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Frankenstein Time
Responding to the announcement that the Human Genome Project was complete, President Clinton gushed that "Today we are learning the language in which God created life."
Maybe. Or maybe we are just trying to steal his job.
When last seen, almost two hundred years ago, Dr. Frankenstein's monster was heading off into the frozen wastes of the Antarctic. If he's still around, he ought to come back. It's safe now. This is Frankenstein time.
It's hard to imagine many societies more arrogant, thoughtless or poorly equipped to deal with the fascinating, even miraculous Human Genome Project that the United States at the beginning of the 21st century. Although researchers from all over the world worked on the map, the United States is expected to be the dominant force in the project. Politicians and exultant scientists were quick to sound caveats and talk about the need for safeguards and ethical standards, but the fact is there aren't any. And the recent history both of corporatism and technology suggests there won't be any. Powerful technologies unleashed are never easily controlled. What people can do, they will do.
The project itself was announced Monday like an NFL playoff game -- the U.S. might not have thought much about the evolution of genetic research, but it sure loves a high-stakes contest. Headlines all over the country announced that a cure for cancer, heart disease, aging, depression and aging may well be imminent.
There were the crackpot critics spouting obligatory warnings and alarms, but they were given short shrift amidst all of the gee-whiz hype shrouding the announced that scientists from the non-profit HGP and researchers from Celera, a for-profit genetics company agreed to work together on producing the world's first genetic map.
The U.S., the world capital of technological hubris and arrogance as well as the center of global technological development, may be the most unfortunate repository for so much of this research. The U.S. is also the home of many of the corporations that will attempt to profit from it. In the Corporate Republic, every new bit of science and technology goes into mass-marketing, hype, and product development. That's where the human genetic map is heading, for all this week's chatter about dramatically improving the human condition.
There is absolutely no doubt that great benefit will come from the gene map, or that many of its creators have the best intentions. But there are also grim dangers. Unthinking technology is always dangerous technology, and few great scientific projects have ever been rushed to completion with as little public consideration as this one.
No presidential candidate has ever made technology a serious campaign issue, unless it's to warn about sex online or to urge the distribution of V-chips and blocking software to protect children from techno-driven culture. Only a handful of educational institutions in America teach technology well, or even at all, concentrating mostly on keeping kids away from dirty pictures online. Discussions surrounding the ethics of technology are unheard of outside very few academic circles. Only a handful of Americans even know what the genome project is, let alone what it might unleash. Online, 15-year-olds who master Linux boxes think they understand technology itself, and it's curious, often erratic and ominous history. In America, the best minds in the country are holed up in California think tanks dreaming up wireless phones and hand-held computers that access sports scores 24/7 so that fans won't have to bother to turn on the car radio for results or wait two minutes for their e-mail or stock prices.
Fertility drugs are a perfect metaphor for -- and a warning to the world -- of America's insane approach to complicated issues like this one. Critics are quickly dismissed as Luddites or simpletons. In the U.S., couples are applauded for bringing six, seven, even eight children into the world at once even though medical experts warn that such children face grave physical risks and emotional problems. President Clinton, who called the genome map the "most wondrous map ever produced by humankind" was also one of the first people to call up the parents of Iowa's McCaughey septuplets and congratulate them on bringing seven kids into the world, even though the parents admitted they couldn't afford or care for the children they'd given birth to, and whose lives, said doctors, had been put at extreme risk. Dozens of companies plied the family with gifts and money.
The Genome Project goes far beyond anything fertility doctors have tried to accomplish. The map promises to alter and control the nature of life itself, and hardly any Americans grasp what it might do, how it might work, or what kind of changes might be brought about by its use and misuse. The gene project also has mind-boggling financial and other commercial implications.
If it does, in fact, cure cancer and other diseases (it already has helped identify and treat some afflictions), a promise bio-tech and other medical research have been making for years, might it also eliminate other problems and diseases that aren't clear -cut or horrendous, such as depression and some forms of retardation?
Genetic research, warns medical ethicist Leon Kass, will inevitably lead to syndromes like "the perfect baby." The perfect baby, he warns, is the project not of infertility doctors, but of eugenic and genetic scientists. "For them, the paramount right is not the so-called right to reproduce but what biologist Bentley Glass called, a quarter of a century ago, "the right of every child to be born with a sound physical and mental constitution, based on a sound genotype.." To secure that right and achieve the requisite quality control over new human life, human conception and gestation will need to be brought fully into the bright light of laboratory, beneath which the child-to-be can be fertilized, nourished, pruned, weeded, watched, inspected, prodded, pinched, cajoled, injected, tested, rated, graded, approved, stamped, wrapped, sealed and delivered. There is no other way to create the perfect baby."
This scenario has been raised by visionaries like Arthur C. Clarke -- who reminds us that today's cure is sometimes tomorrow's disease -- and in prescient movies like "Gattaca," which foresee the unpredictable consquences of rushing to shape natural life, and the almost sure discrimination that comes from the inevitable use of gene characteristics to identify "healthy" and "unhealthy" characteristics, usually defined by medical and scientific elites and by their employers, profit-making corporations who invariably co-opt science and scientists.
Quality control is the perfect term for some aspects of genetic research. As of this week, quality control is truly possible for humans. Parents invevitably, even understandably, will seek perfect children.
On the national political or civic level, outside of rarified technological or academic elites, we haven't even even begun to discuss the social, cultural and ethical consequences of eliminating certain diseases, traits, addictions and affictions. The most coverage the Humane Genome Project has received in the media was the announcement that it was done, followed by the inevitable mega-hype.
In a nation that has already surrendered many privacy rights to invasive new software technologies, it's reasonable to assume that the genetic characteristics of most citizens won't stay a secret for long once they're screened. As a society, we may soon be able to get rid of obnoxious, anger and dissent along with cancer and heart disease.
Individualism and "wierdness" could show up in the new human map, along with tendencies towards anger, dissent, and bad skin.
Along with innumerable medical benefits the genetic map may also create staggering social divisions between people who can afford to use it to manipulate the birth and process -- the child-obsessed, highly competitive Boomers come to mind -- and the vast majority of the world who won't have access to it for years, if ever.
In the U.S., parents spent small fortunes on tutoring and other programs that get their kids into elite schools. What might they do to get their hands on the doctor who has access to the genetic map of the "perfect" kid? Parents with resources will inevitably seek to breed children who conform to particular notions of beauty, intelligence and desirability.
From the perspective of the rest of the planet, it's hard to see why the United States would use this profound new technology wisely and equitably when anyone who picks up any Ivy League school newspaper can find ads offering tens of thousands of dollars for the eggs of brainy blonde preppies.
Much of this genetic information and bio-technology will fall into the hands of new corporatist genetic conglomerates, who already promote conformity and homogeneity and who already wage war against individualism and diversity of expression. Just imagine what will they do with the Human Genome Project, which now gives them the tools to market health, happiness and longevity. What parts of the map will they sell, and to who, and for how much? Who will get access to these research and who won't? And more importantly, how can this information be unleashed in a society which hasn't even seriously considered these issues?
Frankenstein was right when he told his doctor-creator that it was a sin to create things one doesn't take any responsibility for. He was right then, and he's right now, and a lot more timely. The hubris described in Mary Shelley's brilliant novel published in 1818 is a hallmark characteristic of 21st century America.
For all that this research is being hailed as the greatest boon to mankind, it could just as easily become humanity's greatest nightmare. "How dare you sport thus with life?" asks Frankenstein of his creator, who loved technology but was impatient when it came to thinking much about how he was going to use it. The monster never got an answer. Now we're all waiting.
Hey legislators, get out of our procreation decisions.
You don't want a child, you want a human as property to have complete control over. The job of a parent is to produce a UNIQUE INDEPENDENT PERSON capable of living on their own and makes their own decisions. It is not like coding a program or creating a machine to specs.
ummm...even though we have a DNA map, we still have only a hazy concept of what any of this genetic information does, and how the different pieces interact with each other.
Not to diminish the announcment, but what we have done so far is basically number-crunching. It will be quite a while before we can actually do anything useful with this information (of course, it's good to think about what we WANT to do with it now, but there's no need to panic!)
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"It was people! People soiled our green!"
Bad skin sounds like a genetic thing to me, not caused by environmental factors.
I have heard that a particular gene makes one more likely to become an alcoholic (and yes, this was in a psychology class). It doesn't make you become an alcoholic, people who don't have this gene can still become alcoholics, and some people who have this gene don't drink at all. But if you do drink, this gene makes it more likely that you'll become addicted. That's the kind of thing I think Katz is talking about.
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$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
"Agh! My [feature] is too [adjective], cuz you guys messed with my genes! I hate you!"
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$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Most poor people work like a dog to keep a roof over their head. My biggest problem when I was teaching in an inner-city school in Houston was that I could not get in touch with parents because they were working -- one poor mother was working three jobs, she often left the house at 6am in the morning, and did not get home until 10pm. Yes, I verified this myself -- I'd sent a note home with her kid, it did not come back signed, he told me his momma wasn't home when he went to sleep and was gone by the time he got up, and yeah, it was true. But what was she supposed to do, given that AFDC in Texas at the time was $172 per month (with $10 extra for each additional kid -- wow).
The poor do not, and never have, received a free ride in life. I am saddened by the fact that so many people born with a silver spoon in their suburban mouths are so ignorant about so large a portion of the U.S. population.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
You just put your hands on why it is that white supremist 1950's sci-fi writers were so wrong (Cyril Kornbluth, anybody?). The notion that "rich people are rich because they're genetically superior" is stupid when most of the world has no access to education or to economic resources that we here in the United States take for granted (simple things like, say, reliable banks -- in most 3rd world nations, there is no real monetary system worth the name).
Even in parts of the United States, access to education and economic resources is extremely difficult -- take, for example, Washington D.C., where there are basically no schools, no jobs paying above minimum wage, and no access to the banking system for the majority of the population (i.e., those who actually live there, vs. thus who merely work there sucking up our tax dollars). I daresay that it easily takes as much intelligence to set up a profitable drug dealing business in D.C. today as it takes to build any successful business, the only deal is that one is illegal and thus has less competition from people with better access to the banking system, while the other is legal and thus impossible for someone without banking access to crack.
Note: If you dispute the part about "access to the banking system": if poor people had access to the banking system, do you think that check cashing stores would be the most profitable (legal) businesses in the inner city?
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Even in this country, the richest in the world, close to half of all children are being raised in poverty, with the resulting stunting of intellectual and physical growth. If we could solve this problem, we could double our economic production in two decades worth of time. As it is, alas, too many of the results of poverty are too severely damaged to contribute significantly.
I met someone who could have been the next Albert Einstein in my inner-city classroom eight years ago. He was that brilliant. Smartest kid I ever taught, anywhere, including in affluent suburban schools. Last I heard, he'd quit school and was dealing drugs on the street. What a waste.
Yeah, the genome project is good news for those (relatively few) individuals who suffer from genetically-caused illnesses. But let's not overstate the importance of this thing. There's maybe 0.5% of the population who could benefit from the genome project. As vs. good schools and good living conditions for children, which would eventually benefit all of us because of having a smarter, better work force and no longer having so many broken people hanging around dragging us down.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Most obesity in the United States today is not genetic in nature anyhow... it's a matter of self-indulgence. Too many fatty foods, too little exercise. Or, as the saying goes, "if obesity is genetic, why don't you ever see fat Ethiopians?" [i.e., you can't get fat if you don't eat!].
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
The kid I mentioned above, BTW, had a measured IQ of 105. But you could give him a problem, and he'd find a solution, usually a sneaky one that was oh-so-obvious once he pointed it out to you (but not otherwise). I had some kids in a "honors" class whose measured IQ was above 115, and they weren't anywhere near as sharp. But then, this kid's whole family was acknowledged to be sharp as tacks... they made the Mafia look like dullards. Why, they had a square mile of the 4th Ward locked up tight with the black tar and crack trade... despite there being a lot of folks bigger, meaner, and more terrifying by nature out there. Interesting how some runty little geeks can psych out a whole neighborhood that way into believing that this family was the second coming of evil incarnate :-}. (This is the same kid who, when another kid could not come on a field trip because of misbehavior, begged and begged for that kid to be able to come... I said "Why do you care, you hate that kid's guts anyhow!" and he just looked down at the ground and said "I know what he feels like.").
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
I suspect artificial genetic selection amongst Americans would favor blue eyes and blond hair. This, however, is also associated with the greatest risk for skin cancer. Blue eyes and blond hair have negative survival coefficient in today's world of Vitamin D supplemented milk, skimpy swim suits, and overall increased UV exposure due to declining ozone layer. Yet I bet you that of the babies who are "genetically enhanced", the majority will end up with blue eyes and blond hair.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Posted by 11223:
No, he's refering to genetic enhancements that can be made to children in the Trek universe for pay. (It's what World War III was about in TOS, and came up again in DS9).
Posted by 11223:
It was a troll as soon as it mentioned Natalie Portman (NPO stands for Natalie Portman Obsessives).
Posted by 11223:
Dear God no, I didn't mean to insult the entire human race that way. I meant it as an example of (pick closed-source program here) because then the dissasembly analogy holds.
Ok, since nobody seems to understand what this announcement is actually about, here's what it says:
We've managed to successfully disassemble Microsoft Windows. We now have the assembly that makes up the whole of Microsoft Windows in our hands. (Parts of it are missing, and other parts are junk assembly, like the parts that used to control DOS devices but are now almost dormant except for causing the occasional bug).
What can we do with this? Well, we might eventually be able to make Windows into a stable operating system, or even clone Windows from it. Except there's one problem - we don't know enough about the instruction set for the processor it was written for. See, we've been dealing with Z80 assembler all this time and are still having trouble understanding the modern Pentium (I*). So it'll take a while before we can do anything with it.
Translation table: assembler - genome, Windows - human, Z80 - fruit fly, Pentium (I*) - Human genetic process/protiens.
Suppose your parents had had access to this technology. Would you like to have had them use it to "improve" you? I certainly wouldn't have objected to better immunity to disease, stronger musclature, even better memory and senses, less stinky sweat, less of a tendency towards chubbiness, and so on. Things like looks are a bit more difficult an issue, due to subjectivity (Rubenesque or Kate Moss?), but certain things are a clear win or a clear loss, and I wouldn't object to anyone not wishing the latter on their kids.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
What is this contempt for scientists I've seen here lately? Of course they desire to expand human knowledge; that's their job. However, if you think that they don't consider the ethical ramifications of their actions, then you are SORELY mistaken.
The people best equipped to decide these things dedicate their lives to it. They might be scientists, but they usually aren't just religious fanatics who think they know best for everybody else. They generally have some training in ethics or bio-ethics, or know the technical and legal details involved, and the past case history as well.
I ask you, if Christians aren't backward or superstitious, then would they ever learn this knowledge in the first place, or question anything about their universe? My answer is this: Some Christians are not backward or superstitious.
In fact, I'm sure that many of the scientists you so roundly condemn who worked on this project are Christians. The odds are with me on this one. Maybe they're doing your god's will, and adding to his glory, and you don't even know it.
Instead of condemning your faith or your zealotry, I will simply quote your bretheren. "The Lord works in mysterious ways".
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Well, well, well. Now you've got my attention.
If Catholics aren't Christians, then who are the Christians? Name the sects, please; I'm really curious.
Also, while you're at it, are Jews Christian? I've heard that Jesus was a Jew. Or are Christians supposed to follow the example Jesus sets for the rest of us, and convert to Judaism?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Hmm. So Christians use a trust model based on the Bible, and Catholics extend this trust to Tradition. ("Do you wish to believe anything you hear from St. Augustine?")
;)
I'll stick to strong cryptography. When the PGP signature says "God" on it, I'll have to give up my Atheism.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Good quotes; I'll have to save them, to remind the local hate-mongering fanatics. However, they will continue to purport to "love God, but hate the sin".
:)
:)
I'm an Atheist, but that doesn't really matter for the purposes of this discussion. (otherwise, it wouldn't be a very fair discussion, would it?
Ultimately, it shouldn't be about denominations at all. If it isn't about the worth of individual people, then those people aren't being judged at all, and we should all avoid a religion that doesn't consider its people over itself. The people *are* the religion. Without them, God wouldn't have anyone around to worship him, and whatnot...
(I mean, really, how egotistical is that? Create people so they can bask in Your glory? He must have a God Complex, or... um... never mind.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I don't expect Jon Katz to be 100% correct in every story he writes. He's never been blatantly wrong, and his ideas still stand EVEN IF A CRYPTIC LITTLE technical issue is misrepresented.
I know that he makes me think more than any other slashdot author does, and he often has many ideas and viewpoints on a particular concept. They may be outlandish, but I like reading them.
In this article alone, I remembered things that I had long forgotten, books that I have read and doomsday/utopia ideas that I had thought of once and stuffed into the nether regions of my brain.
I like being exposed to as many possible lunatic ideas as I can. That's why I read slashdot :)
Take nation like Tukmenia or Kyrgyzia or Belorusia or Lybia. Or China. Not hard to imagine worse society, isn't it? At least, some americans still fight for their right, and sometimes even succeed.
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
The Cure of the ills of Democracy is more Democracy.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
Way down the line when we have many genetically engineered walking among us, the health care providers are going to charge more to insure natural (i.e., random) people because they will statictically cost more. Employers will ask that you submit your genome like they do now with your salary history. And while they can today *require* neither one, you *know* what happens to resumes that don't include. Your genome will become the guide to determine your place in society.
Truck drivers better have the enhanced vision gene. Engineers better have the enhanced memory and logic genes. Teachers better not have the pedophile gene. The legal department says we just can't afford to do otherwise.
The poor who cannot afford genetically manipulated kids will see their kids discriminated against. A whole new caste system will result out of liability reasons.
So long as "all men are created equal", the gov't/marketplace/society/etc. must treat us as such. Creating the unequals will create distincts "levels" of people which society will then stratify.
Nonetheless, if 99% of nations ban genetic manipulation, 1% will allow it. The righ will travel there to procreate their perfect kids.
We will have the problem to deal with someday. It's already too late.
Hmmmm. I agree wholeheartedly with Jon on this, and I have not taken the luddite position on any other technologies to date.
The problem is two fold:
1. Genetics involves systems orders of magnitude more complex than the systems involved in nuclear power, space flight or anything else.
2. The problems are not technical ("We're fucked if this power station melts down") but social ("We don't the ability to do this because we will abuse it").
People are greedy. There is good evidence to support the notion that people will knowingly do immense and certain long-term harm to themselves and others in return for fairly slight short term gain. See drug addiction. See smoking. See cheating on you wife with that student. See buying a new dress when you know you can't afford it.
So, we can be fairly sure that if you give someone the ability to have children who are genetically modified to be good at sports, everyone will want to have children like that. No one is too worried about the process going wrong and producing wierd freak psycho killer mutants. Everyone is worried about the process going bang to plan and producing loads of children genetically modified to be good at sport.
It scares the shit out me, anyway.
Now, there are areas where people worry about tech disaster - in particular GM food, where some people think we'll cause some kind of genetic melt down. I tend to agree that there is an element of the doomsayer situation you mention above. However, I also say that we know even less about what we are doing with the genetics that we do with the nuclear power.
However, the real area of concern is not this tech disaster area. It's the social area. This is not a tech problem, it's a social one - but until now it's merely been a hypothetical social problem of interest to philosophers and sci fi writers. But most of all, it's been of interest to almost no-one, and no-one has been thinking about it hard enough. And here we are in a position to start acting on it.
I'm scared, so should you be.
Yesterday, they patented Bismati rice. Idle fuckers.
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I'm not sure I'm clear about your understanding of God and His job. Could you answer a couple questions for me:
Are you saying that genetic diseases and harmful mutations are the result of God's wisdom, and to counteract them would be wrong?
If we would be "doing God's job" to use genetic knowledge and technology to counteract genetic diseases, aren't we also "doing God's job" when we use medical knowledge and technology to counteract other diseases?
Besides, the whole situation was a setup.
Adam and Eve had no knowledge of Good and Evil until they ate from the Tree, so they really had no basic understanding of "right" and "wrong" at that time, and yet they were somehow expected to resist for an indefinitely long period of time the arguments presented by the snake that God created and planted in the Garden of Eden.
Even a person already possessed of such knowledge would have a tough time in that situation.
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-Rich (OS/2, Linux, BeOS, Mac, NT, Win95, Solaris, FreeBSD, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
I personally won't have a child UNTIL I can engineer the way they turn out.
the incineration of Dresden
Last I checked Dresden was incinerated by US bombers, which are rather tenously connected to Europe.
How is preventing - say - Down's Syndrome or Spina Bifida worse than penicillin? Or any of the other medical advances we've encountered in the last few decades?
no taxation without representation!
Yeah right, the whole world's gonna change and it's gonna be a brave new world.
And we're all going to live on the moon by the end of the 1980's.
Surgeons mapped the heart in the 1600s. It wasn't until the 1900s that we had transplants.
Just because we have a map telling us gene sequences, that doesn't mean we have the technology to start doing anything revoluntionary with them. At best, we'll be speeding up what farmers have been doing for years - selective breeding / genetic engineering.
We've got a map of the stars too. I don't know of anyone taking holidays on Tau Ceti, do you?
--
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
It's our time now. You messed up big times too many times in the past.
Why can't I grow a new thumb, while measly reptiles can?
From now on, we will evolve ourselves. We will reshape ourselves. We will cure ourselves and we will exterminate ourselves, by our own means.
Exist dangers in genetic manipulation (and maybe even in genetic mapping) but that is for people giving it a bad use. The same could be said about cars (how many people die daily by accidents?), scissors (can be used as a weapon, but also can be used in surgery or for eating food), or almost any tool/discovery/advance/etc. Discovering america, internet, even slashdot itself could be viewed as something harmful or that could harm or kill or whatever negative that you can think, but the real evil always is the man that is behind the bad use of it.
:), but still is the misuse the problem, and most times the for sure beneficial uses overweight all the maybe possible not very good uses.
Could exist tools/technologies/discoveries that we are not prepared yet to use? maybe (the first one I could think is making black holes in the backyard
This is possibly one of the worst ideas I've ever heard. Equality doesn't exist. It never did. It's a made-up concept. Our pattern-seeking brains try to divide and judge and measure and declare things as being equal, even when it's wildly inappropriate.
It's pretty easy to measure the size of the steak you got off the tribe's hunt, or to figure out how much food your family will need to survive a winter. It's easy to look at two trees and figure out which one is taller. The brain is wonderfully well-suited for that.
But if you look at two people, how can you really tell which one is absolutely more beautiful? Or intelligent? I might prefer person A in both cases; you might think person A is smarter but uglier than person B; a third party might disagree with us both. And there is no way to know who is right. There have been attempts to quantify subjects like intelligence, but despite the widespread acceptance of IQ as a measure of intelligence, it is actually a lot more complex than most folks realize. One widely-respected theory holds that there are seven kinds of intelligence, of which verbal and mathematical are only two. Some of the others are social intelligence, artistic skills, and kinesthetic talent (the knowledge of where one's body is in space). How are you going to measure these things by looking at potentials in a gene strand?
You're trying to map ideals based on objective goals ('everyone should be equal') to a fundamentally subjective area, genetics. Which gene sequence is better, blue eyes or brown eyes? If Baby Johnny is going to be inclined to be highly artistic but very poor verbally and mathematically (ie, "not too bright"), do we trade away some of one for another? And what if Baby Jane is better at *everything* than Baby Sue is, and we reprogram Baby Jane by giving her some of Baby Sue's genes, so as to make them 'equal'? Aren't we losing something here?
Our cultural values have absolutely nothing to do with the viability of the species. You are trying to replace the accumulated wisdom of about five billion years' worth of evolution with transient value judgements.
This is not a step to take lightly.
I just realized I got the names backwards in the key paragraph here. *doh*
:-) Our understanding will never be perfect... but, if you accept that we've been given the keys to a nuclear reactor, wouuldn't it be prudent to develop the ability to read the manuals first?
:-)
What I should have said was: If we enhance Baby Sue to match Baby Jane, aren't we losing the natural variety of genetic expression?
I also said 'five billion years of evolution' -- I think, looking back, that this is wrong. Isn't it believed that life on Earth started around 1 billion years ago?
Whatever the exact number of billions, we have been evolving for a LONG time. It strikes me that doing much more than trying to read and understand what's going on could be very dangerous indeed.
It's a bit like cavemen having just been given the keys to a nuclear reactor. We can go running in there, hooting and hollering, and start pushing all the buttons and fiddling with the dials -- or we can go slow, and figure out *exactly* what the buttons and dials do before we start adjusting things.
If we are truly cavemen in this area, it might take another century or so to develop a solid understanding of what we're doing. I assume 100,000 years won't be necessary.
Hopefully the scientists involved aren't too geeky... they'd never RTFM.
Well, now you're getting into the realm of science fiction. I would say that should we ever have a world with companies using viruses as advertising vehicles, we'll certainly have reached the stage where all individuals will have a full genomic sequence in their medical history and there will be a way to "restore from backup". Again, this is purely "Diamond Age" type stuff...
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I agree with both ends of that. I have Katz turned off in my prefernces, but when a labmate told me he had written a genome piece, I felt compelled to read it and provide some informed feedback on his thoughts on sexbots or whatever.
My first reaction was surprise that there was nothing obviously stupid on anything he wrote. The second was that there is no real insight or thought, either. He obviously has some preconceived notions (Frankenstein, eugenics, privacy, corporations) and spun it out for a few pages.
Some more comments:
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Well, first I want to make it clear that I'm not saying, "There's nothing to worry about. Go back to Ally McBeal." There are major concerns that need to be addressed philosophically and legally. My objection is to Jon Katz's assertions that no one is taking these concerns seriously except him and a handful of others. Essentially, he's pushing the stereotype of the scientist as a soulless mercenary nerd with no thought to the consequences of his research. It's particularly galling coming from The Protector Of The Geeks, and particularly galling to see it applied to my friends and coworkers who have just busted their asses for two years to get the genome data into the hands of the public and out of the grasp of Celera.
Anyway, here are the issues I know of:
Seriously, what would/could stop(besides cost & complexity) the next generation of spammers from releasing a gene changing virus (or nanites for that matter) that change your DNA
I've got to think that's illegal under existing US law.
Man, 748 comments so far! No wonder Slashdot keeps running his rants!
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Rubbish, Christianity has the full weight of Divine Truth behind it [ . . . ]
That depends on if the Bible is true, and a critical eye can easily see that it is one of the most flawed pieces of "literature" on the planet.
[ . . . ] and anyone who has accepted the love of the Lord can feel that in their hearts everyday.
This is the "If you feel it, it is true" argument. People who are drunk often feel like they "really love" their friends. People on acid see all sorts of strange things. Do those feelings validate the experience? Does it not strike you as interesting that religion is called "the opiate of the masses"?
Ultimately every person on the planet should realise the Truth of our Lord, irrespective of the colour of their skin.
Wrong, you need to wake up from the dreamworld you are living in and realize that you believe in a lie. If you aren't living in a lie, then would you please drink deadly poison for me? The Bible says you can do this and survive.
The only people who are to be hated are those who revel in Satan's unholy evil.
There is no evidence of Satan, hell, or demons. There is no evidence of heaven, God, souls, or angels. There is no evidence of Santa Claus, Zeus, or leprechauns. Your religion is a myth.
Those heathen sinners could do anything and it wouldn't suprise me, since they, like all who do not follow in the path of our Lord, are destined to Hell anyway.
Let me be graphic to illustrate a point: I am better than your God. I held down Jesus and had sex with him, and he liked it!
Tell me, how can I blaspheme like that and survive? In fact, I have blasphemed like this every day for almost three years now. And yet I'm happier now than I ever was when I was a Christian! Is your God too weak or too stupid to do anything about it? Shame on you for the liar you are!
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
Umm.. and how many people suffered and died so that we could get to this point? Trial and error is easy to excuse when you don't have to deal with the errors..
Well, I'm not a very optimistic guy. I don't claim that trial and error is the best way to do things, because it is almost never the best way to do things. I just don't know if I have enough faith in humanity to believe that they would do otherwise.
Surely, a lot of people died because of nuclear foolishness.
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
So now corporations are going to use genetic engineering to eridacate geeks? Lovely.
:)
And who do they think would be actually doing that work anyway, hmmm???? It's not the PHBs who have the know-how to pull that off. It's the geeks.
Geeks are vital to big evil corporations. Who else would know what to do when the CEO's PC freezes if they get rid of geeks?
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
Sometimes I just wish that the magma bubble under Yellowstone Park would pop, flood 1/2 of the
continental USA, plunge the world into decades of cloud-shrouded, plant-killing darkness, and put a hold on this charade. But, we'll just have to wait and see. It's about 4,000 years overdue, or so say the geologists.
That's interesting - do you have any more references on this? That would seriously suck! But it sounds quite intriguing...
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
This piece is mostly useless fear mongering IMSNHO.
The human genome project will be handled most likely like any other huge and potentially dangerous human advance. People will first misuse it, they will get burned very badly, and then they will learn how to control it and how to use it in such a way as to benefit them and not burn them.
Think about nuclear weapons, which are much more immediately destructive. At first, nobody really know the extent of their power, and we had to nuke somebody to find out. Nowadays, we're using those advances for nuclear power and nuclear science, and getting by with the advantages and refraining from destroying ourselves. We have for the most part reached a reasonably stable state with nuclear power, EXCLUDING the possibility of crackpot governments nuking everybody back to the stone age.
Same thing with genetic science that may or may not come out of this accomplishment. First we'll fuck up and curse ourselves, then we'll learn, and it will become beneficial. But during the process, Jon Katz will have plenty of material to worry about and tell us about how the world is going down the shitter. (Monsanto branching out into the area of genetically engineering evil corporation's perfect workers, etc.)
remember that when there is a tech advance, (just like computers and the internet) it's not just the "Dr. Evil"'s that get it. So do we. So stop worrying, be careful, and get out there and kick some ass.
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
Every technology has both good and bad applications. The internal combustion engine revolutionized transportation and also revolutionized warfare. Germ theory provided us with a powerful weapon against disease -- and against each other.
There is no technology so good it can't be applied to destructive ends. Nor is there any technology (I believe) so destructive that there are no positive applications. By the logic Katz uses here, we should immediately stop all biological, chemical and medical research.
-- Old Man Kensey
Your comments re depression got me to thinking...the psychiatrist who treats me for bipolar disorder (manic depression) points out that there's a high degree of correspondence between BP and creativity. Might we throw away a great wealth of creative energy in trying to make people "normal" genetically?
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
Think about it -- Space Seed/Star Trek 2, The TNG episode were kids' super-immune systems attacked normal people, the whole thing w/ Bashir in DS9...
It goes on and on...
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
There are only 2 classes of things that this information will ever be used for: body image improvement eg, weight loss, body sculpting, and replacement therapies are too expensive from an insurance company's/HMO's perspective like Multiple Sclerosis or HIV. Everything else will create nearly zero interest from any investors since the payback will be too far off or too low. Remember we're a nation of fat lazies or eating disorders and nobody wants to pay for long term care
Um, Mr. Katz... Frankenstein was the *doctor's* name. The monster was simply called, Frankenstein's Monster. There's a very, very big difference.
Of course, my thinking was "Hey, better being in a foul and depressed mood most of your life, but still being yourself, rather than being prozac-happy."
As for "there's nothing good about it!" -- look at how much of our art has come from depressed people. I do a lot of writing and I used to also paint often. I'm sure I speak for a lot of people when I say that, when I'm content (good relationships, good job, things are looking up), my writing suffers. I either write without conviction or I simply have nothing to write about.
But man, when life sucks -- or your mind has the perception that it does, there's suddenly lots of stuff to write about, and with conviction! Even if it's apathetic conviction, to coin an oxymoronic phrase.
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seumas.com
It's hard to imagine many societies more arrogant, thoughtless or poorly equipped to deal with the fascinating, even miraculous Human Genome Project that the United States at the beginning of the 21st century. Is it really that hard to imagine a society less equipped and more dangerous than America to deal with the HGP? Have you heard of a little place called Iraq? How about Iran? North Vietnam? How about, with their horrible record for human rights, China?
Headlines all over the country announced that a cure for cancer, heart disease, aging, depression and aging may well be imminent.
I see . . . So what you're broaching is the view that "We'll start changing people so they aren't different anymore. Geeks won't be geeks anymore (and that means no more stories benefiting off of to oppressed masses of brainy outcasts! oh no!). Not only that, but those individualistic types will no longer have cancer or heart disease -- just another attempt to normalize everyone into a single massive stereotypical American! Egads!"
In the Corporate Republic, every new bit of science and technology goes into mass-marketing, hype, and product development.
Yes. This is called "capitalism". Not always a bad thing; sometimes a very terrible thing. Nevertheless, capitalism provides the fuel for these projects to be undertaken. The shear manpower and resources for this project would not ever be available unless those directly involved were to somehow benifit. Certainly, no scientist involved would have offered his or work wholly pro-bono! It would be nice, albeit impossibly Utopian, if some government agency or big corporation, out of the goodness of their heart, offered to setup and maintain a massive storage database of data from the HGP, free to all who wished to use it, but someone has to be responsible for providing services. As long as there is some public consensus and watchdog association formed to watch over these commercial entities and their use of the HGP information, then things should work out well. Let the HGP information be widely and cheaply available (sort of like putting freeware on a CD and charging a minimal cost so that you don't go broke paying for the media on which the software is provided) and let people and companies, within reason, do with that data as they wish.
might it also eliminate other problems and diseases that aren't clear -cut or horrendous, such as depression and some forms of retardation?
What the...? What isn't clear-cut about depression and retardation? These aren't things people look forward to their children having. Nobody says "Gee, I want to have a daughter who suffers from life-long clinical depression and cuts on her forearms with razor-blades, gets involved in abusive relationships to satisfy some masochistic thirst and get hooked on prescription pills!". Likewise, nobody ever hopes that their child will be born with mental retardation. 'Retardation' is not at all an uncertain word. It has a very clearly understood negative connotation. You certainly wouldn't (shouldn't) terminate a pregnancy because of retardation, but what if you had the means to prevent that from occuring and you could bring your child into the world healthy?
There is no connection between bringing physically "perfect" people and mentally "enhanced" people into the world through means of genetic alteration -- and bringing someone into this world who doesn't have heart-disease, cancer, retardation, clinical-depression or even psychopathic tendencies (although the last one may be stickier when you really think about it, in depth).
Anyway, the point being that there are alterations in genetics which are very certainly just to enhance a person -- others are to bring them into the world healthy so that they can have the same right to a life that anyone else should. The limit I see a need to place (if we do need to place any kind of limit on anything?) would be on enhancements to make you stronger, faster, smarter, prettier, more outgoing, than you otherwise would have been. In other words, if you were going to be born with a geekish personality, there should be no alteration before birth that would lead you to, instead, be some popular jock that everyone will fall in love with. However, if you were going to be born with a geekish personality and you were going to have severe asthma, chronic-depression, alchoholism, and (perhaps because your mother smoked, drank or did some narcotic during pregnancy) a major deformation, such as no right arm -- I think it should be an absolute right, if not moral obligation, to provide you the "medical attention" pre-birth (or even pre-conception?) to alleviate these things.
I know, some of what I'm saying sounds a little freakish and too much like social-engineering. I'm not sure that I couldn't or wouldn't change my mind on many related issues, but to me, these seem to be very valid and reasonable suggestions or concerns.
Allowing someone to be brought into the world in sound physical and mental health is unrelated to bringing a "perfect child" into the world. We need to shrug off these seemingly religiously imposed concerns that make us feel as if any change we offer goes directly against nature or 'god'. We have to do what we have to do and if nature or 'god' sees fit to bring a child into this world with major limitations, there is no reason we should not afford the service to remove those unfair limitations. Again, we're talking major things like sight, hearing, walking. A far cry from changing hair color, eye color or voice.
In a nation that has already surrendered many privacy rights to invasive new software technologies
What about a nation that has surrended absolutely all personal traits and deficiencies to being "Gods whim" or "the way nature intended it"? I say fuck nature. We have the power and the tools in our grasp to help people. To help the world. Yes, there are risks of exploitation, as there are with everything. But that should be no reason to completely avoid this, like some kind of ethical plague. HGP does have the potential to be the greatest salvation of (and by) mankind. We risk people who will use it to make the perfect blonde-haired, blue-eyed model, but we also have the ability to alter our species to the point where much of the ocean, high altitudes, other planetary atmospheres and such are compeltely tolerable. There is nearly nothing that we will not have the power to do, so long as we have the judgement to prevent the instances of obvious misuse. Nonetheless, it is out there and if someone whether or not it is ever misused or how we control it, it cannot be put back in the back. The mapping exists and will forever be available.
it's reasonable to assume that the genetic characteristics of most citizens won't stay a secret for long once they're screened.
Well, gee, because privacy laws suck and more rights are given to corporations than individual humans, let's just do away with anything that we can not afford to give privacy to? The problem then, isn't the mapping -- it's the privacy. Point the gun at the right target!
As a society, we may soon be able to get rid of obnoxious, anger and dissent along with cancer and heart disease.
Bah. As a society, we've been trying to do this forever. Where has it gotten us? Look at the variety of geeks, jocks, super models and what have you. There's more variety in people and personalities than ever before. Besides, just because we can genetically alter people, don't you think that there has to be some way that nature -- should we screw up too much -- will fight back? Chaos is a funny thing. Genetically weed dissent and anger out of the human being and I bet it reappears, like a fungus between your toes that you can't quite scrub away.
I'm not in favor of the possibilities of wiping out human emotions -- any of them. In fact, but for extreme chronic and deadly depressions, I'm even greatly against any chemical/drug treatment of it. So you can see how I feel elsewise.
On a side note, genetic modification could sometimes be a good thing, Jon. Perhaps a little more tendancy toward 'perfection' would have given you the natural urge to run a spell-check on this article to catch all of the double-words, typos and miswordings (it's Human Genome Project, isn't it? Not Humane Genome Project?). I thought you were a professional writer?!
I agree with much of what you've stated here. There are great risks and dangers and potentials for exploitation of this information. This is not a limitation of science, the information itself or of right and wrong -- or even of nature or religion. Any harmful or, likewise benificial, results of how the HGP data is used will reflect the quality of the human race. If we have a propensity to destroy ourselves, HGP will serve to do that for us. If we have the overwhelming desire to create a "perfect race" that self-destructs, that too will happen. If we have the want to build bio-engineered humans that can go terraform planets, we will. And if we want to rid the world of disease and offer humanity greater chances in life, we will also do that.
Whatever is done, will be a marker of the wisdom and need for humankind. What we do with this will determine what our value is and ever was -- as well as whether or not we deserve, as a whole, a future in this world. It might turn out wonderful or it might become a disaster, but it certainly isn't going to "go away".
And yes, the whole thing makes me as 'uneasy' as it probably makes most people. As cool as this is, there are so many unknowns and areas open to abuse. We'll have to wait and see what happens . . .
(Sorry, like I said, I was in a nit-picking mood. I can't believe I sunk so low as to be so critical to Katz... Hell, I usually like the guy and think everyone else is being a perpetual dick to him... Oh well. I'm a bad, bad boy... Maybe I need some genetic alteration...)
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seumas.com
- This is just a map. At this time we can't say "These genes control eye colour, these genes control hair colour". We have just a long sequence of letters, a series of convenient landmarks on the overall picture of the human genome, for a set of individuals.
- Although, given that, for a large part, these entries are largely identical: much of our DNA consists of instructions to build *people*. It's not like C code, where you can swap whole lines around and still work: more like bytecode - if I fiddle with this bit it might work, but it's dicey...
- Don't blame science for opening up ethical quandaries: it doesn't care. Science is about tools and techniques. Like with the abortion process, those involved leave the ethics arguments up to others. Science doesn't do right or wrong: it just says "This is the way stuff works. Use it as you will". No one chooses to argue about whether OpenGL is ethical or not: they choose to attack JohnCarmack et.al for what they create with those tools.
- Also, if you don't believe in a creationist universe, you are aware that this is a genetic system. It just works. It isn't well structured. It's only here because other variants didn't work.
Of course, everything I said could be wrong.... and today's pet project has
Malda: Hemos, bring me the brains! .. socio-economic effects by the post-columbine third-wave era in ecopolitical dogmatic...
Hemos: Yeees maaaster.
Malda: *squish* Gosh, there wasn't that much there, you sure you got the right brain?
Hemos: Yeah, bird brains.. right?
Malda: Fool! We'll use it anyway, though.
* Malda casts feign life.
Katz: *groan*
Malda: It's alive! IT'S ALLLIIIVVVEEE!
Katz:
Malda: Uh oh. Ego^H^H^HHemos, quick, activate the lameness filter!
Hemos: Yeeesss maaaster.... *gurgle*
Katz: SEXBOTS new paradigm shift think outside the box...
Malda: HURRY!
* CLiCK! *
Slashdot Audience: Hey, when are you gonna fix Katz?
Malda: Ask me about it again and I'll delay fixing him by 24 hours!
And there you have it.. now we have a frankenkatz on slashdot writing about frankenstein. Wonderful.. slashdot creates infinite katzian loop, film at 11.
Since we know -- here's another example -- that many people post before they bother to read or understand, I just want to make one point in what I hope turns out to be an ingelligent conversation on this topic, rather than another degenerating and embarrasing round of posturing..I'm not against the Human Genome Project, nor does the column suggest in any way that it shouldn't have been done or completed. The issue here is how is society supposed to deal with its many consequences. Here's the lst of a series of posters who are sort of
But remember..this isn't an attack on the HGP, which has astounding potential for good..But it also has astounding potential for evil..Who's going to work on sorting out its consequences is the only question being raised here? If you want to attack me, just e-mail or open a thread..We can actually have a great conversation here and people will be reading. I hope they don't end up, as usual, just e-mail me and shaking their hads at the handful of you that like to whip off completely meaningless and incomprehensible posts like this.
jonkatz@slashdot.org
Every new technology has the potential to be profoundly dangerous to someone. It would, indeed, be a grievous error to argue that we should therefore cease and decist in developing new technologies; however, too many of us are, in our arrogance, far too eager to do the opposite and flip the bird at (or just ignore) anyone who urges caution, particularly in our own areas of expertice.
You have made what is perhaps the best argument for us, the vanguards of new technologies, to be particularly cautious in what we choose to pursue, investigate, and disclose. The truth is that we are moral agents, that technologies have moral consequences, and (I'm borrowing a bit from existentialist philosophy here) to fail to take ownership of the moral consequences of our actions and discoveries is the highest form of moral failure. There is something sick about the modern western scientific tradition that causes it to exalt knowledge for its own sake, and dismiss cautions regarding the content and potential of that knowledge. Our exaltation of "science" and our obliviousness to its moral implications causes us to charge agead with projects like the HGP, and only as the project nears completion do we even begin to think pragmatically about the effects this knowledge will have on our culture and our posterity.
God help us all.
My point was that Jon Katz seemed to have dismissed these and other examples of cultures that are/were far worse than what we are dealing with today, so as to make his story all the more sensational. In doing so, Katz lessened the tragedies those cultures represented.
Stupid people will be persecuted to the fullest extent allowed by law.
Of course, Nazi Germany is not the only such example, just the first that springs to my mind.
I do agree that our (US) culture is hardly ready to handle such technology -- it will be abused and perverted and so on for financial gain. In fact, it already has, by the media.
What dismays me most about Katz's inane comment, however, is how easily he dismisses other eras and cultures that were so much more repressive. Nazi Germany, certainly, should never be forgotten -- would my father be in a nursing home, the victim of multiple strokes, if he had grown up in a normal household with his parents and two sisters instead of an orphanage in a foreign land?
There are others as well, though. I'm sure that the southern whites would have loved to be able to breed the fight out of their slaves a couple hundred years ago. Even today, I'm willing to bet there are a lot of folks in China who would love to be able to make sure they only have male children -- but I guess that's better than abandoning or even killing female offspring.
Jon Katz seems to be no better than the popular media he mocks -- he takes a superficial look at something and makes his pronouncement and sits back to congratulate himself on a job well done.
In this instance, however, I have to speak up. I have personal experience with the results of a culture that would have been far worse at dealing with the Human Genome Project. And, I'd like Jon Katz, and others, not to forget it so blithely.
Stupid people will be persecuted to the fullest extent allowed by law.
I can see news reports from the future already:
"Big floppy ears are all the rage these days, ever since holo-star Reginald Queenster and his mate decided to have their latest child GM'd to order. Hospital bioengineering units are being swamped with requests for those cute big floppy ears and are scrambling to keep up with demand. "This designer kid tech sure has had a positive influence on our cash flow recently" said Malcome Roberts, Chf. Business Comptroller for the 1-valley fertilization and birthing unit. "Folks see these celebrity kids in the screens and just havta have one too! We haven't seen this level of customization since the large lips craze 30 years ago." Also, recent developments at BiTecH give parents the choice of designating features as heriditary or single-gen. "We do counsil prospective GMers carefully about the consequences of their choices, since, like giving a kid a funny name, they may grow up to resent the alterations and choose to not reproduce. But it is all about giving parents more choices" said Shila Paterson, a member of the client advisory board."
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Grammar Man saying "Its in about the same.."
Looks like we are all going to grammar hell in a hand basket.
Intelligent Design Theory is not Creationism
Yeah, well I have the full weight of a Pastrami Dip and Large Chili Cheese Fries behind me, and anyone else who has accepted such a meal will feel it in their hearts, too. In other words, your "divine truth" does not engender your belief system with more validity than anyone else's. Deal with it. Do not expect me to tolerate your intolerance of other beliefs.
ObFrankenstein: My Lord of Pastrami and Chili has just instructed me to devote my life to genetically engineering women so that they may choose to gestate industrial products and medical supplies in their wombs in exchange for monetary compensation.
I can see the fnords!
Pity either way, really. Read it again and maybe you'll discern the observations from the arguments.
I can see the fnords!
If you want likely, then there's this: A reactionary response to DNA twiddling renders it illegal, promoting an underground culture of gene tweaking that is demonized by the mainstream. Those who propose to decriminalize it are castigated, ridiculed, and threatened... until one day mainstream scientists will have learned enough to allow a sufficiently open-minded generation to recognize that genetic engineering is just a technique, morally no different than surgery.
Does it sound familiar? It should... it's the typical response of human societies to new and strange things that threaten their belief systems.
I can see the fnords!
And even when convicted, you get a nice little planet to call home and a hottie in a short little officer's skirt to help populate it. Sounds like a heckuva sweet deal to me.
I can see the fnords!
I mean, hell, we've polluted the environment, we've abused species diversity, and we're about to screw up global climate. Until we prove we have enough foresight to manage these things, we are foolish to tinker with the human genome. (Somebody moderate this parent up so that it's more visible.)
I can see the fnords!
Readers of Heinlein and other authors, and fans of RPGs like Traveller, Robotech, etc., know better -- that it's just another tool. But try arguing that to Bible-waving Fundamentalists, or to already paranoid oppressed minorities like homosexuals, Sufis, or Jon Katz.
Fortunately we have a new name for the practice of designing our offspring: "germline engineering." Hopefully it doesn't immediately scare the average Celica-driving Joe. First impressions count.
Really, it's probably too early to begin actively trying to engineer human evolution - for example, they just discovered recently that the mutation causing sickle-cell anemia also provides resistance against malaria. Eventually we will learn enough to engineer better children, or even tailor them for futures as lunar colonists or subterranean arcology dwellers. (Lord knows I have a few specifications for an engineered mistress lying around somewhere.) But if we tinker too soon, too ignorantly, we run the risk of winning the ultimate Darwin Award -- extinction.
In other words, the rule against self-modifying code still applies!
I can see the fnords!
But is it Frankenstein standard time or Frankenstein daylight time?
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
I can only hope.
Besides, up until now it has been the blind watch maker designing our hardware.
I like to think that a large body of intelligent minds directing enhancements is a much better option.
That's a low blow. Of course, by saying that, one does not stop at looking at the historical and cultural factors that made it so, say, like a "social" system that does not provides at all for the care of the elderly, so they have to rely on their children, and since women are poorer than men, well, better have a son rather than a daughter...
Now, how about saying "any social system where WOMEN are EXPECTED to be POORER than MEN?".
Ooops, you'd be shooting down a lot more "social" systems out there. Including your own.
--
Here's my mirror
Eugenics is an American program, the Nazi's just borrowed it and added guns.
Frankenstein is the Doctor, not the monster, arg!
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
I think people are a bit more diverse in their desires than you imply, and in the end problems like this should be self-correcting - once the plastic blonde sons decide they don't like the plastic blonde daughters, we'll be back to some kind of diversity.
:-( ). Many people would rather have a thinking kid than one that sits down, watches the tube and consumes all the time. I know I certainly would.
But wouldn't it be fabulous to breed out obesity, which - as far as I can tell - has caused nothing but health problems and misery?
Certainly this process is going to be driven by parents, not marketers, so I don't fear a lockstep future of Microsoft-loving drones (at least to the extent this does not already exist
I predict most people will desire a combination of their own attributes with genetically engineered ones. If we all wanted to find perfect kids, then we'd be searching the adoption agencies for those that struck our fancy instead of making them on our own.
I don't think any parent wants a dumb kid, so I would assume the population would grow smarter overall. Maybe too smart for its own good; smart people are often puzzlingly bad at things morons do perfectly. Perhaps in the future knowledge workers will be a dime a dozen, and a good janitor will be priceless.
If I wanted a child in this brave new world, I would take my genes + my wife's genes and have the combination checked and altered to prevent obesity, alzheimers, autism and other unpleasantness. I think that's the way most people will go in the end, and I'd argue it holds little danger.
D
----
Another article chock full of abuse (grammatical and towards the audience) and culture references. Yes, admittedly, the first thing I began thinking about as I read this article was Gattaca. Quite a poignant thinking man's movie, if you truly wish to delve into the discussion of genetic control. But how can we (those of us not locked in California think-tanks) begin to discuss this movie when we're immediately checking our myriad of handheld devices to find the latest sports scores and check our email to see what's happened in the two hour span it takes to watch the movie.
/.ers, fans of technology that they are, would still say that they'd rather not create their own "perfect baby". The ramifications are numerous. First, consider that your own imperfections are magnified. Second, a la "Gattaca", what if we are destroying free will in the sense that we breed humans for certain purposes like we breed livestock. Third, mystery. This is similar in a sense to my previous statement, only more frightening. By breeding perfection, exact physical details become knowns, and the mystery surrounding life itself begins to vanish. These are just the beginning of the possibilities.
First and foremost, no one's going to be making "the perfect baby" this week. Or next week. Secondly, besides the general Luddites who will, of course, cast aversion towards this next advance, I'm forced to think of the Matrix (yes, yet another cultural reference) while reading the article. Primarily, I'm referring to Tank's pride as he states he's pure human. If our society has shown any sort of pattern, it's (note: proper use of an apostrophe, as opposed to Katz's use) the tendency for backlash.
Yes, I'm fairly certain that given a poll (hint hint) that many
I'm not attempting to be a naysayer, nor am I attempting to argue the ethical nature of the discussion. It appears that Katz avoids ethics as well, beyond stating this is bad, and it gives us the power to create perfect babies, he provides no further positions and therefore pisses us off, because his argument has one leg. This is the crux of the Katz-haters, since he often follows one tangent and never returns to the argument at hand. But, I digress (see how easy that is?).
I'm merely stating that if America isn't ready for this, then the majority will stave off of it. This is the general case of everything in this country, until we're good and ready, we don't do much.
ALL HAIL BRAK!!!
Let's hear it for European culture. It produced Shakespeare, Bach, Mozart and Goethe. In more recent years, the Battle of the Somme, Bolshevism, the incineration of Dresden, and Treblinka. Guess we have some catching up to do.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I don't care, I just want a hottie in a short skirt. And if that means genetic engineering, then so be it!
Bad Mojo
Bad Mojo
"If you can't win by reason, go for volume." -- Calvin
If any of you have not read a book called the Forever War, do so. Written in the 70's. it details a war that is fought over interstellar distances, and follows culture from the 90's (which the author (sorry, I cannot remember his name, it has been a while) predicted pretty accurately in regards to culture) Through the next few centuries. The main character, being a soldier and subject to space travel at near realativistic speeds, basically ends up living for thousands of years in real time while only aging in regards to the realativistic time that he is so accustomed to, and has to readjust to a culture that does not wait for him to come home. By the end of the story, humankind has perfected itself and reproduces by cloning, while he and the sodiers that were off protecting humankind are viewed as throwbacks and are more or less relegated to thier own planets. It is an interesting thesis, and bears thought in light of the Genome being (mostly) mapped.
You say you want a revolution....
Bravo, Otter. You made some pretty good points there.
I can't claim to be objective here, being someone who's in this field, but it seems to me that Scientists are, if anything, *more* concerned with the implications of knowledge than the average person. As a scientist, you are probably fairly intelligent, well educated, and most importantly, trained to be critical of others, and especially critical of yourself.
Right now, most of the voices of doom seem to be coming from non-scientists. I'm not going to worry until I start hearing the same things in a peer-reviewed journal.
It is sciences job to not take any ethical view on issues. Of course this isn't possible but it is the goal to work towards. See what can be done and then you can gain the objectivity needed to decide what should be done. You can't be objective until you've already passed through the hype and unknown factors. If we start making laws to limit what can be done with this technology we open up the law to control all the things you are afraid of. What if only those who are rich enough to bribe the politicians are allowed to design their children to be intelligent and healthy? You'd be opening up a class war that'd be impossible to win. I'd be scared to death of having the majority rules on such an issue. All those people who watch day time tv and read tabloids and censor children from the Internet getting decide what kind of child I can have? No thank you! With every new technology there is a time of painful adjustment, mistakes are made and we learn from it. That is the only true way to really learn any lesson. Genetics is not the ultimate power, there is always something even more impressive on the horizon. For genetics that horizon is probably nanotech.. after that who knows?
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Along with innumerable medical benefits the genetic map may also create staggering social divisions between people who can afford to use it to manipulate the birth and process -- the child-obsessed, highly competitive Boomers come to mind -- and the vast majority of the world who won't have access to it for years, if ever.
I may be way off base here (if , e.g. my understanding of the term is incorrect), but aren't "boomers" in general past the reproduction age and therefore cannot reap the benefits of genetical manipulation of offspring (for good or for worse)?
But hey, what's a little chronological accuracy between friends?
Information wants to be beer, or something like that.
My, what witty reparte... you have stunned me, sir, and shown me the error of my ways! Yea, and verily, I have changed - from this point on, I will glory in my newfound knowledge of right and wrong, and be steadfast in the knowledge that I can simply dismiss any who disagree with me just by calling them a stupid-nah-nah-poo-poo-head!
On a more serious note... ad homenin arguments and character attacks are a refuge of the incompetent in any debate. If you were trying to troll, well, take this as a gentle bit of criticism. A good troll can be entertaining without having to descend to this level.
If you think you have a good argument, I suggest reading How to Win Friends and Influence People. Attacking someone is probably the simplest way to convince them that your point is not worth examining, let alone acception.
Finally, if you happen to think that you presented a rational, informaed argument on a fine point of political and phiosophical thought, well, let me know what you've been smoking - it sounds like it must be some damn sweet stuff.
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
The thought that tomorrow's kids could be created as perfect, attractive, genious, and physically superior scares the crap out of me.
Imagine how we will look by comparison.
Finkployd
Sorry, was not 'following the crowd' or trying to be 'clever'. I happen to think it is a very good movie, and relevant. Unfortunately is was very highly stylized movie, and not a lot of people cared for the retro-austerity the Director was in to.
This isn't just a knee-jerk response "DNA->Gattaca" - a fully sequenced human genome is required for the movies' premise. And I think the movie accurately explores some of the possible implications of the success of the Human Genome Project.
Besides, if you'd bothered to read the rest of my post, it had little to do with Gattaca.
-josh
If you haven't rented it yet, do so.
The completion of the Human genome project makes this version of the future a technical possibility, though I think it socially it is highly unlikely.
I find it amazing how Katz can spin almost anything into his alientated Geek gestalt. So now corporations are going to use genetic engineering to eridacate geeks? Lovely.
Somehow I doubt a culture that still idolizes Einstein (one of the more unique individuals of this century) is going to put all of its faith in human control and homogenization of all aspects of reproduction.
-josh
I would hope that readers of Heinlein know better than to swallow all the views of an author, just because his novels and stories are entertaining.
Many of the posts in this thread seem to assume that the reason for human existence is the continuation of the species...that is the question that needs to be answered, and until it is (beyond a shadow of a doubt), we need to tread very carefully. Katz may have used a little too much hyperbole, but his main point is right on. We shouldn't mess with nature too much until we know exactly why we are doing so. I love technology, but technology for technologies sake when lives are at stake is another matter.
The scale and consequences are just too big to ignore, and in seeking to understand the problem we only come face to face with ourselves. Yes, the technology can do great good, and it can do great harm. The technology, Science itself, is Value-less. E=mc2 has no inherent good nor bad within it. So while scientists continue to claim they are pursuing Truth, they neglect to remember that their science, being purely Objective, in incapable of telling us anything about the Subjective realm of Morals, Art, Spirit, and inter-subjective Culture.
Our problem today is that Science has scrambled ahead with flat, objective, value-less data about the world, far outstripping our deep, subjective, cultural ability to agree about how to handle the new found toys. It has been said that the biggest problem facing us today is not the economic or ecological crisis, but our inability to agree on what to do about it. With respect to the disaster, the Ecological Crisis, science gave us the techniques that created it (pollution), and science can give us the techniques to fix it (clean fuel etc.) -- the problem is We, as Humanity, can't bring ourselves to agree on a damned thing!
It's like, if you agree with what I say, then somehow I get the uppper hand -- I get to be right and you are wrong. This inner weakness precludes any genuine working progress.
Three things: This past week has prompted me to think about what life would be like in a nation that was run by a corporation such as that of the Ferangi or the Star Wars Corporate Sector versus that of the present day United States. Some would say that the United States is already there, but I beg to differ. When I mean a corporate nation, I am talking about a country where everything is under private control including all hospitals, law enforcement, and education. In the United States, the government still has control over education and law enforcement. The government does not control the hospitals, but it does control medicare and medicade for whom are elderly or cannot afford to cover regular insurance. In the insurance area, the reason why none of the insurance companies have many problems with the way they conduct business is because no person of any importance has been told that they could not receive care because their insurance is not supported. Until that happens, the insurance companies will continue to do what they do. The evolution of the United States has reached the point where it will have to face what its doing first hand, and the results will not be pretty. One of the issues behind the Civil War, which latter became one of the main ones, was slavery. The next war will also be based on the minor issue of slavery, except the society will be enslaved to technology ment to free it, and the war will be between the American society and the corporation
So if humanity's karma is knocked down to -1, does that mean that other intelligent civilizations will no longer see our trolling TV commercials and our offtopic cell phone transmissions? Although they might think the Areceibo transmission was +1, Funny.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Summary: The human genome project is going to ruin the world as we know it and its the fault of the U.S. for bringing out the worst of it all.
Sheesh, this sounds like a twisted modern day Mein Kampf: "Genetic engineering is going to ruin the world. Damn Jews!"
Newsflash! Nationalistic Crap Parades As Science Article.
News At 11.
We just need to string together these neutral, but hard-to-control technologies in useful ways.
Maybe we can use Napster to distribute Perfect Babies (TM).
-sk
The technological singularity appears to be on track. (Prediction was: sometime between 2005 and 2030.)
How do you compare this development with the approaching computers with processing speed equal to your own? (Of course, someone still needs to write the software. MS?)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The announcements by Celera/HGP are not as earth-shattering as their publicists would have you believe. (We are still a long ways away from a complete, annotated human genome, let alone a "Gattaca" scenario.) Of course, if you own Celera stock, you wouldn't want to be reminding people of how much work is left to be done ...
I find it interesting that your average person wholly supports the search for a cancer cure, yet will express fear about the genetic-modification bogeyman. Information, genetic or otherwise, can often be used for the greater good, or for less worthy reasons. Understanding the real current situation (i.e. we cannot breed a 'super human' yet) might help ease some of the hysteria IMNSHO. I wonder, would better public education make a difference here?
YS
"Arrr! The laws of science be a harsh mistress." -- Bender
This whole thing reminds me of something I read a while ago:
Two scientists inform God that they can create life better than he can. God is amused and says, "Ok, I'm listening". So one of the scientists reaches down to grab a handful of dirt to initiate the demonstration and God says, "Sorry, that's my dirt. You'll have to create life with your own dirt".
The point is that the building blocks were provided to us, we never created them. We're simply learning how to use them while the master looks on. Keep this in mind when you pat yourself on the back and say "I rule!". It's just a giant set of Legos...
--
Quantum Linux Laboratories - Accelerating Business with Linux
* Education
* Integration
* Support
*Condense fact from the vapor of nuance*
For some reason, I'm reminded of a thing I heard about that happened (I believe) sometime in the 1970's or so. The scientists who were working on recombinant DNA became worried about what they were doing. They entered into a worldwide moratorium on many types of research, for fear of what the technology would lead to. That research stopped for many years, until the researchers discovered two important things. First of all, the DNA work they had stopped doing was still going on, in nature, as it had been for millions of years. Second, what they had stopped doing was effectively the same as the selective breeding that has been going on since humans discovered agriculture (albeit faster and more precise).
That's what we have here. A faster and more precise version of something we're already doing. As Jon pointed out, people already spend quite a bit on the seeds of a person with an attractive phenotype (and therefore probably attractive genotype). So you want your children to have blond hair and blue eyes. OK. Why? Because you think that is attractive. Look over at your SO, the other half of the gene pool from which your child will spring. Blond. Blue-eyed. "Attractive". Coincidence? I think not. People have been weeding out undesirable genes for as long as the species has existed. This is merely a scalpel to replace the broadsword.
The other thing that interests me is this: There is a belief that when a species becomes intelligent, begins to use tools etc., evolution stops. That species is no longer shaped by the environment, but instead shapes its environment around it. If you think about it, natural selection is kind of passe these days. Natural selection is only concerned with birth and death. We have for some time had the ability to choose whether or not to have children. And, even as much death as there is in the industrialized world, only a small percentage of people die befor they reach the end of their childbearing years. What does this mean? It means that the death rate has little effect on evolution. And many of the strongest and smartest among us choose to have few children, or none at all. There is an evolutionary preference towards people who are too stupid to understand birth control. (also towards those who are smart enough to use it, but choose not to. That's a different thing, and I assume them to be a reasonably random distribution among the population, therefore an insignificant pressure). But this leads to an interesting thought. It's nature's own bootstrap code. First, the environment evolves us into intelligence. Intelligence halts evolution. But then that same intelligence gives us the tools to shape our own evolution.
Fascinating!
Pound! Bang! Bin! Bash! is this a shell script or a Batman comic?
between knowing the "text" of the human genome, and understanding its contents.
Even the task of locating all of the gene is a long long way off. Note that the popular press articles say there are between "30 to 100 thousand" genes. In other words, we really have no idea how many there are, let alone where they are, not even mentioning what they do.
Sure its fun and scary to imagine a brave new world/ gattica situation where people are classified by their genes, but is it realistic? Is there a gene for "individualism"? I doubt it. Does having a raw map of the genome get us closer to breeding "perfect kids?" Not really.
These are interesting issues to think about, but I don't think we need to worry yet.
spreer
Ok, Jon, calm down.
1)So now we know the *order* of the pairs in the human geneset. Maybe. With over 4 billion base pairs, there might have been a few errors, eh?
2)The order isn't everything, it's barely a beginning. Ever heard of introns? Inactive dna from previous species in the evolutionary tree.
3)The SHAPE of the DNA string also has an effect on expression of genes.
4)Bill Clinton doesn't gush. He smarms...
"...they may harpoon us, but they ain't gonna pick us up on no radar screen!"
How dare you sport thus with life?" asks Frankenstein of his creator, who loved technology but was impatient when it came to thinking much about how he was going to use it.
So here we finally arrive at the pinnacle of man's audacty.
"Today we are learning the language in which God created life."
So we really think that we have caught up to God? Are we so small minded that we think that there is nothing more to learn here? Before I'm flamed right off the face of the earth let me say that there is no way that I'm trying to speak against medical and genetic research. The advancements that we have made here are amazing and I wouldn't want to be without them, but when leaders come forward and compare our understanding with diety I have to question it. At least God has something to show for his knowledge. We have nothing to show for it. What is understanding if there is no tangable result? Can we prove that our "Road map to the future" isn't just taking us down a path to destruction? It seems that we've given ourselves a bit too much credit this early in the game. Where are the results?
Dissenter
Dissenter
"There is no knowledge that is not power."
Oh, really? Please tell me how to breed "Judiasm" out of a population.
If that's what the Nazis wanted to do, they would have sterilized Jews. Instead, they turned them into lampshades and soap. The Nazis exterminated Jews because they needed someone to blame, and 2,000 years of Christian persecution served up a scapegoat that no one would object to.
People who minimize the crimes of the Nazis should be thrown in a concentration camp for a week.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
You have a good point, but when you ask:
That just covers physical attributes. What about mental ability. Would it really be so bad if more people had higher IQ's?
one question comes to my mind: who are we to answer that question? having an "higher" IQ is one thing, doing something with it is another. And then, those that are currently thinking about this question are _not_ coming from all over the world, are _not_ living in different countries (not those that can act on this, anyway): they are living in America or in Europe, with every bias that this implies.
I am not saying that we can't think properly; only that we should not think for everyone on this planet. I believe that an every human as an equal right to decide what we are to do with our (and our children) lives.
Basically, I don't think we should really mess with our genetic code. A cure for cancer/alzheimer/etc. is not the same thing as a "cure" for aging. Aging is part of our lives. We all have our "imperfections" (genetic or not). Do we really think that we can modify our genetic code without modifying our personnality? We are conditionned since our birth by our body, by what we are.
If "every child has a right to be born with a sound physical and mental constitution, based on a sound genotype" (..as quoted by Katz), who is to be judge of this "sound" perfection? Medicine? Parents? Society? (I don't believe in this right at this time) These (hypothetical) children can't say what they want, obviously.. and we should not forget that a great part of life is to understand and _accept_ our limitations, which will always exist, whatever we do with our genetic code.
[cute end]
One that believe in god should not act in his place. And one that does not believe in god should not pose himself as being god. (whatever that means...:)
[/cute end]
Orzak
There were the crackpot critics spouting obligatory warnings and alarms, but they were given short shrift amidst all of the gee-whiz hype...
Is it just me, or does Katz fall into this latter clause seems to shout "Look at me! Read my feature!"category too? Well, maybe he doesn't view himself as a "crackpot" but he's definitely a critic of the fact that the technology in the US. The irony boggles my already-addled brain.
Heaven forbid they should find a cure for weirdness, Katz would loose half of his audience. Oh, those poor estranged ones that don't fit in... I wouldn't mind a cure for self-pity though.
... I couldn't help but laugh at his statement about v-chips and blocking software to "protect children from techno-driven culture." Huh?
I guess you're right, I mean "civil" countries like France or China, they would never put themselves before the rest of the world. And those poor stepped on countries, if it wasn't for the US's meddling, they'd all be recycling and holding hands.
That you have to resort to some of the most restrictive dictatorships to defend American society really bothers me in that context.
What really bothers me is that so many people assume that (insert your grievance here) only happens in the US. It's so nice to hear that there are no corporations in Europe and no patents in Asia. And of course, political coruption only occurs in in certain parts of North America.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Well, to me a lack of wisdom and responsibility is "stupid" any way you slice it.
However, if the US lacks the wisdom and responsibility to handle biotechnology - who on the planet IS responsible enough?
Or, I get the impression, people would rather fight over who's able to handle the technology. While that's going on, of course, people who ARE dumb may well misuse it while people are battling over who is Wise.
The technology is here, if less than it's hyped. Time for us to get Wise and do something with it.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
I don't mean to be disrespectful, but it seems that in the current technophilic age we can find a thousand articles with one theme: "we're too dumb to handle technology" which really means "those Other People are too dumb to handle technology." I'm afraid I find this article falls under that category, despite my respect for the "Hellmouth" series.
Life is going to be what we make it and technology is a tool. We can worry about it and wring our hands - and that makes us no different than people working on censoring the internet or banning linking, it makes us busybodies who complain.
Or we can latch onto it and make it work. We can make sure we embrace the technology so that there isn't going to be a division between users and ourselves.
Or we can complain about how dumb/dangerous The Other is.
Me, I'm chosing to take control of my own life. Barbelith.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
"How dare you sport thus with life?" asks Frankenstein of his creator
ummm, Frankenstein was the creator, not the monster....
Smarter, faster, stronger animals eat the smaller, weaker and dumb ones
...
Apart from the stronger animals (elephants for example) that don't eat any other animals. Or the faster ones (lions) that eat the smarter ones (humans) or the slow dumb ones that don't get eaten because they are poisonous or have some other strategy to avoid being eaten (porcupines), or the really slow dumb ones that parasitize a stronger smarter faster host (tapeworm)
It has been realized; Slashdot.org's STAFF has sold out to the man.
Justen Stepka
I'm not normally one of those anti-Katz fanatics that posts against Mr. Katz regardless of his opinions. In fact, on many topics, I have agreed with his position.
However, in this case, I don't think Katz could possibly take a more nonsensically reactionary stance if he tried. By automatically assuming the United States is less capable of using the information provided by the Human Genome Project responsibly than any other nation on Earth is patently ridiculous. Yes, the United States has a history of getting ahead of itself in its use of technology, but so does the rest of humanity.
Besides that, it's rather hasty to assume the companies involved here, as well as the federal government, will go wild with this technology and start manufacturing conformist blond-haired blue-eyed Ubermensch children just as soon as possible just because they can, when there has been little to no discussion concerning these matters in the public forum by the people in a position to see the issue from the inside out. All we are getting is people like Katz, spewing garbage about Frankenstein's monster (which, I'm sorry, is about the most obvious and unimaginative analogy that could be drawn regarding the HGP) without really understanding what this technology means, and it is them that are putting this particular cart well before this particular horse.
The Human Genome Project, for all its promise, is currently little more than a listing of all the nucleotides, in order, of the various double helixes that form human genes, which in turn form human chromosomes. It is as of yet unknown what each of these genes do exactly, and what twiddling certain nucleotides will do to the overall organism. Such discoveries are still years in the future, and you can bet there will be all sorts of debate as to what people should do with each such discovery, and the Frankenstein dead horse will be beaten to a fine mist before it's all said and done. You cannot expect people to have already debated and solved all of these issues, and thus browbeat the United States because they haven't solved these issues yet, when the genetic map is barely two days old, and no one has really even had the opportunity to look through it and tell what it could mean in the short and long terms yet.
Also, to address the "playing God" argument:
As has probably been stated by some other poster before me by now, the argument that people are "playing God" by messing around with the human body is an argument that's been used and abused ever since humankind has taken an interest in their own bodies, which is to say since humankind has existed. This same argument was used to decry such marvels as penicillin, vaccinations, and was probably even used to denounce such high technology as leeches.
Humans are by nature curious about themselves and their surroundings, and they will always strive to understand all that they can about the world around them and about their own bodies. It is perfectly right and natural that it should be this way. It is defeatist to believe that humans, and particularly the inhabitants of a particular nation (as if by virtue of where you were born, you are pre-disposed to be an uncaring, overzealous louse with no concept of consequences), will automatically misuse grievously any new technology they come across. If we are to take this sort of philosophy to its logical extreme, we should all just give up and live our lives in caves in the dark, gathering berries for subsistence.
If we denounce ourselves for playing God with our technology, we must also denounce God for giving us the ability to do so. If we are guilty of error for discovering things, is it not ultimately God himself who is to blame for giving us the cognitive power to think up such things?
As for the argument that we are destined to misuse this technology because hardly anyone really knows what it all means is absurd on the face of it. How many people understand any new technology? Should we get rid of computers because such a small fraction of the population really understand how they work or what they are capable of? There's probably a respectable percentage of people that don't even know how their toaster works, so should we abolish toasters? I'd wager less than half the population really knows how alternating current really works, so maybe we should get rid of electrical power entirely.
Science is and always has been primarily the realm of the scientist. It is the scientist that makes the discoveries, and then works to make things from these discoveries that can be used by the general population, if possible. Some discoveries, of course, will never be used by the general population, and this is probably one of those. Nuclear energy has been well understood for over 50 years, but the general population still can't, and probably will never be able to, buy a nuclear reactor at the corner store. Just the same, it is unlikely that the general population will be able to pick up designer babies at the corner store either.
There will always be alarmists in the world. What validates their reactionary stances, and makes them potentially damaging, is giving them a voice to the general public, as Jon Katz has with Slashdot. Do these matters need to be discussed? Absolutely. But writing sensationalist garbage such as this serves no other purpose than to shock and alarm the general public into opposing a discovery they do not understand. To compare the HGP with Frankenstein's monster is like saying people should stop eating their vegetables because cigarettes cause cancer, and both products are made from plants. If America has any sort of legacy regarding controversial technology, it is not in its misuses, but rather in its media personalities inciting panic in the general populace about the possibility of that technology's misuse and about how that technology should be shoved back under the rug because of that possibility.
In contemplating Jon's rhetoric to the nth degree, I found myself mulling over this thought: if the ancient Greeks were right, in that happiness is "the exercise of vital powers, along lines of excellence, in a life affording them scope" then how could anyone in a world, where people are designed by nature to excel, be happy?
Would the very lack of imperfection negate scope?
Would we be left with a society of extremely capable but terribly underutilized and unhappy people?
Improve a mechanical device and you may double productivity. But improve man, you gain a thousandfold!
Soon after which, of course, Kirk gets put into the pressure chamber/laundromat...
Maybe Mr. Katz should go off and form his own perfect nation (surely in his own image). This Katzland would be filled with little perfect katz-ons that would be oh so mature and could handle such awesome technologies.
Please stop looking down your nose at everyone. Your smugness is unbecoming.
slashdot.com All the news that isn't.
Oh god. 15 years from now there'll be pissed off high schoolers because their parents saddled them with names like Riley and Taylor that were trendy at the time of their birth. 20 years from now there'll be pissed off high schoolers because their parents gave them noses that were trendy at the time of their birth.
--
Pretend there is some witty statement here.
What? When did we kill forty million people? Did I miss this? Are we talking about the Indians here? Does this mean that we should never have invented syphilis and the compass?
This will get moderated down because it's not popular, but...
I'm talking about all of the abortions since Roe vs. Wade. 35 million people have died as a result of these procedures.
Don't dismiss this as just another wacko pro-life argument. It's specifically life issues that the completion of the Human Genome brings up.
Questions like:
The U.S. has been very bad in its treatment of life, in general. Our emphasis on rights, personal convenience, and inviduality has been at the expense of a devaluation of life in general.
....
Don't get me wrong - I think that the completion of the Human Genome Project is a really wonderful accomplishment! It's going to create a lot more good than otherwise. But we're gonna have to be really careful about how it's applied and used.
No kidding!!
I have -never- said a bad word about Katz's articles, but this one tears it. He can't imagine a more arrogant society?!? What a load of shit. I'm about as far from a sociology major as they come, but even I recall a term called ETHNOCENTRICITY. Just about -every- culture has the same 'issues'...
Someone should start a Decaf for Katz Fund...
Nazi Germany.
There. A society more poorly equipped to deal with the HGP than the modern US. That wasn't hard at all Jon. You really need to put a bit more effort into it.
(ps- imperial rome, the mongols, oog the caveman tribe, pretty much any society that thought they were better than than neighbors and were willing to kill to prove it. Geez, just two seconds thought Jon)
I stopped reading when I got to the part about it being hard to imagine a society more poorly eqipped blah blah blah. It's amazingly easy to imagine such a society, and if the author can't, I find it hard to believe he's got anything else to say that's worth listening to. While I suspect he's trying to get attention, all he did was *completely* blow credibility. Therefore this is a miserably falied article. One of the least successful ever posted. Someone engineer it out of existence, please.
A society controlled by corporations that places no value on individualism.
There, that's also worse than the current US society. Again, two seconds of imagination.
Admit it, Katz made a stupid statement.
While I agree Monday's annoucement was just the start, it seems people never take into account that progress is not just advancing, it's accelerating. Sure, we've got a long way to go, but the basics are there and we'll be moving along much faster now.
How long were people saying it would take to reach this point when they started the project?
I don't think it will take anywhere near the entire next century to gain a reasonably full understanding of the genome and how to use it.
I wonder how soon we will see clones in the Olympics?
First of all, we havn't entered any era yet, all we have is a map.
And second of all, I don't see how stoping "perfict babie" stuff is worth letting people die of cancer....
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I would like to complain about Jon Katz. As I have noted several times in connection with every single one of the last hundred stories posted by Jon Katz, it is irritating to have to read the same nonsense again and again. Also Katz's writing is prolix, redundant, too long and excessively verbose. Finally, he is arrogant and condescending, which the rest of you would realize if you were as smart as me. Also, he failed to mention several obvious points (unless he mentioned them at some point after the first fifty words, when I gave up reading because I am much too busy to read any farther). As for all you people who question whether I am too stupid to simply skip stories by Jon Katz in the future, I won't dignify your inquiry with a response, because the answer is obvious.
I completely understood the point of the movie. It was preachy and romantically foolish, in the 19th century sense of the term.
You must assume that their diagnosis of a heart defect is accurate. Even if the estimation is flawed, or even if he falls in that 01% margin where there is no defect, Vincent has no way of knowing that. It doesn't matter who wants it most, or even who is most capable. It is all about risk management, and Vincent is an unnacceptable risk.
Besides, that kind of society is impossile, because no matter how good you are at predicting someone based on their genes, it will always be more cost effective to clone proven success. Even the poorest mother should have access to zygotes of Jerome's caliber, because like all digital information, genes are infinitely reproducable. I'm less concerned about the ramifications of genetic technology than I am about the restriction of genetic technology, which is more likely to create "class" divisions like that in the movie.
Just imagine the applications, in the field of removing harmful Katz genes alone! The world might never face another monster like Katz, thanks to this new technology.
Despite you blaming technology for the creation of a Katz, the terrifying truth is that he is a natural mutant, one of natures terrible, horrifying mistakes. Only through this new and wondrous technology can we spare both the world from facing another Katz, and spare some poor innocent child from the torment of being a Katz!
Just think about it for a moment, imagine what being a Katz would be like. (shudder) If we have any humanity at all, we should be willing to make any sacrifice to prevent anyone from ever having to live life as a Katz again.
...it's not just funny, it's insightful.
With the g-e super-kids?
("Unnatural Selection")
They were brilliant, beautiful, healthy and psychic. They also had "active defence" immune systems that killed everyone who came near them (causing them to age rapidly).
"We screwed up this batch, lock 'em away and forget about 'em, boys!"
However, there didn't seem to be much of a legal issue...
Khan was much cooler. BTW, did they take that straight out of Heinlein's "Beyond this Horizon" or what? I mean, it's all backwards, but ST seems a lot like the opposite-world to that novel. I wonder if Monroe-Alpha looked like Spock with a goatee...
I can just hear the jingle, patched over with badly warped audio...
"G.E. we bring things to life!"
A lot of comments essentially have a "the future is like the past" argument. Something like "We haven't killed ourselves yet with previous technologies, so we won't kill ourselves with this one." The problem with this argument is that it glosses over the differences in the new technology compared to old technologies.
Genetic engineering is going to be exactly what it says: constructing genetic makeup according to specifications. If it is possible to request a kid with specifications, why not anything else? Who is going to control things so that bad or even disasterous specifications are not allowed? Who can tell whether a spec is bad anyway? History is littered with unintended effects of introducing species to new environments.
The potential problem with genetic engineering is the lack of control. Once something new gets out of the lab, it is difficult to limit its reproduction, and thus limit its effect. Also, the effect outside of the lab is very difficult to predict. I don't think we can afford a wild, wild west phase of generic engineering, but appears to be what we are entering.
It seems to me that parents have a built in desire to see their children do well. They are programmed to care for, and raise the kids in such a way as to increase the kids chance of survival. Genetic tinkering is just another way of increasing a childs survival and success chances. I see nothing wrong with DNA splicing to get rid of Cystic Fibrosis, Juevenile Diabetes or a host of other nasty things. If you can boost intelligence at the same time why not. Any rational, would be parent would be a fool to ignore the tailoring of DNA to improve chances of survival and success.
Oh well, no point in steering now.
Most simply confessed not to know. A few guessed things like "Um, in the blood?" or "In the sperm/eggs?". I was shocked and stunned. How can these people, most of whom were against GM foods becasue "it's playing god", have ANY input to an ethical debate on the rights and wrongs of manipulating genes when they have not the slightest idea what a gene even is?
I guess in a democracy even the idiots think they deserve a say.
I'm curious how this information will be used differently given different styles of medical care (looked at from the East/West angle) in various regions of the world. Western medicine has focused on nature, that is, the physical representation of a disease, finding systems, bacteria, etc, while (to me) Eastern medicine is more about looking at the nurture of a disease, or, to be more precise, the environment in which it exists.
Now, we have the genome. This would seem to be the Holy Grail of Western medicine. But how does it figure into the more holistic or behavioural
medicine?
This whole thing is going to be very important, a certain persistent level of discussion and attention is warranted. And that's for everyone, not just geeks. Does anyone have (or heard) a good "layman's" perspective, i.e. from one who hasn't followed the Genome project's progress. What does Joe Six Pack think about this?
--
+&x
Now who do you want to make your decisions for you? The Gore Fortune 500 or the Bush Fortune 500?
or
-3l337 d00dZ
-welfare moms
-soccer moms
-SUV drivers
-Yugo drivers
-walkers,bikers and other 'environmentalist nuts'
-abortionist
-right to lifers
-the NRA
-gun control supports.
My answer none of the above. But someone will be in control somewhere. Someone, at some time, has to make the 'ultimate decision' on a contested issue. Should that someone be a person that ignores what goes on around them, or someone with enough presence to take advantage of what life offers?
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Smarter, faster, stronger animals eat the smaller, weaker and dumb ones.
Computers have changed society, and some people don't like it.
If we create technological artifacts, some people will discover how to use it to their own advantage. And then they might possibly (oh my god) USE IT TO THEIR OWN ADVANTAGE!!
History has shown that the first society to take advantage of advances in technology will dominate those that do not or are slow in the uptake. If the US dives headlong into this, you may not like the result, but if history is the best oracle the US will dominate.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Except that I do: school taxes, welfare payments, social benefits all through life. We need to get rid of these things; then people can have however many children they want. It's a problem which fixes itself. If people want to have too many kids, let 'em. They'll pay for them.
In a modern socialised government population is a detriment, not a benefit. Poor populations are especially bad; they cost far more than they put in. So these governments naturally try to reduce their populations. In a sane government, population is a good thing; even poor people input something into the economy. We need to stop handing out money to people. That is not the function of the State. Were we to stop, then we could honour the rights of the populace and be making economically sound decisions. The best of both worlds.
Therefore socialized, rich countries have a lower birth rate. It's a fact.
Rich countries have lower birth rates. Most countries are socialist. Ethiopia is socialist. Tanzania (or whatever it's calling itself this week) is socialist. Haiti is, AFAIK, socialist. So are England, Germany and France. So, unfortunately, is the US. Socialism has little to do with birth rate; look to wealth.
Of course, socialism does tend to bleed the wealth of a nation. Look at Sweden if you want to know what Europe will look like in fifty years to a century.
Simple enough: the poor receive money from the government. They do not put as much money into the state. Ergo, they cost the government more than they profit it.
My point is not that they cost us (although that could be argued, perh.). It is that a government will attempt to limit population when that population costs it, and attempt to increase population when that populations profits it. It's only natural. And now that governments find that citizens, esp. the least-well-off, cost it, it becomes natural to look at said citizens as a drag.
Which is why socialism is bad for the poor; the government will try to limit their ranks and breed them out of existence. Why do you think that Sanger passed out birth control info to the poor? Why do you think that `population activists' are always complaining about brown babies but not about white? They're a bunch of racists and classists who want to eradicate those who are not of their own kind, and do it under the guise of compassion.
Were welfare not to exist, the poor would be able to determine the appropriate tradeoff point between more children as a retirement policy in the future and more children as mouths to feed now. Moreover, they would also have to live with the consequences of that decision. As it is now, they have all sorts of strange incentives. They get paid more money for more children. Or maybe not; maybe they lose money with more children, even though they may need them, opr in a fair world would realise a benefit due to them. We are unable to accurately foresee all results of economic actions. Meddle not in the affairs of the free market, for it is complex and prone to anger.
It appears that we are "getting our hands around" another aspect of nature. The technology is promising without a doubt and I look forward to positive results. I guess my main fear is that humankinds track record as far as nature is concered leaves a little to be desired. The pattern seems to be that, by the time the harm is discovered, it's either too late to do anything about it or there is such an infrastructure surrounding it that it's too hard to stop. Case in point would be Freon (R-12). It's pretty much accepted that its damaging effects to the upper atmosphere were known since the 1950's. It took an awful long time to get that under control.
....I hope we tread lightly here until we're sure we know what we're doing and what the consequences are.....
"Rascal am I? TAKE THAT!" -- Errol Flynn
There are powerful forces at work biologically that counteract any human tendency toward nominating "good" and "bad" genes. Genetic diversity is valuable. It will probably take time for the population at large to see this, but if some particular narrow strand gets really popular among the elite, how long before there is a virus (genetically engineered or naturally occurring) that attacks only that strand?
Boy, talk about darkly ironic, to see the power elite grubbing around for previously "undesirable" genes such as African, or Jewish, or whatever, that are resistant to some new disease.
One of my favorite authors, Lois McMaster Bujold, writes of the planet Barrayar where sex selection of babies, newly introduced, results in an imbalance. Many more parents opt for male children in Barrayar's male-dominated culture, only to find, a generation later, that all those males can't find wives, and that females quickly become highly valued. Some of those (now adult) females find very interesting way to use the power of their own gender's scarcity.
To me this highlights the powerful biological laws that hold sway. To be sure, a disaster is possible, perhaps even probable. But humans are pretty good at adapting to changing conditions.
Finally, I think it's a mistake to think you have to have it all mapped out ahead of time, that one must have anticipated all the problems, and must prevent them all. We need some forethought and caution, to be sure, but clearly some of the possibilities offered by the HGP are worth a lot.
"I see great things in baseball" - Walt Whitman
For years, the computer geeks have totally ignored the issues of how technology gets used, whether society is prepared for it, etc. Suddenly, another technology - one controlled by a different elite this time - pushes its way into the mass consciousness and suddenly...omigod! Technology can be dangerous! Put the genie back in the bottle! We're all going to lose our humanity to technology!
It's not just Katz, either. How many people here actually stopped to think about the ways that computers and the Internet have changed how we communicate, where we get our entertainment, who invests in what, and other fundamental things about our lives, economy and culture? How many people here actually asked whether society was ready for these changes? We're the ones who've been helping tear down the walls that slow technology adoption. The "Frankenstein scenario" is as much our doing as anyone else's.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
It's hard to imagine a more poorly equipped person to deal with the Human Genome Project than Jon Katz.
The future has met its enemy, and his name is Jon Katz. Or at least that's how it seems to me.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
That's wanting a not-perfect child. It's a different thing from not wanting a perfect child.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
When have parents ever *not* sought perfect children??
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
I find it interesting how many people have chosen to insult jon and call him names, merely because of this editorial he has posted. You didn't have to read this if you didn't want to and besides, I think that Jon makes some excellent points.
First of all he is exactley right about our country. We have a lot of problems, with our big egos, the feeling that we can tackle anything. Jon's also right about our inability to look forward, people are having five, six, seven or more children. We are eating up our natural resources with SUVs and other wasteful forms of americanism. And when it comes right down to it, we realize we are screwing up, but instead of admitting it and changing, we lash out at anyone with a contrary opinion. We are afraid to accept our own flaws, which is why people didn't bother trying to refute jon's comments, they just insulted him. Kind of like a lot of the bullies I remember from middle school. They knew they were wrong, they just wouldn't admit it.
I'm not saying that I agree with everything that jon says here, however, I think he has some very valid points about the state of American culture and those points should be taking with care, even if you don't agree with them. Remember, the whole point of slashdot is to has an interactive discussion that's constructive. If we resort to insults and name calling we end up sounding like CNN or the house of representatives. And we don't want that.
As is usual with Katz articles, I'm not even sure where to begin. His slander of the United States is the first offensive matter, but that appears to have been drilled into the ground, so I'll move on to the second issue to spring to mind. This one appears to be a common theme in his articles of late: knee-jerk doomsaying of new technology.
For a man who claims to be in touch to modern culture and the cutting edge attitude of the net, Katz seems more in tune with the reactionaries who are constantly screaming about the potential and usually imaginary dangers of any new thing which comes into the spotlight. For all his dire predictions throughout this article, he brings not a single compelling or realistic concern to light. Hint here, Katz, you can throw around the Frankenstein metaphor all you like, but just saying the name of the good doctor every few sentances doesn't, in itself, validate your argument.
For example, your 'perfect baby' scenario and its reference to the laughable movie 'Gattaca' both ignore a number of complexities of the issue, preferring to simplify it to the point of utter inapplicability. First off, these things do not happen all at once. There is no 'BOOM! We have the genome, we now understand how every genetic malfunction works. Pregnant women, please form a single file line for genetic screening'. Were this the case, Katz might have a point. It isn't. He doesn't. This is going to advance slowly, with the key to each disease coming after years of painful research, with plenty of time for the integration of tests and treatments into the already existing pre-natal care package. As screening progresses, hopefully these conditions will be eliminated or lessened to the point where they are no longer applicable, and quicker, easier, less intrusive tests will make it so that there is no continuous medical examination as Katz depicts. This is the history of medicine to date. It is easy to see how Katz' concerns could just as easily apply to the era when immunization was first discovered and it is easy to see how untrue they turned out to be.
The problem with people like Katz is that they detract from the actual issues that should be of concern. Real ethical issues are complicated. By overly simplifying them, such people as he only breed prejudice, knee-jerk reactions, and hysteria. Meanwhile, anyone trying to address the actual concerns is drowned out in a miasma of outrage and self-righteousness. As much as Katz complains about the arrogance and lack of good judgement which Americans have, he and those like him are the primary cause of as much of it as does exist.
Eric Christian Berg
I've talked about this ever since the whole cloning thing started. Sure, at some point we will be able to make perfect identical humans. Like the perfect soldier, the perfect worker, the perfect drone... And why not, wouldn't it be nice to be able to go to a gene doctor and tell them exactly how you want to be. And change it. Tell the exactly how your child is going to be...
It seems like utopian... get rid of the violent genes and physical handicaps, make everyone 6 feet tall with blue eyes and blonde hair and a perfect physique.
So all of these perfect people will want a significant other, but everyone else in the world will be exactly like them. Isn't that boring? Would you really want to date and marry yourself?
I'd like to point out to everyone here that _assuming_ that selection of individual genes someday becomes possible and more importantly legal, we still will not be able to create "perfect" children. Most of the common imperfections that you see in people are in fact not strictly imperfections but more like "qualified advantageous mutations".
For example, a common blood disorder in Africans, sickle-cell anaemia, in only problematic when you have a pair of genes for that trait. When you only have one gene it provides immunity against malaria. Also, Schizophrenia and certain other mental disorders have been shown to have strong links to creativity and intelligence. Genetically enhancing breast size by increasing the amount of estrogen produced would have side effects of enhanced risk of cancer. Significant height enhancements would bring about increased risks of heart failure.
What I'm saying here is that many, if not most, of the changes a parent might want to make to their child are not without tradeoffs. There is no prefect child.
As for more innocuous changes, I also find it hard to believe that suddenly everyone would choose to be blonde hair and blue eyes. Most parents want their children to look like them.
The problem that I see is not a new one. Insurance companies look at your parent's and grand-parent's health histories _right_now_. While people are usually not refused coverage based upon their histories, they do have to pay higher premiums. A child born with the genes for MS would find it very hard to get insurance if genetic testing was common.
In one paragraph, you're talking about loving others, and spreading the Good Word, and so on.
And in the next you refer to Roman Catholics as "heathen sinners" who "worship the virgin whore". What's wrong with this picture?
I'm not a Christian, but I come from a strongly Irish Catholic family, and the kind of hatred that you're spouting in this post is shocking, to say the least. It's amazing that someone professing to be a follower of Christianity's precepts (loving one's brother as one loves oneself, in particular) can even think something along those lines, let along post it.
while i dont always enjoy katz's features, i must say that i enjoyed this one. nice work jon.
the genome project started with noble goals, but as soon as more and more groups started working on it and it became a 'race' all considerations of the ethical and moral issues seem to have been thrown aside. it seems that, for the most part, these companies just want to get their patents and make their money. as a result, even the non-profit groups have had to join the 'race' and fight to finish first, thinking only of the potential benefits, be they to society or to their wallets, and not of the inherent moral and ethical issues surrounding the ability to rewrite any part of the human makeup.
i think more people need to take a step back and look at the big picture and not just the 'cure for cancer' or the 'fountain of youth'. there's a whole lot more too it, and most of it isnt good.
the good news about it is that while the map is there, it'll still take some time before science is able to build the 'perfect baby'. hopefully between now and then everyone will have time to think about this further and realize that it shouldnt be done.
What do the good know...except what the bad teach them in their excesses? - Clive Barker
I am so completely sick of seeing people trot out the "Gattaca" references every time anything to do with DNA is mentioned. We've come to the point where it's not clever anymore. Gattaca is not just an unlikely future, it's a poor movie with subpar acting and stilted directing. It's like making oblique references to "Snow Crash" when people talk about the Internet. You're not being original anymore -- you're just following the crowd. And the moderator who moderated up all of the "Gattaca" posts as insightful and is about to moderate this one down: blow me!
Like Jon said, the possibility for quality control in the birth process won't be too far off. And I think that's great. There are many gene factors that you can modify without making everyone look exactly the same. For example, I have a strange vision problem. I see (with corrections) just close enough to normal to make it annoying (e.g. people sometimes have to read me things like wall-mounted menus in restaurants, etc. but I'm fine to drive, read books, work on computers and other stuff.) It's a real pain in the butt, especially for a network and computer geek. If I can prevent this from being passed on to my kids, I'll definitely do it. But I'd rather not go so far as to pick hair color, eye color, propensity for wierdness, etc. That's going a little too far. But what all the gloom-and-doom types predict is that we'll walk up to an ATM-like device, insert a credit card, and start picking traits. There's no reason to prevent filtering out "bad" traits to prevent universal sameness.
You're right... and the case is also similar, in some way, to the situation found with antibiotics and bacteria. The antibiotic will kill most of the bacteria except for the few mutated ones who are immune to it, which will merely procreate and form a giant colony of radically stronger and more devious bacteria.
Going back to the original poster in this thread, if you presume to make "designer kids," you're going to expose their flaws that are normally masked by the "averageness" of genetically un-manipulated people to the world, and those flaws will be the death of them. They'll stick out like sore thumbs and instead of being the only parents on the block with a brilliant, "beautiful" (ha! - here, you really do kid yourself) child, you've just got another old Joe. Think about it, if you have this careless attitude of wanting "designer kids," think about how many other ignorant souls on the face of this planet that will have that thought as well. You could even try to argue that we all have different ideas of perfect, and you're right, I'm sure, but there are going to develop major categories that most people will fall into:
I'm sure there is a category I've left out, but you get my point.
Of course, one might argue that I'm taking a highly critical point of view but I must merely argue that I have not other choice right now because I agree that our society, and in fact the entire World, is not prepared for what a discovery we have made. Of course, perhaps we will be fortunate and nothing will come of all of this, and perhaps genetic manipulation will not be possible, but I would have to be kidding myself to believe that, especially after such reports as have been made, recently and in the past. With what we do, and the blinding speed at which we do it - without thinking it through first - I think we're in for a big, bad, evil surprise. And I can only hope that I do not live long enough to see it.
Insert mind here.
Well, Jon Katz would have you believe that we will soon have the ability to alter our genetic makeup and change our evolutionary path. I say we've already done that and that we've been doing it for the last 5000 years.
Becuse of our inteligence and ability to form social groups, humans have effectively cirumvented the process of natural selection, resulting in an overall gene-pool which is 'weaker' (more prone to desease and defects) than it was 5000 years ago.
To illustrate my point; many of us (myself included) have very poor eyesight. Thanks to modern technology, we can get corrective lenses to fix this defect. If we lived ten thousand years ago on the african sahara our bad vision would have made us an easy meal for a predator long before we grew to adulthood. However technology lets us lead normal lives with these defects. The result is that we've got no problem making it to adulthood and passing our defects on to our offspring.
The same issue applies to a whole host of other problems (poor hearing, suceptability to desease, even flat-footedness). Undesirable traits that should have been naturally weeded out of our genepool are instead strenthened because of our ability to compensate for them.
So, having 'perfect' babies is not a new problem; is is really a solution to a problem we created in the process of building civilization. Genetic manipulation to remove defects just performs the job that natural selection should have been doing for the last 5000 years.
-- Greg
Slashdot, would a spell-checker for posting be too much to ask? It's not rocket science!
When we're playing with something that has the possibilities of doing such harm and good there is an awesome amount of power to be wielded. Only human arrogance would control the assumption that we will make it through this.
There's so many variables that we cannot even begin to comprehend the posibilites, one of which could be to use genetics to remove arrogance and see they we are not as indestructible a race as is always portrayed in movies, and hope that genetic engineering is not that downfall and find that it is too late.
One possibilty however far fetched it may seem.
Great. No more people who suffer the manic cycles of creativity that bring us things such as the Theory or relativity, or other ground shattering inventions.
If ideas, concepts, or things are to be created outside of the normal area of thought, with the purpose of possibly shedding light on the norm, how can that be done if people dont have these supposed learning disabilities? I am someone who has been certified as having ADHD and partial dyslexia, and for some reason, I find that they help me with my thought process, since ive been able to learn how to live with them, not just try to over power them with drugs. What would I be like if I didn't "suffer" from these afflictions. Would I be smarter (since I supposedly already fairly bright, by concensus of friends, doctors, and the such) or would I actually be considered less intelligent, since I wouldn't have my odd and sometimes disturbing view on situations, which has led to many of my insights in life.
They shouldn't be called Learning Disabilities, they should be called Problems learning in the same way that schools have been teaching.
To get back to my main focus, research has shown that most of the great inventors, thinkers, of our past ages weren't exactly the most genetically perfect people (or mentally stable), so what will happen now if everyone starts producing genetically perfect people. I mean, would Ernest Hemingway would have been as good of a writer if he wasn't so obsessed with his writing being perfect, he may be still alive, because he wouldn't have suffered from the depression and wouldn't have taken his head off with a shotgun.
My take is this: Helps with diabetes (which my dad suffers from) or other diseases, sure, but it is hard for me to say "Away with LDs" since they are what have made me unique. Would I be unique without them, yes, but not nearly as so as I am now.
-Pfhor
gnikrow ot kcab teg tsuM
Engaging perhaps a over simplification of the process what are the moral and ethical questions that shuold be asked about adjusting any currently live organism either during its Life span or its creation. Changing the scale from Genetic to Organic and I wonder why we never have these arguements when someone, who quite clearly would die, receives a transplant of organic material (Blood/Heart/Kidney/Marrow, Liver etc) which enables them to Live, Grow and thrive. Reduce the scale and what are the issues about someone receiving a replacement chromosone, base pair or node to fix a faulty line of development. I can understand the current fear factor of the perfect society but what does it really mean to ask these questions when we already sanction them at a larger scale.
And thats why Firecrackers and kittens don't mix.
What? When did we kill forty million people? Did I miss this? Are we talking about the Indians here? Does this mean that we should never have invented syphilis and the compass?
-Grendel Drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
But those enemies of individualism will have to deal with my army of vat-grown cyber-ninjas!!!!
HAHA!
If you can't imagine a society less well suited to genome information than the US, you don't have much imagination. I certainly wouldn't expect wonderful things out of either China or North Korea. This is not to say that there isn't any cause for concern, but blanket statements about how horrible US culture fall into the "more heat than light" category of public discourse. Tone down the propaganda and maybe someone will take you seriously.
if ($it != $onething) {$it = $another;}
I mean, I've heard Bill Gibson and Stan Robinson come up with more plausible story lines at the Boreal SF convention, and that was in French!
Look, it's real simple - most people will misuse the technology to make babies who are:
1. male (hey, it's stupid, but that's what they'll do)
2. their society's distorted ideal (long necks, ears the size of elephants, it's all in the eyes of the beholder)
3. fewer genetic disease tendencies (this will actually be useful for some populations, until the next plague that makes HIV look a piker wipes out most of these perfect immune systems, since they won't have the glitches that let you survive wierd microbes (like sickle cell anemia which allows survival for most carriers against lethal diseases))
But, at least these designer kids will not write like Jon - that will be bred out of the human species as a survival mechanism.
News Flash: In 2050, the status symbol will be having Natural Kids, which only the rich can afford.
Will in Seattle
Oh, puh-leeze -- humans have been doing that for millenia. (Perhaps the reason chihuahuas have such foul dispositions is that they know they are descended from wolves and humans did this to them.)
there are things which just aren't meant for people to understand, let along attempt to tamper with
Either the Universe was created by some intelligent entity (in which case, the fact that it proceeds according to understandable natural laws implies that its creatures were meant to understand it) or not (in which case, your assertion is a meaningless string of syntactically correct words, a la "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously").
Yet these "scientists", having already condemned decent Christian morality as being "backward" or "superstitious"
This is a silly stereotype. Scientists (and pretty much everybody else, including contemporary Christians) condemn certain elements of old-style "Christian morality", such as witch-burnings and forced conversion, as backward and superstitious -- because these practices are backward and superstitious. The reasonable portions of traditional Christian morality are similar to those of any viable culture's morality, and as such are universally respected among civilized people.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
The original post wasn't a clearcut troll. Some of Jon Erikson's later posts did cross that line, and presumably will find their natural level (-1: Troll) before much longer.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Todays american society is one of the worst places for the technology to fall on. As a prime example, when that statement is made, does it not anger you. Jon isn't attacking any one person, but the ppl of america as a whole. Over all the general attitude in america sucks. We are a very dangerous society with our great notion of superiority over everything. This project would be better served by a representitive from every country that can be involved working on this, or something of that fashion.
While a rep from every country could cause nothing to get done in the end, that might be alright. Who's to say that we definitly got the gnome mapping correct. The human race has made mistakes before, we are bound to make them again. I think there should be some movement on the project, but that it should be very slow.
Jon may have added a very urgent and sharp tone to the article, but he also made a few good points. This is something we should watch. "Yeah, too bad that 1940s Germany didn't get a hold of this information" Todays private industry has the ability to make Hitler look like Santa Clause. The weight of resposability of this project is enough for the entire world to feel. The human race would be wise to choose carefully what it does with it.
Trying to be different, just like everyone else.
Quick nitpick:
Frankenstein was right when he told his doctor-creator that it was a sin to create things one doesn't take any responsibility for.
Frankenstein was the name of the Doctor. Frankenstein's monster was the name of the Doctor's creation.
It's also important to remember that Frankenstein's monster was as much a parabole about being a misfit in a cold and uncomprehending world than anything else: created by a creator who didn't care, tossed to a world who didn't understand full of villagers who, because Frankenstein's monster was different, sought to destroy him. Katz, so wrapped up in the technology aspects of the story of Frankenstein, completely missed the point.
Typical.
Had Katz understood the story rather than resorting to seeing the video clips of the parody made with Abbot and Castello, would have realized that we (geeks) are all Frankenstein's monster: creations of a culture who doesn't care, sought to be destroyed by villagers who don't understand.
As far as I can figure, his points are:
Most of these points are made with the hubris typical of most hack writers: for example, Katz simply presents the "corporate technological elite" culture of the United States as evil as if it was a Universally Accepted Truth. Putting aside the fact that the United States is not the only country in the world which has things like money, companies and technology, one has to suspect anything that is presented as a Universally Accepted Truth, no matter how often it is repeated.
Because Katz repeats this statement over and over again (while sucking at the corporate tit which pays him for this sort of tripe) doesn't make the statement true. It only makes Katz a poor parrot.
Further, Katz makes statements such as Individualism and "wierdness" could show up in the new human map, along with tendencies towards anger, dissent, and bad skin. By completely whitewashing the entire "nature verses nurture" argument, and by repeating the point that perhaps things like "obnoxiousness" or "wierdness" could be edited out of the Human Genome.
What he's alluding to here, folks, is the fact that perhaps they'll find the "geek" gene and wipe us all out of existance and turn us all into mindless Microsoft drones a'la Gattaca.
Dispite the fact that this point occupies about 1/3rd of Katz's article, it's a load of crap: even if there is a gene which may cause someone to tend to mental illness such as a chemical imbalance in the brain that leads to psychotic behavior, it's pretty clear that normal behaviors (such as anger, obnoxiousness or a tendency towards excellence with computers) are at least as much learned traits as they are genetically ordained. In fact, the most that can be said about the "nature verses nurture" argument is that at most genetics tends paint in broad strokes while nurture tends to fill in the gaps (such as a tendency to write overly pompous, bad articles about the Eugenic tendencies of the U.S. "corporate technological elite" culture).
Though I suppose if there was a gene which controlled bad writing such as this bit of tripe, I don't think I wouldn't cry if it was edited out of the Human Genome...
No, Jon, they couldn't. Those have been proven to be mostly environmental factors. There are a few mental disorders that lead to those, but nothing in the genetic code. Did you do any research on modern psychology before writing this?
But research gets in the way of writing over the top tripe like this.
It's inevitable with Mr. Katz's writing: when he writes about technology, he mangles the concepts. When he writes about history, he often gets his facts totally wrong. And when he writes about psychology he so often misses the point that it is laughable. Hell, Mr. Katz's comments on the United States clearly tells me he has never traveled overseas--it's as if his knowledge of world affairs was spoon fed to him by old 1930's National Geographic magazines.
He's like Rush Limbaugh: so completely wrong he's entertaining.
This syndrome might have genetic origins in some cases.
And in the rest of cases?
It's environmental.
This just goes back to the old nature verses nurture arguments. Further, the reality of any mental disease, including those which have clear-cut biological sources, can often be brought into check through proper counceling, exercise and a good diet. That is, even for biologically caused mental diseases, environment can be used to bring the disease into check.
Seems to me that it's nurture: 19, nature: 2.
Most (if not all) skinheads/KKK fuckwits/neo-nazi morons are Christian. Coincidence? If you think so, you too are a moron.
Most skinhead/KKK/neo-nazi morons profess to be Christian, but they only use the symbols of Christianity as a front for what is in essence a neo-pagan ego-centric system of beliefs in which Jesus is reduced to a bit player in a pantheon of older Norse or Astru Gods.
Not that I have a problem with neo-paganism per se. But these folks then commit the additional crime of twisting their pseudo-Christian neo-pagan religious system around a twisted and evil interpretation of how the world works, with their sick-ass hides dead center in their own twisted mystical system.
Calling this "Christian" is like calling the Dali Lama the Pope. They're not even on the same continent.
In the unlikely event that you Bible-pounding shitheads get your way and Baby Bush gets elected to office, we would see a nice shiny new nation of perfect white Aryan babies.
Likewise, most Christians are not skinhead/neo-nazi/KKKers. Claiming this is equivalent of claiming that all neo-pagans are evil, or that all Witches should burn for the crime of Witchcraft. Or that all Athiests are in league with a Devil they don't even believe in.
There is a place for people like you...the lion pit at the zoo.
Dude--did you ever think of switching to decaf?
Bear in mind that Catholics are not Christians since they worship the virgin whore rather than God.
And Christians worship a bastard? Or just the child of a whore?
Oh, no--that's right: Jesus wasn't a man, dispite being a carpender and born to a woman--he's one face of a three-faced God. That's how most "Christians" who claim Mary was a "virgin whore" get around the fact that they worship idols (the crucifiction, or the aspect of God which is Jesus) in direct violation of one of the ten commandments.
Don't complain too hard about the reverence of the mother of Christ--your trinity or the belief in Jesus who may or may not be a man as the mood strikes you isn't exactly the most sound of theological grounds to be arguing from...
Does biology make a difference in behavior? Sure.
Are there mental diseases which are organic in origin? Of course.
Is there a gene which determines if someone is predestined to be a criminal, a geek, or a cheerleader? Hell, the best we can say about the genes we know about is that there are genes for things like breast cancer--but they only indicate a greater tendency towards breast cancer. And hell, that gene isn't even the biggest indicator that if you are a woman, you will develop breast cancer during your life.
Personally I don't give a damn about the fraud of one researcher. What concerns me is the presumption that our genetic heritage predestines who we are, what we are, and how we shall behave.
Otherwise, if there is a gene for criminal behavior, then we cannot arrest criminals: by virtue of being genetically predestined to a certain behavior pattern, we could argue legally that that predestined behavior is as protected as other birth traits which are legally protected, such as skin color or gender.
I would completely disagree with the statement that these things are clearly delimited. big-bang vs creation? How delimited is that?
...if you believe in a higher power, and you believe he has revealed himself in some way to you, yet you extrapolate your theories against that to the detriment of mankind, you are not exactly heavenly.
:-)
It's not as clear cut as that. While we can demonstrate that a literal reading of Genesis is clearly not how the world came into being, even the Roman Catholic Church states that the tale in Genesis is a spiritual and religious metaphore as to how God created the Universe. Just as the wine and cracker does not literally turn into human blood and human flesh, so can the "truth" in Genesis be a metaphore for something spiritually higher.
But who are we to say that it wasn't the Will of God who created the initial spark which resulted in the Big Bang? Most rational scientists, when pushed, cannot say with certainty what happened at T+some fraction of a second. Who is to say that it wasn't God who said "Let There Be Light!" at T - some fraction of a second?
And that's the point. Science can answer the question about mechanism, about physical laws, and about the history and the way things progressed and how things are put together. But the why of the Universe--if it was put together by a Master Clock Builder or is the happenstance of some random confluence of chaotic events--this is beyond the relm of Science. To ask why the Universe is is to ask a question only Faith can answer.
Although science is the study of cause and effect with the five senses, there are many scientific articles which continually extrapolate on what the have observed to postulate thier views on religious topics.
Oh, sure; I read those articles all the time. Gives a great insight into the workings of some scientists.
However, there are definite limits as to what is properly the relm of Science. And speculation into the Mind of God doesn't fit, unless we could get an interview with Him on CNN.
I mean, hell: for all we know, we're the spontaneous and random creation of an uncaring universe which just happened to accidently create intelligent life on a small speck of dust in some unimportant corner. Or perhaps there is a God and He is the Omega Point--the superintelligent and supernatural creation of Man who becomes so powerful and intelligent that He (our literal creation) envelops creation and, going back in time, sets the whole thing in motion. (A'la a wonderful short story by Issac Asimov.)
Or perhaps we were created by a Native American Coyote God which created the big bang as a cosmic prank.
My point is we don't know. And we cannot know, because by the very definition of the supernatural (which are events or things which are unmeasurable), we cannot know.
And an excerpt from the beginning of (Darwin's Origin of Species)...
And don't forget that in later editions, Darwin said that he was presenting the "how" of creation--but that he firmly believed in a Christian God who set the whole thing in motion. This led philosophers down the whole "Deism" movement where some believed that God simply set the universe in motion and has since abandoned us to our own devices. (Well, actually, as God is omni-everything, he was able to set a perfect universe into motion, and thus no longer needs to tend the whole thinng.)
But Darwin never drew the conclusion that why we were created--he only presented the mechanism for how, and left his belief in why to a Christian God he fervently believed in.
Creation is "supernatural", and can't be disproven (how can you disprove creation using cause and effect when the cause is supernatural), yet darwin extrapolated his theory to specifically deny creationism.
We have no reason to know if Creation was supernatural or not. And remember: Darwin limited his arguments to the evolution of species--he only outlined the "how" but said that he believed the "why" was a Christian God pulling the strings on chance.
As we understand better the mechanisms of life and of Chaotic systems, we can better answer the "how" of how life began in terms of chemical reactions and chaotic systems creating localized ordering out of chaos. But the why is never implied in the research: a perfect God may have created a perfect Universe in such a manner that the "spontaneous" creation of his likeness was the inevitable result of his setting the whole thing in motion. Or perhaps he has been tinkering with "chance" all along. Or maybe we're just really damned lucky to exist at all, as the whole thing was just the chance meeting of chemical compounds in a biological soup.
As a mathematician, I don't think pure science (the study of cause and effect) is evil (ridiculous),...
Well, duh! What I ment to say (and apparently had a typo) was that knowledge is not evil, but it's indescriminate use has the potential of being evil. A gun could be a great tool for hunting for food for starving children. Or it can be used to blow your best friend away.
The gun is not evil. Only the intent of it's user. And only in relation to the moral and ethical structures we use as a society for us to get along: maybe your friend was trying to kill a small child when he was stopped by a bullet.
Well, setting aside the fact that I never stated what I believed (for all you know, I'm an american Indian who secretly sits naked under the stars playing a flute and dreaming of Coyote's wisdom), I'm not sure what you are talking about when you say "yet you extrapolate your theories against that to the detriment of mankind."
While I strongly disagree with the original fellow who seemed to imply that there is some knowledge which should be forbidden, there is a grain of truth in the notion that perhaps there are types of experiments or areas of research which should not be performed. Not because these areas of research are inherently evil, but because to a civilized society, they are repugnant. But it seems to me these should be limited to areas such as the NAZI research programs on concentration camp Jews in various areas of eugenics and other NAZI medical research programs.
But ultimately, Science and Religion are oil and water: the Science asks "how" and Religion asks "why." And when mixed together with a few spices, the whole thing makes a really tasty combination...
I don't mean to be disrespectful, but it seems that in the current technophilic age we can find a thousand articles with one theme: "we're too dumb to handle technology" which really means "those Other People are too dumb to handle technology."
You forget that this is the first fundamental theorm of politics--that politics and political limitations are set not because we can't take care of ourselves, but because those other dumb fuckers can't take care of themselves.
This logic goes into justifying everything from antiabortion rhetoric to nuclear arms races to jaywalking laws and everything inbetween. This is used to justify socialism (we can't trust the economy to the "invisible hand" because the "invisible hand" is just a bunch of dumb fucks who don't know how to buy stuff). This is used to justify web censorship using stupid programs like Net Nanny (we can't trust the web to the general population because the general population is made up of a bunch of dumb fucks who can't control their kids). This is also used to justify anti-pornography laws (we can't trust those other dumb fucks not to get hairy hands).
In fact, I cannot think of a single law of the land which doesn't at least have part of it's justfication in the "we can trust ourselves, but we can't trust those other dumb fucks" theory of politics. Except perhaps some of the more fundamental ideas of social justice (i.e. "don't murder, don't steal" stuff).
Ever wonder why Congress exempts itself from many of the laws Congresscritters pass for you and I? Because they trust themselves. They just don't trust dumb fucks like us.
You probably also believe the quote is "money is the root of all evil", when it's actually "the love of money is the root of all evil."
My point being that it's not knowledge which is evil. It's the use of that knowledge, unchecked by ethics or morality, which is evil. Just because you can read on-line how to build an atomic bomb doesn't make you an atomic superpower. And just because you can read on-line how to murder someone and get away with it doesn't make you a hit man.
Science can be a tool for good in our society when it allows us to better ourselves and become closer to Heaven,...
It is not the role of Science to bring us closer to Heaven. It is the role of Science to help us understand how the material world around us appears to work. It is the role of Religion to bring us closer to spiritual perfection. I'm sure you'd probably be very upset if you walked in on your Priest or Preacher using an electron microscope to dissect the Bible.
Yet these "scientists", having already condemned decent Christian morality as being "backward" or "superstitious",...
Many scientists are Christians. Most others profess a belief in God or in a divine spark or a higher power that transcends this material plane. It's difficult to condemn yourself.
What some scientists do condemn is not Christians or Christianity, but the very small few who are in fact backwards or superstitious because they don't understand what Science is about--and attempt to condemn all of Science as a force of Lucifer or somesuch.
Science can be a tool for good in our society when it allows us to better ourselves and become closer to Heaven, but there are things which just aren't meant for people to understand, let along attempt to tamper with.
Of course there are things that man are not meant to understand, but instead must take on Faith. Anyone properly grounded in the underlying philosopical systems which drive the Scientific Method knows this.
However, anyone who knows how Science works knows that these area which man must take on Faith are clearly delimited--things such as the nature of God, the existance of the supernatural, or the nature of the Infinite. It's not that performing scientific experiments on God is Evil--it's that Science, properly defined, clearly says that it cannot explain these supernatural elements. Hense, supernatural.
But to decide that certain material inquiries into certain concrete elements such as the nature of the Human Genome is evil: these are not the pronouncements of God. I don't see "Human Genome Project" mentioned anywhere in the Bible.
No, it's man (specifically, certain "christians" such as yourself) who pronounce certain material lines of research as evil. And as we all know, man is fallable.
Are you so confident in your faith that you believe you can speak for God Himself?
I have extremely little patience in people who fail to understand Jesus's words about witnessing. I have very little patience in people who profess to be "christian", but whose loud "trumphet calls" of "faith" essentially boil down to bashing others. (Jesus Himself had something to say about people like you who do this sort of thing: and it ain't all that good.)
And I have very little patience in people who create strawmen (such as your demonstratably false presumption that scientists are not religious) in order to advocate their own political agenda disguised as a communication presumbably from the Mouth of God Himself.
I don't see where the problem with genetic engineering is. Hmm, let's see: at some point in the future, we're all going to be smart, strong, and beautiful. It might be a rough ride getting to that point as people try to resist the inevitable, but the end result is good for humanity. The Gattaca world is only midway through the transformation.
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
I think Godwins law takes effect here.
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(See http://www.netmeg.net/jargon/terms/g/godwin_s_law
-- Superlame http://catpro.dragonfire.net/joshua/
Um, wasn't the main theme of Frankenstein that of man being afraid of what he does not understand?
But anyway, yeah, I think the US is one of the least prepared societies to deal with something like this. Drug companies spend billions trying to figure out how to put hair back on the head of a fat lazy american while africans are dying of AIDs in the droves because they can't afford the $600/month drugs when they only make about $1/month. We should concentrate on applying the technology to the problems at hand instead of trying to get rich designing superbabies.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
No, unless you're trying to imply that Katz is subject to it.
Yes, genetic testing may lead to people with genetic conditions having to pay higher premiums for health insurance, just as people who smoke, engage in other risky activities, or have an existing medical condition have to pay higher premiums. That's the way insurance works: the idea is for someone to pay a bit more, over time, than the average person with his or her circumstances will require in medical costs. Otherwise, insurance doesn't work.
Considering how many health conditions are believed to have genetic components now, how many more are likely to be found to have such components, and how most people will probably be found to have something that will be considered a genetic condition, no matter how minor (in other words, we'll find predispositions to a lot of things we don't even think of as genetic illnesses), the insurance agencies wouldn't be able to survive without covering people who test positive for various genetic problems. Instead, just as we're starting to slowly see now, insurance companies are going to emphasize preventative medicine. It will be much cheaper to test someone and say, for example, "Oh, he's got much greater-than-normal susceptability to influenza, let's have him go get flu shots every year on our dime so we don't have to pay for him going into the emergency room with a high fever, again." And, as genetic treatments become more common, more refined, and less expensive, insurance companies will start using tests to recommend those treatments to permanently avoid the hassle and expense of certain health problems.
So, I don't see testing as such a horrible thing.
You're forgetting two things.
First, yes, a lot of traits people will select for will have little survival utility. (Well, except for increased intelligence, removal of genetic infirmaties, enhanced physical condition, those sort of things.) However, just as in natural selection, these traits will be prone to artificial selection (in the truest sense): if people find some new trait annoying, troublesome, uncomfortable, offensive, or otherwise "bad", they won't get it for their kids. Every generation may have people with "peacock" traits that turn into PITAs, but very few people in the next generation will have those particular traits.
Second, no, all Americans won't select for blue eyes and blonde hair. Part of the reason both versions of Village of the Damned were so creepy, after all, was because all the children looked alike and, perhaps more importantly, nothing like their reasonably varied parents. People generally don't want children who don't look like them! And that's just among people who are already pale. To suggest that most black, latino, Asian, etc. parents will want to give birth to Aryan Perfection Skin Cancer Victim(tm) kids is absurd. And further, even among the small minority of parents who won't care about kids looking wildly different from them, "blue eyes and blonde hair" isn't anywhere near a universal ideal. Personal preferences will produce variety: I'd suspect parents would go for ideals of various ethnic phenotypes they find attractive and charismatic.
We know what all the numbers are. We have a readable copy of the executable code. That doesn't mean we have commented source. That doesn't mean we know what this line does (we do, in some cases, but we did last week, too) or whether it is a good thing or not.
No, we don't have quality control, except, perhaps in the sense of being able to measure how far a product differs from the standard. But we still don't know how to make a better or worse copy, we just have a standard model. Parents want excellent children, not standard children.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
We apologize for the inconvenience.
I've criticized Katz before, after trying for a long time to resist, but this is better than usual. It's interesting and contains some non-obvious thoughts.
People are generally foolish, at least in the US, about many issues involved with children. For example, it doesn't take much thought to realize that putting a kid in day care from six weeks old isn't as good for him or her as being raised at home. But parents are doing this by the millions, and they fool themselves into thinking that it is in their child's best interests, because otherwise it would be unspeakable. And there's a weird pre-occupation in the US with normal childbirth being an aberration of nature. You have to intervene and use vaccuums and drugs and such, and still have higher infant mortality rates than countries which aren't looked at as such world powers (Finland, Norway, Belgium, Germany, France, Sweden, Switzerland). Kinda seems silly to even think about genetic issues in light of the other nonsense that's going on.
Considering the world-wide effort put into this project, if everyone was being extremely secretive about their research, we wouldn't have a complete mapping at this point, we'd have dozens of incomplete mappings.
---
I hope you're not pretending to be evil while secretly being good. That would be dishonest.
There is a lot more involved, not to mention that once you develop something, there's years of testing to boot.
Yes, it will assist in studying disease and it will likely get ethically misused, but this information is not really the instant gold mine that the media makes it out to be... there's a heck of a lot of research to be done to really understand how to use this new information.
My best analogy is that this is like having a road map to a country you know very little about, in a language you only know a few phrases in.
There is still a long way to go...
---
I hope you're not pretending to be evil while secretly being good. That would be dishonest.
The hardest thing for parents is to see their child struggle. And so partents will use anything to make life easier for their children.
This is very true. Unfortunately, parents who try to shield their kids from such trials and tribulations WEAKEN them... if little Johnnie isn't allowed to get into any arguments or fights with his friends, he'll be a 'mama's boy' all his life, never able to stand up for himself. If little Janie is never allowed to talk to boys or learn about sex she may end up in an abusive relationship or dead from some VD before she's 30. If kids are genetically enhanced to be 'perfect', I can forsee a society that mirrors Japanese schools, with high suicide rates for the tiniest failures. Or at the very least a race of supermodels with no fscking personalities.
I can easily believe that something like "Gattaca" could happen now. What's to really stop it? You? Me? We don't have the money to fight it, and if parents around the US of A REALLY want it, by God they'll get it.
The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
MattW has unfortunately drawn himself into a common fallacy. The poor in third world countries don't have lots of children because they're idiots or ignorant. (Granted there is a general lack of education and health care which certainly doesn't help things.) They have lots of children because of in such harsh conditions it's actually a pro-survival move for the family or society in general. In agrarian pre-industrial societies, children are needed to help work the land, and the so-called "nuclear family" model simply does not work in conditions frequently found in places like Rwanda.
Birthrates in America in the mid 19th century and prior were also frequently high as it was a general assumption that over half your children would not live to see their majority. (Abraham and Mary Lincoln had 6 children, only one, Robert lived to adulthood and they were the First Family of their time.)
The problem of poverty is not resource scarcity it's resource mismanagement, waste, and outright greed. It's also pretty much a given that the main reason that these hellholes are pretty much going to stay the way they are is that it is too much to corporate benefit that they do so.
Case in point; Some years ago a Union Carbide plant exploded in India killing hundreds both in the plant and in the nearby village as well as poisoning a considerable chunk of the surrounding area. The UC plant was slipshod and ran without many of the safeguards and guidelines that would be mandatory in countries like the U.S. If the area was not a poverty-stricken famine prone area like the ones described, Union Carbide would never have been able to both build death trap plants like that one nor have been able to hire the locals at pretty much slave wages to work in them.
To you and me these conditions may look like problems, self-made hells. To the major corporates they're opportunities made in heaven and by thunder no one's going to be allowed to make any real progress in changing them.
Fuck you cunt.
"Don't open the gates, who the hell needs a wooden horse that size?"
This is a bunch of hype with no substance. What is someone going to do, make super-strong combatants. Big fucking deal, people will just shoot them. Make super-smart people? Intelligence implies training and access to information. Many highly intelligent people would shy away from being foot soldiers in an army. Make everyone a clone so you have a perfect genome, and then watch natural selection find a weakness and kill everyone real fast. You need to stop reading X-men and stop watching GATTACA. Both are alarmist and discount heavily supported scientific theory.
If I was going to engineer two of my children, one one be a boy, other would be a girl. Here is how I would do it:
Boy: Grows up to be about 6'6", handsome like me (haha), supersmart, atheletic, no eyesight or hearing probs, never go bald, etc.
Girl: Grows up to be about 5'9", blond and cute, blue eyes, thin and toned, supersmart, etc. Maybe I can control her boobsize too.
If we start engineering our children, we are going to have a bunch of "perfect" children. There will be dozens of 6'6" atheletic dudes trying out for the basketball team, and dozens of perfect girls competing for homecoming queen.
Things should not be like that. Eventually there will be a rift between engineered people, and non-engineered people, and it will be chaos.
If I was a kid in high school, and there was all these perfect people getting all the attention, it would probably be Columbine time. I would go nuts.
"...we are moving toward a Web-centric stage and our dear PC will be one of
EverCode
Last I heard, China had some rigid population control laws. Next, the Chinese won't be allowed to have them at all (the natural way).
I'm not going to try and say that the ethics of population control are sparkly and great. But consider this - the earth can only sustainably support so many people! I'm not going to try and spout a number, but I'm hoping that you'll agree that there is a finite limit. At that point, would you still be opposed to birth control/population control? Many people say that we passed that point a few decades ago.
Or would you rather that two parents living on a $40,000 salary have seven premature, sickly babies that will have to deal with their birth defects for the rest of their lives?
Two kids per couple... isn't that a modest proposal?
Wah!
Oh yeah, that's right... Crap. Thanks.
Wah!
For the most part people have one kid at a time; they have eveyr opportunity to decide how many they can afford. If they have too many, well that is their problem. No skin off my nose; I don't pay for them.
People have kids so that they can be supported in their old age. The poorer they are, the more they'll need in order that they won't die alone in a government home. Socialized governments give people the security that, in less altruistic societies, could only be got by having capable offspring. Therefore socialized, rich countries have a lower birth rate. It's a fact.
Secondly, it will be your problem, because if people are too poor, they're going to do what they have to do to survive, and if that means breaking into your BMW and taking the radio, then that's what they'll do.
Poor populations are especially bad; they cost far more than they put in.
Prove it. Troll.
Were we to stop [welfare], then we could honour the rights of the populace and be making economically sound decisions. The best of both worlds.
It may make sense to you, but it doesn't to me. Please elaborate.
Wah!
You cannot turn back the clock -- you cannot unsplit the atom, make the world flat again, or place the Earth at the center of the universe.
You're right. Once discovered, scientific knowledge rarely goes away, especially in this day and age of the printing press, etc.
However, just because we have the scientific knowledge, doesn't mean that Atomic bombs, ICBMs, and WWF RAW on Monday nights are a logical consequence. We choose to incorporate them into our society, in one way or another. In the case of North Americans, the overwhelming majority of people don't know the facts or don't care, and allow their decisions to be made for them by those who do know the facts and have a lot of money invested in their acceptance.
Though everyone's going to laugh, I'd like to point out a little country nestled between China and India named 'Bhutan'. The valleys in which most of the population lives are fairly isolated by mountains, so the most convenient way to enter the main city from abroad is by air. Because of this isolation, and because of their small size, they have a very pronounced sense of community. Technology is given an inspection for its benefits and costs before it is adopted. For example, they have chosen not to recieve cable or satellite, but they do have local broadcasting and a booming movie rental business. Tourbuses full of the typical package-tourist aren't allowed, but you're more than welcome to come visit, so long as you're not upset by the idea of actually visiting another country, one where you can't get a Big Mac.
Anyhow, long and short - Don't imply that just because technology exists, that we must use it. We collectively choose to use it because those who have the most to gain from its acceptance assure the public that it's perfectly safe and will cure cancer, AIDS, and that bored feeling at 2:30 on Sundays. Think DDT (perfectly safe at the time), early fertility drugs (perfectly safe at the... oops, flipper baby), and now G.E. foods (perfectly safe, oops, now genes are jumping to make herbicide resistant weeds... and all the monarch butterflies are dying from eating BT-genetic-pesticide 'enhanced' pollen...)
A healthy dose of cynicism helps reality go down.
Wah!
Oh shut up Katz, being a quote-unquote Pundit has gone to your head. I didn't really have an opinion on your rants before this, but now I'm just tired of it. I'll go shopping for my melodrama elsewhere thankyouverymuch.
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
ok, i've been reading some of the responses to this and have been shocked and amazed at how much everyone believes that they know. (don't be offended our society has taught us some of the wrong things about these people)
To begin, I want to ask a question: assuming that the Nazis would have had this information, what exactly would they have done with it? Breed out the "race poison" that had been infecting the German people? Make a whole race of Super Aryan Men(actually there were umm... farms in the German countryside that excellent soldiers could attend so as to better spread the good German genes onward)? Realize that there is no real difference between the race(there are only 3 races on earth: Caucaziod, Mongolid, and Negriod I hope I spelled those right)? Assuming the technology that was needed to gain this knowledge existed at the time, all Hitler could have used it for was propaganda. Without the major diffrences in the races(which in his mind was really ethnicity see above) to create some form of anti-race germ(if that's possible) THERE WOULD BE NO REAL USE FOR IT. Also might I add that it was not Hitler's orignal idea to exterminate any of the peoples the German Army squished, why not use them for slave labor and spare German lives the strain? In fact, the Final Solution was not inacted until 1942, when German was losing the war. Oh, and Hitler didn't even make the decision. The head of the SS(I can't remember his name, was attempting to forge a new use for his orginization. Hitler only gave the final word) History has already shown us what the Nazi's would have done.
And now onward to the problem of China. What if every family in China had boys? The population growth of the nation would continue for a while, but what happens when all those boys come of age and want to start families of their own? Given the restrictive society that China is importing women would most likely prove difficult therefore, and I know this sounds very cruel, the most efficient form of population control I've ever heard of would take place! Granted a very rich society and culture would die out, but they brought it upon themselves right? Nature(as I believe would be the correct force here) normally finds a way for correcting its mistakes. Now for a few of the smaller points I came accross while reading. Someone mentioned ETHNOCENTRICITY, what do you think he's talking about? American culture is about as elitist as they come. American has become its own ethnicity. in the begining we might have been a melting pot, but after the Revolutionary War almost all who immigrated, assemilated themselves into our society. Just look at American English and the amaglam of foregin words that are not in used in England(of course vise versa, but their words do not come from Mexico and what not).
I've been ranting too much, but if one would engage brain before speaking so as to not place foot in mouth it would extremely help these "conversations(I can't think of a better term)" Once again, I don't mean to offend anyone, but facts are facts attempt to get them straight
11 was a racehorse
12 was 12
1111 Race
12112
Virgin WHORE? She was chosen by GOD! How could the Son of Man, who lived without sin come from a sinful whore? A house divided against itself cannot stand. I was raised as a Catholic, and though I've found that anything other than praising the one God is not the way, Mary is worthy of at least as much respect as any of the prophets. So who was Moses? The bastard orphan? Abraham was the child beater, I guess.
You have not yet accepted Jesus as your personal savior. If you had, you would spread the word among those who have lost the way. Instead, you vilify them like the Pharisees vilified Jesus for sitting with moneylenders. I will help you find the way if you are willing.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
We have known about the dangers of genetic manipulation since the early days of Sci-Fi. It is inevitable that the human race will become an engineered one, and while it will be a tough transition, it is no different than the socio-economic classes that we have today.
100 years from now, the human race will be closer to perfection than we have ever been before. We will live longer, be smarter, stronger, faster, etc. Sure there will be the have and have-nots, but there are have and have-nots today. I feel sorry for them, but it is no reason not to continue on with the logical evolutionary step for mankind.
I think we have all missed out on something very important here. Curing every disease, allowing poeple to live longer, making poeple smarter. There is one thing in common with those things: Overpopulation. We have over 8 billion poeple on the planet that can only hold a few billion more. all we need now is to make everybody live longer and cure diseases, yah, that will fix everything up.
I to hate seeing poeple die of needless causes such as disease and old age. It horrible, disgusting to watch even. But think of the ramifications of curing those diseases and curing old age and stupidity. If everyone is smart, who is going to do the dirty work? we will have to create a certain number of humans of want to pick up trash.
Over population is a problem, we all know it, by the time we breed enough smart poeple to think of ways to live in space, the earth will be depleted of all its resources.
It just a thought, I don;t really subscribe to it myself, I prefer to think that humanity will realize this soon enough and we will solve all our overpopulation problems by living on the moon or mars before we have any serious problems.
For starters:
The monster was the monster. Not Frankenstein. Frankenstein was the doctor. You at least once referred to the MONSTER as 'frankenstein'.
And, the monster was last seen IN the Antarctic. Jumping into a giant funeral pyre. If you are going to quote classic literature, do your research. Instead of spouting out another crap piece.
I don't usually agree with Jon on his position of social issues, but for once I have to admit that I do. As a believer in capitalism and a market-driven economy, I forsee great benefits of the genome project.
However, not to sound too techno-geeky, I'm reminded vivdly (from out of the blue) of a Star Trek: TNG episode I saw years ago. The basic premise is a scientist creates faster-than-light travel. There's of course, the 1 hour conflict-resolution cycle, but the ending is one that throws the US into sharp relief. The ruler of the world said that the project would be put on hold until they better educate the population and bring their consciousness up to a level that could deal with inter-tellar alien contact. I think that's exactly that the US needs. I DO NOT advocate a federal education program - in fact, I'm completely opposed to the Department of Education. However, I think we need a return to the educational goals/values/ethics/methods of past generations where students learned and understood instead of being programmed and cranked off the "perfect student" assembly line. The populace needs to be educated in all moral and ethical facets of the genome project before they can make rational decisions (i.e. voting for congressmen, laws, etc..) about how to treat such groundbreaking knowledge.
Some people take their .sig way too seriously
Your position, while understandable, has been taken before. Perhaps it is the mere presence of such doomsayers that has resulted in their predictions never coming true. So while I completely disagree as to the direction our new discoveries will take us, I can see that you have a place in our society as a sort of crackpot canary that serves as a VERY early warning of possible consequences of our actions. Luckily we've managed to slip by without destroying ourselves yet, and I think we'll make it through this discovery as well.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
Nah guy's be risk takers the only thing to have is a DECK OF MANY THINGS.
I've always wanted one of these.
Plus I don't think the Thunder god would take to kindly you using his big stick it would fuck up the weather!!!
"The way she used to say Rimmer as if it rhymed with scum" Red Dwarf
No but you boy's in the US though he was such a genius that half of his staff was shipped over to your country... You guy's copped out so fucking badly that most of your COLD WAR gains where ripped off from those same "NAZI geniuses" that you abhore so very much. Wake up and smell the roses. I know the USSR did the same thing. How come you think you got so far ahead in rocket technology??
PS - 23 million of my people where killed by the NAZI's so don't start that monopoly on genocide shit with me if you reply back!!
"The way she used to say Rimmer as if it rhymed with scum" Red Dwarf
HMM a gene for Judaism, I suppose there is a gene for being able to find WALDO.
Go back to school you fucking moron
"The way she used to say Rimmer as if it rhymed with scum" Red Dwarf
Much of this genetic information and bio-technology will fall into the hands of new corporatist genetic conglomerates, who already promote conformity and homogeneity and who already wage war against individualism and diversity of expression.
Huh? When you make a statement like this, Jon, you just *have* to back it up with something. Which 'corporatist genetic conglomerates' are waging wars against individualism and diversity of expression? What have they done? You shouldn't make broad, silly comments like that and call it journalism.
If They (whoever you are refering to) are trying to force genetic conformity on us, please give us some shred of evidence! Otherwise, it sounds as though you were just looking through the thesauraus for scary words.
Dana
anyway, Katz paints a.. bleak view of man. And specifically the US. Not to mention IV league schools and parents who "spend small fortunes on tutoring?" Man.. parents who want their kids to do well are jerks. Give them some credit, Jon. I mean, really.. no one's perfect, but they're also not the complete SOB's you make them out to be. It's true that the US loves itself, and loves to be the first to invent something, but hell, doesn't everybody?
Also: Stealing god's job? Do you really think we could? Assuming you meant that slightly literally, isn't it also possible that he left the genome there for us to find?
all in all, you're complete lack of faith in people is kinda disturbing.
-V
I whole-heartedly agree. When was it ever wrong to know? Man has always wanted to know things. It's what we do.
it's not evil to want to know more about yourself and the people around you. It's also not evil to want to better society. Doesn't anybody think that's what god would want?
Sure there are pitfalls inherent in any new technological discovery, but we deal with them.
I think that many people think much less of god and their fellow humans than they realize.
-V
yeesh. I for one am not an atheist. At the same time, I also.. how would you put it.. belong to the cult of science?" Even better, I'm christian.
I think I could argue that selective breeding is, as you put it, "tinkering with god's blueprint for life." It just happens to be in a much cruder form than genengineering.
"husks of men?" What gives you the right to judge them? You don't know them. I would argue that their "aim" is to better mankind and society.
-V
Isn't it possible that these geneticists are approaching one of god's most amazing creations (life) with awe, wonder, and love?
Are you assuming that they're doing this to further they're own evil plans?
-V
Ok, first off, that was totally freakin' uncalled for. He (Jon Erikson) is expressing his views, and while I don't quite agree with all of them you've really no bloody right to tell him to "sit down and shut the fuck up."
Try keeping things civl, eh?
-V
WTF? I get done defending you from somebody being a jerk, and I turn around to find you doing the exact same thing.
Now, I also happen to be Catholic. Catholicism is a branch of christianity. Now, I'm going to (attempt) to put my beliefs aside, and ask "is it possible to have a decent conversation without trying to draw blood? Maybe?
-V
:-)
all too true.. but then again, I'm a bad christian/catholic, because I hold that the bible and the church aren't always right.
I think maybe, when they did eat from the forbidden tree, god realized how important free will really was.
In theory, he hasn't turned his back yet..
-V
Every critic I hear of the HGP keeps going on about this fear of ppl wanting the "perfect baby," sorry folk, but there is no such thing. Every person has a different idea of what their "perfect child" would be like, ask 50 couples and I garauntee you'll get 100 different answers. The worry about increased class division also seems unnecassary, every technology created throught history has been in the hands of the rich and influential first, and eventually drops in price enough for the common person to use it, I see no reason why this one will be any different. It will give a short term increased advantage (maybe) to the rich, but in the long term if anything it will help equalize the playing field. We are gaining power over our own evolution. We have eliminated natural selection almost entirely in human society, so htis is the only way we're going to continue to grow as a species.
Lucyfer Sam
"In the beggining, Man created God, in the end, Man will realize that He is God."
_seven_ degrees of Kevin Bacon!
I think it's pretty clear this is not Jon Katz.
Bzzz. About as clear as mud. If you'd have bothered to fully investigate after clicking on "User Info" to discover how many posts this person has made, you would have discovered that "jonkatz" resolves to user number 7654, which is the same as "JonKatz." Thus disproving your case sensitive argument, and proving that this is indeed the real Katz.
Open mouth, insert foot, echo internationally.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
Katz both rants and proclaims some excellent questions and truths. Interestingly enough, this project will probably be more relevant to the older generation for the political problems it will involve and moral and ethical issues. I see some basic points evolving here:
- The development or demise of the technology concerning the genome project will be economically driven, period. It's all about the money, folks. Screw ethics, screw morality, if the almighty buck does not prevail, nothing will. You don't get computer upgrades just because they are cute, you know.
- This is most definately the generation that must decide the ethical/moral issues. Why? Because when we get old, it's going to be OUR butts that will have to be saved by medical technology. But by that time our voice will have been diminished.
- Everyone seems to be saying that the presence of technology doesn't necessarily mean that it will be used for our demise. I agree, that's a true statement; however, technology and money combined have a way of corrupting someone, anyone, to do something not beneficial. In the theme of MI:2, if you don't have a problem, you don't need the cure. Look for more of that to be present.
- This technology will not be the "miracle cure" for everything. Just when we thought we had erradicated tuberculosis, it's back, and a different form in some cases that's making it tough to treat. Several different forms of staph and pneumonia are making themselves present that are completely or almost completely resistant to all known antibiotics. Yet we use the antibiotics more frequently than ever, thus accelerating this problem.
- Creating "perfect" human beings will be a detriment to everyone. Defects in nature occur from a mixing of the gene pool. If all of a sudden we stop this mixing, we will lose out on the inate functions that keep us resistant to disease. Got cancer? I'm sorry, but nature says you're a product of the gene mixing. People who are defective die out, people who are not live. Simple as that. If we suddenly make people perfect, tougher disease will prevail due to the lack of that natural "culling" process that keeps us strong against defects. Sure it's harsh, it's reality.
Katz makes some good points. There are obviously many more, and most people are ignoring them. I imagine it will get worse before it gets better.Technology: GOOD
Technology in the Hands of People: Potentially Nasty
Technology at Microsoft:Awful
Need I say more?
Blog,Twitter
With all this, but I'd like to raise a few more points. I'm all for Free software, and open development, but I almost think the Genome project was too open. Had it been done in the cold war era, the various governments involved would have kept their mouths shut. There'd have been no drooling politicians nor ravenous corporate CEOs waiting for its completion. The world would have been a better place for the knowledge, but it would have been an even better place for the control based on that knowledge. You see, I have the ability to build a nuclear bomb. It'd take me some time and effort, but I *could* build it. Except that I have to fissionable material. It's kept under tight lock-and-key. Now, all these gene-splicers are available commercially. I'll have the knowledge. What's left from someone building a virus to end all virii? Heck, what's stopping someone from making a puppy with softer fur, that end up carrying the virus that ends all virii?
My two-and-a-half cents
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Katz has just released his first piece of FUD against a competing technology.
Can your IM do this?
You don't take into account the human element, and that is what matters.
On the other hand, i think he is taking the human element into consideration. Most of the greatest technology advances were either created to destroy/harm people, or were adapted to that purpose shortly after. Just look at all the cool new stuff designed during WW2, which were good tech advances, but as soon as we understood it, it was unleased to kill more people then we ever killed before. As far as that creationist crap; i hate to break it to you, but 95% of people in the US only pay lip service to that stuff, very few actually practice what they preach.
Although I do agree that most of the research will be patented by corporations for profit, I think the above statement is way off. Discussion of the ethics of altering human (and other animal's) genetics has been going on for years.
Although I'm sure someone has already posted it, here is a link to the Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues (ELSI) of the Human Genome Project page.
--RB
"One man can change the world with a bullet in the right place."
- Mick Travis, "If..."
They don't call 'em meat markets for nothin' :)
"One man can change the world with a bullet in the right place."
- Mick Travis, "If..."
Frankenstein was the name of the doctor. The monster has no name. He is simply Frankenstein's monster. Please don't perpetuate the myth of the creature having a name.
-NOC Monkey (OOK!) Experience is what allows you to recognize a mistake the second time you make it.
imho, Jon is a good writer. However, I think that he easily succumbs to the 'megahype' he rants about.
I watched quite a few news programs, Nightline amongst them, Monday night. Yes, there was so much hype you would have had trouble breathing at the press meetings and such. Nightline had an interview with Venter (Celera Corp) and the Researcher who made the announcement of the HGP completion with President Clinton.
Basically what it all comes down to is this: They know one thing for certain, now that they have a relatively complete map of human DNA, they have an even *longer* road ahead of them in determining what it all means and/or does. They admitted that they have identified a few sequences that are potential trouble makers in the way of several types of cancer and other such hereditary diseases.
I recall from that same broadcast, that there was a passing mention of a law already having been passed regarding discrimination on the basis of genetic potential. This law apparently applies only to the governmental bodies, though it can be easily extended. Is there potential for a 'Gattaca-like' future? Probably. Let's not get ahead of ourselves.
'The perfect baby' ?? come on. To paraphrase 'Ghost in the Shell': "...over specialize and you become too predictable...it's slow death." The key thing we must bear in mind is that we as humans have a right to know all about the genome that gave rise to us, it should be taught in biology classes, and examined in history classes. Keeping people from that knowledge is inherently wrong.
I must say I agree with many of the other posters to this thread: mankind would have to be very arrogant if he tried to 'steal God's job'. I think some things should be left alone, and this is one of them.
zerodvyd
We have to recall that the human genome is precisely a blueprint for the construction of a human body, and only that. Although much psychological research has been leaning towards blaming all mental maladies on physical conditions, we should remember that our bodies simply produce other bodies, whether we make them "perfect" or not.
Human minds and cultures produce human beings. I don't think the most carefully produced "super baby" would be free from psychological problems if raised by an abusive parent. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World seems the closest literary example to what's possible now, and you'll remember, they had to use a steady regimen of drugs throughout life to get people as homogenous as they wanted.
Don't write everything off to genetics! There's still a lot of ways left for people to come out fsck'd up.
As much as I like Jon's other articles, I'm going to have to agree with many of the others in this forum. I'm really glad the internet was almost completely unexpected by the media, or it would never have been allowed to exist.
If we are not prepared for this development, can you define what would qualify us as being prepared? As a society, we have already explored the possible consequences of this discovery in fiction (ever visit the scifi section?), and despite the ignorance-slanted portrayal of what this discovery could mean for us as a species, the only way to become more 'wise' is to go through exactly these kind of trials.
Look at it this way.. which world would you rather live in, one where people never had to suffer throught he humiliation of a colostomy bag again (because colon cancer is treatable if spoted early, and genetic tests can do this), or a world in which we let the fear of the policies of insurance companies, employers, or governments rule us?
Sure, while we change a few errors in our genetic code, we'll have to change a few things in our society. So whats the big deal?
Why don't we pass the following law:
Resolved, that:
1) No in-vitro changes shall be made to an individual's genome unless they will be made to prevent A) an infirmity B) a life-threatening illness.
2) When an individual reaches the age of 21, he or she then has the right to retroactively "edit" their genome however they see fit with retroviruses, DNA/RNA fragments, etc.
Does anyone have a problem with that?
+++ATH0
While many of the benifits and nightmares may be possible with such new technology. What are the real chances they will be used in the ways you suggest?
:)
Hell, right now its just a map of the genes, we still dont know what the fuck most of them do, thats years even decades down the road.
While I agree that as a society, we fall FAR behind our technology, and are very inequiped to do so, there arent many periods in time when humankind felt otherwise.
As a species, we push to learn, to do, to create. With that comes the LACK of knwoledge to use what we learn, that comes in time, after we blow up a couple pacific islands with nukes, ect.
Hell, even if we do manage to destroy ourselves with our lack of ethics, as you said, much of the world can't or won't have access to this technology, so they will continue to live as before, hopefully learning from our mistake that if you splice gene ddFgx, with y9Aqw it causes all humans to sneeze a higly toxic mist
Laters....
#include caffiene.c
www.mp3.com/Undocumented
Actually, if enough people in China decide to have only male children, this will swing the balance of power towards those with female children. After all, what good is a male child if he has no children of his own?
I'm not sure how this would work out. It could be that the grandson would have both the mother's and father's maiden name, or a larger dowry. They might decide to have mail-order brides, which brings into question who would want to immigrate to China and would the other Chinese accept them into their society.
Or it could just dramatically reduce the Chinese population.
Polish Grandfather Clause: If your grandfather had children, you may have children too.
In fact they will celebrate it. There will be the few who have actually thought about it and realize the true nature, but most will still continue this mentality of great achievement far into the future.
Because of our short lifespan humans have great trouble looking beyond the short term, We hail our discoveries only seeing how it may benifit us in our own life time or perhaps the lifetimes of our children.
Perhaps if anything the Genome project will be able to give us the ability of true foresight, or at least caution.
The only people who are to be hated are those who revel in Satan's unholy evil.
Hmm. I don't remember Jesus saying anything REMOTELY similar to that. I seem to recall him talking about the need to love everyone unconditionally, forgive your neighbor 7*7 times. Could you maybe provide chapter and verse? Thanks so much.
Bear in mind that Catholics are not Christians since they worship the virgin whore rather than God. Those heathen sinners could do anything and it wouldn't suprise me, since they, like all who do not follow in the path of our Lord, are destined to Hell anyway.
Ok. At this point I'm guessing you're just another boring wanna-be-troll, but I'm responding anyway. (Hey, I'm at work, I could be WORKING)
Each "Christian" believes that those who follow his particular brand of christianity is a TRUE christian, while any christian who holds a different set of beliefs is a FALSE christian.
It's all a matter of interpretation. All of life is a matter of interpretation. All instances of right & wrong are just matters of interpretation. You take what you want (or what you feel is reasonable, or what you think is believable) and you disregard the rest.
For instance... I tend to believe that when Jesus talks about the kingdom of heaven that he's really talking about a state of mind that can be attained by humans, here on earth. I also believe that Satan is not a real entity, but rather a SYMBOLIC REPRESENTATION of the evil in each man's soul. One part of you (Jesus likens it to being childlike) is interested in the good of others... one part of you (SATAN) is only interested in self.
The overall message of Jesus (to me) is that if we all give up on hating and fighting and hurting and lying, we all get to live in a wonderful mind-state that frees us from petty concerns about money/status/power (which can never truely bring any real satisfaction anyway) and brings us into a connection with the WHOLENESS (unity) of the universe, wherein we help each other because we sense the commonality between us, and realize that when we help someone else, we're actually helping ourselves.
More about my perspective can be found at:
http://www.nothinghead.com/jpbio.html
-The Reverend
-The Reverend (I am not a Nazi nor a Troll)
=(.\')=
If we have a safe, effective way to eliminate even some forms of birth defects and other severe genetic problems via genetic manipulation during pregnancy, why wouldn't we want to employ it? A clear definition would have to be laid out as to what ailments fall under this description and controls put in place to ensure safety and protect against misuse. It's a tough issue to wrestle with... do you end the suffering caused by such ailments or do you yield to your conscience that says we shouldn't be playing around with such things?
Manipulating physical features such as hair, eye color, noses, etc. should be strictly banned. Although, honestly, I am certain that eventually parents will do this whether it's legal or not. Once the technology is here, perfection-crazed parents will inevetibly pay high $$$ to unscrupulous doctors to perform such genetic manipulations. Perhaps some way of detecting genetically manipulated children could be developed to try and limit this.
Either way, I don't think there's any way to stop the momentum now. Many new and different things are on the horizon... What will life be like in a hundred years? And will we all be around to see it?
I guess "corporatism" and "nationalism" could share similar traits in the stripping away of humanity in the sciences.
If you didn't see the article: Why the Future Doesn't Need us in Wired 8.04 by Sun Cofounder Bill Joy you should. It was profoundly interesting. There was a slashdot discussion here.
I wasn't quite sure what to make of it. On the one hand, I think people are being alarmist. On the other, I think history is littered with the unitended negative consequences of a technology we didn't understand. I don't think, for instance, that any technological device should be capable of self-replication...
---
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
Unfortunately for the world, it's hard to imagine a more poorly equipped society to deal
with the Human Genome Project than the U.S.
Yeah, too bad that 1940s Germany didn't get a hold of this information.
Try the decaf, Jon.
Unix: Where
How's it like to feel like a piece liquidateable property junior?
Well, today my stock value went down but I promise to do better. That's my job. I'm a good kid really.
What next? Children as fashion?
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
The US is arrogant because it's 200 yrs young healthy.
Europe is senile becuase it's decrepit and centuries old.
No one is right for the job.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
I'm not a citizen of the US. But I can think of no country more able to deal with this discovery. While not perfect, the US is the best.
I think some commentators, as Mr Katz here, may be forgetting just what this type of thing means to theocracies or dictatorships. And most of the countries in this world have little semblance of representative government. Of those with representative government, an extreme few are proper constitutional republics.
It is much easier to overthorw a citizen's rights in a country without a written constitution. In the US, courts can enforce the Constitution above statutes (unlike Canada where a 2/3 majority can legally abrogate almost anything in our toothless "Charter" of freedoms--sheesh!).
In short, the US may have lots of flaws at the moment, but it's still got more checks and balances than any world government operating today.
Steve
Frankenstein's monster went north, not south. And, in the last bit of the article, you forgot that Frankie was the Dr, not the (anonymous) monster.
At least you got the moral of the story right: that man needs to take responsibility for his work, rather than the old "things man wasn't meant to know" line.
1) Frankenstein was the doctor, not the monster. For about half the piece, Katz seems to know that. Then suddenly he doesn't. Mid-piece emergent amnesia does not inspire confidence in the reader.
2) I've found it useful to replace the name of whatever an incoherent rant is directed against with the name of the ranter, because incoherent rants are usually paranoid projections of negative characteristics of the ranter onto an object/person/event, not sane-but-vociferous reactions to that object/person/event. The point of this piece seems to me to be: "It's hard to imagine many [people] more arrogant, thoughtless or poorly equipped to deal with the fascinating, even miraculous Human Genome Project than [John Katz] [...]." He does seem to be dealing poorly with it.
Love,
Katz-basher #80985
Your mouth is like Columbus Day.
Katz has done it again.. he took a simple premise, made it chicken little all over again, and ran with it.. (and ran and ran and ran).
:)
A few points I took exception to:
1) the US and/or Canada are probably the BEST countries to handle this, at least we have SOME form of ethics in our medical industries..who would you rather see, John? India? China? one of the "other" countries that the Big Bad US has had downtrodden for years? Is this an actual concern about ethics and standards, or are you just ranting on the US cause you can?
2) One point off for gratuitous use of Bloom County material.. are you talking about babies, or are you talking about a Basselope?
3) again, you are assuming too much.. so the map is done.. the moon was walked on 30 years ago too, and there arent cities of glass up there, which your predecessors in the press ALSO ran screaming about, claiming the downfall of humanity had now been discovered, as evil people set up housekeeping there free from the earthly bonds of legality.
It's unlikely that this will offer any real changes within our lifetimes.. just because we can figure out the map doesnt mean we know how to get anywhere with it.. we know how the brain works now, mostly, and yet HAL doesnt exist.
Stop screaming and yelling, and look at the positive side.. and Im quite sure you wouldn't complain about a little medical manipulation if you knew that your 2 week old foetus could be cured of its spina bifida, or severe retardation, before birth, by the use of some of the things that we have now discovered. I know I would.
4) do you REALLY think that family intended to bring that many children into the world? Fertility drugs are an iffy question, but I cannot see ANYONE rationally deciding that 6,7 or 8 mouths to feed are better than one.
(for more clarification, see the Simpsons episode where Apu's wife gets pregnant.)
Well, enough out of me.. discuss amongst yourselves.
as always.. I remain Maeryk
maeryk@rcn.com
Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
- How about birth control methods, very significant to the birth of children, very profitable for corperations.
Huh, they must put it in the water where you live. Around here, taking birth control is a choice left up to individuals."Prejudice is wrong; you should hate everyone the same."
As a race, we can't get along.
As a race, some of us claim that 'resources are running out.' Other believe that the resources are unlimited. /. story touches on the idea that "we" want more power to keep living the life "we" have.
Even this
Yet, in these conversations about resources and allocation, no one discusses making a change to reduce the long-term numbers of consumers of resources.
If "we" can't even discuss population control, how are "we" even able to discuss engineering a 'quality controlled' human?
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
If you think about it, genetic engineering could be see as the logical next step in evolution. Because of the nature of evolution, the 'perfect baby' isn't necessarilly going to be the fittest that survives.
One way or another, the cat is out of the bag, so within our lifetime, we may be able to catch a glimpse if this 'mutation' is beneficial to us as a species, or if it has doomed us to genetic homogoniety.
On the positive side, now I can name my first kid Khan...
...like the potential to slice a penguin with a Gnu...
"You done taken a wrong turn."
-Bill McKinney, in Deliverance
Mr. Smith: WTF?!
MIB: As you have been informed before, sir, any offspring produced by you and your wife has an 85% chance of conforming to a genotype patented by ScruYu International. This is well above the 30% chance allowable by law. Under the law, you may not produce offspring without paying royalties to said organization.
Ms. Smith: WTF?!
MIB: Mr. Smith, you are further charged with violating the GMCA [the Genetic Millenium Copyright Act], by reversing the vasectomy you were required to undergo when obtaining your marriage license. This is a direct infringement upon ScruYu's right to protect their property. You have the right to remain silent...
I am a man of const int sorrows
I have not been scientifically trained but I enjoy reading armchair science books. I have a couple of questions for you regarding the ethical guidelines of genetic research.
the link in your article was a page describing the ethical questions and problems involved, but there were no guidelines there(just a spotlight on the issues involved). Katz said there are no guidelines or rules on the books. Are there actual rules and guidlines within the project dealing with the issues we are concerned about, or just the questions raised?
When will I be able change my skin color to blue?
Seriously, what would/could stop(besides cost & complexity) the next generation of spammers from releasing a gene changing virus (or nanites for that matter) that change your DNA so that your skin(through pigmentation changes) becomes a billboard for their ads? The tactics and behaviour of these individuals don't convince me that they would not do something like this, and it is easier to image other people doing worse. But it also easy to imagine people doing remarkable good, like changing us so that we can use a photosynthesis system like plants to gather energy rather than(or in addition to) eating.
$var = <STDIN>
$var =~ s/\\$//;
this is slashchomp
As a society, we may soon be able to get rid of obnoxious, anger and dissent along with cancer and heart disease.
Not everything about people is genetic, 'weirdness' for the most part is a learned behaviour. How exactly can the Human Genome project determine my opinions of the government and of society, and what my favourite baseball team is?
And you speak of corporations being the ones driving this new technology, I don't exactly know anyone who would be interested in paying to deal with genetic personality traits. While I agree their will be interest in making babies 'smarter', I don't see how people are going to want their children to be much different from themselves.
The benifit of living in a capitlist society is that morality is dictated by the consumer, and what is morality other than 'the rules' that society decides are acceptable.
At last count the sky has been falling ever since I first decided to hump that other real cute unicellular organism floating next to me in the primordial ooze.
It's been billions of years now since I started the long and very slow process of becoming this unspeakably complex being that I am today.
And now, as I stare at the informational detritus of 5 billion years, which is me, in a handy xterm I can't help but reflect for a moment and go...
Whooooooooaaaaaaaaaa !
Neat !
Catch a wakeup JonKatz and take a bit of time to notice where, who and what we are.
My wife and I are going to be using fertility drugs soon, after having experienced the trauma of an ectopic pregnancy a few months ago. We've discussed the possibilities and are not interested in producing a whole hockey team at once (although I wouldn't mind a defense pair or forward line).
As the old saying goes, it isn't the technology itself that is good or evil, it is the practical application thereof that people need to make informed decisions about. I'm thankful as hell that researchers have worked hard over the years (mostly in the face of strident opposition from god-fearing Luddites) to give couples a choice. If you don't think that sort of technology should be available for us to use, then kindly go screw yourself.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
All of those stories are true, except the one about slashdot.tv. Did you make that one up?
Abashed the Devil stood,
And felt how awful goodness is
Heh, you might want to look at Siggy's mods on his past messages. Hell, I'd toss you a point for Insightful just for drawing that WB reference; after all, they both spew forth loads of crap, are well aware that what they spew forth is crap and yet they both nail down the ratings. There's something to be said for knowing the demographic that you're playing to, even if they don't really know themselves. :)
Deo
Think about the early 1900's when quantum physics was discovered and it's underlying principles understood. It still took us 20+ years to make the atom bomb. And now we live in the shadow of that powerful creation. I believe the HGP is opening a similar door. I don't think we'll see common practical applications for another 10-12 years...Or at least to the point where a routine that can be performed will be affordable by the top 15% of the world....
I don't share Katz's vision, but more of Neil Stephenson's vision a la Snowcrash with some Gattica thrown in for good measure. The rich will be able to afford this technology first, thus ensuring their kids will be "perfect" - stronger, more attractive, etc....But they will lock themselves away in private surburban enclaves....And giving them even more of a leg-up upon the less fortunate. If you don't think is true, you need to study suburbia building and housing trends...The poor will be pushed down into further menial jobs, and the good, well-paying jobs will belong to a bunch of "similar" good looking people that have as much variety as GAP khakis.... Continuing along this trend, I really don't see a "Gattica-like" state of being for the U.S. as being that far off - perhaps 50+ years from now. Unless an interesting chain of events happens (large world-wide depression, the ancesion of China as a world force, collapse of US corpratism), the U.S. on its current path (the rich ARE gettting richer, the middle class is shrinking, and the poor are getting poorer.) Hopefully I will be wrong as I'd hate to these visions become reality. But observing current trends, I don't have much hope....
Please bear in mind that this is a very American-centric view, and is mot likely not applicable outside the U.S. I go with what I know.
-lostproc
That which does not kill you, makes you stronger.
What a jerk. It's very convenient for ignoramuses like Katz to simply dismiss my desire not to pass a genetic disease on to my child, but maybe if he spent a few weeks taking care of my aunt who is doomed to an early, slow death thanks to a genetic disease he might change his mind. Absolutely I want a perfect baby. As for Gattaca it was an interesting movie but completely unrealistic, mainly in that it vastly overemphasizes the role that genetics plays in personal achievement. It would have made more sense if the society of Gattaca had been backwards and economically impoverished because of its bigoted exclusion of the genetically "imperfect," whatever that means.
...where they could live up to your ideal of what a perfect society is. I'm not the king of the USA, gut it's still good to be here, thank you very much. Get a grip, or get a ticket out, but quityerbitchin.
- real hackers don't have sigs -
The most powerful company in the entire world is incapable of mapping stable OS layers... Who the hell is going to create a perfect human being? Blue Screen = Spontaneous Combustion
I already know that this is not what is going to happen, but I will express my opinion anyway. I truly wish that genetic treatment will become standard for all, some kind of universal treatment based not on what the parents or guardians can pay for. I want my children to not suffer from poor eyesight, like I do. I want my children to be free of asthma, unlike me. I want the possibility of weeding out diabities, and genetic cardiac disease. But I am just a dreamer...and this will never be. There will instead be attempts to create the perfect athlete, and the perfect intellect. Genetic changes will go to the highest bidders. Now there will be a physical difference between classes, and there will be, mark my words, resentment.
Ciao
nahtanoj
I agree. But I think there are better reasons for differences than genetic luck. Let's raise the median, its good for everyone.
This was a notch above recent Katz posts. Again, I wish Jon would turn his considerable talents towards the introduction of original thought, however, rather than simply lacing the obvious with witticisms and passing it off as news.
That said something jumps out from reading the article: there's a big difference between eugenics and genetic enhancement. The fact is, there are a lot of significantly disadvantaged people in the world. They lack the intelligence, or possibly even general health and well-being, to compete in and contribute to society. Nothing is so humbling as to step back and realize that no small measure of your own success is due to gifts given you in a grand game of chance, which you did nothing to deserve. Genetics gives us the chance to equalize the luck of birth for all people. This cannot be inherently bad. Or, to romanticize it less than Katz: if you know 1 in 100 babies with be born with genes for a removable genetic defect which will render them retarded, what is the greater ill -- to fix their genetic code, or to birth them and claim, "Everyone is acceptable"?
I'm not preaching unacceptance. I believe everyone's life has an equal inherent value. But what a person derives from their own life is largely contingent upon their blessings, or lack thereof, of genetic chance. To give everyone a chance to start equal should appeal to people on every part of the political spectrum. And this is the best way, of course, by raising up the less fortunate through a "miracle" of science, rather than by handicapping the more capable, which is a popular theme in today's world.
As a final thought on that first observation, society needs to require responsible parents for such children. If you add genetic enhancement to the mix of poor, ill-equipped parents without time to raise their children, society may find itself in the midst of a boom of genius criminals, and one person I respect has observed to me before that it is much easier to destroy than create. For those of the security vein, the observation was it is considerably easier to penetrate a system than to truly secure it. Similarly, it is easier to destroy life than to protect it, and rushing ahead of ourselves by over-enhancement may mean our own destruction. We may end up with the power to create our own mad scientists, as it were, and sadly, as often as they are romanticized to go hand in hand, moral responsibility does not accompany scientific prowess.
In the end, you simply cannot ignore the benefits that can be enjoyed as a result of this ambitious research. You cannot turn back the clock -- you cannot unsplit the atom, make the world flat again, or place the Earth at the center of the universe. And that said, you cannot undiscover our genes. The reason Gattaca was so poignant was not only the warning it gave, but the certainty many felt upon seeing it that society would face that moral dilemna.
It is now up to all of us to see we make the right choices for everyone, take moderation to heart, and use technology responsibly, while guarding against those who would abuse it.
Bzzt! Wrong, scientists are part of the cult of atheism which has attempted to have decent Christian teachings banned in our schools to be replaced with their cold mechanistic view of a "clockwork universe" in which the love of God has no place. Ultimately their aim is to have us all in our place, our lives ordered by the "scientific" elite according to their deterministic principles.
Um, since you live in the UK I can't say for sure about this, but it seems that I recall a bunch of Christians trying to push their specific flaovor of Christian agenda in the schools all over the US. I also don't really grasp the point about scientists trying to control us all (cue the spooky organ music). I have a pretty good grasp of history, and I recall that one of the primary uses of organized Christianity has been to have [everyone] all in [their] place, lives ordered by the [religious hierarchy] according to their [religious?] principles. Or maybe I missed how these incidents were just funny wrappers for the love of God?
I mean JonKatz's rantings, not the HGP.
awww man, damn, why did I have to be born in the 70's... with these grafted bellbottoms and the disco ball for a head.
Dad says, "Disco ball??!! Why in my day we were grafted with tweed suits and hawaiian shirts. Well, son, if you wait until the 90's it'll come back into fashion... so buck up. At least you don't have your mother's bee hive."
Of course the amazing thing is that the thing we use most TODAY to affect children in utero is abortion. Forget genetically modifying them, we usually just kill them, and usually not for reasons of birth defects or hair color.
We've got a long way to go, but who knows maybe we'll figure it out someday. Meanwhile, I'll take my disco ball and bellbottoms thank you very much and be happy to at least be alive.
Toddlers are the stormtroopers of the Lord of Entropy.
GATTACA was a very insightful movie, on the other hand.. you can know much about a man just by looking at him. You can make good predictions how much money the insurance agency will have to pay for him just by making a couple of simple tests: smoker? license? worker or student? annual income? sex? heart failures? drugs? alcohol? Why isn't it done on a daily basis? It could bring billions. Nobody checked at my insurance agency that I'm a smoker (nicotine as well as THC), free-climber, fast-driver, alcohol-abuser, choleric molecular genetist(*) with a heart failure. Go, and dream on.
Regards,
January
(*) High heart attack rate after reading Jon Katz' articles.
If you dont like the corporate republic, go vote for Ralph Nader he seems to be as virulently anti corporate as you are, you two should get along nicely
Ever hear of Nazi Germany and the "Perfect Race?"
What makes you say such things?
I KNOW! I KNOW! PICK ME!!!!
It is, JonKatz, as I have said, and others have said before, that you TROLL for comments. You are a yellow journalist of the worst calibur. You make the New York Times look like responsible reporting. You make the Washington Post look like conservative reporting.
I saw your report a while back in a magazine (US News and World Report, or was it Time, I can't remember exactly.) You supposed that you could "speak" for "geeks" everywhere. For Heaven's sake, Jon, you're not a "geek." You're a troll. I was so pissed when I saw your words on the pages, telling people how "WE" feel. You don't know a fucking thing about us. You only know how to piss us off. I wouldn't even have seen your article today(I have the JonKatz filter checked) but I wasn't logged in at the time.
Even the opening blurb about your drivel was designed to inflame. And it worked.
You know, I mailed you once before, when you threw in the obligatory story about how angry white men are ruining the internet. Why are we angry JonKatz?
BECAUSE TROLLS LIKE YOU WON'T LEAVE US ALONE.
I wrote you back an angry retort, asking you how much money you got from Andover et. al. for your trolling. I suppose this wasn't fair to Andover, and I felt badly about this, and apologized to Hemos about the whole thing. I think I even apologized to you about the whole thing, saying merely that you had gotten me all worked up.
Jon, I am not going to tell you to "Please die." I am going to tell you to "Please go somewhere else." Please pretend to speak for someone else, not us.
Jon, you're not special. You're like Jenny Jones. You're like Geraldo Riviera. You're like Oprah Winfrey. You're like Jerry Springer.
You will never have the respect of us "geeks."
And I will never apologize to you again.
"We apologize for the inconvenience."
You may not like to hear this, Jon, but religion has nothing to do with science. As well as having a strong faith myself I'm also a scientist by training - a molecular biologist before I became a full-time unix geek and I can honestly say that in that field I met people of every faith that marvelled as they worked at the ever finer detail of [insert-relevant-deities-name-here]'s creation they were uncovering. This was equally true of the many dedicated scientists who were either agnostic or atheist, they just didnt choose to attach a divine name to it.
Much as I hate to criticise an honest belief it is my opinion that views such as yours, expressed in this manner are nothing more than a reiteration of the arguments whereby the established church strangled the development of medicine throughout the dark ages, characterising herbal cures as satanic sorcery, forbidding surgical research as heretical and on down a long list. - Even efforts towards a literate public were regarded as interference with the natural order of things.
Mayhap the first step towards the more enlightened society you so obviously yearn for is tolerance. May I gently remind you of certain teachings regarding the mote in your brothers eye and the beam in your own?
# human firmware exploit
# Word will insert into your optic buffer
# without bounds checking
I had a
Since the discovery of fire and the wheel (both of which have been used to good and evil) every technological breakthrough has had both wonderful and disasterous consequences. Everything we discover can be used for both good and evil. Should we stop making breakthroughs and abandon research all together?
Hell no!
The discoveries are neutral, and we're the ones who make good and bad uses of these discoveries. Unfortunately some people irresponsibly pervert our best intentions, and though unfortunate, I do not see this ending any time soon. However, I believe the benefits of research outweigh the bad consequences derived from it, and far outweigh the consequences of abandoning research on any subject.
Idol Star Astronomer
Um, no it isn't:
See, that wasn't so hard. If there was a Nazi state today (say, if Hitler hadn't been dumb enough to invade Russia), it would be hard to imagine anything worse than that state having the genome map -- instead of murdering Jews and Slavs and Gypsies and homosexuals and the other "inferior races", they could just engineer them out of existence with the force of the state behind the "genetic cleansing" effort, rather than just personal decisionmaking. Compared to that, I'd say the U.S. is much better prepared to handle this new technology!
Of course, there are serious ethical and philosophical issues at stake with this new technology, as there are with all new technologies. But Katz's hyperbole is a little bit out of proportion to the stakes at hand, as per usual.
-- Jason A. Lefkowitz
Read my blog.
Well, ok.. So they have the map, the thing is they don't know how to read it. It's gonna take a lot longer than it took to map out the whole thing to understand it. I can't see anything to worry about so far, we're atleast a hundred years away from "Gattaca" still!
While I tend to agree with what you are saying for the most part I believe that you are approaching the situation a little bit too objectively for the like of the author of the original post. My impression of the original post's author is that he is of the christian type who sees the bible as the direct, infallible word of God dictated to each author and translator of the said book.
What this means [to them] is that the bible is the TRUTH. The truth cannot be looked at objectively by someone in the previously defined position. The bible cannot be looked at objectively by those people either. Nor can the truth be criticized by someone outside of the system using external proofs to try and clarify matters. Most followers of this interpretation of the bible choose to side-step and ignore the glaring inconsitencies and paradoxes of the bible because if they were to admit that any part of the bible were fallible then that would leave room for claiming that all of it could be fallible.
So what I'm trying to show is that the direct assault is not the best assault. Since they know the truth, the words you say about their Holy doctrine, no matter how sound they are [these words], if they lie outside the doctrine that is taken as truth, are false.
I have found that a more effective means is to try and address the issue from within their set of rules. What needs to be shown is actual inconsistencies between translations especially those of political agenda, which I believe that you alude to. One of my favorite avenues is to address the issue of the ultimate evil dead that Satan could do. Wouldn't it be simply evil if the devil were to influence the hand of the writer just as god did? This would introduce inconsitencies into the bible would it not? Another approach I have seen taken by actual biblical scholars themselves is the critique of the process by which books were chosen for addition to the bible. Did you know that Martin Luther opposed the inclusion of the books of Hebrews and James into the bible because of their questionable content, the very books that many of these Christian sects rely upon heavliy for their propoganda.
Unfortunately many many religious affiliates are suspect of being entirely too subjective and many non-religious affiliates are suspect of being too objective. I'm not sure if I adequately described the idea I had in the back of my head. All I know is that if you ever want to effect people's cosmologies [the metaphysical study of the origin and nature of the universe ] you need to do it in a way that they will not outright object to and from my experiences with people such as the writer of the original post your approach would fall on deaf ears as being of the devil or just blatently incorrect. Like I said before, I personally agree with you but all an axiom bashing arguement does is lead to anger. I personally believe that any dialogue between individuals should lead toward the finding of truth. To communicate effectively we must understand our audience.
Random Task
"I can hoist a Jack. I can lay a track. I can pick and shovel too. I'll do anything you hire me to." - John Cash "Legen
If God had meant us, to spend our lives, in slavery to ignorance, he would have left us with minds as simple and uncomprehending as the beasts that surround us. We are not a mockery of the Creator, but a reflection of him; it is natural for humanity to wish to create, and affect the world around him, it is a desire we inherited from our Father.
Fear the man who wishes to make decisions for you, for he considers himself to be your master.--Nietzsche, horribly paraphrased and translated.
Weapons of Mass Analysis
How can anyone say something like this: - "Today we are learning the language in which God created life." Maybe. Or maybe we are just trying to steal his job. " - and still take themselves seriously?
This sentiment may seem anathema to many but I for one believe it is true. Any sentient being that can discover how to alter themselves wil try to! At the present it is not a huge worry nor is it likely to be for a generation or two but the day will come when you and your wife will be able to create an embryo, derive embyonic stem cells from this embryo and alter the genes at will to remove predispositions to illness, enhance intelligence, add physical prowess of desired nature (able to live to low gravity, fast reflexes, great eyesight, physical durability to hot or cold or dry conditions etc.) and then create a new embryo from these cells giving the desired features to the resultant child. Of course the environment the child grows up in will be pivotal to the expression of these traits and mabey we will try and control that too.
However, this scenario will only be available to the wealthy and powerful for many years to come and will ultimately increase our genetic diversity. Our societies will become fragmented at the fringes along genetic class lines as initially people will be trying to design individuals with extreme phenotypes. As others have stated, time will allow natural selection to occur on this population and those that reproduce rapidly will come to dominate. Soo a few predictions:
Super fertile and horny men and women able to concieve between ages 8 and 200 with strong parenting instincts will become the dominant group (numbers wise).
Uber Smart people will not become dominant in numbers (they will generally not want to be burdened with families and the thought drain they represent) but instead will live lives tormented with mental disease since it will take scientists millennia to discover the environmental conditions that allow the intelligence endowed to thrive and support self reproduction.
People will segregate into classes based on their particular genetic choices making future alteration of their genes to other class types more difficult as generations continually hone their genetic niches (warriors, workers, artists, scientists, space colonists, the beautiful media celebs, pragmatic politician leaders {I hope this group and the media celebs can be kept separate}, organizers etc.)
All the while, the majority of people on earth (but less so elswhere) will continue to have kids by the "traditional" route keeping a solid genetic diversity base to work from.
We will ultimately have a society that is more diverse than when we began and thus should be better adaptable to future environmental demands.
The crux of what I'm trying to say here is that the genetic alterations will be made on a choice basis by affluent parents for their offspring and the majority of the worlds people will likely continue as they have since the dawn of mankind.
I look forward to such a world, even if I was a worker specialist.
no sig.
Parentage and Perfectablity
My first reaction to this particular stream of drivel was that I wonder to what degree people would consider the link between parentage and genome. I would think that for the same reasons that adoption is so attrociously under-represented pretty much world-wide, most people are not going to want to host a kid with more genes tweaked than natural.
It seems somewhat reasonable that the idea of congenial correction would be more widespread; who wouldn't want to prevent their children from receiving their sickle-cell gene, but what brown haired couple really wants blonde kids? The joke changes from being about a milkman to the eugenecist.
Frankly, the degree to which people, especially men, are obsessed about the parentage of their kids will preclude a lot of the gengineering processes that might become popular; until it can be done after the fact, on adult organisms.
The End of the World Again
But I'm frankly unsurprised by Katz going off the handle about a technological advance. I'm surprised he hasn't predicted that the Pentium 4 will be remembered in history as the end of freedom in the known world. Or maybe that's his next article.
Luddites always see how Satan is coming in the next technological revolution. Motorcars, electricity, mass production. I'm sure someone somewhere wanted Gutenberg branded a heretic for producing a bible without writing it by hand. And we do own the pessimistic visionaries a debt of gratitude, since they do point out the dangers and hazards of new revolutions. But if we were to take them completely at their words, we'd be living in caves pulling gathered nuts around on sleds. Hardly an appetizing worldview.
Societal Preference
Speaking of worldviews, though, I've got to wonder who Katz would prefer the Human Genome Map to be in the hands of. Not much of a US fan myself, I wouldn't say that the US is any better or worse than any other culture to handle this. In fact, there's probably more of a reproducive Luddite factor in the US than anywhere else. The Far East has a reputation of female infanticide, the Middle East and Slavic nations of ethnic cleansing and termination-as-birth-control, European nations have histories of eugenics and governmental interference in reproduction, African nations are known for non-existant female reproductive rights and general human rights violations.
Overall, even with a long record of sexual permissiveness and shallow image conciousness, it almost seems like the States would be the best choice. Excepting maybe Canada, granted.
The Weirdo and Persecution
Maybe the Hellmouth stories were too popular. Maybe Katz made too many friends on that piece. Or maybe he's always had a geek-as-misfit crusade going. I didn't read him before the Hellmouth stuff. But I think the entire approach is skewed. Until you start jailing people for speech issues, I don't think you're doing anything wring to form cliques, and include or exclude whoever you want. You don't get to be an outcast by being accepted. And the in-crowd doesn't innovate.
Seriously, a step or two off of the paranoid pyramid he's been building might be good for Jon. Genes for weirdness? Come on. Probably easier to find intelligence genes (if they aren't identical.)
The truth of the matter is that there is still no Neo-Nazi organization trying to round up all the geeks and put them down. And there are no Evil Eugenicists working for them.
Ushers will eat latecomers.
IP is just rude.
Is there any torture so subl
I didn't see Jon saying anyone was too "dumb" to handle the technology, but rather the US lacks the wisdom and the responsiblity to handle the technology. Big difference.
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"Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief."
now that you've "figured it out", why don't you remove Katz articles from your preferences and stop posting to them. Thanks
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"Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief."
I believe that was a troll you fell for...hardly worth replying to. If that AC really believes what he said, then pity him, dont feed him.
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"Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief."
Katz can go back and redo the piece comparing the Shadowrun rpg and reality - monsters (and by extension, magic) will coexist with corporatism in the future!!
Who are the Christians? See below:
"A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another."
-Jesus (John 13:34-35)
This is how we know who the children of God are and who the children of the devil are: Anyone who does not do what is right is not a child of God; nor is anyone who does not love his brother.
-1 John 3:10
If anyone says, "I love God," yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.
-1 John 4:20-21
So the way I understand that... is that if someone isn't showing the love of Christ towards others, it doesn't matter what they call or consider themselves, or where or how often they go to church, they're not a Christian.
For the record, if anyone cares, I am a Christian, and though I certainly fail sometimes, I also try my best to do what Christ said, follow the example he set, and love everyone, regardless. THAT is what Christianity is about. It's not about belonging to this denomination, or not belonging to that one. (see above quotes)
-Ascent
I would remind you that Socrates chose to drink the hemlock, because he considered it his civic duty to abide by the laws of the land, a death sentence in this case. He even declined his friends' offer to help him with an easy escape.
God, I'm even more pedantic than you.
>>Bzzt! Wrong, scientists are part of the cult of atheism which has attempted to have decent Christian teachings banned in our schools to be replaced with their cold mechanistic view of a "clockwork universe" in which the love of God has no place>>
Religion has NO place in public school. What you must realize is that faith must come from the heart to be worth anything. If I was a christian, no matter how dedicated I was if my faith was not true I'd live a miserable life on earth aping through rituals I don't believe in and end up going to hell anyways. You'd get alot of this false faith if religion(outside of a general study of it and its impact on society) was part of the public school system. People who hate life and go to hell anyways.
Without religion being taught and preached in public schools, people will feel more free to follow their heart... They will be able to develop into good people with a true faith in whatever deity they choose for themselves. In fact, I'd say a greater portion will be true Christians than if Christianity was part of the curriculum, because their following it comes from their heart, not rote repitition. This is one of the reasons the LDS church is the branch of christianity I most respect, they recognize this vital part of religious faith.
And even from a Christian viewpoint... Shouldn't you understand God? Strive to know him? How else to do so than looking at him through his creations? Much more direct and less subject to meddling by medeival Kings with their personal political agendas.
"Assuredly I say to you, I have not found such great faith, not even in Israel! And I say to you that many will come from east and west, and sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven. But the sons of the kingdom will be cast out into outer darkness. There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth." Matthew 8:10-12
Gee... Apparently not just Christians get to heaven. This was said referring to a PAGAN Roman Centurion. For the article I got this from, click on this link and ope your eyes. Your god is not so exclusive.
click here
And anyways, if Heaven is populated by assholes like you I'll take Hell 500 times worse than even our Creator can imagine.
Okay, serious question here. I don't know how many times I've heard the word 'eugenics' used as a synonym for 'evil'. Quite frankly, I've never figured out why. The closest I've ever gotten to a meaningful response ("It just is" is not meaningful) was something to the effect of "Hitler did it! Hitler was evil!! Oooooooohhhhhh!" or some such. (Post hoc ergo propter hoc, and that's being generous to the argument and assuming that Hitler == evil.)
So anyway, what exactly is wrong with weeding out certain genes? Throughout his above diatribe about the evils of everything since the discovery of fire above, Mr. Katz seems to think that any form of genetic manipulation of humans is a sin. Why? If I had the genes for multiple sclerosis, as an example, I would be quite happy to have them replaced or repaired in my child. Admittedly, attempting to make a conformist, pacifist, or whatever before birth is appalling -- but show me the gene for 'obeys blindly'. I think you'll find it's a bit harder than you think. (Ahh, the old 'nature vs. nurture' debate rears its ugly head!)
Finally, as a completely unrelated side-note... Mr. Katz, for someone who conciously tries to be as counter-culture as possible, you sometimes fail miserably. As nearly as I can tell, instead of making sane, logical points about why the US is unqualified to posess scientific knowledge, you simply went randomly US-bashing because it's fashionable. Just because everyone else is vocal about hating the United States doesn't mean you have to say it too -- if you want to attack the 'States, at least come up with a reason or two. (Hint: capitalism != US government. Surprisingly, there *are* other capitalist economies out there and they (*gasp*) have advertising!! Horrors! The US has polluted the world!)
- fader
Hmm. I don't think so.
You cannot have "designer kids" because the children that are given to you fall under the realm of God, not the Human Genome Project. Sorry if this bothers you, but truth is truth.
-AC (post 618)
Are we talking about the same slashdot? Creationists (as usual) will get some legislation passed that prevents the people who think it's ok from doing it. Yay. more wasted technology (brought to you by pushy parents and over litigation).
-saintalex
Observe, reason, and experiment.
Observe, reason, and experiment.
(if you're too dumb, just pray)
Hello Boys and Girls! Do you know what time it is?
That's right! It's FRANKINSTEIN TIME!
Kids: YAAAAAAY!!!
The phrase of the day si.. "FIRE BAD!"
Can you say "FIRE BAD!" boys and girls?
----
Oh my god, Bear is driving! How can this be?
ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
Parents invevitably, even understandably, will seek perfect children.
Mr Katz's rant on "playing God" is all very well, until you ask the question:
What is perfect anyway?
Everyone has diferent ideas. You will not end up with everyone looking the same, because all over the world, in diferent countries, in the same neighbourhood, everyones ideas of "perfect" is diferent.
That just covers physical attributes. What about mental ability. Would it really be so bad if more people had higher IQ's?
People on Slashdot (in particular) are always complaining about lUsers. What if there were no more lUsers? What if people had the physical and mental ability to do something with their lives? Would that really be so bad?
Me, i don't think so. But then, we're a long way off anyway.
Syllable : It's an Operating System
I just finished Heritics of Dune and the Bene Tleilaxu use a very similar statement to describe genetics: "The language of God"
Somehow I always suspected Clinton was a face-dancer. What we need is a ghola of LBJ.
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
Malda: *squish* Gosh, there wasn't that much there, you sure you got the right brain?
Hemos: Yeah, bird brains.. right?
My god signal, tasking yourself with something as simple as flaming Katz, and you totaly dropped the ball.
If you don't mind me asking, are you a writer for the WB network? Because every time I read one of your trolls, I am reminded of the useless and mindless dialog you can always find on that network.
I'm sure George Lucas could use your assistance writing for the part of Jar Jar Binks for episode 2. Don't worry about hurting your karma, the whole prequil trilogy is already considerd a troll, it can't possibly be moderated down any further.
NightHawk
Tyranny =Gov. choosing how much power to give the People.
Great hyperbole, but "quality control" as you define it, already happens today in the forms of ultrasound scans, amniocentisis, and other prenatal testing.
Yes, but testing after the sperm and egg are well into embryohood is a completely different proposition from being able to test, and evenually alter, a human zygote.
"...but this is now officially Frankenstein time..."
Cool! What does a time/era/moment in history have to do to get "official" status? Maybe I can get next year officially declared "daemon time."
More generally, it's funny how Jon writes such scary, dramatic, button-pushing stuff about 'media megahype.' Maybe he's not heard that old parable about the pot and the kettle.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Is part of the worry with this kind of thing that people think that they wouldn't be around if all of the getting rid of genetic wierdness had been possible when they were concieved?
I'm scared, I'm not sure that I would have made it. I like me, some other people do too. Why shouldn't I be?
I read a short story once. It was called something on the lines of "The Ugly Child". Everybody on the planet was beautiful. All was wonderful and everyone was happy. All with the exception of one child, who was ugly. Thus, the others were beautiful; without him, they weren't.
Do you have any better hostages?
The end result, following the line you have established, is a society obsessed with the correct genes. Who decides what genes are correct?
--
This is Exactly what happened in the movie Gattaca, with Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman.
--
This is a ripoff from Monty Python. 'The Philosopher Song'
'Ello Bruce!'
--
Regardless of what you think about Jon's rambling style or whatever, he always gets people talking, which seems to be his most important goal. In a world of soundbites, crucial topics like the HGP get boiled down to press conferences and one sentance summaries. The whole point of the open vs. closed media post was to push for discussion and questioning, not indoctrination. The 760 something posts at this point point toward success on Jon's part so stop nitpicking about everything. -brian
The idea that we're suddenly going to be having "franken-babies" any time soon is
laugh-out-loud funny for those who have even the slightest inkling of what we don't
know in cellular mechanics (or, to translate into hype-speak: nano-biology)
Salon magazine recently had a good primer on the reasons why this nightmare scenario
ain't happening any time soon. You can find it here.
It's all a conspiracy!
-ryan
"Any way you look at it, all the information that a person accumulates in a lifetime is just a drop in the bucket."
-ryan
"Any way you look at it, all the information that a person accumulates in a lifetime is just a drop in the bucket."
There's no guarantee that we can prevent it, at least not on a worldwide basis. AFAIK, once the damage is done to the foetus, it is irreversible. Also, I worry about exactly what would happen if we remove all traces of disease.
Or any of the other medical advances we've encountered in the last few decades?
I'm not saying anything against medical research. I look at this news with wonder and awe. What worries me is who will have access to these advances. As much good as drug companies do, there are always things they don't tell you. Also, if you breed out and exterminate disease, we as a species can no longer deal with it. Microbes mutate naturally, and believe me, if we engineer our susceptibility to them out of ourselves, nuclear holocaust would look like a scuffle in terms of casualties. Right now, I believe that we should approach this very carefully.
- "How do we do it? Volume!" - The Bursar of Unseen University.
This is like that 50's film where they show that triangle of physical health, social health and mental health and have the jock and the nerd get crushed by one side. American society is fragmented. Now is the time to really go for it. If anyone has an app that connects people really well, this is the time. Somehow, the internet hasn't done it by itself..
he who has the fastest cart always has the best lie.
i'm just happy that katz wrote something that wasn't a movie review or a restatement of the obvious relating to a technology issue.
this is perfect katz territory, social commentary; where it doesn't take any level of knowledge or expertise to have an opinion.
I'll bite. What about the US do you think makes us "ill-prepared" to deal with genetic engineering technology? Oh, I don't know, could it be...what little freedom we have left? </Church Lady> Seriously, what country do you think is better able to handle it?
I should know better than to reply to such a blatant troll, but: [enormous sigh] here we go again with the old, bogus "playing God" objection. People "play God" all the time; what this line really means is that some new technology is coming up, and the writer doesn't like it for that reason, unlike all the old methods of "playing God" that he's used to now (but that his ancestors berated with exactly the same pointless line).
Maybe a few high-profile media figures will make a big show of high-order multiple births, but the rest of us in the infertility trenches see that as our worst nightmare. Most of us want a baby, not a litter.
The problem is that the number of babies (zygotes, actually) is much more easily controllable when more advanced techniques such as in-vitro fertilization are used, but most insurance won't pay for that, so couples have to either do without, or resort to garden-variety fertility drugs.
What's worse is that fertility clinics themselves vary widely in how aggressively they use these drugs, with the lower-cost clinics tending to be the most reckless.
When more states mandate infertility coverage (as Massachusetts, among others, now does), couples will be able to receive appropriate treatment and counseling, without having to deal with unscrupulous shoot-from-the-hip clinics who only want to keep their numbers high.
-Father of one baby, thanks to properly used fertility drugs
dear post-sans-cogitation,
it's called "preferences" -- this link might work
We'll all be walking around with naturally-curly 4 inch long nose hair, perfectly straight, thick leg hair, and all be art-movie ugly.
At least if the US is gonna start twiddling with genes we can look forward to a future where women have back problems at 15, males have to consume 6000 calories a day, and viagra is generated by the adrenal gland.
wait-- maybe all the men in future might have hair...
semantics are everything!
This comes down to the "What good is half an eye?" argument that is frequently proposed in these situations. Evolutionary advances of this nature require time for evolution to build up the necessary components for the completion of the architecture. In other words, evolution needs be lenient enough for a series of detrimental mutations to produce an advantageous one.
Back to the major point... as in a genetic algorithm, life must be sufficiently tolerant of genetic imperfections so as to allow those 'imperfections' a chance of becoming something more. A fitness increase is often preceeded by a large downturn in fitness over preceeding generations. In algorithmic terms, how do we know that humans are not now on a 'local minima' in the global fitness space, and what damage could we do if we do not proceed with sufficient caution?
I'm sure that a qualified geneticist could rip this argument to shreds, but oh well...
A couple things, Jon. In Mary Shelley's original novel, the monster is not named Frankenstein. His creator is Dr. Frankenstein, and the monster is simply known as Frankenstein's monster.
Also, please, please stop making wild assertions without any evidence at all. To boot:
At best, everything you mention is vehemently debatable, much less fact. You yourself contradict the first statement - that no presidential candidate has ever used technology as an election issue. For every poor school there's a forward-thinking institution. I don't know what you're trying to demonstrate with that 15-year-old Linux users comment - except perhaps that you've forgotten your grammar ("its", not "it's"). And seriously, for every researcher at Ericsson working on WAP, there's another working at eliminating malaria.
You could spawn a two-hour debate with just that paragraph alone, and yet you use it as though it were irrefutable evidence in your favour.
Personally, I find the possible applications of the genome mapping to be disturbing. I don't want to be pushed aside by some technologically created wunderkind in 30 years. But you have to remember, the jury is still WAY out on the nature-vs.-nurture debate. Even with the best genes in the world, you can still turn out to be socially inept or dumber than a bag of hummers. =)
All in all, my rating of this JonKatz article: 6/10: good effort, needs improvement.
--
Seriously, Jon does have a point here, it's just hard to discern among all the forced comparisons and pseudo-evidence he presents. I also think Jon is a little Ameri-centric. There are many researchers world-wide with the ability and the know-how to use this map. Don't assume that just because the US has unlocked the code, they're the only ones who know how to use it.
--
Yes there is... the random element! But that's about it. Let me remind you that all this genetics stuff was started by a priest.
Bzzt! Wrong, scientists are part of the cult of atheism which has attempted to have decent Christian teachings banned in our schools to be replaced with their cold mechanistic view of a "clockwork universe" in which the love of God has no place.
Why are most of the scientist I've met devout christians then? It's hard to spend that much time looking at the marvels of the universe without coming away with a sense of some higher power at work, bit it god, allah, bramman, or the first law of thermodynamics. As for your "descent christian teachings", they aren't banned from school because of some mythical conspiracy of athiests, but by some very intelligent people (aka the Founding Fathers) who realized that it's wrong to force your dogma on someone else.
Ultimately their aim is to have us all in our place, our lives ordered by the "scientific" elite according to their deterministic principles.
Hmmm... doesn't sound much like any scientists I know. Actually, it sound more like corporate elite than scientific elite. Really, I think it's pretty much impossible to have a scientific elite with any real power in a culture that worships actors and basketball players...
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
And speaking of truth, here's some for you to chew on: Jesus didn't believe in an immortal soul. How do I know? Because Jesus was a jew, and the soul is a greek concept introduced into christianity by Paul, who if i remember correctly never even met Jesus. Perhpaps you should learn something about your religion before you go around preaching it.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Think of the industrial revolution, women and children forced to work long hours slaving over dangerous machinery.
We've got to get a few thumbs chopped off in the machinery in order to advance. We can't just shy away from it.
There's nothing wrong with having the "perfect baby" if people are able to realize what perfect really is. "Perfect" is being born without deformation or retardation. "Perfect" is not having blond hair or perky breasts or being six feet tall. In a society that places so much value on appearance and superficiality, I doubt we could make that distinction.
God help us if Cosmo or "the academy" should get ahold of this technology.
But it has to happen, and it's gonna be rough.
One of the many things I hate. thingsihate.org
You can't think of the consequences before releasing something to the world.
What if Chuck Palahniuk never wrote 'Fight Club,' because he was afraid that some guys, somewhere, would go out and beat each other up after reading the book? (As I'm sure happened somewhere.) We'd have one less great book in the world.
Just an example.
Fear of how people will react is no excuse to stifle art of science.
One of the many things I hate. thingsihate.org
genetic engineering has the potential
to destroy all life on this planet.
let's make proper research before applying.
the dangers of genetic manipulation are greater then atomic pollution.
but research has the potential to bring huge benefits
and gives us the opportunity to choose what we really want,
in a true worldwide democracy.
StopLifePatents
Didn't Frankenstein's monster wander off into the Artic? That would be easier to get to from Germany.
To paraphrase something from I think Neverness: our level of genetic sophistication is we've just learned the alphabet. We've pretty much just written down all the letters so far and we can recognise some of them in words. It will be a long time until we understand DNA grammar.
C'mon -- with fashion changing so fast, can you really create "designer babies"? Imagine your parents in the 70's genetically engineering you into having afros and sideburns. You'd strangle yourself today if you had that. OK, so it was an over-exaggeration, but you catch the drift -- if today the high demand in US is athletes, it is not unlikely that after a while this set of characteristics will be outdated and no longer the "hip". One can buy a new wardrobe, but once you are born with a certain set of characteristics, you can't easily change them. Also, one of the fallacies of parenting is that parents are always trying to raise a perfect child, while really they should be trying to raise a good adult. Take my mother -- she thought that lisp is really cute, so she never bothered to correct me when I was growing up. Then I moved to US where came to a sad realization that lisp in this country is stereotyped with a certain sexual minority. ;) I'd be very distraught if one day I come to pick up my kid from a daycare and become surrounded with Shirley Temple look-alikes...
If you open yourself to the foo, You and foo become one.
Soon we'll have genetically engineered penises through gene therapy and stuff. Hell, with Viagara selling like ambrosia, you know that's really the only thing these gene researchers are looking for...
--
Peace,
Lord Omlette
ICQ# 77863057
[o]_O
I'm curious how Jon Katz has carte blanche to write this drivel - maybe I'm not well enough up on /. history. We get to moderate down folks who spout crap in the threads. Anyone else fancy a thread-topic moderation system too?
Let's face it, Katz isn't adding any more to any of the discussions than the average petrified Portman merchant. He's just a troll with higher status. His opinions are not original, informative, amusing, helpful or useful in promoting discussion (except discussions starting "Isn't this a dumb thread?"). Unlike other guys who start threads based on interesting questions, news articles, whatever, to create a pool of interesting information, Katz's articles serve only to glorify Katz - it's self-indulgence, nothing more.
Anyway, I've had enough of this shite. I promised myself I wouldn't diss anything just bcos of who wrote it, but I've had enough. Filter time...
Grab.
This is just what Huxley predicted in Brave New World. When genetic manipulation becomes the standard, everyone will want to have a 'perfect' baby. The problem is that the world can't support 100% perfect people.
I mean, if you are perfect, you won't do any dirty, brute, job. There must be some balance in it. So they will start creating mentally deformed humans to do the low profile jobs.
Pretty scaring, huh? At least Huxley didn't predict the advance in robotics (Come on, his book is from 1932), so I guess (or better, I hope), that we'll have some bots to do the dirty job.
---- Email is reversed
Why don't you actually read what he has to say, rather than just bash him because he's Jon Katz? Must be fun to be part of a mob.....
Scientists says that genome can help saving many lifes. Maybe. It's cheaper and more effective, save lot of people that have nothing to eat, helping them to farm their food, instead of improving weapons. Since goverments are not interested in helping people but earn money, why we should expect that the information of genome project will be used to improve the quality of life?
I'm glad to see that you generalize about ALL Catholics (I'm a Catholic), and immediately condemn us. Wasn't there something in the bible about "Judge not lest ye be judged yourself"? Are all people who don't believe exactly the same things as you sinners also? Or just Catholics, since the Catholic Church committed so many atrocities in years gone by? Another note is that it was Christians (but not specifically Catholics) that were involved in the Salem Witch Trials and Nazi Germany (which were mentioned in the post you responded to); however, you immediately place the blame on the Catholic "heaten sinners".
And to correct your mistaken view on Catholic beliefs, Catholics do not worship Mary at all, we pray to her for help as we would pray to the saints. We ask for their help just like we might ask a friend to pray for us if we are going through a particularly trying ordeal. That should not be confused with worship, though it commonly is. (By that definition do I worship my close friends that are Catholic? :). I also don't think referring to the Mother of God as a "virgin whore" is a very Christian thing to do, regardless of denomination. (Side note: Isn't "virgin whore" an oxymoron? Or do you just use 'whore' as a general insult to apply to women?)
I think Genetic Engineering is going to challenge a lot of religious views, especially the question of when life begins. Many religions (Catholicism in particular) view conception/fertilization as the beginning of a life, and will fight tooth and nail to prevent the spread of situations such as that in Gattaca when the parents choose one of the four fertilized eggs to give birth to, and discard (read: abort) the rest.
DISCLAIMER: This post is not intended to be a flame or flamebait in the least (though I'd question whether the previous post is due to the emphasis on insulting Catholics). I just wish to correct this common misconception about Catholics.
God did not sit down, boot up, and fire up StarOffice to write the Big Book
Of course not he uses EMACS.
*grin*
My point about that is, ask almost any creationist about the concept of genetic engineering, and they'll think its a horrid idea, like satan himself put it into your lips.
Ah, but even without them, we are saved from misuse, because misuse of this technology won't happen as long as people don't want it to happen. Look here - on a forum like slashdot, over half of all people said that they would never geneticly engineer a child, at all - this is *slashdot* - free thinkers, independant minds, creative people, those who are the least afraid of technology. This is slashdot! And most people on slashdot are saying they wouldn't use it. If that clues in some of the people reading this.
So, no, i don't think creationists are going to save us from misuse. I think we're going to save us from misuse. Creationists are just a large group that you can pretty assuredly say will not use the technology.
- Rei
The yellowcake is a lie.
Counterevidence:
1. Genetic diseases are just as difficult to identify (or, to say, just as easy) as the genes for eye/hair color, thus, your argument must be that for some reason the ability to manipulate these won't be allowed for a (presumably long) period of time. Why? The length of time between the first essential organ transplant and the first nonessential organ transplant wasn't incredibly long, and there are far more possible complications involved in a transplant, for example. And, to doctors, moral issues such as a high chance of killing a person just so they can get, for example, a hand.
2. It takes a long time for something that many would consider a "sin" or "morally wrong" to be accepted. A *long time*. Do you not think that, in all this time, people would see no moral issues with this at all? if so, you must think humans are a race that is becoming continually less sensitive to people's differences. And, yet, look at our past verses our present, what, with Affirmative Action and such. All signs point towards greater acceptance of differences, not less. And acceptance is largely based on communication between different peoples - and the expanding net is the perfect medium for that.
3. Why would parents completely design a child? Why would a parent care what protien forms a marker on their child's cell walls, or the thickness of the phospholipid bilayers of their cells? Almost all genes are something that a parent wouldn't care about - and it would be pointless *not* to leave it to natural selection.
4. Reproductive rights are one of the most strongly guarded human rights, typically second only to the right to survive. You will *never* find a world where no woman wants to give birth to her own children, where no parents want *their* genetics passed along. As someone who cannot have children, barring advances in organ cloning technology, I can attest to this.
5. Discrimination doesn't occur in the workplace. Because, if it does, there are lawsuits. And they win, because of laws. This is how laws work. If a law is passed (and, in a country where the vast majority of americans would think it a horrible thing to be discriminated by genetics, it will), the law will be enforced by companies, via fear of lawsuits. It happens now, and unless our government collapses (in which case genetic engineering will be the least of our worries), it will happen in the future.
6. You talk about insurance companies offering lower rates for "geneticly superior" people. Do, say, car insurance providers take race into account when they set your fee? I'm sure you'd find corrolations. But, they don't, because that is discrimination (I still think its wrong that they take sex into account, but that is just me). There would be riots if they started taking race into account.
Lets see what that leaves us with: Most genes in even a custom-designed person being still naturally chosen. Corporations unable to discriminate based on genetics. A *long* period of time with which to determine what is immoral. A culture becoming increasingly accepting of, and encouraging diversity. Completely different opinions by different people of what is a desirable trait.
Please post criticism of this. I'd like to dispell a lot of this fear of genetic engineering with reasonable debate as possible. Look at the past, people's eternal desire to be themselves, people's desire to raise their children, and for their children to be like themselves, antidiscrimination laws... and get back to me.
- Rei
The yellowcake is a lie.
A valid point, woo!
I think this will be debated much at many levels of society in the future, the way the fundamentals of health care are today.
Lets see how my predictions turn out. ; )
- Rei
The yellowcake is a lie.
Jon, you do excelent humanitarian and human rights stories.
But on this, I have to say that you are incorrect.
First of all, let us look at past trends involving medical research. Would you consider any of them "evil"? Discovering how to transplant organs so the body won't reject them, how to immunize against disease, how the various organs worked, etc. Perhaps the only "evil" ones are biological warfare - and biological weapons are internationally banned because of this.
You don't take into account the human element, and that is what matters.
You think, for example, that people re going to try an create the perfect baby. Consider now that almost 50% of our nation is creationist, and you can expect the majority of them to consider that a sin. Then take the rest of the religious types in the nation. A large portion of them will consider that wrong. Most of the rest will think it wrong to manipulate anything but things that are *obvious* disease. They wouldn't want to be messing with God's creation unnessisarily, now would they? Almost all of the people remaining at least are humanitarian. Jon, noone wants to see a world where people are all identical. Noone has the same "perfect person" in their mind. Realize now that the people who are not religious (and thus, more likely to do this) are more likely to be free thinkers. *almost none* of these people are going to want their children to be closed minded. *almost none* of these people are going to want their children to be the same as everyone else. Individuality is a *highly* praised human trait.
Take a survey. I almost guarantee you will not find a single trait that the majority of the women out there can agree on as ideal for their child - even 50% - assuming there are a few possible selections - excluding severe diseases. Jon, you have a rationalle - you realize that while its ok to use this technology to cure cancer, it raises moral issues to use it for, say, picking how your child looks. Jon, do you lead the nation in moral fiber? I really doubt it. Why on earth do you think that, not just some, but near all of us, will jump up and do this?
Then, you have corporate interests. Corporations do not have, never have had, and never will have, a significant influence in the birth of children. I can almost guarantee that throughout history near every person surveyed would say that children are their parents responsibility. And, legislation always forces apon corporations the overall opinions of society. Do you *honestly* think that the government won't pass laws that say that you can't be discriminated on by basis of genetics, the same way they did with race, sexuality, gender identity, age, etc? Give me a break, thats preposterous.
Lets look at what we have (take surveys to verify, but remember your surveyed target audience fits in the last category if you do an online survey, since its a high-tech forum):
1. A large portion of Americans won't want to use the technology at all
2. The vast majority of the rest would think it wrong to use on anything but things that are obviously disease, and especially not things that deal with the mind (most people are overly identity-conscious, notice the protests of cloning)
3. The rest will likely have *quite* different ideals from each other. There is no "human ideal". Just rough things that are more popular than others, changing with the times (if everyone is blonde, red hair becomes more popular...)
Please think about this. Thank you.
- Rei
The yellowcake is a lie.
However, anyone who knows how Science works knows that these area which man must take on Faith are clearly delimited--things such as the nature of God, the existance of the supernatural, or the nature of the Infinite. It's not that performing scientific experiments on God is Evil--it's that Science, properly defined, clearly says that it cannot explain these supernatural elements. Hense, supernatural.
I would completely disagree with the statement that these things are clearly delimited. big-bang vs creation? How delimited is that?
In fact, I would argue the best way to become a famous scientist is to theorize on either a supernatural or moral issue.
Although science is the study of cause and effect with the five senses, there are many scientific articles which continually extrapolate on what the have observed to postulate thier views on religious topics.
Also, many theories brought about by scientists (theories, not facts) have so determined the course of history and philosophys from that point on. Remember the full title of darwin's work:
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.
And an excerpt from the beginning of the book:I WILL here give a brief sketch of the progress of opinion on the Origin of Species. Until recently the great majority of naturalists believed that species were immutable productions, and had been separately created
Creation is "supernatural", and can't be disproven (how can you disprove creation using cause and effect when the cause is supernatural), yet darwin extrapolated his theory to specifically deny creationism.
As a mathematician, I don't think pure science (the study of cause and effect) is evil (ridiculous), however, if you believe in a higher power, and you believe he has revealed himself in some way to you, yet you extrapolate your theories against that to the detriment of mankind, you are not exactly heavenly.
There's also something to be said for knowing your own limits. Perhaps JonKatz is right, we aren't responisible enough for that.
This "perfect baby" is quite like the A-bomb, discover it, try it, then decide its wrong.
That is "science" after all.
I need a TiVo for my car. Pause live traffic now.
.. your last blood test was genetically tested and we have determined that your genotype is no longer supported. For an extra $49,000 one-time per-incident fee, we will upgrade you to the current version so your medical support can continue. If you do not wish to purchase additional support at this time, we will do our best to make your remaining few days as comfortable as possible, but without this upgrade it will be uneconomical for us to continue to treat you. Thank you for calling.
73 de N5VB (ex-KD5BIV) AR SK
A little harsh maybe? Well, consider that medical coverage determines survival rate to a large degree, indigent care notwithstanding. If your HMO decides you're worth insuring, you're just going to get better care, period, and sooner or later you're going to end up in a medical-emergency situation where you'll live if you're covered and die if you're not. Thus, we are now selecting for insurability by HMO's. Throw HMO-mandated genetic viability testing, however accurate, into the mix, and suddenly your genetic makeup determines your survival in an *economic* environment as well as a physical one.
Bear in mind we haven't even touched applications of the same technology by employers on their employees. Don't think for a moment that an employer that tests you for drugs wouldn't be even happier testing you for genetic markers that *may* be linked to violent behavior, resistance to authority, a tendency to die young, or any number of other things that make you less economical to keep on the workforce. You do have the freedom to refuse the test
73 de N5VB (ex-KD5BIV) AR SK
Is katz. Please tell me Katz, what is your conception of the perfect human baby? What's that, there is none? But you said that because of the HGP parents would be able to pick the ideally suited baby. I thought you meant blonde hair, blue eyes.... But I could be wrong. See, everyone's cool in there own way, and no self respecting pair of parents would want it otherwise. They might try to save their baby from an unhappy life of malformed body parts, or basic immunity to things like ahlzeimers, but your specific fear is scarier than that. To think that you believe that everybody wants the same thing simply shows shortsightedness on your part.
Lemure, wtf! Don't you mean Lemur?
I read somewhere the other day that the most popular "grad" gift for girls was breast implants.
Now beaming parents can make sure that both their daughters and sons are well endowed at birth.
I thought this was the best Jon Katz article to date. I have a hard time imagining that a country obsesses with WWF, Guiding Light, Survivor, Elian and the size of their breasts/dicks would have the requesite intelligence and foresight to deal with this.
Break out the torches, we have a monster to burn.
Variety is the spice of life
...that the smaller the organism, the more careful we should be. After all, if somebody botches up and creates a bunch of overly flatulant geneticly engineered cows, we can just slaughter them. But if somebody screws up and creates mutated flies with a poisonous sting, we will have to have massive insecticide drops. Worse yet, if somebody screws up and creates an airborne bacterial disease, we could all die.
Now humans are the exception to my "small is dangerous" rule because there is no ethical way to kill them (forgetting the animal rights arguments for a minute).
Of course, I could say more, but why bother. This is probably the 789th post.
#VRML V2.0 utf8
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Its name is not 'Frankenstein', Frankenstein is the guy who made the monster. Katz got it right a few times, then got it wrong a few times.
-Elendale (There is a fine art to comment subjects- one I'm not particularly good at...)IANAT (I Am Not A Troll)
IMHO it will be fuckin cool to replace my body hair with yak fur. Oh, add on regeneration, 20/5 night vision, horns and springy legs!
The problems will come from people hating, fearing, and attacking other people because of the info in the some 40,000 (out of the 3.1 billion) base pairs that are different from the info in their 40,000 unique base pairs.
When can they start adding midi-clorians to my blood?
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
You're right.. Katz COMPLETELY ignores the fact that people adapt to their environment, and affect their own development. All the "perfect" genes in the world won't stop someone from becoming a fat lazy slob if that's how they act. Genes won't produce perfect athletes, that takes years of hard work and training.
Certainly genetic tinkering can vastly change the birth of a child, and perhaps even give them a genetic predisposition towards a particular lifestyle, but Katz's article makes it sound like genetic manipulation will create a race of mindless clones incapable of making decisions about their path through life.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
I am British. And I can imagine a few
UK under Margaret Thatcher - she would live on forever
Germany in the mid 30s - the Aryan dream ...
Ceaucescu's Rumania
Any culture who values children of one gender over the other
Mr Katz is being a little harsh on the US. Nowhere in this world is perfect.
Stephen Hawking has written another book. It's about time as well.
Despite the hype about the Human Genome Project, it really isn't that big a deal. It's only a core dump of one particular person's DNA. We don't know what the vast majority of the genes do or if they do anything at all. And even if we did know, I don't see how it could lead to the "perfect baby" syndrome. There are over 20 genes that have been discovered to have some connection to "intelligence". And there are probably hundreds more. To breed a baby with the exact combination of "intelligence genes" that you wanted would take millions of tries. While making that many babies would be a lot of fun, I don't think it's a very useful scheme for creating your own super race of people. The only problem I foresee is the active manipulation of human DNA. Fortunately the biology community has done a good job of self-policing on this issue.
Physics, Cosmology and
Ha! Is Jon trying to be serious? Who here can't come up with a rather lengthly list of other societies more poorly equipped than the US for this project? It isn't hard.
It's the conqueror's fault, not the cartographer.
Knowledge is knowledge. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
--
It's a
-- Danny Vermin
Contrary to what Katz may say, there is no such thing as an "Evil" corporation (there are evil sole proprietorships and partnerships, but that's another story). All a corporation is is a bunch of people doing there jobs, hopefully what they are good at, trying to make a living. As for the management, they are nothing more than a bunch of middle age men (and a few token women) with failed social lives trying to derive value from their otherwise meaningless lives through success in their jobs. Members of a corporation may be misguided in their beliefs and subsequent efforts (an example would be the Jack Volenti type although I don't believe the RIAA is a corp.), but the do generally believe in what they are doing.
By the way, I'm sick of hearing about "god", "lord", and "creation" in every damn story about bioengineering. It offends good athiests. And Buddhists too. I can't back that second one up but it sounds nice.
Well, Katz has one possible outcome in mind, where the world will be ruled by smart, beautiful people who all conform to some lauded ideal, and dissent and non-conformity are bred out. Not unlike the movie Gattaca. But there's also a different outcome. One that makes a fair bit more sense, especially from _his_ viewpoint that the smart people are hated by the vast majority. Those of us who have read Heinlein - especially "Friday" - probably already know what I'm talking about. Imagine what a child that's been genetically engineered for perfection would be like... with an IQ of 180 or so, well-versed in science, mathematics, music, yadda yadda. And just for fun, throw in the ability to think faster than everyone else, with rattlesnake reflexes and the strength of an ox. (the assumption being that the child be male just for arguments' sake.) Will this child live a life of extraordinary acheivement, famous for his intellect, or will he grow up lonely, ridiculed and shunned by the rest of the world? He has the opportunity to be anything he wants... a scientist, a poet, an author, a musician, an artist, an athlete, or all of the above. But people being what they are, and society being what it is, he will invariably be unpopular and probably even hated by most everyone. As an athlete, coaches would love him but even teammates would probably at least be jealous and not invite him over to after-game parties, or probably hate him outright for not having to work at what everyone else has to sweat blood for. As an artist of one sort or another, well society just will not understand him - he'll be that wierdo in the corner with his poetry and his paint. I couldn't tell you what would happen to him as a businessman... I don't understand them at all myself. ;) And as a great scientist he would grow up as we all know best... as the nerdy sort that most people despise and revile. Although he has the strength to defend himself, he has the wisdom and intelligence not to want to, making everyone else think he's a wimp for not beating the crap out of some dimwit with more brawn than brain who's always on his case. In light of this, attempts to make people "perfect" through genetic engineering will probably either go the way of the dodo after a generation or two, or a new definition of genetic perfection will evolve - mediocrity. In the latter case though, I think that most people will see the less expensive solution and not bother, as mediocre kids are born naturally every day. In my own opinion, I think that people who are genetically engineered are going to be the ones that are looked upon as unnatural freaks and marginalized by society, to be told to sit at the back of the bus, should they ever have the audacity to use public transportation. The goverment would probably make it mandatory for them to be tattooed at birth "for the protection of society." After all, this is dangerous new technology that must be controlled, regulated and approved by the goverment.
---
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
In relation to physical, economic, psychological and social conditions, responsible parenthood is exercised, either by the deliberate and generous decision to raise a numerous family, or by the decision, made for grave motives and with due respect for the moral law, to avoid for the time being, or even for an indeterminate period, a new birth.
17. Upright men can even better convince themselves of the solid grounds on which the teaching of the Church in this field is based, if they care to reflect upon the consequences of methods of artificial birth control. Let them consider, first of all, how wide and easy a road would thus be opened up towards conjugal infidelity and the general lowering of morality. Not much experience is needed in order to know human weakness, and to understand that men -- especially the young, who are so vulnerable on this point -- have need of encouragement to be faithful to the moral law, so that they must not be offered some easy means of eluding its observance. It is also to be feared that the man, growing used to the employment of anti-conceptive practices, may finally lose respect for the woman and, no longer caring for her physical and psychological equilibrium, may come to the point of considering her as a mere instrument of selfish enjoyment, and no longer his respected and beloved companion.
Let it be considered also that a dangerous weapon would thus be placed in the hands of those public authorities who take no heed of moral exigencies. Who could blame a government for applying to the solution of the problems of the community those means acknowledged to be licit for married couples in the solution of a family problem? Who will stop rulers from favoring, from even imposing upon their peoples, if they were to consider it necessary, the method of contraception which they judge to be more efficacious? In such a way men, wishing to avoid individual, family, or social difficulties encountered in the observance of the divine law, would reach the point of placing at the mercy of the intervention of public authorities the most personal and most reserved sector of conjugal intimacy...
Consequently, if the mission of generating life is not to be exposed to the arbitrary will of men, one must necessarily recognize insurmountable limits to the possibility of man's domination over his own body and its functions; limits which no man, whether a private individual or one invested with authority, may licitly surpass. And such limits cannot be determined otherwise than by the respect due to the integrity of the human organism and its functions, according to the principles recalled earlier, and also according to the correct understanding of the "principle of totality" illustrated by our predecessor Pope Pius XII...
We are well aware of the serious difficulties experienced by public authorities in this regard, especially in the developing countries. To their legitimate preoccupations we devoted our encyclical letter POPULORUM PROGRESSIO. But with our predecessor Pope John XXIII, we repeat: no solution to these difficulties is acceptable "which does violence to man's essential dignity" and is based only on an utterly materialistic conception of man himself and of his life. The only possible solution to this question is one which envisages the social and economic progress both of individuals and of the whole human society, and which respects and promotes true human values [26]. Neither can one, without grave injustice, consider divine providence to be responsible for what depends, instead, on a lack of wisdom in government, on an insufficient sense of social justice, on selfish monopolization, or again on blameworthy indolence in confronting the efforts and the sacrifices necessary to ensure the raising of living standards of a people and all of its sons [27].
Pope Paul VI: Hu manae Vitae
How many people have to suffer a harsh punishment before "cruel and unusual" returns zero?
We and the Germans have both legislated who is entitled to be called human and who is not, changing 6000 years of developing thought on the matter with a quick stroke of a pen.
We and the Germans have put our trust and efforts into technogogy instead of human virtue with the result of insipid legislators, technological attacks on privacy, a society that favors expedience over truth, and soundbyte elections.
The PC movement has put its spin on every aspect of human research and education, with the result that it is more important that things look or sound good than that they be good. Hitler loved animals, drank pure water, and kissed babies in crowds.
How many people have to suffer a harsh punishment before "cruel and unusual" returns zero?
(It's what World War III was about in TOS, and came up again in DS9)
To nitpick for a moment, in Star Trek, WW3 was not about genitc engineering. The "Eugenics Wars" were. These were supposed to end in 1998 (or '96, I don't have my trusty Star Trek Timeline book with me). To explain away why we haven't had the Eugenics Wars yet, and why in one particular episode of Voyager why they beamed down in 1996 and everything was normal, they just say that Kirk's prior medling with the timeline changed the date (with good reason, nobody's established a new date). Keep in mind that the 90's date for the war was estabilished in the orginal series, and genitic engineering by this time seemed plausable enough for Star Trek. Perhaps they were only off by a few years.
Now on to the lesson: The Eugenics Wars were about geniticly enhanced humans coming together to fight off the "imperfect" masses of non-geniticaly engineered humans. The "perfect" humans lost, and boarded a sleeper ship off the planet (which is how they later caught up with Kirk). As a result, humans just thought it too dangerous to have genitic engineering, and the belief in this danger still kept with them to the founding of the Federation. Thus, by that time, laws were passed to ban genitic engineering except in cases of birth defects (apparently, baldness doesn't count :).
In other words, the population became smart enough to weed out the bad stuff about gentic engineering while still gaining its most important benifits. However, they had to have a big nasty war before learning this lesson.
There were cases of illegal genetic engineering going on, though, such as in the case of Dr. Bashir (of DS9). I beleive that in the real world, as long as it is made clear that genetic engineering isn't OK, but we will still accept such people into our society, such people can still have valuable contributions. This will keep the ammount of cases down while still getting a few benifits.
Now the question is, do we have to go through a real Eugenics War before banning the bad parts of genetic engineering? I know the Klingons just plain think that genetic engineering is dishonorable. I doubt the Cardassians would be above it, and the Borg probably do it at will. Wait, the Klingons? Yep, apparently they were far sighted enough to realize that unbridled genetic engineering is a bad idea. Can we be like that? Not likely, and perhaps the future really doesn't need us.
------
Not a typewriter
Hey, hows this for an idea?
FOR CRYING OUT LOUD, IMPROVE THE DAMN HUMAN RACE.
Really now folks, is somebody had been kind enough to give me vision in both my eyes I WOULDN'T HAVE COMPLAINED ONE DAMN BIT.
This pisses me off folks, we here at Slashdot.org are supposed to be at the forefront of technology, using science to better the human race and all that.
Hey, how about we actualy do that?
Whats moraly wrong with the perfect baby?
Better then his peers? So what, in a few generations everybody would be perfect. It would be eutopia.
Notice I said mabye, this is ONLY if worry warts like Katz and the Southren Babtists don't put a halt to progress first.
Hey, prosthetic limbs can be used to help people, lets outlaw those too!
How about laser eye surgery, boy, can't have EVERYBODY seeing properly now can we?
Hmm, ouchies, if somebody has cancer, must be the will of god, let'em die.
Notice the sarcasm there folks.
If somebody had had the kindness to boost my IQ by 50 points and give me a mnemonic memory, I really wouldn't have complained. In fact, I would have thanked them.
While we're at it, maby be can get rid of the human sex drive too. Kill two birds with one stone, genetic imperfections AND the population problem.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
"Frankenstein was right when he told his doctor-creator that it was a sin to create things one doesn't take any responsibility for."
Frankenstein was the name of the creator, not the monster's. You can find the novel here.
Try a country like Venezuala (sp?) (I think they're the one I'm thinking of) where cosmetic surgery is a prevalent as cell phones are in Israel.
Refrag
I have a website. It's about Macs.
Allow me to be the first to say...
What a pile of shit.
<sarcasm>Yeah, it's a shame Nazi Germany didn't have this technology first. Or your average tinpot dictator. Or Imperialist England, circa 1880. My god, think of what America might do with that technology! Why it could make life less fair for some people!</sarcasm>
Yeah, it's entirely possible that America and other countries will make bad decisions with the info gleaned from the human genome. Yes, we could end up with some nasty Orwellian future because of it. And, yes, we could also have nuked ourselves and our world into oblivion around 1960. But that didn't happen either. And while there exists in every new technology the potential for disaster, becoming so focused on that potential that we're paralyzed with indecision is a Bad Thing (tm).
"This is your world. These are your people. You can live for yourself today, or help build tomorrow for everyone."
As an avid fan of science fiction, I can see where katz is coming from. Here is my teardown of some of his comments:
Responding to the announcement that the Human Genome Project was complete, President Clinton gushed that "Today we are learning the language in which God created life."
Oh shit clinton's going to get his ass wiped by some atheist. Bringing god into any discussion of technology is a bad, bad idea. Everyone has a different idea of what "playing god" is. Remember, if god didn't want people playing him he would have killed them by now. Test tube babies were considered to be "playing god" too. But today they help couples who could not conceive naturally. This is a blessing to many couples, not "playing god"
The project itself was announced Monday like an NFL playoff game -- the U.S. might not have thought much about the evolution of genetic research, but it sure loves a high-stakes contest. Headlines all over the country announced that a cure for cancer, heart disease, aging, depression and aging may well be imminent.
A cure for cancer, heart disease, depression or (in my case) diabetes are not a bad thing. Why it says a cure for aging twice I do not know but a cure for aging is bad. Soylent green. When people live too long they must begin to eat their dead or each other because there are no resources left.
No presidential candidate has ever made technology a serious campaign issue, unless it's to warn about sex online or to urge the distribution of V-chips and blocking software to protect children from techno-driven culture
Protect children?! HA! The children are the ones who know better than the censors how to avoid porn. All these v-chips and censorware do is give parents the opportunity to protect their kids from the real world. Guess what mommies and daddies, when little timmy grows up he will figure out what porn is and that the world is not a peachy place. Filters are for irresponsible children raised by irresponsible parents. Software is no substitute for trust.
Online, 15-year-olds who master Linux boxes think they understand technology itself, and it's curious, often erratic and ominous history. In America, the best minds in the country are holed up in California think tanks dreaming up wireless phones and hand-held computers that access sports scores 24/7 so that fans won't have to bother to turn on the car radio for results or wait two minutes for their e-mail or stock prices.
Katz is so fucking stupid here it's funny. Yes, I am a 15 year old boy. Yes, I work on linux boxes. I know what the genome is and what it can do. The problem with katz's argument is that the 15 year olds DO UNDERSTAND THE TECHNOLOGY BETTER THAN EVERYONE ELSE. It is not for katz to say that certain people are stupider based on their age group. I can talk tech to 30-40 year olds and scare the shit out of them. My best friends are all programmers. I have more technology experience than half the computer support staff at most repair places. My uncle owns one. He wants to employ me there when I can drive because I already know more than his techsperts.
There is nothing wrong with handheld computers and mobile phones with WAP access. The only difference is the media. If you could check sports scores using both the radio and the computer then it is your choice which media to use. That's the wonder of technology.
Fertility drugs are a perfect metaphor for -- and a warning to the world -- of America's insane approach to complicated issues like this one. Critics are quickly dismissed as Luddites or simpletons. In the U.S., couples are applauded for bringing six, seven, even eight children into the world at once even though medical experts warn that such children face grave physical risks and emotional problems. President Clinton, who called the genome map the "most wondrous map ever produced by humankind" was also one of the first people to call up the parents of Iowa's McCaughey septuplets and congratulate them on bringing seven kids into the world, even though the parents admitted they couldn't afford or care for the children they'd given birth to, and whose lives, said doctors, had been put at extreme risk. Dozens of companies plied the family with gifts and money.
President clinton cannot regulate stupidity even if he endorses it. Dealing with irresponsible parents are not the goverments job. It's their problem. You wonder why there is such a debate about distributing birth control at high schools? There shouldn't be. The goverment shouldn't have to put money in welfare for some stupid teenage girl who got knocked up. It costs the goverment money and makes all our taxes higher. No one wins. If the parents cannot take care of their own children then child protection steps in. If there weren't stupid and irresponsible parents then there wouldn't be child protection services. Birth control is not the problem. That stupid people can use it to duplicate in mass numbers is the problem.
This scenario has been raised by visionaries like Arthur C. Clarke -- who reminds us that today's cure is sometimes tomorrow's disease -- and in prescient movies like "Gattaca," which foresee the unpredictable consquences of rushing to shape natural life, and the almost sure discrimination that comes from the inevitable use of gene characteristics to identify "healthy" and "unhealthy" characteristics, usually defined by medical and scientific elites and by their employers, profit-making corporations who invariably co-opt science and scientists.
I cannot remember the title at the moment but I seem to remember reading a story about a war between the "norms" and the "non-norms". Norms were normal people who were conceived naturally. Non-norms were superhumans with IQ's of 400 and they all looked the same with none of the problems that were associated with the "norms". Of course, the non-norms were hitlers perfect race, all smart caucatians (sp?) with blue eyes and blond hair. The non-norms started killing off norms when they were not the majority of the population, and the norms fought to get enough spaceships to build a space colony far away from 21st century earth. Norm or not, hate and rasicm will still be a problem in the future. All science fiction eventually leads to that. Like frankenstein. Especially frankenstein.
Quality control is the perfect term for some aspects of genetic research. As of this week, quality control is truly possible for humans. Parents invevitably, even understandably, will seek perfect children.
Parents creating "perfect children" will be self sufficent at 2 weeks old, never question their parents or authority, and have ridalin produced in their pancreas.
Free thinkers are dangerous. Everyone knows that.
As a society, we may soon be able to get rid of obnoxious, anger and dissent along with cancer and heart disease.
Individualism and "wierdness" could show up in the new human map, along with tendencies towards anger, dissent, and bad skin.
Well I don't give a shit what the genetic engineers or society want me to do. I want my children to be "weird". Most weirdness is caused by enviorment. In order to eliminate all traces of weirdness several generations of a perfect society would have to progress. All those weird people are the ones who change the world. When all of society is a drone, nobody will care about changing the world. Nobody will have ambitions. Nobody will care. I want to be weird. I want my children to be weird. I want my grand children to be weird and god help me if someone wants to change that I'll tear their head off. I don't care what you will say about teasing and everything else that goes along with being "weird". Half of those "weird" people in the hellmouth discussion were owning big companies and making tons of dollars while the "perfect" kids (jochs) were working at mcdonalds for minimum wage. I want my family to be successful. Even at the price of being different than the rest of society. When you're old enough to realize this, you'll understand. Mother theresa once said that "in the end, it is between you and god. It was never between you and them anyway." So I want to be "different"
And I want my kids to fight. If we had dissent bred out of the human race america would still be a british colony. Of course there are many other scenarios but a society lacking dissent is a society afraid of change.
From the perspective of the rest of the planet, it's hard to see why the United States would use this profound new technology wisely and equitably when anyone who picks up any Ivy League school newspaper can find ads offering tens of thousands of dollars for the eggs of brainy blonde preppies
And people who sell their eggs for tens of thousands of dollars is not only a sellout of their body but quite a bit more preppy and blonde than brainy.
For all that this research is being hailed as the greatest boon to mankind, it could just as easily become humanity's greatest nightmare. "How dare you sport thus with life?" asks Frankenstein of his creator, who loved technology but was impatient when it came to thinking much about how he was going to use it. The monster never got an answer. Now we're all waiting
Of course we're all waiting. And until society thinks about things like this in depth we will wait for a long, long time.
Society changes people and people change society seems like an interesting ending thought. Because when the perfect child v2.0 is released then society won't change anybody because everyone is the same and people won't change society because changing society would make you "weird".
So screw all the normal people.
Kris
botboy60@hotmail.com
Nerdnetwork.net
Kris
botboy60@hotmail.com
Nerdnetwork.net
So maybe it's time for people in this PC world to begin to face reality rather than their own idealistic ignorance.
There is a difference in quality among human beings. Some are smarter. Some are stronger. This is a simple fact that too many people choose to ignore. Now, we'll see what everyone really thinks are good qualities in people, even if they won't admit it.
I'm not afraid of this change. It's just a wake up call -- a call for us to begin to see ourselves as something under our control, part of the universe of things that we can engineer. That we can mould and design as we see fit.
In the end, people will do what they want to do with this newfound power, and in our consumer society, I'm pretty sure that it will take the form of pop-culture / fashion / fads... People will change themselves and their children in accordance with what the fad is. Maybe for a few years in japan, round eyes will be the rage... Then, when China becomes cool, oriental eyes again... beyond that, who knows?? I do know that most of it will be relatively harmless though.
In the end, there will be a pronounced trend toward more able humans, and this is something that I'm sure everyone will come to see as a good thing.
--toro.
Uhhmm... Apples and Oranges here. If you're hacking the human source code, then there is NO RISK of killing the patient, because the fetus at that point is not considered to be a seperate organism.. it's not like I could walk into a BodyShop at my venerable 22 years and say "Hey, I've got a history of heart disease, cancer and diabetes in my family. How much to tweak the chromos? And while yer at it, I want longer legs and whack that stupid gene for Male Pattern Baldness." These things have to happen at the moment of conception, before the zygote has the opportunity to become a multi-cellular fetus.
While we're on that subject, what about detemining parentage right on the spot? "I'm sorry Mr Jones but your wife's latest endeavour seems to have the SAME sequence along chromosome 12 that your milkman has..." Is THAT the moral duty of a cosmetic geneticist?
"2. It takes a long time for something that many would consider a "sin" or "morally wrong" to be accepted. A *long time*. Do you not think that, in all this time, people would see no moral issues with this at all? if so, you must think humans are a race that is becoming continually less sensitive to people's differences. And, yet, look at our past verses our present, what, with Affirmative Action and such. All signs point towards greater acceptance of differences, not less. And acceptance is largely based on communication between different peoples - and the expanding net is the perfect medium for that. "
We aren't really getting any better at accepting other people's cultures, we're just better at blending them all together. I don't even see cultures anymore. I see people. Then again, I have no culture of my own, as a white person in the USA, I find that trying to get in touch with my roots and find "my people" gets me branded a White Supremicist... and nothing could be further from the truth. I just want a place to belong. The Net is provinding a place where people can meet and homoginize because there is no inherent bias for the digital realm... it's taking away our differnces, not celebrating them. We are heading towards, evolving into, a planet full of Pepsi-drinking English speaking people who eat at McDonalds three times a week and have ulcers. National borders and ethinc lines are being blurred and scuffed out of the sand by the evolution of the collective human condition. I'm part Scot, Welsh, German, Cherokee and Apache (oddly, I'm technically an American Indian becuase of bloodlines, but have to mark 'Caucasian' on every government form because of my skin color. More about that later...). How many other /. readers can claim more than one ethnic background to further muddy the waters about exactly what the differences in all of us really are. Would it suprise anyone to learn that there are ony two genes for skin color? We may well determine that whilte, black, asian or indian are only differences of one pip on a chemical formula billions of molecules long.
As for the morality of it... I was raised Catholic to believe that it was a SIN and I would BURN IN HELL for eating meat on Fridays... Nobody really believes that anymore. I think I even saw the Pope in a Honey's BBQ last Friday... And it's only been in the last few years that the meat-eating rule has really been thrown by the wayside. My parents tell me of eating fish in public shools every Friday as to not disturb the Catholics. Sure, most Americans are God-fearing Christians, but we are moving to a secular society, ruled by the desire for worldly gain. In that light, who is REALLY going to have an issue with modifying their child's DNA to make them the best child they can be? I asked myself this question, and I didn't like the answer. I would certainly allow genetic modification of my child (We'll call her Wendy for the rest of this discussion) for protection agains genetic disorders or potentially lethal disabilities. I don't think I'd allow a genetech to modify height, weight, skin/eye color or any other pysical charictaristics, or even allow someone to boost Wendy's intellegence or personal charm. If I was told that Wendy would be autistic or would be afflicted with Down's Syndrome, would I allow the technician to play that kind of merry hell with her genes? What if I did? Should I ever tell her? and would it be WRONG to do it? I've already made sure shes immune to polio, should I make sure she doesnt have ADHD like her old man? I'm already playing God, shaping my daughter into an ideal image like a lump of PlayDoh, where is the line drawn between 'acceptable' and 'unacceptable' gene manipulation? What are the social implications of meddling with the Second Most Powerful Force in the Universe? These issues are going to come to light as the technology matures, and will not affect us personally, but my little Wendy may have to ask herself these questions in earnest. We need to examine ourselves and see what the answers should really be.Perhaps we need a few guidelines for the people it will really affect.
"3. Why would parents completely design a child? Why would a parent care what protien forms a marker on their child's cell walls, or the thickness of the phospholipid bilayers of their cells? Almost all genes are something that a parent wouldn't care about - and it would be pointless *not* to leave it to natural selection.
4. Reproductive rights are one of the most strongly guarded human rights, typically second only to the right to survive. You will *never* find a world where no woman wants to give birth to her own children, where no parents want *their* genetics passed along. As someone who cannot have children, barring advances in organ cloning technology, I can attest to this"
these two really go together... I recently built a computer for a friend of mine... PII 600 with 128MB SDRAM, 40 GB HD, 10/100 Mb/s NIC.... who gives a flying f**k what brand the TRANSISTORS are, as long as they are all there. If the technology exists for parents to 'program' their children, I'm sure that they will use their own DNA to make a little froggy thing (maybe even using tradional methods!!) that they take down to the aformentioned BodyShop, put it in the Cyclotron and then start picking options and packages.
"Hrm, let's split this one into three zygotes. Make one female and the other two male. 'K, then.. the first male, designated EDWARDS, BLAKE KYLE (Asset/SocSec # 999-99-9999) will get the Hometown Hero package, with the Big Pecs upgrade. Let's also boost his IQ to around the 200 range.. that ought to be perfect... Second male zygote, designated EDWARDS, NATHANIEL LEE (Asset/SocSec # 999-99-9998), gets the Alt-Rock Intellectual, with the Real Lady-Killer (tm) relationship sub-package... and for kicks, let's make his eyes Storm Grey... As for the female zygote (isn't this FUN, Honeybun?), she will be EDWARDS, JESSICA ELAINE (oh, after my mother, how sweet!) (Asset/SocSec # 999-99-9899), why don't we give her the Head Cheerleader pack, with Girl-Next Door Allure ('They'll all want to take her home to meet Mom!' tm), and the Corporate Raider success drive... That should do it, ring it up, and reimplant the children, please...."
See? Still using your own DNA, slightly modified, and none of that messy "Understand what you're playing with" thing.. It'll be as simple as using the Kodak PhotoComputer at WalMart to make extra copies.. and speaking of which, why NOT make extra copies, just in case Blake takes a header off his bike. You can ease the pain by pulling another Blake outta Cryo and taking him full term again. (this one is v 2.0, cuz version .9 died in Beta...). No one is taking anyone's right to reproduction away. And genetic manipulation may even allow those of us who CAN'T reproduce naturally to do so using tissue samples... In fact, and the last male in my family, and an injury-induced sterility, this is NOT a bad sounding plan... But I'm sure someone would have an issue with it...
"5. Discrimination doesn't occur in the workplace. Because, if it does, there are lawsuits. And they win, because of laws. This is how laws work. If a law is passed (and, in a country where the vast majority of americans would think it a horrible thing to be discriminated by genetics, it will), the law will be enforced by companies, via fear of lawsuits. It happens now, and unless our government collapses (in which case genetic engineering will be the least of our worries), it will happen in the future. "
RIIIIGGGHHHTT.... Because laws against it exist, it NEVER happens. That's a naieve statement. I don't want to be rude, but I've livied in the corp world long enough to realize that less than 1/2 of 1 percent of all (criminal)discrimination incedents are ever reported... I took a night class once.. big mistake. I was the only man... and the other students averaged 36, divorced, and ANGRY. I was discriminated against. But if I had spoken up, I would have been pulled from the class... and it was the only one I could take at that point. I had to determine that my personal dignity and pride were not worth the cost of raising a ruckus. And I see events like that all the time. My last boss was BAD about sexually harassing his female employees and bragging about his infidelity. No one has EVER, in his three years with the company, said anything about it. I don't know why, but I am no better than anyone else for not reporting his CRIMINAL behavior.
The point is, just because there are criminal recriminations possible, doesn't mean that all the good little people are going to stay away. take us for example... the hacker culture. I've done a few things in my quest for knowledge that were of dubious legality... And I'm SURE I'm not alone. Same with drugs....
Interesting scenario... what about engineering sports players? Illegally... The Mafia has a vat somewheres, cuts deals with All American Families to have a genetically superior quarterback taken into their home in exchange for a fat pension... all very quiet, of course... then they get all of these sports figures on a single team, say the Colts... big winnings are possible, and it's SAFER THAN STEROIDS!!!! Takes longer, but the payoffs are far greater as well... John Q. Quarterback could be built to throw 100% completion, have amazing speed, agility, stamina, and lifespan. And he LIVES for football...
"6. You talk about insurance companies offering lower rates for "geneticly superior" people. Do, say, car insurance providers take race into account when they set your fee? I'm sure you'd find corrolations. But, they don't, because that is discrimination (I still think its wrong that they take sex into account, but that is just me). There would be riots if they started taking race into account. "
You are right, but what about Age, Smoking or NonSmoking, History of Heart Disease? You're damn straight that insurance companies would use genetic profiling to determine your eligibility. They do it now, in a family history questionaire... I pay more for health insurance because my grandfather had cancer, my dad has high blood pressure, and my aunt has diabetes. It ain't right, but it's legal. It's called "Risk Assessment" and they do it everyday.
I guess that the point is, this is a big can of worms, and that exremists on both sides will scream, and they'll be right in some cases... but the thing to remember is that this is the most powerful weapon that has ever been devised, and that we need to be CAREFUL about how it's applied. It will take years, decades before these questions are resolved. And maybe some of these fears will come to light during that time and create a need for an international treaty on human genetic manipulation. Who knows? We stand on the cusp of a great future for humanity, let's not blow it.
If this posts as Anonymous Coward, sorry.. forgot to log in, I think...
Peace, relay_switch
This message has been brought to you by Budweiser, breakfast of champions!
There are points in our existence when we are no longer innocent, and we realize that the world can be cruel, heartless and unforgiving. It never means that this is how it is for eternity. If we never stop to grasp how our cynicism blinds us, we will be stunted for life. My point is that yes, the human race is not perfect and yes, in trying to be [perfect] we step on, harass and take away the rights of others but there is alway a point where we correct ourselves and put in the proper safeguards, so that future generations will not have to suffer.
When we don't give ourselves "enough credit" for realizing err and correcting our perceptions we create room for paranoia and skepticism, which help hinder progress or new discovery. As with anything new, we need time to analyse it and find out where there is no trampling of rights or other injustices; we aren't a super race so it will take time . We need to stop being quick to judge and ascend to soapbox positions.
Nuff Respec'
DeICQLady
7D3 CPE
The world doesn't end at the US Borders...
Though sometimes reading Slashdot you'd think it did...
"Information wants to be paid"
I pity those of you without that love, and will do everything in my power to help you to see that love if I ever meet you.
And if that ever happens I shall say "Fuck off, god-botherer."
So if Christianity = truth, what about Judaism? Islam? Buddhism? Paganism? I'd say they're all != truth, myself. All religion is, is a way for the few to gain power over the many.
Well you can take that primitive belief system and shove it!
"Information wants to be paid"
The comments made are valid in a totalitarian society. Which fortunately we do not have. At least so I'm lead to believe. However, having a map doesn't mean you can read it; and more often than not you usually need a compass. The map as it exists is largely unintelligible and has landmarks which we know nothing about. Creating the map was the easy part. The hard part is to understand what we're now looking at. This will take decades, if not longer, of research. Imminent 'cures' for cancer and aging are no closer than they were 10 years ago. Designer babies won't happen because society won't allow it. Tests already exist for such 'deformities' and parents already have the option for an abortion. Some don't do it because it is their child and they are prepared to give their love as a parent. The same will be said of genetically modifying the foetus before the child is born. Most parents won't do it. Some, undoubtdly will, but most won't. Accurately predicting the outcome of a genome of our complexity is astronomical. To make its use prevalent and reliable is beyond our current capabilities, and will be so for some time to come. At the moment all we can do is give ourselves a pat on the back, and a relaxing cup of tea and a biscuit. Before we commence the real work. Fear mongery and paranoia isn't going to advance our knowledge. We only have a short time in this universe, lets make the most of it while we're here.
When "man" (which I will use as a term for humankind, thank you) first gained an understanding of how to control fire. I'm betting the first application was weaponry. One of the most famous wheeled vehicles is the chariot, a vehicle (primarily) of war. Splitting the atom led to the fiery destruction of two significant cities in a certain very nasty war.
Today, nasty things are still done with all three of those inventions/discoveries. Arson, self-immolation, flamethrowers and deforestation are all carried out through, what a shock, controlled fire. How many people are hit by cars somewhere in the world every day? And nuclear accidents are generally accepted as reducing the quality of life for a great many of the earth's residents, human and nonhuman alike.
They've also brought us great advances in the way we live our lives, from easy transportation (And all that that brings), to cooking food, to being able to run your microwave and your clothes dryer at the same time. These are all things that we take for granted. Today, no one (Or at least, almost no one) suggests that the discovery of how to control fire is a bad thing; It makes our very way of life possible.
Any technology can be misused, and generally is. The issue is how we will misuse it. I'm a lot more concerned about death by nuclear fire than engineering people for desirable facial characteristics, because you can't engineer someone's brain with it. While there is a great deal of debate on the subject, the common consensus is emotional development occurs throughout life, long after your genes stop their most puissant magic.
We can achieve a great deal of good with genetic engineering, and we already have. Tampering with the genecode is just another step. Like any other advance in technology, it will be used for "good", and for "evil". I think it's safe to say that it can and will be used for the wrong reasons, but I also have a certain amount of faith in human indignation which leads me to believe that by and large, it can become just another part of our lives.
This does raise ethical questions, as people have mentioned repeatedly before me. I do believe however that they will boil down to christian "science" vs. medical science: Is it right NOT to tinker with the genes for, for example, downs syndrome. Mark my words: When such a debate comes up, a (possibly bad) science-fiction writer will write a book in which a "person with downs syndrome" saves the city/state/nation/planet/universe/etc, sort of like that Star Trek movie with the whales. Who knows, maybe it'll even become a made for TV movie. "Sci-Fi channel presents: Not without my genes, starring Chris Elliot".
Seriously though, we have problems today with whether not taking your child to the doctor is faith or abuse, and it can only get worse with the advent of gene tampering. Let's say your child is going to be born with some horribly crippling illness; Is it faith or abuse when you refuse to change them because they are cranked out according to god's plan?
Personally, I'm hoping that within my lifetime we start tinkering with genes (IE, retroengineering) for purely cosmetic reasons, so I can ditch the body hair I don't need, and maybe kick my metabolism up a notch or two so I can keep my weight down. It wouldn't hurt to be able to re-engineer for longetivity, a lack of hair loss, and a lower occurence of split ends, either.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Katz? Research? There's a good one. On the one article I thought Katz made a good point, he responded to my post and told be I was wrong about it. Katz's articles seem to be long winded sensationalism. He wants to stir up trouble more than actually promote any progress. Katz never seems to actually want to solve any issues, just get other people thinking about them. That's good, in a way, but the fact that the way he does that usually ends up being everyone finding out ways that he's WRONG on an issue isn't really helping.
I could go on about why I dislike Katz's style (if it could be called that), but I'd rather not. It's not really worth my time.
Besides, the current state of the human genome map doesn't make it possible to really fool around with genes. We know where there are paterns, but not what they do. It's a start towards genetic manipulation, but it doesn't actually allow any of the horrors Katz is talking about.
(Good Frankenkatz post, BTW.)
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
According to the (second) story of Creation (the first taking seven days, the second starting in the Garden of Eden), God created a tree which held the Fruit of Knowledge and condemned man from ever tasting of it. By extension, man is therefore going against the will of God by attempting to gain knowledge.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
So yeah, some time has passed before the Biblical accounts of things were written down on paper and when they were just stories told around the camp fire. And just like the story of the huge fish that the guy across the fire is telling, some embellishing had to have taken place.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
And Jon Katz usually DOES read comments based on his own articles - the jonkatz account mostly replied to his Open Media article with the one post to this article. The jonkatz account seems to only read Jon Katz articles. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that it was legit.
I also wouldn't be surprised to find that it's a troll. (But then again, some would argue that the two are one in the same. :))
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
- chiasmus_
- Chiasmus_
- CHIASMUS_
Likewise, _xeno_, _Xeno_, and _XENO_ all resolve back to me. (Well, I'd assume _Xeno_ does as the latest Mozilla nightly as a most annoying auto-complete feature, and insisted I meant _XENO_ when I tried typing the URL.) cmdrtaco and CmdrTaco are also one in the same (according to User Info land) - although neither is actually Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda. (Either that, or Rob finally decided to join his own creation after some 200,000 other accounts were created, and likes to troll...)I have a fealing that the users.pl script does do case-insensitive matching by taking the lower-case. Unfortunately, since cmdrtaco seems to have taken over CmdrTaco's user page, this seems to be... in error.
So again, we're left with wondering whether or not that's really Jon Katz. Based on the rather low User ID, there's a distinct possibility, but I'm not sure how low the ID number really should be.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Scientist have discovered the gene which drives people to post erratically on the popular web site slashdot.org. Dubbed the "Troll" gene, it spreads harmful negative karma points among users and general flaming. Dr. Van Gnome stated that the cure is imminent.
Let's suppose that God does exist, and that He is posting His resume on godster.com or something. I sure that there is much more in His job description than "creates life"
Oh, gotta cut this short. A user down the hall just solved his own problem, thus making a foul mockery of My place as Help Desk Technician..
seanmeister
wow.. good call.
However,
Suppose you find genes that are common in a race that you don't approve of, but not in your own. What about engineering something that attacks those genes.
This could soon be moving from the world of science fiction into reality. But it is also not a reason to stop genetic research. In fact it is a reason to do more of it. Because if we stop the research, someone else will continue it.
Hype Hype Hype-hooray!
At best, we can make a prediction as accurate as a ninety day weather forecast. Let 'em go. Do their thing. Now, let them try to slap behavioral and physical characteristics of statistical significance to genes. (I mean, this child will be 6'2"--providing he doesn't go hiking in the Alps, get lost, get frostbite that turns to gangrene, and lose both legs).
jars
Okay, who the heck started the whole "we're trying to be god" thing anyways? This is not the first time someone's brought it up, and to that I say... we have ALWAYS been god. God is made up. If you believe in Christianity, then you believe that humans were the first inhabitants of the earth... which has since been proven wrong by science. (for those doubtful, just for the sake of arguement) Now here's someone saying that we "shouldn't mess with nature". Humans have always messed with Nature. Always have, always will. So far, it's been about 50% effective. While humans are living longer, we are also polluting our atmosphere, our oceans, etc... One would expect the same types of things to occur with this Genome thing. Genetic profiling could allow more people to live longer, but it could also ruin a few people's lives. Just like the internet. While it brought many job opportunities, it has also hurt many people's business, and brought about political changes. That's just how things turn out. You take the good with the bad. Aside from not being the "superior species" anymore, I don't see that much bad in this.
witty sig goes here
What does he know about anything? tisk tisk... troll.
All I wanna know is if I can get a baby that goes with my Prada handbag and Gucci pumps? :)
Does this mean i can get wings. laser eyes and telepathy?
Andy's a Gimp 10-4
do you wear clothes made out of cotton or wool?
do you eat meat or vegetables?
do you use medicine?
Your whole life already revolves around stuff that is genetically engineered. So what's the problem? Besides, I think if you'll go back and read your Bible you'll see that it says God gave man domain over His creation.
Thank you.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
What will become of the disabled, forgotten and unwanted children associated with creating the perfect child?
They will live like everyone else... doing the best they can and surviving the best they can.. What else?
YouTube & Google Video -> podcast http://castcluster.blogspot.com/
A lot of people have taken exception to Katz's claim that the US is the worst society in the world for genetic engineering, and posted lists of countries that shouldn't have genetic technology. Does anyone realize that this only serves to strengthen Katz's main point? It's not that America shouldn't have this technology, it's that humanity shouldn't
Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose
That's fine and great, but since I don't see alcohol, Victoria's Secret and p0rn disappearing anytime soon, I seriously doubt that we are EVER going to totally control human reproduction. Especially when there's no 100% reliable form of birth control available.
This is another view of the world.
I know, but there are some that will take the test results and abort the fetus instead of carrying it to term. You have to admit, that is method of eradicating wayward genes.
This is another view of the world.
Great hyperbole, but "quality control" as you define it, already happens today in the forms of ultrasound scans, amniocentisis, and other prenatal testing.
This is another view of the world.
...when parents forget that life is sacred and they start creating custom "designer children".
I can understand correcting birth defects and things like that, but when we start tweaking every little gene to suit our personal taste, isn't this child now existing for our own pleasure? Such a parent will probably take credit for every accomplishment the child has. What do you think?
This was my favorite: "Critics are quickly dismissed as Luddites or simpletons". Well geez, look at the kind of arguments most critics make. "It's against God's will". "It's not natural". "It's too dangerous to society/life on earth" is the only one with any potential, but you know, every technology has unforseen side-effects, good and bad, which will NEVER be thought of before it's used. So I guarantee you that sitting on it until a committee decides that 'the time is right' is a waste of a valuable technology.
One more thing, what makes you think the septuplet parents received all that stuff from fans? If I were to send anything to them, it'd be out of pity, not because I thought their bonehead move was a good thing.
Dyolf Knip
--
Dyolf Knip
What is the next evolutionary step?
I think it was Larry Niven who said someing like this....(This is from memory)
"If you were to ask a ape 3 million years ago what the 'Super Ape' would be like he would Probably say 'Bigger, stronger' but really it was an opposable thumb, and the Ape that had it (man) was smaller, and weaker"
Also it is not true that History has shown that "the first society to take advantage of advances in technology will dominate".
I guess I would have to call this the Maxium Machine Gun argumment. It goes like this. "The British developed the Maxium Machine Gun, and they used it to maintain power over everybody else."
And that worked fine for the first 50 years or so, but then EVREYBODY got Machine guns. And look where England is now.
Yes I can not spell...Wait....for a second there I almost cared.
a troll? This and a the last couple of Jon's stories are making me think that he really is trying to troll.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
First: God.
I could create life, design my own new universe, and modify the future evolution of animals and I'm still <b>not</b> playing God. Strictly speaking, the single qualification for really playing God is controlling the outcome of souls (heaven or hell).<p>
Second: Can do = will do.<br>
I'm a trans-humanist and I believe that any technology that can aid humanity should be used in (at least) an effort to do so. I don't mind adding wings to my son or trying to increase intelligence or attempting to create the "perfect" person.
Third: Yeah, it can go wrong...<br>
I admit that some parents may make bad decisions when designing their children--midgets for humor, sex slaves for sale, etc.--but so long that these people can lead a life they enjoy (and you may be able to modify what people enjoy--which is scary) I'm fine with it.
A: He called it the "Frankenstein Syndrome", because people who think this way are acting like the people in Frankenstein (more the old movie than the book). In Asimov's books and stories, people feared robots not because they wear dangerous, but because they were different. They feared that technology would compete with them and show them in a bad light.
I don't believe this. The only threat genetic engineering could present would be uniformity. And I just can't see humans doing that. This is just more FUD, from someone who usually champions (in his on twisted way) technology.
Read any of Asimov's robot stories. Read the short story Beggars In Spain (about genetically engineered children) by Nancy Kress. And read this:
What is different, they fear. What they fear, they hate. And what they hate, they destroy.
it's green.
----
The major flaw in this argument is that Jon compares the HGP to Dr Frankensteins quest to make life. Dr Frankenstein made a discovery in secret, acted on it, and promptly abandoned his creation causing the dreadful series of events that followed. Comparing Dr Frankenstein to the scientists who have worked long and hard on the HGP is an enourmous fallacy.
This has certainly not been a secret project nor has it been rushed through as Jon seems to think. The project was started many years ago and there was extensive ethical and community consultationaccross the globe when it was begun. There was plenty of "media Hype" at the time but this seems to have been forgotten by Jon.
Throughout the project there have been many breakthroughs which kept the project in the press, not the least of which was the introduction of Celera to the project, and from the number of articles on Slashdot the media has been interested for the last year at least. For most people the finishing of the first draft has not been a surprise.
Also unlike Frankenstein's monster, this technology will not be abandoned. In fact genetic engineering of any sort is one of the most well regulated technologies in existance. The amount of public consultation and ethical approval required to genetically engineer anything is staggering, let alone clone something or involve humans or human genes in genetic engineering.
This technology provides wonderful opportunities and the potential for harm however it is not the runaway bus that Jon is implying it is. The technology is intensly regulated (more so in Europe and the pacific than the States to be sure) and there is plenty of time for public debate about the future applications of this technology to humans. This news should be welcomed as a platform for public education and debate not used as a forum for paranoid ranting.
Not to mention we do not have details about the variations of the genes from person to person. My genes could be significantly different than my neighbors.
However, I believe we (humans) should be thinking about these problems now. There is plenty of time to discuss the issues and decide the best way to proceed with new technologies that come our way. I believe the best way to proceed is to simply talk about the best way to proceed before you proceed. What happens then is people in control of the technology have a better understanding of the moral implications and will likely make better decisions. This is the only real way to prevent disaster.
So let us talk about the new technologies and how they could affect the world.
--
May the source be with you!
--
May the source be with you!
Jason Zwolak
Maybe I'm the one here that's too dumb, but in all honesty, I can't quite see how the septuplets relate to the human genome project. I can see that the rampant use of fertility drugs by couples unwilling to pare their viable embryos down to one or two is a hazard of technology, but it doesn't seem like quite the same issue. What I mean is this: if a couple, through the use of fertility drugs, chooses to birth 5 or 6 or even 9 children at a time, it is a contained, small-scale problem. At best, the couple bares healthy offspring and can manage to provide food and medical care for their brood. At worst, the parents can't provide for the children at all, the babies have divers medical problems and the entire family must rely on state and federal aid in order to survive at even a sub-standard level. Now, I'm not suggesting that this isn't a problem in itself, but it seems to me that for those who oppose genetic tampering (I'm not one of these) the problems are of a more serious nature. The argument made in this piece and others is that it is the very philosophical, spiritual, and communal nature of our species that will be affected for the worse should genetic alteration become the norm. No matter how much I don't agree with or believe in this particular position, I do take it seriously. Discussion and thought on these topics is essential if we are to prevent the Gattica-type world mentioned. However, using mostly unrelated examples like the septuplets make you sound more like a crazed "science=evil; granola=good" technology hater than a person seriously interested in either the exchange of ideas or the state of our transforming world. just one girl's opinion
"The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing." -Socrates
Now that the human genome is documented, what happens to the genes and sequences which people and companies have patented? They're now known and documented and published, plus they're part of a government-assisted project. Does this mean now that those patents are inviable, or does this mean that the Government and all science papers have to leave out these patented items or fear infringement cases?
Dragon Magic
Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different. -- Earl of Chesterfield
Not only will it become a question of who can afford to genetically engineer their children, but who can afford new genomic remedies for disease.
The only real example we have to look at is pharmacutical companies. The recent news stories about the gracious plan of AIDS drug manufacturers to cut the price of aids drugs to Africa by 25% in the face of international pressure that may have led to the loss of the intelectuall property rights, is indicative.
The new price point is only 200% higher than the average per capita income of most African nations.
Is this the way we want genomics to work?
Does it really matter how we want it to work?
Biotech industries have to remain competitive in just the manner that pharmecutical (and software) companies do, by limiting peoples access to information and technology that should be open to all.
Genomics may be good technology, but in a bad system, where those without buying power are not given access to technology, it will be corrupted.
Jon- I'm sorry, but I could not finish reading your essay as [it] was rife with spelling and grammatical errors. An essay like this should be completely free of elementary school level errors in order that they are more easily read by the target audience.
you would have discovered that "jonkatz" resolves to user number 7654, which is the same as "JonKatz."
I'm genuinely curious about three things:
1. Where can I find the User Info page for JonKatz?
2. Would cmdrtaco and CmdrTaco share the same id # and user info?
3. If so, *why* would Slashdot strip out the capitals? You look like Zak3056 to me - not zak3056.
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
I think it's pretty clear this is not Jon Katz.
Of course, given the fact that he's posting at automatic +1, he's done a pretty good job of not appearing to be a troll, but if I recall correctly, isn't Slashdot curretly written in Perl? And isn't Perl case sensitive? AFAIK, no one has ever written in the line(s) it would take to make "JonKatz" equivalent to "jonkatz".
Second, posters of stories don't generally participate in their own discussions. Actually, I've never seen it happen. This jonkatz has posted 19 articles in the past few weeks. Why would an author want to flamebait his own discussion by tagging someone's post as "meaningless and incomprehensible"?
Finally, this isn't written in Katz's (unfortunately) familiar style. Katz is more verbose than this, and he makes fewer grammatical errors (with the exception of those caused by typos, which he doesn't check for). He would never say "The issue here is how is society supposed to deal with its many consequences." Instead, he would say something like, "Genetic Engineering has been a 'buzzword' for the new millenium for some time; only now, however, is society in a position to deal with it, and we should not ignore the issue at hand or try to obscure the blah blah blah blah"
In conclusion, this is a truly evil troll.
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
Can God use the threat of the DMCA to shutdown web sites linking to the genome map?
"The words of the prophets are written on the Slashdot walls."
Completely fallacious.
Si vis pacem, para bellum
The only thing more annoying than a Libertarian is an (un|mis)informed Libertarian
Politicians and exultant scientists were quick to sound caveats and talk about the need for safeguards and ethical standards, but the fact is there aren't any.
------------------------
Part of the federal funding that was devoted to the HGP went towards the study of the ethical question that would be raised by the genome's completion. Personally, I'm sorry that funding which could have been given to stimulate progress was instead put into the coffers of men who seek to bring "traditional values and ethics" into a world where genetic engineering and gene therapy is commonplace.
---------------------------------------
Unlike Jon, I believe that man will not use the genome to create a "mass-produced" society. Genetic diversity is a key component of a "perfect humanity" that will allow it to adapt to changing environments. I believe that the first phase of genetic research will involve discovering genes reponsible for common diseases or conditions that are either fatal or severely detrimental to one's lifestyle. The next phase will encourage cosmetic and mental "enhancement" in the same way that plastic surgery has emerged from modern medicine.
Eliminating baldness, specifying gender, increasing intelligence etc, will be the closest that the marketplace will allow to complete genetic enhancement. How many parents would pay $1000 or more to determine a child's hair color, eye color, or other frivalous changes. We will be able to evolve ourselves increase our ability to survive rather than relying on nature to do this for us. We can finally take control of our own evolution.
Ordering babies to order is not necessarily a bad thing. Universal generic enhancements such as increasing intelligence and strength could create a level playing field for all, where equal opportunity is no longer a myth. Each set of parents has a very different idea of what constitutes the "ideal child" that is only partially rooted in social doctrine. Genetically engineered chlidren can be free or the diseases and disabling conditions that plague us; every parent wants his child to be able to live a better life than himself, wouldn't this be the ultimate expression of this desire?
ByteMyCode.com: A Web 2.0 code sharing community.
He's engineered in a test tube, implanted, carried to term, and released into the 'wild'. He grows up happy as any other kid, healthier for his genetic enhancements, bright, more athletic....
And then G-E boy keels over dead in a sports contest, or a test, or on his way from English to Physics class....
And then you watch the world fly into fits about the death of this kid. It will be high profile, you can bet every doctor, company, and researcher involved will get slapped with a suit. You think Big Tobacco is a sitting duck? Try when a pack of parents of GE 'perfect' children start asking questions in the wake of this.
Basically, I'm not worried about this kind of engineering. It would seem to be quite self-correcting at the end of the road. This is especially true with the fact that most people are still taught to believe that life is sacred, and that genetic manipulation goes against the plan of almost every god out there. The people duped into the scheme will pay for the rest of their lives for having let their hubris endanger their children, much as smoking and drinking do now.
I am, however, far more worried about being genetically tested without my consent or permission and having that information made available to people who would use it, intentionally or inadvertantly, to harm me and mine. The HGP simply makes it easier for me to think twice before going to any doctor office or allowing any sampling to be done anywhere. You don't have to be a Luddite to realize that this is going to happen--and when it happens to you, it is going to suck.
In space, no one can hear you moo.
Of course, that led to the Wrath of Khan. One of the side effects of genetic improvements is bad chest implants and hair weaves.
Genetic subjects also cannot defeat the might of James T. Kirk.
Soon, we will be able to buy genetic code on priceline.com by naming our own price.
I am exited at the prospect.
I've always wondered why nobody seems to mention what could happen with biological weapons (from Iraq, no doubt...) with this data. Maybe it's already been done, or not possible to use this for making that kinda stuff, but with the whole genome, it'd be prrty easy to make extremely destructive biological weapons. Unless i'm wrong...
Saddam'll be dead by then, hopefully
No, Jon, they couldn't. Those have been proven to be mostly environmental factors. There are a few mental disorders that lead to those, but nothing in the genetic code. Did you do any research on modern psychology before writing this?
Actually, a large percentage of geeks and nerds are believed to have Asperger's Syndrome, a disorder that impairs social interaction skill development, but also sometimes makes people very well suited to writing code all night.
This syndrome might have genetic origins in some cases. (It's hard to know, because it was only discovered as a unique pathology in 1994 and there are currently no biological tests for it).
OTOH... These days, some parents would probably want to genetically add the syndrome, rather than subtract it. Bill Gates shows many of the symptoms of this disorder, and who wouldn't want their kid to grow up and be a multi-billionaire? :)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
That sounds more to me like dogma than a conclusion.
The "nature vs. nurture" argument about human development is a lot like the "particle vs. wave" argument about light.
The correct answer, according to the leaders in each field is the same: "We think it resembles both."
There is plenty of evidence that genetic programming dramatically influences our physical and mental health, and that a lot of our "environmental" conditioning begins in the womb, when factors like our mothers' hormone levels have a great deal of influence on our development.
There is also plenty of evidence to suggest that environmental and behavioral conditioning during childhood is very important, but before you assume that it is more important (as a typical Psych book from the 70's may have lead you to believe), you may want to read a little about David Reimer and Dr. Money's bold attempt to prove that nurture trumps nature. The results are not encouraging for his side, and his blatant fraud does not help his case (although it won him many accolades when he was still getting away with it).
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Well, if your goal is to arrest criminals, then I guess discovering a gene that causes people to murder, rape, or steal is a bad thing. After all, if we treat these people with corrective therapy before the problem manifests itself, then we won't get the carthartic sense of satisfaction when whe punish them later, right?
OTOH, If your goal is to prevent people from being murdered, raped, and ripped off, then such a discovery would be fantastic news, although it would raise as many questions as it would answer.
Our laws, ethics, religions have always been built on the idea that we are each personally responsible for our own actions. To imagine that it might be otherwise is the most dehumanizing concept since Darwin & Co. said that we are basically just animals, with slightly better brains and opposable thumbs. "Genetic tendencies" sounds too much like "pre-ordinaiton" to us. We tend to fear that the concepts of "responsibility" and "free will" are somehow going to be stamped out by the discovery of a "nerd gene" or whatever.
But what about the psychopathic killer? Some of those guys kill themselves or choose not to appeal death row sentences, because they know they will kill again if given the chance.
What if it turns out that most deviant behavior could be attributed to some form of madness or another? What if most of what we call our "personality", the reason why I am a very different sort of person than my brother (even though our "nurture" environment was pretty much the same), is the result of subtle differences in our DNA?
There are certain things about ourselves that we have little control over. If I trained every single day, I would not be as fast as Michael Johnson, nor as good of a boxer as Tyson. If I spent my every waking hour developing my intellect, I would still be no match for Stephen Hawking, nor could I learn to beat Kasparov at chess. Is it so unreasonable to think that other traits of our identity, like personality, might also have predetermined boundries?
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Iraq
Albania
Libya
North Korea
Haiti
Cuba
Brunei
Laos
and the list goes on and on...
You have resorted to wild hyperbole before, John, but this time you are just being silly.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Mr. Frankenstein was a mere student who quit school because he was smarter than the faculty and no longer needed them. Like Bill Gates, Frankenstein dropped out. Furthermore, I was told in my SciFi class that Shelley was only *17* when she wrote to book (although life expectancy was shorter then). Note that the same issue of forbidden knowledge, this time forbidden by God, is raised in the Genesis story of the expulsion from the garden of eden. That's all for now due to the unseen censor....
Artificial Intelligence = "Eye in the Sky" = One Dollar Bill = "The Force" = The "Martin Luther" King "God"
Katz says that the US is the country least able to wield this technology without ever naming an alternative. I guess he's saying that places like Libya, Iran, Iraq and Somalia are better at dealing with the technical and ethical issues that this technology brings up. Take a reality check, Katz. There are far worse places on this planet than the US. Personally, I can't think of a more freer and open society in which to deal with and debate this most important issue.
Afraid of corporations controlling this? Reality check, again. Individuals put their hard earned money into them to take a chance that this might pay off. Bio-technology is one of the RISKIEST investments on the face of the planet. Lots of people will lose their shirts. A lucky few will actually make money off this. They will be entitled to it because of the risk they took to develop the technology. If you don't want corporations to develop it who better, the government? Do you really want underpaid bureaucrats guiding this? Of course, money would be no object; they could just use tax dollars. Never mind about results when when they're paid the same regardless of the outcome.
Don't bash the US until you can come up with something better. They day you can, I'll move there.
And what's wrong with having the perfect baby? You write: "we haven't even even begun to discuss the social, cultural and ethical consequences of eliminating certain diseases, traits, addictions and affictions... That's just total nonsense. Let's see, eliminate disease, addiction and affliction and we get... HAPPY PEOPLE!!! When a doctor prescribes a treatment for me for a disease or other affliction, I get HAPPY as a result of being well. Other people report to me similiar euphoria. I have NEVER heard of a person becoming depressed as a result of getting well, have you? This seems to be a very good ethical outcome. As far as the social and cultural outcomes, we already know that, too. The answer is OVERPOPULATION. In third world countries, population has skyrocketed due to better medicines being introduced over the past century. Since these cultures are used to having lots of children to offset infant mortality, better medicine has decreased infant mortality and also improved the lives of people still living. This has been a problem for a long time. We are all aware of it. The solution lies in those cultures changing with the times. Western society has changed (remember women's sufferage?) with the times; they can, too. Personally, I don't want a blind, deaf or retarded baby. I would like my child to be able to have the most opportunities available to it unhampered by any afflictions or disabilities. Life is tough enough economically and socially without physical barriers to deal with.
But what about "designer childen?" You write, "Parents with resources will inevitably seek to breed children who conform to particular notions of beauty, intelligence and desirability." I say let them. The more someone conforms, the less they innovate. People with superior resources have them because they take the paths LEAST followed. They are aggressive, imaginative and independent. Introducing traits of conformity results in a passive, dull and dependent person (if you doubt that, walk into any government office and observe the career people). Besides, if these parents all pick the "beautiful" traits, won't their kids all look alike, sound alike and act alike? What's beautiful about that? People with brains, tenacity and independance make it in the long run. Looks and test scores may get you in the door, but NOT up the stairs.
...should be named Khan.
-Those who dance are considered insane by those who can't hear the music.
It's obviously a problem wherever you come from, anyway :-) Grammar too. According to your sentence, the US must be awesome since literacy is the ONLY problem we have...
It's not funny till someone gets hurt.
Has anyone discovered the self-contradicting, raving-sans-cogitation, improperly-linked-pen-and-brain gene so that we can prevent the propagation of further Katzes? Or, barring that...can someone tell me how to filter him off my /. home page?
It's not funny till someone gets hurt.
Now where did I put that capitally-punished-murderer brain?
It's not funny till someone gets hurt.
Arctic, actually. I find it prudent to keep better track of the last known location of a monster.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
The "doctor-creator" was Frankenstein. The monster was simply "the monster", or "Frankenstein's monster".
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
I am concerned with the societal implications of the newly discovered secrets of fire...
Instead of wrapping their children in mammoth furs, some parents will use fire to heat their cave...
As an ultraparanoid geek, I feel that the advantages of not freezing to death does not outweigh the potential loss of privacy. Other people may start lighting sticks and walking around in the dark, violating the privacy of my cave at night.
... This may sound silly, but so does opposing medical advancement.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Jon Katz, Jon Katz, is a dirty old bugger
And he likes to eat small cats
Jon Katz, Jon Katz, is a dirty old bugger
And he likes to wear brown hats
Jon Katz is a bugger, he's a real big bugger, and he likes to drink Labatts
Jon Katz, Jon Katz, is a dirty old bugger
And his belfry's full of bats...
-- Sergio - This is here, This is the place, This is now!
After reading most of the discussion, I can see why there is so much antipathy towards Jon's article.
In the first case, he is lambasting the ability of the US to properly make use of this new genetic potential - a bad thing to do when most of his readers are card-carryin' US citizens with the prerequisite dose of American arrogance/pride. Jon's point, if I may be so bold, was to point out that no current country has the wisdom to use this to its greatest benefit. None. Nada. We are like babies with a gun - none of us can be trusted with it.
Secondly, I think Jon may be preaching in the enemy's camp, so to speak. The main message of his article is that we should adopt a healthy skepticism concerning technology because the changes it brings are sometimes horrible and irreversible. That this message is being broadcast to the most technologically adept of a highly technological society means that his cautionary tale will fall on deaf ears, mostly. Most /. readers have too much invested in technology to even consider rethinking its place in their life.
Thirdly, I think we have to make a large distinction between knowledge, intelligence and wisdom. Most of you learned how to use a computer at a young age. In other words, you have knowledge concerning computers. Many of you put this knowledge to work and are currently earning your living in computing, demonstrating intelligence, or the ability to manipulate knowledge effectively. How many of you, though, asked yourselves at the outset of your computing lives whether you should be using computers at all? Whether computers were good for our society as a whole? What could potentially go wrong with a computer-based society? How they could be misused?
This would demonstrate wisdom, and I am willing to bet that hardly anyone out in /. land exercised any, at least concerning computers. Computers were so cool at the time that we didn't even think about the greater repercussions of their use. Forty years later, we couldn't go back even if we wanted to.
Considering the possible scope of effect with the HGP, shouldn't we all be using a little wisdom when we decide how it shall be used, or whether it should even be used at all?
© Copyright 2000 Matthew Yeo
and hardly any Americans grasp what it might do, how it might work, or what kind of changes might be brought about by its use and misuse.
A constant theme throughout your essay is how ill-equipped Americans are to handling this new technology. Well, exactly which country are you endorsing as having this "grasp" on the issues?
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
So you presume to know the mind of God? How arrogant. It may be that it's part of God's plan for man to decode himself, in order to understand more about God.
If there is a God, he designed us with intelligence and curiosity. Since there are no roadsigns that say what we should or should not do with it ("Thou shalt not decode thy genome"), therefore I conclude that everything is fair game.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Have you ever heard of the Bible? God's mind is revealed to us through it's words. Couldn't be simpler really, could it?
Well, yes, it could be simpler. Even if you grant that the bible is the word of God, it's hardly a crystal-clear document. Particularly when you are reading a translation.
And I also believe that it does say that God is to be worshipped, not mocked and reviled, as these "geneticists" are doing through their work.
Please provide a direct quote from the Bible that indicates that self-analysis of man is "mocking and reviling" God. Actually, let's go whole-hog. Provide a quote that actually forbids man from creating new life (aka "playing God"). Never mind that we've already done this by domestication (dogs and cats were created by man), and by cross-breeding (Boysenberries).
The fact is that you can make this argument about any gathering of knowledge, and in fact, many do. Do you also endorse that any medical treatment is an affront to God? Where do you draw the line of which knowledge is OK, and which knowledge isn't?
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Just because we have the technology to do something, doesn't mean that it will open the floodgates of abuse of that technology. The atom bomb was invented over 50 years ago, and I would say that it isn't readily available by private companies for sale (or by most countries, as well). Space travel is another example. It's just too expensive for the majority of companies out there today.
This technology, while it has the potential for being abused, will be difficult to implement to the point of creating "perfect" people. What companies have the money, resources, and motivation to allow people to do this? Natural procreation will always be around, and will be the main way of furthering the human race (not to mention it's the most fun way too!).
In a nation that has already surrendered many privacy rights to invasive new software technologies,...
I find it interesting that you are using the point of privacy invasion from software technologies, when the main point of this board is to further new software technologies that are available to everyone! Kind of a double standard, don't you think?
Attention all planets of the Solar Federation! We have assumed control! - Neil Peart
Perhaps Katz was simply trying to provoke discussion. He has been known to do that, after all. In so doing, though, Katz missed the opportunity to make good, genuine points about a technology that we should be wary of.
This is not about a battle between the haves and have-nots. This is not a Frankenstein fantasy, nor is it the introduction to a brave new world. Instead, as we have already seen with Montesanto's terminator seeds, it is another tool of oppression.
Imagine a future in which your food supply is dominated by one or two companies. Those companies, then would wield incredible power, beyond what most governments can manage, even though those governments are usually backed by people with guns.
In truth, genetic engineering can and probably will be used as a means of oppression, much as several other dual-purpose technologies have been.
www.alarmist.org
...a doctor at his desk asking:
"Do you want legs or tentacles?"
ObOldSNL....
wow, that sorta sucks that you completely misunderstand jesus. It'd be kinda cool if you realized that jesus came here to tell us to get along. Its sad that there are so many people in this world that completely misunderstand god and his intentions. They memorize biblical stories yet draw the wrong conclusions from them. I don't care if everyone in the world is a christian. When did it become my right to impose my will and my beliefs on others? If jesus were alive today, he'd laugh at how much everyone just doesn't get it. By the way, were you home schooled?
-f
That is EXACTLY the problem with genetics we are talking about. Getting rid of what we think of as "stupid" is not always the answer. Guess what, christians think you are stupid too and they have a much more organised heirarchy. Not to sound like a long hair, (they do have some good points) but once genetic mutation is used to curb something that you personally do not like you increase the chance that something similar will be done to you..... Try to think before you speak next time, and maybee you won't sound so much like one of those "stupid christians" you are talking about. and yes I know my spelling is not perfect
$home =~ s/work/play/gi; nice -20 run $home;
After spending months reading him and honestly trying to figure out where this guy is comming from, I have finally figured out John Katz. He is a troll. So, rather than staying here and arguing, which is pointless, I'm skipping.
In the terms of Usenet,
<plonk>
-- V was its Victim who cried out "But why?" --
They know the sequences of somebody's genome, but they still lack the first clue as to how it works, or if in fact it has anything to do with what makes us human.
I'm really surprised at all of the people here who think JK is blowing things oout of proportion.
I think he's right on.
All these examples of other cultures that would could do more harm with the map are forgetting one thing. In those examples it is the state that would control the power and do things that are clearly evil. In our case it is Corporations that will control the Genome and how it is used. They've got one thought one their mind, Profit.
Do we really want a world in which people are made to order? It wouldn't be long until people are assigned their roles in society.
Then no one will be free.
-ryan
Ok, I could imagine a disasterous end for humanity if, through genetically engineering, we managed to foolishly remove most of the genetic diversity in our species. (Genetic diversity is a vital component to evolution, and evolution is important for adapting to a changing environment.)
But, does that really seem at all likely? I mean, really, think about how many people in the world live without much in the way of even plumbing. How plausible do you think it is that we'll get to a day when all of humanity is genetically engineered to be "perfect"? At the very least, we'll probably always have genetic diversity in the Third World.
-- dR.fuZZo
Can we say Gattaca anyone?
Hmmm... I wonder how much of this technophobic hysteria could have played out with respect to earlier scientific and technological advances. Imagine all of the horrors we could have quite reasonably anticipated from: antibiotics (overuse, with the rise of resistant organisms), computers and the Internet (name your poison!), broadcasting (massive mind control and cultural homogenization), electric power (dangerous and controlled by monopolistic corporations), the wheel... And don't even get me started about the evils of FIRE!
Craig Venter and Celera aside, I don't think there has ever been a major scientific advance conducted in a more open and democratic manner, or with greater ethical consciousness and concern for social consequences, than this one. Katz's beef seems to more with change generally (especially in technologies he understands poorly) and with the economic systems that mediate how benefits will be distributed. I hear him on the latter point, though; much of Africa is on the verge of an almost unimaginable holocaust because it wasn't sufficiently profitable for western pharmcos to allow anything to be done about it...
The first book is a perfect illustration of Katz's point about what parents would do given the chance. At the time the first couple genetically mainipulates their daughter so that she doesn't need sleep, such a modification is illegal, but the other modifications (no genetic diseases, high intelligence, beauty, predisposition towards math, art, etc.) are legal. This couple just takes the extra step. And then human nature takes over. People want what's best for their children - rich people especially since they can pay for so much. In the book, other parents quickly have their own children similarly modified. After all, these Sleepless kids have a Bachelors and several graduate degrees by the age of 18. No matter how smart their kids are, they'll be left in the dust if they have to sleep. My sister-in-law is a raging "I want what's best for my child" fanatic. The kid has been enrolled in "The Best" private school in NYC since he was six. She belives that if he goes to this private school, he will go to an Ivy League college and be successful, rich and happy. When there was some question about a year ago whether or not the kid had ADD or some other problem, she confided to my wife that she would rather he just died, than live with some kind of disability. He was seven at the time. If she felt she could get away with it, she'd probably be pushing little kids down stairs to make sure my nephew stays at or near the top of his class. There is no doubt in my mind that if she had the opportunity to give her kid a performance boost through genetic manipulation, legal or not, she would have done it. She wants her kid to be happy, and if anyone else has to suffer for that happiness, well that's just too bad.
"Can I finish? Can I finish?
Ba ha.. why/when did Wired fire hm?
jack's bicycle is music to my ears
As we have learned, you cannot un-invent technology. All we'll learn through "designer babies" is that they are anything but. We are not programmed and humans cannot control nature, because control is unnatural.
We can't stop people from wishing for designer babies. What we should be scared of is governments deciding that people should do certain things with such technology.... as always.
> To secure that right and achieve the requisite
> quality control over new human life, human
> conception and gestation will need to be brought
> fully into the bright light of laboratory,
> beneath which the child-to-be can be fertilized,
> nourished, pruned, weeded, watched, inspected,
> prodded, pinched, cajoled, injected, tested,
> rated, graded, approved, stamped, wrapped,
> sealed and delivered.
Most of the people I know would much rather make babies the old fashioned way. Even the people who go the lab method only do so when the old standard doesn't work for them.
And of course, very few people out there plan their reproduction enough to involve a lab:
"What do you mean you're pregnant? We only did it once"!
If the discussion on Slashdot is any sign, then at least one of Jon Katz's claims has been proven true. Katz said:
There were the crackpot critics spouting obligatory warnings and alarms, but they were given short shrift amidst all of the gee-whiz hype...
And sure enough, look at the response on SlashDot. Almost everyone seems to be of the opinion "Change happens, so deal with it".
I suspect that most of these people are too young to remember the Cold War. Can a new technology just plain-old be dangerous. Yes! Unfortunately, that lesson is lost of most SlashDot readers. As Jon Katz said, 15-year-olds who master Linux boxes think they understand technology itself. How true. There are way too many posters on SlashDot who claim to understand technology, then claim that knowing the human genome is harmless, or is "just part of the usual process of technological advancement". Anyone who can't even think of a way in which "normal technological advancement" can be harmful doesn't understand technology. They probably don't think their computers are responsible for pollution either.
Can you imagine a world in which every country had access to the bomb? It's bad enough that India and Pakistan have the bomb, given that they're (for all practical purposes) at war. But imagine if every country in the Middle East had the bomb. Nuclear Winter would have happened by now. So why hasn't it? Simple. The dangers of the atomic bomb were recognized immediately and restrictions on the spread and use of the technology were immediately and strictly enforced. At first, the technology simply was kept a national secret by every nation which had it. Nowadays, there are restrictions on the movement of both entire bombs, and on weapon-grade plutonium.
Now think about the potential dangers associated with knowledge of the human genome. Forget theoretical questions about whether or not breeding "perfect" humans is a good thing or not. Consider instead the deadly chamicals and viruses which could be created (as weapons) by a society which knows everything about the human genome (even moreso if retrovirus technology continues to advance). If you know exactly what you're attacking, you can attack more effectively. Or more subtly, which is even more scary.
So, how exactly do we deal with this? Restrict chemical/viral weapons? Perhaps we can limit more obvious uses of chemical weapons. But unlike weapon-grade plutonium, I doubt we can restrict the use of the tools which are needed to develop such weapons. Then when some country develops a virus which breeds in all people, but only attacks people with certain gene combinations (say, ones which are common in a target country), we've got problems.
I suspect that many people will ignore the above as just a hypothetical possibility. "The technology doesn't exist" and "If we can create the disease, we can create the cure" will probably be used as arguments for ignoring what I said. Although I suspect it's easier to create a super-effective carcinogen than to create a cure for cancer, I suppose it's fair to say that my concerns are speculation. But even then, we still have to deal with all of the subtler effects of knowledge of the human genome. As one example, consider that discrimination now has a new, "scientific" grounding. In the extreme version, this new technology likely to inspire the next Hitler. On a lesser level, concerns have already been raised that DNA analysis could be used to discriminate in areas from employment ("Sure you're experienced, but you don't have the following high-intelligence related genes...") to insurance ("I know you have no accidents, but this DNA analysis says your manual dexterity is relatively poor..."). God forbid if immigration got their hands on DNA analysis (The phrase "We don't want your type" would take on a whole new meaning...) Of course, at this point most people are probably shouting "Nature vs. Nurture". Reality check time: most people don't understand the difference. And even if they did, that doesn't mean that nature isn't still a factor. As long as they're concerned with probabilities, not certainty, then discrimination on the basis of DNA makes sense.
I hope people will really think about this issue. Basically, Jon Katz is right. Any new technology is generally hyped up early on in its life, with concern for the negative consequences coming in later. The automobile was thought to be a great thing at first. Only later did we realize the negative effects of all that pollution (not to mention the way we had to redesign our cities and even our lifestyles around cars). Nuclear power seems like a good idea. "So cheap it won't even be metered" they said. But radioactive waste and Three-Mile Island type disasters were not brought up as concerns... at first. So please, let's think this genome thing through now. Knowledge of the human genome could be both as destructive as the A-bomb and as lifesytle-altering as the automobile. So let's think about it now, not just say "Hey, technologial change is normal, so let's just let it proceed as it will".
Katz wrote: >>Despite the soothing caveats about ethical standards, staving off discrimination and privacy issues, the completion of the so-called human map offers benefits and nightmares in almost equal proportions. Once unleashed, powerful technologies are tough to contain or control. There was lots of megahype chatter about curing cancer, heart disease and aging, but this is now officially Frankenstein time, the era of the "perfect baby" and human quality control. Unfortunately for the world, it's hard to imagine a more poorly equipped society to deal with the Human Genome Project than the U.S. >Responding to the announcement that the Human Genome Project was complete, President Clinton gushed that "Today we are learning the language in which God created life." Maybe. Or maybe we are just trying to steal his job. >> How could we do a worse job? Jon, news flash here: As it stands now, every single one of us is headed for death. As I alluded to earlier, there is an epidemic. I don't want to be a victim of death. I want to live; That's my main goal. And I therefore support those things that further that goal. Genetic engineering holds more promise than anything else on the horizon in the area of keeping my carcass alive, and guess what, Jon...the same holds true for you! >>When last seen, almost two hundred years ago, Dr. Frankenstein's monster was heading off into the frozen wastes of the Antarctic. If he's still around, he ought to come back. It's safe now. This is Frankenstein time. >> About time! >> It's hard to imagine many societies more arrogant, thoughtless or poorly equipped to deal >> You forgot "hubristic". >>There were the crackpot critics spouting obligatory warnings and alarms, >> If you mean to imply that critics of Genetic Engineering (GE) are in the minority, you couldn't be more wrong. Of COURSE, the vast majority of humans on this planet are against GE. There have ALWAYS been more villagers than Drs Frankenstein...and when they get their hands on a Frankenstein type, they usually burn him at the stake. >> Frankenstein was right when he told his doctor-creator that it was a sin to create things one doesn't take any responsibility for. He was right then, and he's right now, and a lot more timely. The hubris described in Mary Shelley's brilliant novel published in 1818 is a hallmark characteristic of 21st century America. >> "Burn the Sinner"...ever the cry of the villagers, and it goes ever on... >>For all that this research is being hailed as the greatest boon to mankind, it could just as easily become humanity's greatest nightmare. "How dare you sport thus with life?" >> Wouldst thou have that Which thou esteem'st the ornament of life, And live a coward in thine own esteem, Letting 'I dare not' wait upon 'I would,' Like the poor cat i' the adage? ... I dare do all that may become a man [or, it is to be hoped...MORE than a man...someday...]
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Just a small side note: Frankenstein was the creator. The monster he created had no name. I wonder if Jon read the book?
One need not await the fruits of the genome to find formerly ethical scientists whose morals have been overrun by corporate greed. I direct your attention to an ongoing Eli Lilly-funded project being conducted at prestigious academic research institutions around the country in which siblings of children with schizophrenia are being given antipsychotic medication (Olanzapine/Risperidone) "in an effort to prevent them from developing the disease." These drugs are dangerous in and of themselves (side effects include tardive dyskinesia and permanent alteration of brain structures). Importantly, none of these drugs are FDA approved for use even in schizophrenic children, much less nominally healthy children, but this has not stopped Eli Lilly's quest for expansion of its market. Eli Lilly and the rest of the drug pushers have systematically melted away the ethics of much of the psychiatric profession. And guess what - they own every last drop of DNA collected from the kids suffering through their "research." What monsters might they be hatching?
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
Jon writes books, not slashdot articles. You make the Human Genome Project look like it was some big secret thing, I remeber learning about it in school years before it was completed. Another thing... I don't get why you're rants seem to pass as news. I mean, I usually agree with what jon is saying, be we all know that this was completed, and it is not nessessary to write about concerns that lots of people have over genetics, that's not news.
Come back when you have a story about the goverment growing a race of super-soldiers or cloning presidents, ok?
So quick with fear you tiny fools!
It's true that technology, once unleashed, is difficult or impossible to restrain. And there are examples in the past of technology which produced changes which were considered unthinkable by the people of the time. If those people could see what we are now, they would likely be horrified. So, the doomsayers are right in a sense. This technology will probably be one of the most significant discoveries in history in terms of fundamentally altering the way we think about and experience a great many things. It's not the end of The World, but maybe the end of Our world. It's called Change.
Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
There are some good points in the original post that most of the replying posts seem to hve completely overlooked. The question here is not whether everyone will take advantage of this new technology, but whether just a few will. If you don't think that the potential of altering human genes on a large scale is something with which we should be concerned, then you've not actualy looked at the ramifications very much at all.
.02, for now at least.
So what are the arguments against? Can we argue most human beings will oppose physical similarity on the grounds that individuality will be a thing of the past? Okay..that's laughable. World War Two was fought, in part, because a group of people (and a very small group of people at that)were using the crude technology of the time to bring about exactly that thing. Sure, we fought off that idea, but at what cost? Could we argue that most people would never be able to take advantage of the new technology anyhow? Well, I can't argue that, at least when it's first introduced, but, like we've found with computers, it doesn't take long for amazing technology to make its way into everyone's hands. Could we argue that we've managed to handle other technological advances safely, so this one shouldn't be a problem either? Well, we could probably argue that also, but we still don't have a good handle world-wide on nuclear power (or did we forget Chernobyl, and, besides, we still can't decide what to do with the waste products, can we?), nuclear weapons are still a threat, and the only reason that they havne't been a greter threat is that everyone that had them was scared to death of unleashing them lest everyone else unleash theirs. Do we really want a genetic "arms race"? I doubt it.
The fact is that once this genie is out of the bottle we have no idea where it will go and, right now, it doesn't look as if we actually care. There are a lot of very sticky issues here that our government and our soceity have yet to ponder at any length at all and despite that, we're ready to begin changing our own genetic code. Katz was right when he said that we're not suited to handle this technology. We're not even close. But that's one of the few things he said that doesn't matter. Whether we're suited to handle it or not, we're going to have to. I think we should start dealing with the ramifications right now, not based on what everyone might do with the technology, but what the most determined or desperate might do with it.
And that's my
-Jim
If you are going to use Frankenstein and his MONSTER in a story how about getting it right? Frankestein was the Doctor a unstable but genuine (in the book anyhow) genius. his creation the MONSTER was never given a name, and to call him Frankenstein as well, shows to me a serius lack of knowledge about the very premice(sp?) you based your story on. I am sorry but I find it extremely hard to find any support for a person who does not research all aspects of his story before he takes it to print.
WinLinux the Operating system for LLamas
Sorry I consider myself a open minded christian and even I can't even begin to tell you how wrong that post is!!
And to the Gentleman who posted right after you calling Christanity bs I am truly sorry sir I hate to believe someone who must have been a christian or at least said he/she was (just to say you are does not make you one) could have left such a bad taste in your mouth.
I beleive in God I believe in love of your Fellow man I beleive that true christinity has been diluted over the millineum(sp?) but what man does himself should have no reflection on what the truth here is, which is there was a pime mover for the start of what we know as reality and hopefully that prime mover is still careing about what we do as a people (you will notice I say here people not race there should be no race only people any color or denomination or nationality we are all brothers).
no more here shall I post this is enough for now
WinLinux the Operating system for LLamas
sorry sir but if you are going to believe at all in the bible you have to realize that Satan is a real Identity just as God is remember Satan (angelic name LUcifer) was the angel of Light before his attack on god so yes Jesus is talking about a very real being when he speeks of Satan
WinLinux the Operating system for LLamas
"Unfortunately for the world, it's hard to imagine a more poorly equipped society to deal with the Human Genome Project than the U.S." This statement tipped me off to the sensationalist nature of this post from the moment I saw it. Sure the U.S. is not perfect, we have greedy corporations, ignorant politicians and a bored public. However, we are first and foremost an open society and thus better equipped than any other nation to deal with this breakthrough. Personally, I was amazed with the amount of level headed, cautious reporting on this story in the main stream press. By now every man woman and child has had the phrase "brave new world" and the obligatory folloup warnings etched into their subconscious. When the new challenges brought about by the Human Genome Project come to pass, our first reactions may well be ridiculous, as the past few days have well illustrated, but eventually this momentary hysteria will be replaced by rational discussion. Much like what we are doing now. I can't wait to see it unfold. "The Republic is gone, mountains and rivers remain"
but hacking it, and understanding how to usefully modify it is another. Anyone who has patched a binary file will respect the much more complex task of hacking the human genome. We are not yet to perfect babies, so calm down.
-PKor
It won't be the illiterate masses of the US who control this thing anyway. They're for selling it to. The only people who understand this stuff well enough to use it are medical geeks.
In the cold war era USSR: You will be issued a coal mining child. It will have four arms to facilitate faster digging.
How is the US the worst choice? I do believe that the English speaking West still has the strongest Judeo-Christian ethic among those technologically capable of doing such things.
Now, if you don't like the Judeo-Christian ethic, you'd better get another standard before you start crying about a Judeo-Christian society does with its technology.
...that Jon Katz is still a fucking moron.
We [still] hold this truth to be self evident that all men [and women] are created equal [although thanks to technology some of us are created more equal than others].
Look how expensive test tube babies are today. It's not going to be your average Joe who can afford a superbaby. It will be the affluent, who can also afford to give their children the perfect education, all the opportunities, etc. It seems we've created another way for the elite to be more elite.
On the other hand, what about all those genetic alterations that fail? If genetecists really go after the "super baby", there are going to be a lot of lab rat babies who end up with serious defects or impairments due to a doctor's incorrect hypothesis or miscalcualation or even equipment failure. How will we deal with these new numbers of defective humans we might create? Frankenstein indeed.
Will a new breed of nazism appear as we determine that once again the inferior races are bogging down the "super race" that we just created? Will military countries look for ways to create the perfect fighting human, who will then be sent to scientific training camps to become soldiers and nothing else? While we're at it, who is going to clean our sewers? Why don't we make a being with a low IQ, but high endurance and resistance to all kinds of disease to be raised as a full-time sewer cleaner? Ok, now we're getting into Brave New World. But maybe it's time to give Huxley's book another look.
And of course Orwell, not just 1984, but also Animal Farm, as I alluded to at the top of this comment.
While we're at it, how about another season of the long forgotten T.V. show, the $10,000,000 man.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
there's a major problem there: the assumption that there's a reasonably straightforward mapping from gene to meme. but i think that current assumptions are probably highly simplistic, and in fact, perhaps in general the mapping is not discoverable.
not so long ago, i read most of a book by Stuart Kauffman called "At home in the universe: the search for the laws of self-organisation & complexity". It became a little less solid towards the end, but the early chapters contained what was, to me, a brilliantly illuminating discussion of the way that networks of genes function.
kauffman argues that the expression of a genome is not just just the simple reading of segments of the DNA which encode proteins which go away and build things, but that a set of genes really forms a boolean network, where the action of some gene can affect the expression of another gene, and vice versa.
what that means in computery terms is that the way your genes work is less like a shopping list (gene A implies obesity, gene B implies intelligence, etc), and more like a cellular automata. if you remember some of your computer theory, you might remember that many simple CA's (e.g. Conway's Life) are Turing complete.
so what we have is essentially an evolved computer program. and if you think that some people write bizarre code, wait till you've seen some that's generated by genetic algorithm. then multiply that by billions of year's worth of evolution, raise to the power of the Halting Problem, and that's the order of the difficulty of decoding the genome!
by way of illustration of the sort of complexity that can arise when even simple systems are evolved in the real world, check out Adrian Thompson's web page. In particular, this paper has a fascinating analysis of the properties of some genetically evolved FPGA hardware. now this stuff is really simple - we're talking digital components, 100 gates, evolved to perform a simple discrimination process.
the circuit worked, but they didn't really have the faintest clue of how! because it evolved, it pushed the physics of the FPGA as far as they would go. to quote from the paper:
as anyone who's played with software knows that making a change in one place can have far-reaching implications. try experimenting with a simple 1 dimensional CA and changing the rules slightly - you'll get an almost completely different result.that's why i argue for caution in the use of genetic engineering technology. actually, i'm not sure i do. nature has thrown so many genes together for so long that i doubt we can come up with much that does anything really useful that isn't just a simple isolated gene-to-attribute mapping.
the claims that are made for genetic engineering are way overblown - genes might be the roadmap for life, but i bet they'll be an almost completely unreadable one.
Oh, puh-leeze -- humans have been doing that for millenia. (Perhaps the reason chihuahuas have such foul dispositions is that they know they are descended from wolves and humans did this to them.)
There is a difference between selective breeding and tinkering with God's blueprint for life. By directly taking a hand to DNA scientists are pretending that they have the Lord's wisdom, something which is clearly false.
This is a silly stereotype. Scientists (and pretty much everybody else, including contemporary Christians) condemn certain elements of old-style "Christian morality", such as witch-burnings and forced conversion, as backward and superstitious -- because these practices are backward and superstitious. The reasonable portions of traditional Christian morality are similar to those of any viable culture's morality, and as such are universally respected among civilized people.
Bzzt! Wrong, scientists are part of the cult of atheism which has attempted to have decent Christian teachings banned in our schools to be replaced with their cold mechanistic view of a "clockwork universe" in which the love of God has no place. Ultimately their aim is to have us all in our place, our lives ordered by the "scientific" elite according to their deterministic principles.
I, for one, would rather have the love of God on my side than a symposium full of these husks of men.
---
Jon E. Erikson
Jon Erikson, IT guru
Christianity is the most dangerous cult in existence today.
Rubbish, Christianity has the full weight of Divine Truth behind it and anyone who has accepted the love of the Lord can feel that in their hearts everyday. I pity those of you without that love, and will do everything in my power to help you to see that love if I ever meet you.
Who do you think is going to have a stranglehold on this information in the US? In the unlikely event that you Bible-pounding shitheads get your way and Baby Bush gets elected to office, we would see a nice shiny new nation of perfect white Aryan babies.
What has Christianity got to do with race? I think it is just you who has issues there. Ultimately every person on the planet should realise the Truth of our Lord, irrespective of the colour of their skin. The only people who are to be hated are those who revel in Satan's unholy evil.
You whine about Christians being persecuted, while conventiently forgetting that you are responsible for the deaths of millions of people over the last thousand years...in the Crusades, in the Inquisition, in the Salem witch trials, in Nazi Germany, and so on and so forth.
Bear in mind that Catholics are not Christians since they worship the virgin whore rather than God. Those heathen sinners could do anything and it wouldn't suprise me, since they, like all who do not follow in the path of our Lord, are destined to Hell anyway.
---
Jon E. Erikson
Jon Erikson, IT guru
So you presume to know the mind of God? How arrogant. It may be that it's part of God's plan for man to decode himself, in order to understand more about God.
Have you ever heard of the Bible? God's mind is revealed to us through it's words. Couldn't be simpler really, could it? And I also believe that it does say that God is to be worshipped, not mocked and reviled, as these "geneticists" are doing through their work.
---
Jon E. Erikson
Jon Erikson, IT guru
For those who don't know what I'm talking about, read Ray Kurzwiel's The Age of Spiritual Machines. He details how in the next 100 years, we'll upload our brains into quantumn computers and cease to be biological life forms. It's a good read, and it's what the future will be. Before I read it, I thought a Brave New World-ish type scenario (of which the genome manipuation is a central feature) would be the future. Now I realize that those technologies will be irrelevant, because we're going to be moving away from a biological-based life form in the future anyway. (How 'bout a book review, or did I just miss it?)
If anybody has a copy of Rhapsody for Intel to give away, drop me an email.
Okay - so HERE's what's wrong with weeding out certain genes.
If I had the genes for multiple sclerosis, as an example, I would be quite happy to have them replaced or repaired in my child.
Very understandable. But the problem comes along in drawing the line at what is "eugenics" and when does it become more superficial? What if I happened to fit the genetic profile for obesity? Obviously, having lived my life with a problem that seriously impaired my self-image, health, and most likely caused me a lot of hardship, I would want to eliminate that gene in my child.
Is that still okay? Is obesity (which can be genetically predispositioned) a disease serious enough to justify genetic engineering? Maybe it is.
Let's say that I had horrible, horrible acne as a child. As a result, my face is scarred and pitted, and it has caused me no end of unhappiness. I don't want my children to suffer the ridicule and low self-image that I had to endure.
Is that still okay? Is acne(which can be genetically predispositioned) a disease serious enough to justify genetic engineering? Maybe it is.
Don't worry, almost done. Just one more.
What if I was just plain ugly? I never liked the way I looked, and always got ridiculed, and never went out on dates. Assuming I'd find a way to have a child, I would most certainly not want them to have to suffer from this unfortunate fate...
Is that still okay? Is good ol' fashioned ugliness(which is certainly genetically predispositioned) a condition serious enough to justify genetic engineering? Hmmm...
It's so very very hard to draw the line. Who gets to hold the rubber stamps that say "Unfortunate Enough Problem To Fix With Genetics" and "That's What Nature Intended"? Who has the right to make that call? THAT's why eugenics is so dangerous...it's hard to keep roped up.
I though that Gnome was a package put out by Red Hat?
Get your own Red Swingline Stapler
Science fiction does not get the respect it deserves. Here is a medium that allows us to explore the consequences of our creation. We do not really want to explore the consequences; we just want the immediate benefits. That is fine. We will survive, or we won't. There is little we can do about it.
On the other hand people who ignore science are just stupid. It is especially stupid to contaminate the ethical arguments of science with terms such as "playing god". If you want to believe that god turns on your light bulb, go for it. But I am going to have much more luck building a light bulb if I understand electrons, photons, wire, and vacuum.
How does this relate to the genome project? Simple. Scientific experience has shown us that the universe is much more complicated that we think. When we try to reduce physics to a simple set of deterministic rules, we end up with probabilities. When we try to reduce evolution to survival of the fittest, we get symbiotic relationships, niches, and catastrophes. When we try to cure illnesses with antibiotics, we get super germs that we cannot kill.
Sound byte science is not sound science. A human is not just the sum of his or her genes; memes also play an important role. That is why is cost a lot of money to raise a Kennedy. The people who try to make a perfect human by playing with genes are totally ignoring past experience. Let me reiterate. These people are not just ignoring science fiction, but also science fact.
rant off
Now I am not saying that genetic research is bad. When not diluted by public relation people, it is a very interesting. On the other hand, there is no reason that genetics in itself will cure anything outside the realm of what we call birth defects. For instance, there is no absolute genetic relationship between breast cancer and heredity. Another example is Alzheimer's. There is no reason to believe that it is not perfectly natural to lose ones mind when one gets very old. The progression of the 'disease' is likely variable in the human race, just like height or eye color. Conditions such as cancer, dementia, and low intelligence probably have a significant environmental component, and it is not at all clear that the most cost effective solution is the 'fixing' of bad genes.
And this is the crux of the matter. The money from genetics will come from an extension of the current massive consumerism. We will have fast cures for being 10% overweight, 2 inches too short, or the infamous non-blonde-hair-blue-eyed epidemic. Will it be worth the money? Maybe. Will it feed the poor? Unlikely. Will people still die? Hopefully.
You know, now that I think about if, the most appropriate fable for this situation is the Star Bellied Sneeches. I wonder if any of the scientists have read it.
While I'm not espousing that the US is the holder of the One True Mantle of Holiness, I am saying that I'd much rather see it done here than in Iraq, India, Lybia, Iran, Pakistan, etc. Don't try and once again unfairly hold American politics against terrorist and militant nations and tell me they're the better choice.
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
Nice if this had been GPL'ed? ;)
- cfelde
Whats to stop someone creating an army of
:), now the weapon of mass desctruction is in our genes. we could find every
super humans? Alls they gotta do is find the gene
for strength. oh, and take out guilt, remorse, and
emotion. Take up the IQ to oh... around 200 or so,
and remove any imperfection they can find. remove any trace of free will, and oh, And while your at it, increase the rate of growth so they are mature at around age 12
yeah ok so mabye thats a long way off, but really,
think about. first it was Nukes, then Chem/Bio weapons, then Linux
imperfection, and remove it. Or cross Ebola with Influenza, and add a touch of Aids.
I spose it does have good points. we could eradicate every hereditary disease, imperfection, etc. but where would it end up? without VERY strict regulation consistant around the world, not just the US, UK, and AU, we could easily end up like <I>Gattaca</I>, or worse....
"Ring 555-GENE now for this FREE home DNA splicing kit... only $19.95 plus $4.95 posting and handling... plus, ring in the next 15 minutes and you'll receive "Design your own baby", a simple guide showing you just how to make your perfect baby. PLUS! theres more. we will include a free copy of Pamela Andersons DNA code on DVD.... "
*Shudder*
Buddy...a quick reality check.
Children born without deformities, defects or diseases is a *good* thing.
It's a little to early to be writing off our 'poorly inadequtate' society just yet.
Satan Oscillate My Metallic Sonatas
How weird, he can not even spell; it is "weirdness" and not "wierdness."
The road to wisdom? Well, it's plain\\and simple to express:\\Err\\and err\\and err again\\but less\\and less\\and less.
What if the company that made you required you to take a certain serum in order to stay alive once a week? And what if that same company had a subsidiary that made that serum? You better hope that they do not go out of business.
Seriously, this is not that hard to do once you can manipulate DNA. We already play games with people's hormones to fix percieved illnesses such as depression, and know which genes often cause depression. I'm just waiting for this to happen - chances are, it will happen at least once somewhere.
I think the best point you make is the future division between the modified elite and the natural masses. It could well create an unbridgible gap where genetic modification will secure a child a much better job in the future allowing them to modify their children, and so on and so forth. The other issue would be wealth in that the genetic enhancements would certainly increase life span thus allowing a person to accumulate more wealth before passing it on to their children.
I would remind the author that Frankenstein was NOT the creation, but the creator. Frankenstein's monster is never named in the book.
Paul Anderson
"I drank WHAT?!" -- Socrates
Rubbish, Christianity has the full weight of divine Truth behind it and anyone who has accepted the love of the Lord can feel that in their hearts everyday. I pity those of you without that love, and will do everything in my power to help you to see that love if I ever meet you.
The words "Christianity " and "love" don't even belong in the same sentence. By the way, isn't pride supposed to be a sin according to the Bible? And isn't trying to force your religion on people who don't want it a mark of pride?
What has Christianity got to do with race? I think it is just you who has issues there. Ultimately every person on the planet should realise the Truth of our Lord, irrespective of the colour of their skin. The only people who are to be hated are those who revel in Satan's unholy evil.
You mean the truth of YOUR Lord. The one who tells you to give a tenth of your income to your pastor so he can make payments on his Cadillac. The Lord that tells you to beat your children and forbid your wife to have a job and money of her own. You can have that truth.
Bear in mind that Catholics are not Christians since they worship the virgin whore rather than God. Those heathen sinners could do anything and it wouldn't suprise me, since they, like all who do not follow in the path of our Lord, are destined to Hell anyway.
First of all, you just showed your own stupidity. "Virgin whore?" Those labels are mutually exclusive. And where did I say anything about Catholics? The only thing you're proving is what an idiot you are, and the more you babble, the more you prove my point.
obTroll: I will take these hot grits from you with my hand, and pour them down my pants.
Forcing your religious beliefs on others is also uncalled for. He asked for it, he got it.
obTroll: I will take these hot grits from you with my hand, and pour them down my pants.
Okay...
:-)
H0T GR1TZ!
There we go. Now it's an official troll.
obTroll: I will take these hot grits from you with my hand, and pour them down my pants.
If he has a right to stand on his widdle soap box and preach, then I have a right to flame him to char for doing so. And vice versa. Ain't America grand?
obTroll: I will take these hot grits from you with my hand, and pour them down my pants.
And while you're at it, give that Erikson fuckwit the same 0 you gave me. Thank you ever so much.
obTroll: I will take these hot grits from you with my hand, and pour them down my pants.
No presidential candidate has ever made technology a serious campaign issue, unless it's to warn about sex online or to urge the distribution of V-chips and blocking software to protect children from techno-driven culture. Only a handful *snip*
Fertility drugs are a perfect metaphor for -- and a warning to the world -- of America's insane approach to complicated issues like this one. Critics are quickly dismissed as Luddites or simpletons. In the U.S., couples are applauded for bringing six, seven, even eight children into the world at once even though *snip*
These two paragraphs are completely unrelated. Hasn't Katz ever been tought how to write a paper? Or is this some new-fangled writing-style that one learns from writing for Wired? I don't get it. I'd read the whole thing if it had some sort of flow from front to back, but the article reminds me of some of my worst college papers. I'm certain there's some flow there, in your mind, and you might even reply and elucidate a bit of the clarity that never got expressed in this paper.
On an on-topic refute, the statement:
Individualism and "wierdness" could show up in the new human map, along with tendencies towards anger, dissent, and bad skin.
No, Jon, they couldn't. Those have been proven to be mostly environmental factors. There are a few mental disorders that lead to those, but nothing in the genetic code. Did you do any research on modern psychology before writing this?
-o Who care's how corrupt our leaders are when they're political karma whores? o-
Excellent reply. It is interesting to note how Jesus' teachings still apply two thousand years later.
Not to mention the ability to actualy patent genetic codes. The idea that one can actualy get a patent on our own gene structure is a rather awfull concpet. If we are indeed the sum and order of our parts, as a materialist would have us belive, and a company can own a map to those parts, then what does that say about humanity? That we can put a price on what it is to be human.
I've seen plenty of odd ideas for genetic engineering in science fiction books, and now they have taken a tiny step closer to reality. I can imagine people trying to engineer the perfect sports player - enhanced muscular development and endurance. Then comes the down side - people could start engineering the perfect warriors....
--
* Q
P.S. If you don't get this note, let me know and I'll write you another.
health insurances will profit most
Hi! My name is.. (what?) My name is.. (who?) /. for one second?
My name is.. {scratches} Jon Katz
Hi! My name is.. (huh?) My name is.. (what?)
My name is.. {scratches} Jon Katz
Ahh emm.. excuse me!
Can I have the attention of
Hi kids! Do you like tecnology? (Yeah yeah yeah!)
Wanna see me write pompously and sell books to geeks for my Bid? (Uh-huh!)
Wanna me celebrate you and do exactly like I did? (Yeah yeah!)
Try cid and get fucked up worse that my mind is? (Huh?)
My brains dead weight, Im tryin to get my head straight
but I cant figure out which After-Y2K girls I wanna impregnate (Umm..)
CmdrTaco said, "Jon Katz you a basehead!"
Uh-uh! "Then why?s your face red? Man you wasted!"
Well since age eighty six, I?ve felt like Im someone else
Cause I hung my original non-geek from the top bunk with a belt
Got pissed off and ripped Rob Malda?s site off
And pleasured the geeks egos so much it made thier dicks soft
I smoke a fat pound of grass and fall on my ass
then write a 30 page essay (where 1 page would do) fast
Come here slut. (Shady, wait a minute, that?s Hemos, dog!)
I don?t give a fuck, God sent me to jerk the nerds off.
My English teacher wanted to flunk me in junior high
Thanks a lot, next semester I?ll be 65
Wrote a 500 page dissetation and didn?t use an eraser, tried to fasten them but it broke the stapler
hit the teacher upside the head with a 40lb stack of paper (Owwwwwwww!)
Walked into Wired, had my jacket zipped up
Flashed the Sysop, then stuck my dick in the tip cup
Extraterrestrial, ignoring ACs while I troll over them
in Windows 98 while they screamin: "LET?S JUST BE FRIENDS!"
Ninety-nine percent of my life It was the mainstream I preached to (Reader?s Digest)
I just found out nerds have more money and patience than I do (Ka-ching!)
I told you I?d grow up to be a famous writer
Write a book about being a nerd and name it after you (Oh thank you!)
You know you blew up when your writing is droll and bland
and dweebs worship you like some screamin Steve Jobs fans (Aaahhhhhh!)
This guy at Thinkgeek asked for my autograph(Dude, can I get your autograph?)
So I signed it: ?Dear Troll, thanks for the support, ASSHOLE!?
Stop the tape, this kid needs to be locked away! (Get him!)
User, dont just stand there, Moderate!
Im not ready to leave, its too easy to sell books (Fuck that!)
In your board and in your nerd mind I?ve got hooks
(Huh yup!) Am I comin or goin? I can barely decide
I just drank a fifth of vodka, dare me to write? (Go ahead)
All my life I was very deprived
I ain?t had a solid job in years, my ribs, too bony to hide
(Whoops!) Literate like the Incredible Hulk (hachhh-too)
I spit when I talk, I?ll sell out anything that walks (C?mere)
When Slashdot I was little I used to get so pompous I would throw fits
HOW YOU GONNA "DUMP THE JERK"? (WAH!)YOU MEAN I MIGHT HAVE TO WORK! (WAHHH!)
I troll a lot and strap michael to the bed
Put a rubber vest on and shoot Tux in the head (BANG!)
I?m ranting mad (Arrrggghhh!) And by the way when you see my dad? (Yeah?)
Tell him that I wrote about him, in this dream I had
---- Some people do Haiku. I do pop.
What most people really admire is someone achieving something against all odds. That's what makes Gattaca such an enthralling movie, isn't it? Why would anyone decide to make his children feel deprived of any sense of fulfillment by giving them a perfect genotype and upbringing? Only someone who wants to rub his own ego at the expense of his kids' happiness.
Hmmm... now I'm getting worried, 'cos you do see a lot of that sort of twisted parenting around. Hey, maybe this is the answer to overpopulation: give people all the tools they need to really feel depressed and frustrated, and sit back and wait for the surge in suicide rates! I reckon this wasn't one of the original aims of the HGP, but science can have all sorts of interesting side-effects.
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sig is gone.
not sure if anyone remembers what clinton did with cloning, but as I recall he basically banned human genetic monkey business in the states... Now if good ol' falwell get's his -37 cents in.. the god-fearing majority will get it's panties in a bunch and who ever is president at the time will be forced to say "no playing god, bad science" and slowly they'll figure out some ways to control all this.
Now, Katz seems to have taken the "doom-speaker" position.. which as it seems from other replys some seem to think that this is wrong... but I for one say we NEED these "doom-speakers". Really, there aren't that many of them, I for one am not of this kin. Although personally I believe that playing with genetics is a wee bit wrong... as commonly it'll be used to help those whom I consider mentally unhealthy and incrediably stupid (ok ok ok, your average person) but also it could also put an end to actual evolution as people would want a "normal" child and would of course want to remove any genes that would make them "different". But, on the other hand, this MAY double over on itself and all of a sudden, the stupid population would actually have some common sense! (O no!) and then they'd stop processing these normal children, or even save humanity and not have any children at all!!! (What?!?! Have no children?!?! that really is a good idea!!!)
But really, think about it.. from my knowledge it's incrediably hard to edit DNA in fact currently it's impossible, we can read... just not mess with... Also there's the fact that we currently don't have any way to edit a large amount of cells and we'd have to edit them one at a time which.. the body wouldn't like.. and it would then destroy that cell..
basically... yes we do have the priliminary map.. and no we can't do anything with it, just understand. From what I know it'll be a long time before we can actually get this "perfect baby"
-I still want an army of me...
-Where the hell is my army of me!
I agree that genetics is a must in human race. But I disagree completly with the direction is taking. It's my opinion that science and technology should serve to humans, incluiding people of under-develop countries. Saddly until now, technology has been serving Secretary of Defense, what they decide is what we work on. I wonder what Manhathan like projects they decieve already for this Genoma Tech. I think we should work on tech that will help humans on producing more food (millions dye of hungry) to all humans as a whole planet. We are in this space-ship together!
Jeff
Asolute freedom is slavery to mortality.
While Jon Katz may be a bit sensationalistic at times, he's on the right track. For a more broad and insightful look into this controversial discovery, check out some of the latest stories at http://www.philosophynews.com/
My big gripe about this is that the map can be decyphered using online web-bioinformatic tools. So what. What happens when insurance agencies can target gene defects and decide who gets coverage? The scary and relativly real component of this map is the capability to screen people and deny services. From a moral prospective this would be wrong, but profits would be great.
Until, of course, the masses could figure out whether or not they needed coverage for genetic misfortunes...
Heh, humanity has known for how many years now that our propigation was genetic/hereditary? It's been hundreds of years. People have known that to get a 'perfect baby' you and your sexual partner would have to be perfect as well (or at least half of each of you, and extremely lucky).
Still for hundreds of years people haven't chosen partners based on perceptable genetic quality. Far too often desirable partners are singled out for their looks, and what they wear and how cool they are.
So mankind made the greatest technological leap: have a good smart kid without having to give up that ditsy blond or sugar daddy.</sarcasm>
Question: What will become of the disabled, forgotten and unwanted children associated with creating the perfect child? The right to live is a huge discussion now and if you don't fit a particular description will you be carted away and reprogrammed (whether you are black, white, and antisocial or have a clue)?
What will become of the disabled, forgotten and unwanted children associated with creating the perfect child? The right to live is a huge discussion now and if you don't fit a particular description will you be carted away and reprogrammed (whether you are black, white, and antisocial or have a clue)?
Since the discovery of a rock as a useful tool, humanity has wrestled with the fact that science and technology are essentially amoral. It is neither good nor bad. While the rock proved to be wonderful as a tool, it is also a weapon. The same dichotomy proved true with the pointy stick, fire and now genetics. We, as a people a choice: to either tremble in our caves while our children go out and use the rock anyway, or embrace it and use this new tool for the betterment of all.
The HGP will be used for good as well as bad. This has been true since the rock. It is up to us, humanity to try to make the good outweigh the bad. It is far better to use the tool as opposed to closing our eyes and wishing it would go away. Or to start screaming that the sky is falling as John Katz has done.
I persoannly look forward to the possiblities this achievment heralds: regenerating telomeres, organ cloning, fixing immune disorders, noninvasive cancer treatments, and yes, technologically driven evolution. The potential advantages of this technology far outweigh any possible GATTACA or ubermensch fears. Daeven
I don't see anything wrong with using this and future technology to improve the human species. It is inevitable that it will happen. Of course, the transition will be difficult (much like the Industrial Age was horrible for people who lived through its initial beginnings) but afterwards the rewards will far outweigh the difficulties. I, for one, would be MORE then happy to genetically enhance both myself and any children I might have.
I'm sure you have all seen "The Children of the Damned" (or the Village of the Damned). Remember how scary all of those souless blonde haired blue eyed kids were? I don't remember where those kids came from or why they were like that, but that is how things would be. Also, if there is actually some type of afterlife, or some type of god out there, then these children who were not created naturally would not get the benifits of this afterlife. They would be souless beings, just like those scary children. Think about that before you decide you want to pick what your child will look like.
We are not a responsible species as a whole. To unleash the possiblity to create life with out reproduction, or to altar our genetic code is just plain irresponsible. The genome project is a wonderful and ingenius step for mankind, just not a very bright one. Our intellegence as individals is powerful, but our lack of intellegnce as a whole is dangerous. We need to take into consideration of the worst possible outcomes when messing with the genetic code, for not all code should be cracked. Peace
This obligatory and possibly offensive statement was bestowed upon you by the honorable reverend d.