ancient mantras can be disturbingly reinterpreted by science

What is your impression of the highlighted sentence? Does it have a positive or negative sense? Does it want to say that in spite of our modern sciences we are not yet able to reinterpret ancient mantras perfectly or does it mean that our new technologies have become so modern that they can not any more reinterpret our ancient mantras?

Context:

The new ‘transgenic artists’ are engaged in more unsettling activities. Eduardo Kac’s 1999 work Genesis uses a ‘synthetic gene’ which is a translation into Morse Code of the line from the first chapter of the Bible, with obvious implications – ‘Let man have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’ The Morse Code is converted into DNA base pairs according to a conversion principle specially developed by the artist for this work and the ‘gene’ is then incorporated into bacteria. The cultures are shown in gallery conditions and participants on the Web can turn on an ultraviolet light in the gallery to trigger real biological mutations in the bacteria, altering the order of the letters in the original biblical sentence. Kac’s attitude appears ambivalent. While positing a view that we have reached a point at which ancient mantras can be disturbingly reinterpreted by science, the work manifests a clear enthusiasm for participating in its new technologies.