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Artificial Chromosome Inheritance
Socramon writes "There's been a lot of discussion (and flaming) lately about genetic experimentation. For those who aren't sick of hearing about it already, there's an article on New Scientist about a Canadian
company, Chromos, which has created an artificial chromosome that has (so far) been passed down through three generations of mice.
The company's homepage, www.chromos.com is, unfortunately, "Under Construction"."
During the last Olimpic Games, the IOC got its fingers burned by innitially disqualifying some women competitors, allegging they were men (!). Eventually, genetic tests proved the girls were really girls.
:)
Now, jump 50 years into the future. Everybody has "artificial" genes, most of these made specially for your family or your church or your country (funny perspective, is't, it?).
How you tell a human now? chromosome count will be useless. Appearence? Are you kidding? We are talking chromosome implant here. A single chromosome can carry incountable genes, each one responsible for changes far beyond imaginable.
Which trait, which fundamental fact will make one be considered a human being and another a new kind of ocean beast?
The main candidate will probably be the culture, the inherited and learned memes that make us part of a common history.
And I have not even touched the problem of machine consciouness...
Ok, whoever designed this genetic inheritance crap was a moron. It's not a clean object oriented syntax. Suppose we want to inherit eyeColor() from a parent. Both parents are of Class Mamallia. Unfortunately, there's no clear way to tell if Class Mamallia defines the eyeColor() function or if it's been overridden in one of the many subclasses. I think you can see the problems right now:
1. There's no information in the DNA source explaining what the object is. You have to look at the entire object and possibly compile the source to determine what class it belongs to.
2. There are too many levels in the class hierarchy. Not only do we have classes, we have kingdoms, phylums, orders, families and genuses. This is unneccesary and makes inheritance from base objects hard to trace. Additionally, the distinction beetween class and order is ill defined and an optional tool rather than a core part of the language.
3. It's impossible to tell which implementation of eyeColor() will be used when creating a new object.
Can we make God code in Java? Sure it's less powerful than DNA, but it's also much harder to code bugs (or arachnids for that matter) in Java.
--Shoeboy
> I would propose putting this technology into cochroaches and other insects
It's bad enough that code has bugs, do we really need bugs that have code?
Drinking will help us plan!
If we humans could harness DNA to put vast amounts of information in a chromosome our legacy would last literly till the world blows up. I would propose putting this technology into cochroaches and other insects because they are almost impossible to kill off. Insects also dont have much genentic diversity throughout generations. If a meteorite hit the earth and all human life came to an end, chances are that somewhere there will be a cockroach still alive and it holds the map to our race. Roaches have the best chance of carying on our information, short of sending a probe into space, than any other means today. Something tells me putting the complete human genome will not fit on a roach, though, but we might be able to tarball it!
Buying a Dell computer is equivalent to dropping the soap in a prison shower.
More ubermouse conspiracy stuff. Soon we'll be up to our knees in 10-year-old oversized glowing green mice that are smarter than we are. We're going to need a "mouse eugenics" category here.
"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." - Alexander Hamilton