have been unthinkable ten years ago.

Organisms evolve in response to changes in their environment, or just by chance. Now, with the discovery of the “evolution gene” any living organism can be primed ready for evolution at the drop of a hat.

“We can ‘instantly’ change living organisms to mutate and evolve any way we choose,” says GeneBank’s Art Frome.

High-speed evolution had been theoretically predicted for a long time and is now starting to look like ‘quite normal’, and certainly attainable with the discovery of the ‘evolution gene’.

Just stop a moment to think what the implications could be for you, your family, your business, a country and the world. What could be the new challenges facing regulators?