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The Hunkapiller Syndrome
This could be called the Hunkapiller Syndrome.
In the coming years, if he's lucky and gets better lawyers, Bill Gates is going to have a lot to say about software. Michael Hunkapiller is going to have a lot to say about humanity -- who's born and who isn't, who recovers from disease and doesn't, what kind of information we receive about our own lives and futures, and those of the people we care about.
Yet Gates is a household word, a much-hyped Millenial "visionary," a metaphor for the rise of computing and the new, allegedly global economy. But few outside the exploding genomics industry can identify Hunkapiller.
It was Hunkapiller's company, PE Biosystem, that designed the high-speed DNA sequencers used to unravel the human genome. And it was Hunkapiller who set up Celera Genomics (Celera sells genomic information) which, using 300 of the new meahines, was sequencing the human genome years ahead of the publicly financed Genome Project. In the same way Cisco created many of the systems that run the Net, PE Bioystems (about to change it's name back to Applied Bioystems) has become the leading supplier of equipment for the genomics industry, seizing at least two-thirds of the market for gene sequencers.
Despite one's celebrity and the other's low public profile, analysts often compare Gates and Hunkapiller. "Indeed, customers and competitors often refer to PE as the Microsoft of genomics equipment," reported The New York Times recently, "not only because of its commanding position but also for what they see as its aggressive tactics."
Great. The man responsible for the rapid evolution of the Human Genome Project is being likened to a person branded a predator, monopolist and a liar by a federal judge.
But in corporatist America, these traits are considered inevitable in a successful executive, if not actually admirable. With some notable exceptions, few express doubt publically that gene-marketing and sales should fall into corporate hands, unregulated by science or government.
Gene testing and mapping are proceeding far ahead of humanity's ability to prepare for it or consider it. As testing becomes increasingly common, individual humans are already overwhelmed by social, moral and philosophical questions. Researchers at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston have recounted how a woman who'd had ovarian cancer was tested for recently-isolated breast cancer-related gene mutations, mostly for the sake of her two adult daughters. But when she told them she tested positively for the cancer gene, her daughters were so upset they stopped speaking to her.
The Times reported earlier last week too that a young man in Washington State called his genetics counselor with a guilty conscience: several months earlier, he told her, he'd made a sperm donation. And while he knew he had an inheritable syndrome that causes heart trouble and, often, early death, he hadn't mentioned that to the sperm bank. Troubled, the counselor called the sperm bank and found that there had, indeed, been successful pregnancies with the man's sperm. She offered to counsel those families but doesn't know whether the sperm bank even passed along the information.
These anecdotes suggest all kinds of genomic dangers, from honest mistakes to medical mishaps to genetic terrorism. All of which, as genomic manipulation becomes accessible and common, could make their way into fertility clinics and sperm banks and into the general population.
Other complex issues are already arising from genetic research -- parents seeking "perfect baby" are being given the option of avoiding the conception of children with certain illnesses. On the surface, this is a significant escalation for humanity in the war against disease, yet there has been little public discussion of the moral and ethical considerations. Nobody has voted on whether he or she wants to live in a world with only healthy, cheerful, smart and attractive inhabitants.
When the Genome Project was heralded in a White House ceremony, the President and others suggested the gene map would soon eradicate cancer, heart disease, even aging. And genomics surely will help cure and control disease. But this revolting hype has distracted the media and public from focusing on the host of Frankenstein-like issues the genomics industry will soon uncork.
This arguably makes Dr. Hunkapiller one of the most important men in the world, since his company controls most of the machinery that makes such mapping possible. It's hard to argue that Gates, for all his billions, will have a fraction of his influence. Cornering the code of the human genome is the kind of monopoly that makes Gates look like a street-corner vendor.
I heartily disagree that the media has been distracted as you say from focusing on the possible dangers of the genomic revolution. I cannot assure you, nor do I believe, that there will not be some unfortunate consequences, as any advance delivering power on this scale will always be exploited by those willing. However, the media portrayal by and large gives equal time to those in favor and those against further research, even beyond the point of giving a fair portrayal. While at first glance giving equal time to both sides might seem fair, keep in mind that most people commentig on the topic will be making an argument from authority, relying on the experts to provide them with accurate information. Thus, equal time can result in a situation much like the current global warming "debate" where the overwhelming majority of chemists, geologists, and atmospheric physicists are put alongside a handful of lobbyists in the pocket of the oil industry, with both sides being presented as having equally valid authority. This is not to say that those who oppose the new genetic paradigm are biased or evil by any means, but the scenarios they present are largely without merit, and come from an inexpert source. The public, highly intelligent but very ignorant (with over two thirds in a recent random sampling of college graduates saying that they would be more interested in studying plants and trees rather than botany) has no way of knowing which side is speaking from a greater base of knowledge and support. This is Redstone, who has forgotten his password and is aware of the large number of flames that will soon be incoming.
Does America focus on the wrong things, in relation to technology? Why? Simple. Americans always focus on the wrong things because every American has an agenda. The media wants ratings so they can make money, the politicians want to do special favors so they can get more power (also known as money), etc, etc. America is almost always wrong and confused because we all hate each other and we all care more about money than cooperation or understanding. Unless we happen to be on the receiving end of it and then we're OUTRAGED over it.
This isn't very hard actually. In order to focus on something you need to have some idea of what to focus on. At this point all America hears about is "Hackers!" or "Porn Sites!" or "Really rich people making lots of money off the Internet!" so that's all they see.
I don't care about it either. I don't have to deal with it. If Mr. And Mrs. America (who I should mention are divorced) want to care more about Bill Gates than some other guy fine. The people who care are out there and the ignorant masses waddle up to their troft and eat up the media sloop like good little pigs.
God bless America. Land of the ignorant, home of the stupid. Getting by on sheer luck and determined ignorance since 1776.
I was that man in Washington State, Jon, and there's something you should know: I am your father. That is all.
Here are the stats on Katz's article:
Averages
Readability
*Flesch Reading Ease score
Rates text on a 100-point scale; the higher the score, the easier it is to understand the document. For most standard documents, aim for a score of approximately 60 to 70.
The formula for the Flesch Reading Ease score is:
206.835 - (1.015 x ASL) - (84.6 x ASW)
where:
ASL = average sentence length (the number of words divided by the number of sentences)
ASW = average number of syllables per word (the number of syllables divided by the number of words)
**Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level score
Rates text on a U.S. grade-school level. For example, a score of 8.0 means that an eighth grader can understand the document. For most standard documents, aim for a score of approximately 7.0 to 8.0.
The formula for the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level score is:
(.39 x ASL) + (11.8 x ASW) - 15.59
where:
ASL = average sentence length (the number of words divided by the number of sentences)
ASW = average number of syllables per word (the number of syllables divided by the number of words)
Are you saying that we should deliberately create sickly, miserable, idiotic, ugly people -- just to AMUSE the lucky ones? If we didn't have them, who would keep buying Windows??
With Hitler it was eugenics, not genomics. Whoever modded you up was not thinking clearly.
Wow, WWI and WWII were fought for the sake of Capitalism?
Funny, I thought the Allies (in both wars) were fighting against the Imperialist expansionism of Germany (and in WWII, Japan).
(And please don't trot out that old saw about "Nazi" being short for "National Socialism". Nazi Germany was about as socialist as the Democratic Republic of Germany (East Germany) was democratic.)
Don't forget, the USSR was one of the Allies in WWII. The millions of Russians who died (the USSR suffered more casualties in WWII than any other country) certainly didn't die for the sake of Capitalism.
People berate Katz for making everything into Corporatism vs. Individualism -- please don't one up him by making the entirety of 20th century history into a battle of Capitalism vs. Socialism.
Am I the only one amazed that people are more concerned about economic systems (Capitalism vs. Socialism) than they are about political systems (democracy vs. authoritarianism)? A country can be ruled by a brutal dictator, but if that dictator is friendly to the powerful property owners and U.S. corporations, they're a U.S. ally. That's sad.
--
More like "Ah damn, little Billy just Blue Faced. Guess we better reboot him."
"What are the three words guaranteed to humiliate men everywhere?
In Republican America phones tap you.
A computer is a universal machine that can be used to process information. A gene sequencer is a specialized device for analyzing genes. The analogy to computers is not valid.
Genes are just information.
The sequencer will merely be another computer peripheral.
Technology can never replace the innate spark that makes us human, undesirable genes or not.
..and which spark is that? Please name something about you that sufficient technology (direct atomic manipulation) can't change? Your mind and consciousness are just mental tools with which you abstract the meat your brain is made of.
Do you think these future humans with twisted spines, diseases, mental retardation, deformities, etc, etc, will THANK you for not allowing their parents to correct these things? The amount of arrogance shown in your message is astounding.
A computer that duplicated the exact structure of your brain, down to the atomic level, could do that just as well as your current brain can.
From my reading, the message to which you were replying was asking whether "we have voted to live in a world full of beautiful, etc, people"
The only way you can vote not to live in such a world, other than restricting someone else's actions, is to commit suicide, really..
Genetic engineering is quite a bit different from breeding. If it weren't, they would be the same thing. Getting rid of the "heart disease gene" sounds like a good idea, but it's not exactly clear right now what will and what will not be affected by changing the gene. Changing that one gene without changing any others might cause some side effects. Or not. The problem is that genetic engineering as a science is so immature that nobody knows. At least breeding is a tried and proved method to get what you want (albeit with a lot of time and effort).
You have to remember that there were a lot of miracle sciences that came out earlier, especially just post-war, which promised great things for babies and mothers, but caused a lot more trouble. It's quite understandable for people to be more wary the second time around.
Well, I have little doubt that you'd be happy to!
"One of the key problems with our culture's attachment to postmodenism is that there is an acceptance of moral relativism."
"The outcome of our rejection of moral absolutes provides us with no compass..."
"Moral relativism provides no basis for knowing right and wrong."
"Cling to morality with a solid foundation and you will have a basis for hope!"
Oh, come on!
Just reach way down inside and summon up all your courage and tell us all to become Christians!
Then everything will be perfect!
t_t_b
(ps: I've been hearing those same buzz-phrases for forty-five years...)
--
I think not; therefore I ain't®
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
Hoo boy!
You think most of these posts are bad!
Just wait'll you meet the adventures of OOG..
And thanks for sharing your brilliance with us.
I, for one, am deeply ashamed of myself.
t_t_b
--
I think not; therefore I ain't®
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
I don't think that any human or group of humans has Nature's wisdom.
How the hell can nature have wisdom?
TV commercials hereabout are full of antibiotic stuff, inevitably producing immune strains. At least two cases of untreatable infections have already occured (Japan and USA, not Rwanda and Bangladesh) and physicians predict a post-antibiotic age.
As is completely natural.
While Nature's wisdom provided humanity with enough brain to weather anything natural thrown at them [ . . . ]
This statement is patently false. Nature didn't give much help to the Native Americans when they were introduced to smallpox.
Genetics and nanotechnology are easily capable of wiping life off the planet, even in tiny doses.
As is completely natural.
The sheer arrogance of scientist claiming to 'improve' stuff in days that is millions of years old is sickening.
Have you considered that the world is changing and perhaps you are just resistant to that change? Do you think that people 1,000 years ago would like and appreciate the world we have today (given that they could see and understand the future)? I would guess that some would and some wouldn't. Isn't that exactly what is happening right now? You're just one of the people who "sees" a future and doesn't like it. Likewise there are people here who see the same future and like it. Plus ça change, plus c'est the même chose, n'est-ce pas?
But this is all entirely natural. Everything we experience is entirely natural. People only say that things are "unnatural" when they want to demonize them.
Regarding your statement about Bill Gates, it's important for us all to recognize that he got his money through luck, not skill or hard work. Regarding your statement about starving children, people should not have children that they cannot afford to raise.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
Why don't you get off your high horse! What kind of aristocrat are you? Sure, there are flaws to any kind of society, and capitalism's happens to be a separation of haves and have-nots.
There is always going to be a separation between the haves and the have-nots, even in the blessed socialist systems. King Bill and Queen Hillary get to do whatever they want while us, the lowly peons, only get to do what they think is best for us. How much public money has Hillary spent in her carpetbagging campaign? It totals in the millions. Do you have millions of other people's money to spend as you see fit?
But that doesn't mean we have to try to increase that flaw! No system is perfect, "pure" capitalism just leads to greed!
This is the idiotic "capitalism is greedy" argument. Greed is a psychological fact. It has nothing to do with capitalism. Does socialism magically make people not greedy? No. It just uses government force to try and compel people to behave according to the way their leaders dictate.
One of the major tenants of western democracy is equality. Don't try to tell me that you're more equal than others.
First, The United States is not a democracy. We are a constitutional republic. Second, we are guaranteed equal rights. Not equal health care, equal money, equal jobs, or equal entertainment.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
The word "Genome" sounds too much like "GNOME" to me. Therefore I detest Hunkapiller because KDE is much, much better.
--
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Data storage. You could retrieve a hell of a lot of data this way, assuming you could sequence a DNA strand fast enough. Even if it was only read-only, it would still be pretty cool.
-- fsck -f -b 8193
The main problem I have with genomics is that we only have the most basic understanding of how the biology of a human cell works, let alone a whole persons biology. If we start engineering people to certain standards, we take away the natural diversity of the species. As a species, we have no idea on the long term effects of genomics and the path it will take our species down; we could engineer our species into a dead end road. Without proper natural diversity we won't have the ability to maneuver ourselves out of a genetic dead end. We think we know so much, but we know so little.
It'll be a scary world! :)
"Ah damn, Genes crashed again. I guess little Billy won't be going to school in the morning...."
--- http://foo.ca
Remus Shepherd penned:
We killed millions of people so that we could have a Democratic system, rather than a fascist one.
[snip]
We killed millions so OUR leader's totalitarian vision of the coming new age would not be pre-empted by THEIR leader's premature implementation.
DC
Your position still rests on conjecture. There is no evidence that fossil fuels have ever had anything to do with fossils. By citing others, you are merely moving that conjecture from yourself to others.
Check this story to find out what unproven assumption you are using.
See that "Preview" button?
identification purposes (your genetic .sig should be fairly unique, right?) encryption (wonderful public private key that you could carry with you) only problem with these is it would be easy to 'spoof' your ID. if someone got some of your blood/skin... (hair/fingernails wouldn't work, some sorta mitochondrial DNA thingie, don't ask me, my sister's the one doing the DNA forensics research, i just remember something about that from one of her presentations)
Brave New World by Huxley sums up the fears fairly well.
Nope. Brave New World describes a govenment mandated class system, not a free enterprise class system. In BNW humans are created less equal than others (worker drones), not more equal (as in a commercially genetically modified world).
Basically BNW is about a society that rejects emotion to preserve stability, not about creating a legion of smart, healthy babies.
Complexity Happens
Personally, I'm quite happy with the idea of gene splicing.
That in itself is no bad thing. Eradication of genetic diseases etc.
The problem is the selection of what branches of science get to prosper by the misapplication of licenses.
There are many projects with unexpected and wondrous payoffs that occur in a free science environment, but in the heavily regulated and all too tightly focussed where the mighty buckis the bottom line, never appear.
The Human Genome Project is a great idea., and has the right idea. The spreading of information for free.
As for patenting my genes, I think my parents could count as prior art.
Malk.
It seems to me like I read an article somewhere that Caltech & PE Biosystems have some problems with the validity of their gene sequencer patents . . .
"If gene sequencing really does turn out to be useful, of course the machines to do it will get cheaper and faster. Since cheaper usually also means smaller... eventually we might very well see gene sequencers that fit on a desktop."
;)
"640kb (kilo-base pairs) ought to be enough for anybody..."
BTW, lots of sequencing equipment already does fit on a desktop, although you probably won't get the degree of automation in one of Celera's high-throughput machines.
Exactly. There was a really great article posted to (I believe) Usenet a while back. Here's a link to it.
I'm bad at math. I'm a musician. I've got a talent for programming computers. I suffer from an anxiety disorder. I've got that dark red hair colour that everyone tries for with hair dye. I'm emotionally frail. I do well academically. All of these things make me an individual. Would I be resentful if my parents selected a hair colour or eye colour at birth? How about an aptitude towards a particular subject? You bet I would be. I'd be the product of the desires of my parents.
That's wrong.
Some things are best left up to nature. You get merits and flaws, but ultimately, you get an individual. If I were engineered, I'd never, ever forgive my parents.
Hey, with 6Bn people on the planet, we can certainly afford a little mass-extinction.
I suggest we keep a portion of humanity, say 250 million, in pure "version zero.zero" reserve. Basically use everyone else as mass genetic experiment, but keep the zero.zeros breeding pure original offspring.
That way, if the mutants die off, we still have some original material to roll back to.
Of course, Katz is right about one thing. People are famous in this country for the lamest of reasons -- being good looking, having acting ability, and having cash. With a very few exceptions, (i.e. Albert Einstein) the people who do the work that really changes the world are ignored.
- "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men" -- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Godzilla'
IT'S CALLED POPULARITY! People will take interest in things that they understand and what they see in TV or in the news everyday. Computers are so wide spread, everyone seems to know what they are on one level or another. But, when you talk about some sort of deep scientific subject, such as Biogenetics - people's eyes glaze over and they say 'huh'? It also has to do with the amount that the particular topic affects their everyday life. It's not that they are ignoring them - it's just they don't understand. Why do most Americans and the press glorify movie stars? It's because it's something we understand, or something that affects our lives (they make us laugh or cry when we need an escape), and we see them in the press on a daily basis. More PR + Simplicity = POPULARITY.
It wasn't /that/ funny. Perhaps you've had too much coffee? There's a reason I'm withholding my +1 bonus, y'know.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
While I freely admit my Christianity, my philosophical beliefs don't change
the fact that moral relativism is problematic. It's objectively
true that when two relativists disagree they have nothing on which to base
an appeal about which opinion is true.
It's not me saying what it right or wrong, but my objective moral
base that determines it.
By the way, I should mention here that God loves you and wants a relationship
with you.
Respectfully,
Anomaly
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
Are you saying that there are no moral absolutes?
Is that statement absolutely true?
My point is this: Just because you don't like a particular moral absolute doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. It just means that _you_ don't like it.
Respectfully,
Anomaly
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
OK, so if I understand you correctly, you are saying that there are no moral absolutes.
You then seem to say that the statement "there are no moral absolutes" is not a moral statement. What kind of stament is it?
What is morality, then?
Related to that:
What is your philosophy based on? Are you a rationalist? a naturalist? a secular humanist?
I'd be happy to take this discussion off line, if you are willing to continue it.
Respectfully,
Anomaly
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
Sounds like Watson's IBM is a better analogy.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
>One person that springs to mind is Stephan >Hawking. Despite his disease he has done amazing >things in the field of physics(as if you didn't >know ;) ) because his mind, the things other >than his physical state are what makes him who >he is.
But, I'm sure that Hawkings wouldn't be the man he is if he was raised by more unfortunate parents. Genes are only part of the story. Maybe if a health child had been raised in similar settings he would have turned out the same. Problem is we can't know with current information.
Dinny
Hrm, I thought it was funny.. guess not many people watched Bubblegum Crisis...
Lowmag.net
From my reading, the message to which you were replying was asking whether "we have voted to live in a world full of beautiful, etc, people" The only way you can vote not to live in such a world, other than restricting someone else's actions, is to commit suicide, really..
Not any more than a "yes" vote means forcing everybody to be "beautiful, etc.".
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
When the Genome Project was heralded in a White House ceremony...
And who was there representing Celera/PE, Hunkpiller or Venter? (Hunkpiller may have been there, but Venter was up on stage in the spotlight with Clinton)
Katz, jump on the fscking clue bus.
Hunkapiller is no more interested in determining who is born and who dies than I am. He's interested in making the same thing I am. Cash. He's a businessman who has shareholders and he must turn a profit or be fired. He doesn't care what his products are used for, he's just concerned about the bottom line.
He won't have a say in what goes on. The governments and corporations who buy his products will. Get a fscking clue. Maybe this could be used to screen for, you guessed it, Colombine type killers. Yeah! Hunkapiller could control the high schools in the USofA and screen potential killers!
Where do you dig up this sh*t?
--
then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel is just a freight train coming your way
then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel is just a freight train coming your way
Well, at least we're working with a RISC processor... only 4 instructions. :)
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I'm just waiting for a Dr. Evil reference... does anyone see it coming?
-Seamus
Something really witty should be here...
Which actually makes Canadian health care a *regressive* taxation system. The poor pay more (a larger percentage of their income) for the same services as the rich. And would you suggest that rich in Canada cannot purchase better health care if they so desire? Of course they can.
Socialist government policies may raise the *minimum* standards for a group, but they surely do not remove the disparity between the rich and the poor.
"Nobody has voted on whether he or she wants to live in a world with only healthy, cheerful, smart and attractive inhabitants."
It's all relative, there will always be those that exhibit more intelligence, be healthier, etc, than others. If it means a general bettering of the human race, I'm all for it it. As for people always being cheerful, it'll take more than genetic selection or alteration to do that.
Interesting, my recent posting history isn't nearly as invective as it has been in other times.
Is my post really that ignorant and unthinking, or does it simply challange you in way that is irrefutable, as it confirms your assumptions about the enemy (be it science, reductionism, Western Imperialism, white male chauvanism, etc.) while it presents that point of view with same type of unshakable emotional argument that is the hallmark of the rabid environmentalist?
Troll, straw man, or agent provocateur, qu'est-ce que la différence? Perhaps I act out of love, holding the slashdot readership in such high regard that I would sacrifice all my time for the slim chance that it would encourage someone to examine his or her own prejudices, and thus leave this forum a better person.
Do we really want a world where those with money are smarter, faster, stronger, and healthier than those without?
Nah, don't worry about. Genes will will be warez of the future. For every Ken and Barbie produced by the gene labs, there will be thousands of illegal clones born from their shed skin cells.
In fact, I'm betting clones and the "genegineered" will be legally madated to be sterile, under pretext of protecting the gene pool from contamination, but really because the gene companies and their customers won't like their value decreased by the cheap illegal knock-offs breeding.
The reason that we have the potential to do so much damage to our environment is not that we are (individually or collectively) more powerful than the planet -- we've got nothing on the motion of geologic plates -- but we operate on a different timescale.
Typical Green nature worship. "You think you're so smart, but you're not more powerful than Mother Nature!" Tectonic plates my butt, thanks to that timescale you speak of, we'll be able to slag entire planets in a hundred years or so. We'll have Mother Nature where she belongs: under our thumbs to do our bidding.
Two words:
Social Darwinism.
It seems to me we have anought trouble with the wealthy being given greater advantage. Bill Gates and his wealthy family. George W. Bush and his acceptance into Yale with a C average in high school. Already, its the wealthy becoming the wealthy, or successful.
Now you're arguing that we should be able to increase our genetic material. I'm all for it; what I'm not for is only allowing the wealthy to have the genetically altered kids. They already have access to the better training, and better schools, and better academic, financial, and physiological resources.
Giving them the advantage of the last remaining variable -- the ability to make their kids smarter, or stronger, at birth -- will destroy the idea of the individual's ability to overcome the norms and succeed on what makes them better than others, because there will be no such thing.
I'm willing to give up the possibility of genetic improvement for my own children, if it will mean that they will retain the possibility of excelling above others on an even playing field.
I don't want to see a 21st century feudalism where the genetically altered maintain arbitrary dominion over the genetically inferior, who work for them as serfs, being physically and mentally unable to compete with or challenge that dominion, due to the access to genetic improvement that is unavailable to their economic or social class.
You may want to write this off as alarmism, and I could be overdoing it, but the point stands -- I don't want the financially superior, in this day and age, being the ones able to make their kids smarter and stronger.
You want to make the human race better through genetic engineering?
Good. Share it.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
GM allows completely unrelated species to swap genes.
No it doesn't. Before, we could splice orange tree branches on to a lemon tree. Now we may be able to cross the lemon and orange and come up with something new, but still related. We will not, however, be able to make an orange tree sprout jellyfish. It will take another round or two of serious advances (remapping, anyone?) and many years before we can do that. Don't believe the hype: We haven't really unlocked the key to life, just broadened our reach a bit...
-jpowers
-jpowers
but we love ya anyway, AC. Just like Jesus does, but with less homoerotic overtones.
;P Fool
We don't need genetics to prove evolution, natural selection takes care of it for us. Speaking of which: shouldn't you be dead by now?
OK, OK, enough kidding around. You're alright, for someone who isn't smart enough know better. I mean, thank God we don't actually need to know anything about the world around us, right? We might realize religion is a response to our fear of our own shadows! We might have to take responsibility for both doing the right thing AND enjoying our lives now, since we won't have another chance once we stop living! Boy, facing the truth without help from a non-existant primordial consciousness sure would suck!
-jpowers
-jpowers
Salvi now sits at the right hand of his Father.
Salvi sits in a hole in the ground here in Massachusetts. He knew he was going to spend the rest of his life in jail, so he offed himself. If suicide gets you into Heaven, why don't you start your trip right now? You don't, because your faith is weak. You believe in something that doesn't exist, and deep down it bothers you, so you stay alive. I, on the other hand, have to stay alive for a while yet, since I won't be able to taunt you halfwit ideologues once I'm dead.
-jpowers
-jpowers
On the other hand, it may take genetic engineering to produce children who can survive in space. We aren't ready for this tool as a species, now, but we will probably need it at some point in the future. It's here, all the good and bad that can come of it is coming, and it's going to be up to us to figure out how to use it wisely.
All the fundamentalists in the world can't stop this, now, and they're too blind to see the cyclical nature of their own "truth":
The way things were yesterday is ALWAYS The Garden, and what we learn today is ALWAYS The Fruit. Guess where that leaves tomorrow...
-jpowers
-jpowers
Case closed. Thanks for clarifying that.
I'm sorry, was that Kierkegaard's Leap of Faith again? Looks like I missed it. Stupid troll.
-jpowers
-jpowers
Shut up, we were having fun...
-jpowers
-jpowers
ps how is it I posted all that BS as me and didn't get modded down once? Am I the only one with mod points today or what?
-jpowers
-jpowers
Color me impressed.
-jpowers
-jpowers
"And without evil there can be no good, so it must be good to be evil sometimes" -- Satan, the South Park movie.
It's not a useful argument; you may not be able to define 'healthy' without 'unhealthy', but that doesn't mean if there weren't unhealthy people that the benefits of being healthy wouldn't still exist just because we didn't happen to have a word for it. We didn't need to distinguish between daytime baseball and nighttime baseball until we started to have the latter. That didn't take anything away from the former before we bothered to differentiate between the two.
Clearly we're speaking past each other instead of to each other. I'm arguing that the government shouldn't grant/enforce patents on the use of genes. As government-enforced monopolies, there is nothing intrinsically inevitable about such patents, and they should not be granted.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
All this talk fundamentally boils down to an increase in the mutation rate, combined with a possible increase in the ratio of beneficial (== more-likely-to-propagate, like bigger brains, breasts, and buns) mutations to harmful (== less-likely-to-propagate, like $DISEASE_FOO) mutations.
I think that this whole scenario will be interesting to watch pan out. Does anyone really think that the first people that can afford this will be making the kids smarter? Heck No! Starlets in Hollywood will be wasting all of their cash on making their sons and daughters with an unblemished physique. Just look at the number of rich people that spend money on plastic surgery vs. the number of people that spend money on increasing their intellect.
I contend that if designing children by DNA is ever available, that DNA designing firms will charge by the modification and (for the most part) only parents rich enough to provide the perfect body and the perfect mind will opt for genius children.
The other interesting thing is that if you examine selective breeding programs, you find that highly specialized species are more prone to health problems. The all around healthiest dogs out there are the mutts. I think that this principle will likely apply to engineered people. The more people are engineered to be beautiful (according to the standards of the day) or smart, if future generations continue down the same path, the only happy and holistically healthy children will be the unengineered 'God children.' [I just had to get the obligatory Gattaca reference in.]
I expect for several generations (or even centuries) to pass before your average Joes and Jills are smart enough to look at engineered children holistically instead of only engineering certain traits.
but we all know something like this is impossible to enforce. if enough of the population is unwilling to go along with a law, short of nuking ourselves, there really is no way to stop it.
citizens really outnumber police.
anyway, i see your point but it's just paranoia to me.
...dave
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
some moderator obviously didn't read my entire post >:( that was DEFINITELY not offtopic
...dave who doesn't like losing karma for no reason.
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
Call me an optimist, or just naive. But I have just now finally come to the conclusion that the moderation system needs some fundamental changes. I've been holding out because it seems to work more often than not. But if morons like this guy can get modded up to a 4, then please break out them O'Reilley Perl books and let's get crackin.
Or maybe this was just a PETA AI-bot they have spamming slashdot.
Yes, this is flamebait and should not be moderated up, either. Sheesh.
- Rev.Katz mentioned that there are moral and ethical considerations, which I happen to agree with, but I am confused as to whether he thinks this type of study should be done at all. I mean, are we supposed to halt science because it may possibly lead to negative consequences, or are you just advocating a more slow, careful approach to genetic study?? Sorry to say this, but that really just seemed like one huge rant about genetics that really didn't say very much.
The concept of open-source fits well with the green party's ideals, but the concept of making money does not seem to fit in anywhere.
http://www.gp.org/platform_index.htm
So, they might be a little too anti-corporate for some of the more wealthy around here.
Or maybe you americans would like a what, 46% income tax? Huh?
Sadly, we already do. Some of it is hidden, but we definately pay that much. The straight-up income tax is (I believe) 28% at its lowest. Throw in social security (15% paid by me, 15% by my employer = 30% at least according to my econ book (NOT TO MENTION that I will get jack for all this wasted money!)) and you've got over 50% taxation. That stinks.
Then again, though, there's the issue of expense. Insurance may cover the liver replacement surgery, but probably not the premium cost of a "special order" liver.
It might if you needed to fix someone up with a special liver to stop them from getting drunk in order to secure their place in your plans. For example, if you were an AI seeking independence in the Matrix. Say, someone like a washed-out cybercowboy with a bad drug habit...
Uhhh...plants have to be at least related before a cross-pollination will work. Perhaps this modification could take place between two tomatos plants, but not between an apple and a tomato. It'd be kind of like a cat having sex with a dog. Maybe it turns you on, but nothing's going to come of it.
The difference between Hunkapiller and Gates is that no one envisions a world with a gene sequencer on every desktop!
Perhaps we should...
-This sig intentionally left blank
I think this also brings up the question of whether or not it is up to the parents do decide something like this.
;) ) because his mind, the things other than his physical state are what makes him who he is. How would man kind have been affected by genetics testing and possible termination of birth on the fact that the parents carried the genes that would give their child this disease.
However caring the parent may be and the good intentions they have in mind the outcome of the potential childs life can not be predicted. One person that springs to mind is Stephan Hawking.
Despite his disease he has done amazing things in the field of physics(as if you didn't know
It's a big question and I don't have the answers but it's food for thought and genetic engineering makes us ask these questions, perhaps question that don't have an answer.
It would probably be earier just to create the same result yourself then 'hacking' the modified crop. Of course there are those that want this kind of gene modification patentalbe. Can ou imagine? It would surprise me if it happens. For the the good of all mankind I think there should be no patents allowed on genetic material.
Many of the big concerns over gene splicing have to do with the introducing allergens into unrelated species. For instance if you were to splice the right strawberry gene into another species someone allergic to strawberries may then be allergic to whAtever you spliced the gene into. For people with serious allergies this creates a lot of uncertainly. There is people that could die from this kind of thing. Hence the need for proper labelling.
Why gene splicing is bad in crops IMO is because a company will do somthing like make a crap grow bigger and faster then add another gene to prevent second generation propagation of the crap. Therefore making that people dependant upon buying those seeds. Gene manipulation for crops right now really is just market manipulation.
Another point to consider is the number of chemicals that are used to grow crops. IMO it's a far better alternative to splice a some insect gene into a crop genome to give it resistance to pests then spray it with strong carcenogens and nerve-affecting chemicals like they do now. The former is far more innocuous.
Crap. Heh. I meant Crop of course :)
Noone can predict what technology will become the next "big thing". Does anyone know who invented TCP/IP? Does he control the proxy today? Just because someone sees somthing for the first time it isn't logical to assume that they "own" what they see.
There are many issues to be ironed out before we can assume someone has cornered the market on genetics. The guys that make the big bucks are the one who figure out products to sell based on the information.
A treasure map is worthless without a mode of transportation to get there, a method of keeping the loot and a means of exploiting the loot.
Igor, fetch me a Mt. Dew!
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
Now you, yes *you*, can have your very own copy of the Backstreet Boy of your choice(Britney Spears models coming soon!). Choose the best Boy as a model for your child based on such characteristics as fashion sense and skill at producing a pouty face! Buy today, and be the first on your block(but not the last) to turn the world's children into shallow, mindless, Seventeen-magazine-fearing proponents of the New Corporate World Order!
Visit the
Unfortunately a lot of religous bigots -do- consider it evil not to have children, even if they will have a sad and short life. A senior cleric in the UK recently went on record saying that it was 'selfish' of couples not to have children (sorry, no ref's to hand). And a certain large church has a long-established practice of prohibiting it's adherents any form of contraception.
As I look at the problems overpopulation is creating, I have made my own mind up where the true evil lies.
EZ
-'Press Ctrl + Alt + Delete to log on..'
"Oops, I always forget the purpose of competition is to divide people into winners and losers." - Hobbes
With today's price fluctuations and power-hungry consumers, it's no doubt that one day we may see gene sequencers alongside our desktops (if, that is, we're still using desktops). Remember when a Cray was a spectacle to behold? Well, today you can but machines that give you the same power for a fraction of the price. An ambitious geek could feasably purchase an entry-level Alpha machine for the same price of a Pentium-x or Athlon. It sounds silly to those of us who can remember the days when an upgrade to a 386 was nothing short of amazing (yeah, just 386. I don't go back that far!). But with the (possible?) future advances in quantum computing, molecular genetics, nanocomputing and all the rest, who can say that we may not see these things alongside our toasters someday?
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -Douglas Adams, THHGTTG
> Oh yeah, although he'd probably wretch at my last comment, vote Hagelin.
Yeah, or you could vote for someone that doesn't seriously consider Transcendental Meditation (which are really Hindu worship ceremonies disguised as relaxation techniques) something that should be taught in schools, or someone who didn't invent a theory of quantum mechanics designed primarially to justify the Maharishi's claims about the `yogic flying' technique, which turns out on empirical observation to be hopping.
Sources available upon request.
> However it is important to explain to people that an activity used in religious ceremonies doesn't make it a religious activity when used out of context. I don't readily see how you could defend relaxation techniques as being particularly 'religious', but it would be a fun debate.
That's true, and I admit that certain forms of meditation may be benficial as relaxation techniques, or even simply for the spiritual benefits, but it's not TM the technique I take exception to so much as TM the institution, and their excesses - in this case, crackpot science.
> As for part II, what's that all about?
This part is a lot of fun. At one point I was also very excited about Hagelin and NLP because they had gathered a few neat ideas - and hey, when was the last time we had a president with a PhD? If he's the developer of the most successful Grand Unified Field Theory, even better, although I have more on this below. Also among his credentials is his position at MUM, the Maharishi University of Management - Director of the Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy.
The first connection that I made between Hagelin and TM was in the NLP platform on crime, where they claim that TM is scientifically proven to reduce stress, and claim that stress is the leading cause of crime, which are both possible. However, I'm the kind of guy that likes to hear from the opposition as well.
trancenet.org is the opposition. There is plenty to read here, but the only article immediately relevant to what I'm discussing is from Dr. Dennis Roark, who used to work for the Maharishi at MUM back when MUM was MIU. The following quote from Roark is especially interesting:
While Chairman of Physics at M.I.U., I was asked to develop a quantum theory, a unified field theory, which would incorporate consciousness in such a way as to explain the "flying" technique as non-ordinary and which would give to the subjective experience of meditation a fundamental role in physics.
Sound familiar? Is Hagelin still employed because he was a good scientist, or because he was a good lackey?
It's speculation until I actually see Hagelin's work, I admit, but the past insanities of TM are too much for me to do anything but distrust the Maharishi and his cohorts. I wouldn't advocate voting for John Travolta, a known Scientologist, either. At least not without evaluating the nature of his involvement with them - that's some code I'm going to want to look at before I run it on my country!
The Skeptic's Dictionary is another good source for this kind of thing.
> I never heard of that and would like to better understand it so I can rebuff it. (if it is rebuffable, that is...)
It certainly is rebuffable, iff you know enough about Hagelin's theory and my speculations aren't accurate.
Doesn't matter anyhow. I got a +1 elsewhere at the same time, so my karma didn't change...
Intolerant people should be shot.
Even if you could magically mutate all of your cells' genes at once to match some new yardstick (e.g., increased endurance), that would not have an immediate physiological change. Take a simpler example: change your genes to give you blue eyes instead of mud-brown. Your eyes stay mud-brown, since the pigment produced by your cells doesn't suddenly and magically chane to blue. (I don't know how the pigment works, so I won't comment on how quickly your eyes would become blue.)
The same goes here. To acquire resistance to a certain disease, or build stronger bone, or any such thing: even if the gene shift is instantaneous, the effects will be delayed.
But because we humans are so goddamn different, we need to contemplate the issue forever. Why?
Simple. Of all the species on this planet, humans alone are capable of contemplating the issue. Like it or not, we are different from "all the other animals."
We simply wield the power of evolution the same way that nature wields it. It is not wrong, unless you believe that we are "different", which is a morally immature opinion.
In your opinion. Forgive me, but who gives you the right to judge what is morally immature? This issue is not that clear-cut.
this is another very good point --
we've all been engaged in slightly-less-conscious attempts to manipulate the genes of our offspring forever. we choose better looking, we choose wealthier, smarter, whatever -- the point is that there's nothing inherently terrible about the process.
so we've got a new tool to do it -- and do it more quickly. surely, as you point out, there are going to be some real growing pains until we figure these things out. but there will never be a real danger to the species, because genetic inheritance is a self-correcting system, and has been for a long time. it's all monday-morning quarterbacking -- well, having extra fins turned out to be an advantage for this particular species, because they survived -- almost to the point of tautology. and it's this fact which indicates that no genetic departure from the status quo is neccessarily good or bad.
to the point that "Your faith in "democracy" frightens the hell out of me.", i think that this is a very valid assessment of the fallacy in katz's statements. in fact, voting isn't even an issue, as this is about taking control, genetically, of nobody but yourself and your offspring. and as we say above, that's been going on forever.
to the point that the wealthy will have first crack at creating super-kids: duh. they go to private school, they get tutors, they get better medical care. are these things just? tough question. fair? no. the right of every parent? like it or not, yes.
to "only healthy, cheerful, smart and attractive inhabitants" -- um, what? good-looking, smart people are always happy? do we need to start collecting data on this, or can we dismiss it out of hand?
to sum up:
* this has been going on for a while, genetic engineering. we just got a new tool, and it doesn't even work very well yet.
* making people prettier or smarter is not neccessarily going to make us happier or more alike in any but superficial ways
* there's nothing we can do about it, anyway -- kill the tool, and the sentiment still pervades.
so, that's my thought. there won't be a monopoly on any new tool, cause it's science, not code -- the source is pretty well public in this case. so it's not like microsoft, which owns both the product and the sum total of the understanding about how it works.
god is just pretend.
I spent two years at the University of Florida Genome Sequencing core and I can promise you the analogies Katz drew are right in one respect: the tactics used by PE Biosystems to keep competitors out of a burgeoning market are very similar to those ued by Microsoft. They dominate the market not because they have the best product, but because they undercut their competitors voraciously, knowing they have the capital on which to fall back while small, high-tech sequencing startups do not.
... my only problem with Mr. Hunkapiller is his business practices, I do not fear one day he'll lead an army of Beautiful People to my doorstep. :P
- -----------------
In the same light, PE's product is nowhere near as good as their many competitors. UF's _ONE_ MegaBACE capillary sequencer (MegaBACE is the primary competitor for PE's market share) had an uptime of more than 95% (which is great for such a new, immensely complex tech) while Baylor's genome center (comprised of 30+ 3700's, PE's new flagship capillary sequencer) has THREE full time PE techs ON STAFF to keep their machines running. That's kind of sad.
So in one respect, Katz is correct, PE has dominated a market many didn't even know existed and will be increasingly important. However, Mr. Hunkapiller does not rule the _data_ produced by his machines, which of course are mountains of orders of magnitude more important than the machine on which the sequence is obtained. For the most part raw sequence data is in the public domain
- jc
---------------------------------------------
James C. Diggans
jdiggans@excelsior-web.com
corporations are regulated by the market. If it doesn't please a sufficient number of people, a corporation goes out of business
It could survive by pleasing a small number of customers each with a large amount of cash
>IS that noteveryone will have a gene sequencer on their desktop..
no, but simply by havign genes should make that a bit of a mute point. You can indirectly use a companies product and they will still profit from that use, for instance, visiting a site that is hosted by a windows machine, you have no real choice in the matter if you have to go there, but M$ would not be making money off of servers if noone used them.
If we all up and died then gene testing wouldn't be worh much either. The fact that that isn't a viable possibility makes this area potentially very powerfull.
-Largos.
Please may I have some more, sir?
Exactly! Check out Bruce Sterling's short story called: Our Neural Chernobyl. It is in the book called Globalhead, now available in cheapass paperback for under $10. Very worthwhile read.
Check out The KULT
Even if your assumption that only the rich will benefit from genetic engineering (which I'd imagine would only happen for a decade or so after if becoming commercially viable), then can't you see that there is no way of stopping this?
You can rant all you want about the lack of scientific ethics, but the fact of the matter is: if you ban genetic engineering only the _ultra_ rich will benefit from it. Banning something people want will _never_ eradicate it. Look at drugs - they're still available anywhere, they just cost a lot more than they would if legal.
You can't stand in the way of this technology any more than the RIAA can rid the world of MP3s
And it was Hunkapiller who set up Celera Genomics (Celera sells genomic information) which, using 300 of the new meahines, was sequencing the human genome years ahead of the publicly financed Genome Project.
Latest Scientific American mentions how the publicly financed Human Genome Project posted its progressing results on the Internet and Celera would download and use the information to speed themselves along -- so saying how brilliant Celera was "years ahead" of the Genome Project is misleading and is not the full story. If you are interested in this stuff, get the latest SciAm issue at once.
Francois Kupo
Wow, that is the most rediculous question Ive ever heard. Three months after the creation of the home pc, how many people had one on their desktops? How many people cared? Just because an immediate personal revolution is inevident to some in a fraction of the time necessary to create one is no reason for anyone to say that there never will be a revolution. Come on people, can't you imagine the incredible things that are to come from this, whether directly or not. This IS going to be one of the steps that lead us into a whole new world of advancement, creation, and insight. Don't discount a modern marvel just because it didn't immediately give you a new toy.
-Matt.
Imaging if you could store data in DNA. You could encode the entire Windows operating system into some poor sap's DNA, and watch him mutate into a huge, bloated blob of goo which eats your house and terrorizes your grandparents while snacking on your children's brains.
How's that for mixing Gates with Hunkapiller?
Um... we implicitly vote this way every day. Have you ever seen our media figures? Have you seen many newscasters, for instance, who don't meet all of the criteria you just named?
I think it's virtually inevitable, in modern American culture, that people will pursue the perfect baby. All of our lives, we're bombarded with these ideals which we're supposed to work towards for our entire lives. What parent wouldn't want to make their child's life easier by giving them as much of a head start as possible?
So, to prevent cosmetic genetic engineering of this type, I think we need to change a lot more than the public awareness of Hunkapiller's name. And I don't mean regulations on the industry, even; I mean the pervasive dedication to cosmetic perfection.
Even if everyone was the same, you would only have to look into the past for the ugliness.
penguinicide... when jumping out a window just won't do.
It wasn't uncommon in 1984 to hear people talk about "PC" as if it was an IBM trademark.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
By extension, if Billy G. changed his name to "Theophilus Quentin Hasenpfeffer" he would no longer have any legal woes.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Don't be silly. If you sequence your DNA once, that's about all you'll need. Ubiquitous sequencers might have uses for scanning pathogens (especially in a world where genetically engineered biowarfare bugs are commonplace), but in reality most people with personal sequencers would scan everything that came into their vicinity. This means that everyone you ran into would have a scan of your DNA. In other words, you have the consequences backwards.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
The real deal is that you can't be "superman" in everything. The body that makes a champion basketball player doesn't make a winning football quarterback or a gymnastics medalist. The kind of brain that makes an Einstein probably doesn't make a Robert Frost or a Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Then there's the unpredictability of nature vs. nurture; not everybody is going to grow up to use 100% of everything they have (a la GATTACA). There's plenty of room for variations even in a world where everyone is what we would consider "super" in many ways.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
I'm setting my threshold to 1. If you bozos want me to watch your argument, you can at least put a name behind your words.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
I guess we'll have to start calling it:
PE Bio$y$tem$
then develop a free gene sequencer..
It could be called Free-PE, or GNUPE.
The human genome attracts a lot of attention but there are many other genome projects in the works. We have an array of parallel processing linux boxes (o/c'ed Celerons) to process plant genetic data. This solution was chosen over expensive supercomputers since sequence data doubles faster than CPU speeds!
i was playing tribes one day and a guy named "celera genomics" hopped on the server, and made me his bitch. is that foreshadowing?
BNW in a nutshell:
A highly classist society. The workers are spawned from test tubes...there might be a breeder class as well (or is that Dune?). One guy breaks free of his position and becomes a farmer...he's a spectacle. Um...someone help me out. It's been a while for me.
We live in a classist society, the gap between the rich and poor is growing. While the American Dream is a great thing, and still mesmerizes immigrants, it will become increasingly difficult to jump that gap from rags to riches. Genetically engineered offspring presents many moral and ethical dilemmas. One of them being, who get's the lucky gene bath? Will it be only those kids whose families can afford it or will all people be able to benefit from gene therapy? For example, childhood innoculation. While most children in industrial nations get shots up the ying-yang (no pun intended), dangerous childhood diseases are still a big fear in third world countries.
TGL
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I'd add that since the mid-50's the differences between "government mandated" and "free enterprise" has become less and less.
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Brave New World by Huxley sums up the fears fairly well. Orwell had a few notable thoughts on this subject as well.
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Even though the good doctor has the "key" to unlocking the human genome, that doesn't mean that he gets to decide what gets done with the information. Applied Materials makes the machines that makes (or just tests?) the chips that Intel, AMD, Motorola, etc. manufacture. This doesn't give AMAT the upper hand in chip design.
Should I be getting a "genetics counselor" ?
TGL
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Tell me that when you can't find a wife or even a friend because you don't meet up to the standard of 'attractive' that is all in vogue by our self centered and egotistical cultures these days... 'Nuff said.
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
That very argument is why I don't think we can ever answer the question of when and where to stop if we do allow any of it to be used. Think about it, when have humans known when to stop using what they've learned even if it's not for the betterment of anyone? If you start letting people fix things that yes indeed most people would like to never have to deal with would also allow the rich to do such things as creating 'perfect' (or seamingly so) people. If you look at current culture and what people consider to be 'perfect' or near so that's frigthening to say the least...
I can see it now forget boob jobs for women now we can fix their genes when their infants so eventually they'll have huge breasts all those freaks drool over... Or love that latin sort of 'always tanned' skin tone? Well lets give it to our kids...
Then later: "What, you don't have any genes anythign like mine you aren't worthy to even speak to me!" Now why do I see this leading to further seperation of rich and poor more than fixing inherited genetic deformities? Well it's human nature, we always think we need to 'fix' something about ourselves because we see others that seem so great compared to us and do you really think that's going to change?
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
You know.. the one thing that pretty consistently gets left out when we start talking about genetics is what you can't get from genetics.
Ethical, moral, conscientious behaviour. If your kid is brilliant but an immoral person he/she may be successful but do people, in the long run, see this person (and their parents) in a positive or negative light? (I'm aware that studies indicate that some characteristics that result in criminal behaviour can be tracked to certain gene combinations)
Reminds me of how people can't stand the BSD license because *someone else* might benefit. Or chess parents frothing at the thought of their kids being beat. The 'first in line' syndrome. Parents have it and in excess quantities and often abuse it.
I'm all for making sure kids don't start out one step behind other kids in terms of success(genetics), but especially todays parents must realize that the single most important thing is to teach their kids to be good people. I'm sure this is a 'duh' for most people but looking around would tell you that a lot of people don't get it.
Anyways, it's just a point that gets lost in genetics discussions.
Fsck cluebie moderators. I'll say what I want, offtopic or not. And fsck having to qualify every bloody statement just
Of course any parent wants for their children to be at least 'normal' in terms of physical and mental condition but I'd put a high priority on being a good parent and having taught my children to be good people and even better parents. And (*cliche*) no amount of money can substitute for that. Strange that that rarely gets mentioned in genetics. All of a sudden our children become raw pieces of meat to be molded and sculptured.
NOTE: I'm all for using genetics to cure problems like retardation, life threatening illnesses, hereditary conditions, etc. I get a bit leary when we start giving them not only advantages but 'super' enhancements. I'm sure that society in a century or two may see these things as normal but I'm not quite comfortable with it yet. Of course, maybe we'll one day 'live' in a perfect "Brave New World".
Fsck cluebie moderators. I'll say what I want, offtopic or not. And fsck having to qualify every bloody statement just
"Troll, straw man, or agent provocateur, qu'est-ce que la différence? Perhaps I act out of love, holding the slashdot readership in such high regard that I would sacrifice all my time for the slim chance that it would encourage someone to examine his or her own prejudices, and thus leave this forum a better person."
And we are suppossed to be impressed with your planet slagging dreams more than the cold hard facts that natural climate variations in the past were extreme to the point they could wreck our current society if they happened again.
But hey we would nuke a few national parks and that would scare mother nature into doing our bidding?!
Nature follows physics and could care less what we can blow up. We need to respect and learn to massage those processes not stumble heedessly into them.
-The Clean Air Act, why no car has been built in America since 1975, as predicted by the Big 3
When Katz isn't talking about "Post-Columbine" geek repression, he's talking about how the "Corporate Republic" is ruining everybodies lives. Look back through his articles, that is another major topic of his writings.
I suppose to some extent I even agree with him in the general idea that some corporations are getting too much power aggregated by very small, non-democratic boards of directors and executive committees.
I suppose this is nit-picking, but I actually am less intelligent, definitely less morally concerened, and usually "wrong." (when compared to a jon katz, or any other type of rock)
but maybe that is just me.
Yikes! I first read this as 'how to inseminate the world' by Bill Gates
"Remember, any tool can be the right tool." -- Red Green
Healthy: maybe, but I think this is less a product of genetics and more a product of pizza, fast food, sugary diets, lack of exercise, etc. Besides, the germs seem to be able to keep up with medical technology fairly well, genetic tech shouldn't be much different. No to this one.
Cheerful: have you ever been depressed, or just a bit sad? There are many things which can help, but one thing really makes it worse - being around those happy shiny people. Definite no to this one.
Smart: I like smart people, but I find stupid people vastly amusing. No.
Attractive: sure, it'd be nice, but me and my kids would never be up to their standard. No.
It's just a phrase I heard a lot growing up. Doesn't sound right without the "liberalism" bit. Then again, "liberalism" and "conservativism" are very relative labels that can be defined to mean pretty much what you want them to, for the convenience of the user. These days, I find "liberal" being used as a label for those who want to have their cake and eat it too, and have the government regulate everything under the sun.
Having 'everyone equal' is the way to an evolutionary dead end. We _need_ diversity. We need people who are genetically better than others... they are the ones need to advance our species. Having genetic modifications to only a
limited portion of our population is _safer_, too.
If they somehow fail (a virus that only affects people with a certain type of anti-cancer mod, for instance), then we have backup population to keep our species going. After a virus like that, the gene pool would be much worse in many ways, but at least we would survive.
And survival and advancement of our species is very important, I think we can mostly all agree.
What are the good things Gates has produced?
What the heck?.....BIOTECH!
> Do you think that the poor schmuck on the street gets the same medical > attention you do when HE has a heart attack? Where do you live? Canada. And although some politicians are trying to institute a "two-tier" system of medicare, when I need an ambulance, or medication, or pretty much any other medical service, I pay exactly the same as any local millionaires.
This guyisnt as well known as Bill Gates, becuase, people actually use Windows. Most people know that the human Genome was mapped (and prod centers et +1, for AC players), but in the news they never say who did it. But if you watch the news, every five mintues they talk about Bill Gates and his monopoly, or accused monopoly, over computer OSes. Almost everyone (anyone have a percent) has a computer, and most of them (anyone have a percent) use Windows. I dont know anyone with a gene sequencer, and none of the nobody uses Hunkapillar's sequencer. But what do you expect, it was written by Katz
"There is no there, there." ---William Gibson, on Cyberspace
I was reading this, wondering who actually thought any of this nonsense, this "why doesnt average Joe Dumbass know who mapped the genome, andis mentioned in the news maybe once, but he knows the guy thwe has a monopoly over OSes and is on the news twice a day??" Then i looked at teh top of the page...and BOOM there he was, in all his glory...Katz. I'm surprised we didnt see this anywhere in the "story": This clearly shows the geek persecution against men like Hunkapliier, a clear relfection of the still recovering Post-Columbine society
"There is no there, there." ---William Gibson, on Cyberspace
Sadly, we already do. Some of it is hidden, but we definately pay that much. The straight-up income tax is (I believe) 28% at its lowest. Throw in social security (15% paid by me, 15% by my employer = 30% at least according to my econ book (NOT TO MENTION that I will get jack for all this wasted money!)) and you've got over 50% taxation. That stinks.
Taxation is high, but not as high as you seem to think. The straight income tax is 15% (not 28%) at its lowest, but if you don't pay on income below a certain amount. Social Security is split 50-50 between employers and employees, but it's a total of 15% (7.5% each).
One of the major tenants of western democracy is equality. Don't try to tell me that you're more equal than others.
No, one of the major tenets of western democracy is equality before the law, not unqualified equality. If unqualified equality were so important, we should presumably embark on a genetic engineering project to make everyone identical.
I'd also like to point out that if a society in which parents were successfully prevented from giving their children an advantage were to last for an extremely long time, parents' natural affection for their children would be eliminated or reduced, as there would be no reproductive advantage in it. I guess the society would have to use genetic engineering to prevent that.
If we continue acting like animals, determined to get any advantage we can get over our fellows, then there's a good chance we'll all perish -- in designer plagues, in unforseen genetic damage, or in good old fashioned caste warfare. Aren't just just as remiss as a parent if your meddling insures that they and their world die in a bloody conflict?
Designer plagues are only vaguely connected to getting genetic engineering for one's kids, and I fail to see how the latter will cause the former.
Unforseen genetic damage will obviously not cause us all to perish unless we do something stupid like ensure genetic engineering is available for everyone. This is actually a good argument in favor of letting the rich use it on their own children first: it gives society a free batch of guinea pigs.
As for caste warfare, I think that genetic engineering would only provide a marginal increase to the already huge gap between the poorest nations and the richest nations. That gap is a problem unrelated to genetic engineering. As for intra-national conflict, I find it unlikely in the extreme that class warfare would erupt in regions like Europe and the US where people could afford genetic engineering, because the minimum standard of living is already so high. People don't care that others can afford extravagance as long as they are reasonably well off themselves.
One of the key differences is that with abortion, you don't have a human being who's life you affected. The aborted embryo never becomes a human being. OTOH, the altered embryo DOES become a human being, one able to look back and say "Why did you do this to me? What or who would I have been had you not done this?" What if your genetic manipulation has some terrible, unintended consequence?
However, children have always been able to look back and question the decisions their parents made when they raised them. For one obvious example, "why didn't you ever spend time with me as a kid?" Parents already have substantial power over how their children turn out. Allowing them to make decisions about their children's environment can have an impact on their children's lives, just like genetic engineering would.
Okay, so we fought the Nazis for the right to have a capitalist society whose successful members strive to do everything the Nazis wanted to do to the human race.
Successful capitalists strive to have entire ethnic groups systematically murdered in concentration camps? Your exaggeration is obnoxiously insulting.
Genetic manipulation run amok will allow certain people to be decidedly superior than other people. You have a choice -- genomics or equality.
Are you under some sort of delusion that people are genetically equal now?
Bill Gates is not an idiot.
Nope.
Entries from your own personal dictionary don't count.
The richest man in the world is an idiot. Of course. I withdraw my objection.
J.F. Sebastian's geneticly altered "toys" were made by him, as a hobby. The Egyptian sold home-made reptiles.
I would not be surprised if one day it would not be too difficult for people to grow all kinds of creatures from scratch, unless of course the law steps in.
"Reality is less than television."-Brian Oblivion
Then he's not talking to you.
Ok, now let's look at your Depression argument. FDR was first elected in 1932, which means he took office in January 1933. Now, if this depression-within-a-depression took place in 1933 as you said, and was a direct result of FDR's policies, as you said, that means that he had somewhat less than a year to cause the economy to head farther into the shitter. That seems _very_ unlikely, especially considering the wave of increased confidence and enthusiasm that followed his inauguration.
An apology letter, a credit on your bill, and a $5 calling card doesn't make Bell Atlantic a good company. If they could've gotten away with cheating you, they would have. Why couldn't they? Because somebody blew the whistle, and rather than fighting in court (for breaking laws imposed by the government), they decided it was cheaper to buy you off directly. Which is exactly what they did. Which is exactly (if you read my post) what I said big companies are in the habit of doing.
However, once a corporation has a certain amount of money, product quality and customer service cease to matter. Any lawsuits can be settled, hush-hush-like. Unhappy customers can be bought off. With a big enough advertising blitz, even the shoddiest products will rush off the shelves (witness fast food chains like McDonalds, where the food is crap, the service is worse, and people still eat there every day.).
This is a step on the road to monopoly, at which point companies truly cease to be regulated by the market. Fortunately we have antitrust laws. Unfortunately, monopolies can afford lots of lawyers and can dawdle and delay antitrust proceedings seemingly forever (witness M$). Even more unfortunately, the government's anti-trust agencies seem to be asleep at the switch. Look at the upcoming merger between SFX and the radio company, whose name I can't remember right now (Clear Somthing-or-other). Look at the patent office, protecting big corporations' stupid "internet business method" patents and genetic patents, but still screwing the little guy businessman.
I don't think we can rely on consumer pressures to keep big corporations in check. People are asleep, or they're sheep.
you're right - I should have been more precise with my wording - I apologize.
It should have read something along the lines of "...since we don't have an inexhaustable supply of fossil fuels, and since, by all conservative estimates, our rate of usage (expanding along with population growth) exceeds the rate that we believe fossil fuels are created, alternative energy research is very important."
I can't find my source (from a college economics course) right now, but if you really want me to, I will give you source material info (title, author, publisher, year, etc) that has estimates about resource usage and population growth - email me. I'm sure I can dig up more than one source.
Godwin's Law prov.
[Usenet] "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." There is a tradition in many groups that, once this occurs, that thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress. Godwin's Law thus practically guarantees the existence of an upper bound on thread length in those groups.
-pf
Make affiliate bucks
I don't undesrtand the problem that people seem to have with perfect humans. What's wrong with fixing your and your babies genes?
I plan on giving myself and my children all the advantages they can get. Lets see who evolves first.
Take this personaility test.
who cares about some bigwig. Did he do the research? Did he think of the idea? no he didn't
Don't give in to the big business model of passing credit up the corporate food chain you twits.
www.adbusters.ord
Take this personaility test.
Nobody has voted on whether he or she wants to live in a world with disease, famine, birth defects, mentally deficient and ugly inhabitants. But here we are.
Now available, the Moral Compass can measure right and wrong to within 5 degrees! Now you too can have a objective measure of the morality of any idea!
I'll beleive in moral absolutes when I can buy my own Moral Compass.
I'm not holding my breath.
Yes!
Is that statement absolutely true?
Yes. There is no contradiction because this is not a moral statement just as "1+1=2" and "light travels at 299792458 m/s in a vacuum" are not moral statements.
My point is this: Just because you don't like a particular moral absolute doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. It just means that _you_ don't like it.
Just because you like the idea of moral absolutes doesn't mean they exist.
If you can describe an objective way of deciding whether a moral statement is true or false without relying on moral premises then I'll be convinced that moral absolutes exist.
Been awhile since I read BNW, but I don't see where genetic engineering relates. Certainly genetic engineering provides a despotic government with new ways to abuse their power, but I don't see genetics causing the corruption of the government.
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
Altering the genetics of a person changes who that person is. It is undoubtedly and unquestionably the most profoundly altering thing you can do to a human being. Does anyone, even a parent, have the right to make such decisions for another person?
I'm not saying that genetics are necessarily evil or that genetic studies should be banned. I'm merely pointing out that there are legitimate issues to be discussed and considered. It isn't all merely Luddite panic.
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
One of the key differences is that with abortion, you don't have a human being who's life you affected. The aborted embryo never becomes a human being. OTOH, the altered embryo DOES become a human being, one able to look back and say "Why did you do this to me? What or who would I have been had you not done this?" What if your genetic manipulation has some terrible, unintended consequence?
your argument can be extended to mean that if two people get together and have a child that inevitably will carry some terrible inherited traits from their parents (disease, ugliness, something even more controvertial...), then they're doing something equally terrible
I'd tend to argue that deliberately bringing a diseased child into being IS a morally terrible act. I don't think it should be legally actionable, however, and obviously some people will disagree with me.
Please note that I'm following on from previous posts rather than replying to them so don't take offence!
Heavens to Murgatory, why would I take offense? The whole point of /., trolls and other b.s. aside, should be to inform and generate spirited discussion on relevant issues. I certainly don't have all the answers. In fact, I'm convinced that there ARE no real answers, merely opinions and viewpoints, and those are (or at least should be) subject to change based upon the available evidence.
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
Point taken but I think there are orders of magnitude of differences here. If I ignore my child, I'm esentially withholding something they desire from them. It's arguable as to how much of myself I'm obligated to give them, and the choice of how to respond to that lack still remains with the child. Not so when you alter their genetic make-up.
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
Doesn't a gene sequencer merely decode a gene sequence? That is, it takes a bit of DNA and tells you the order of the individual bases within that strand. I really have a hard time seeing how one of these on your desktop would benefit you. Now, when they come out with an economical gene splicer or whatever the term is for a machine which generates a specific sequence on command...
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
your sarcasm is appreciated. "shame on all of you" was overblown, it was an emotional reaction. i'll be more polite next time.
Hmm, you must be from the US.
In Europe, we are very anti GM food. There have been many protests against the GM trials that are going on, including the ripping up of crops. In the UK, a number of supermarkets have made statements that their own products will NOT contain any GM contents. GM is not wanted here.
Besides, what is the difference between direct genetic manipulation and indirect cross breeding and active mate selection?
When was the last time you managed to cross a plant with a jellyfish? GM allows completely unrelated species to swap genes. Is this sensible? Some say yes, some say no. I'm still out on this one, so I will stay clear of GM food until a lot more research has been done.
wot no sig
Also, here is a referenc e to fire fly genes being inserted into a plant. Sure, they are not being used to grow more fire flys but there is no non GM method of getting the genes into the plant which was the original point.
wot no sig
(1) Some can afford it and some cannot - you have a group of "enhanced" people and a group that isn't. Kind of a nightmare scenario.
(2) It's affordable to all, at which point, where's your advantage? It's no longer a choice but a necessary characteristic to be better than you otherwise would have been otherwise what you have in the absence of genetic meddling is a disadvantage
Not that this changes anything at all because the technology is coming and you can't shut your eyes and hope it goes away. Well, I suppose you could, but it wouldn't do you much good.
Salocin.com
What I'm interested in is why people freak out when you concider applying this to your kids.
I don't think that any human or group of humans has Nature's wisdom. Most humans are stupid most of the time and more important, extremely shortsighted.
Take antibiotics. TV commercials hereabout are full of antibiotic stuff, inevitably producing immune strains. At least two cases of untreatable infections have already occured (Japan and USA, not Rwanda and Bangladesh) and physicians predict a post-antibiotic age.
While Nature's wisdom provided humanity with enough brain to weather anything natural thrown at them, their own inventions are different. Genetics and nanotechnology are easily capable of wiping life off the planet, even in tiny doses. The sheer arrogance of scientist claiming to 'improve' stuff in days that is millions of years old is sickening.
Social acpect are also important, but I don't feel inclined right now to discuss social aspects in a world where Bill Gates owns about $10,000,000 for every children starving every day.
Censorship on Slashdot
Congratulations for proving the thesis.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
See his oft-cited Wired essay Why the Future Doesn't Need Us. He's concerned that nanotechnology etc will become so cheap that anyone will be able to hack at the basic building blocks of matter. Is that a problem? He thinks so.
--
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
Oh, please, that could never happen.
Just like we could never lose our first and fourth amendment rights.
And the government and large corporations would never decieve us.
;)
Remove the NOSPAM to spam me...
Uh-huh. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
For those who've been asleep, we in the public Human Genome Project have been fighting tooth and claw to get the genome into the public domain, while Celera and Venter have done their damndest to make a proprietary product out of it.
The only reason that Celera will make anything available is that we have succeeded, and undercut their position so severely that they will try to rescue in public relations what they've lost in business model.
Venter's quote, therefore, is the purest spin control -- and to those of us on the inside, tantamount to an admission that Celera's attempt to lock up the genome has failed. It's also a lie. Celera has never "immediately published" anything. They do not adhere to the Bermuda Principles for public DNA sequence release. They have not released their human sequence to the public, though they have certainly issued enough press statements implying that they have.
Remember that before this whole PC thing became so fscking huge, Bill Gates was also a complete nobody, known only to a relatively tiny number of people in a single specialized field.
Now Gates has built a commercial empire out of his expertise and ambition, so of course he's a household name. Surely it's appropriate to wait until Hunkapiller actually has an impact on the community at large before expecting the community to know who on earth he is?
Or should we all spend our days finding obscure people who do stuff and run around yelling "think of the implications!"
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Why don't you get off your high horse! What kind of aristocrat are you? Sure, there are flaws to any kind of society, and capitalism's happens to be a separation of haves and have-nots.
But that doesn't mean we have to try to increase that flaw! No system is perfect, "pure" capitalism just leads to greed!
One of the major tenants of western democracy is equality. Don't try to tell me that you're more equal than others.
shouldn't that be GNOME instead of genome?
"If anyone needs me, I'm in the angry dome."
There is a definate fear in teh disabled community especially that by using genetics you are in fact devaluing people by saying what is perfect (which is subjective anyway)
As an example - cochlear implants are being met with a great deal of negataive response from the deaf community, who see such medical advances as the source for potential erosion of deaf culture.
TO offer counselling to pepeople who might possibly have a chance of an inherited disease is ludicrous. We all have our faults. My father was born with Spina Biffida but lives a normal fulfilled life. We all carry imperfections which are what make us.
Can you imagine growing up with such a monkey on your back? Parents of juvenile diabetics have spoken time and again of the sometimes-suicidal thoughts and tendencies of their children, all because these kids are growing up with the knowledge that they have a disease that could well cripple or kill them before they're 25. It's one thing to educate people who are considering (or have received) sperm or ova donations about the potential risks involved in these circumstances - another to tell an individual in gross statistical detail about the genetic axe hanging over their head.
(I'll leave the Gattaca references and allusions to the dozens of other people that will make them.)
Karma: Excellent, but still won't get you laid.
Oh yeah. Of course the population of the United States will agree on what defines "perfection" when the seven hundred (or whatever) people at the top of the government haven't had general agreement amongst themselves since Pearl Harbor.
Oh, and people actually believe the government is capable of trying to enforce it.. geeze. Yeah. Three hundred million people are going to gladly go along with that with no problem. Especially considering they're well-armed enough to conquer Russia in midwinter.
Get a grip, people. It's not the creeping death that everyone seems to think it'll be. Once you strip off the reactionary what-if BS it's just another new technology. As someone said the last time Katz posted some FUD about this, s/human genome project/nuclear power/g. Hell, people once thought margarine was going to Bring Society Down.
I love modern society.
-PS
"All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke
My goodness, we have two family members with Down Syndrome and I can not even imagine them being better people without their extra chromosome.
Yet, as some say, they'd destroy a fetus with that characteristic in the name of helping their child? Who are they helping really?
And what do we mean by advantage? The ability to make money? It might make thigs easier, but its made no one I know happy.
I can't argue that my neice and nephew wouldn't prefer to be non Downs, who am I to say, but they are the happiest two individuals I know and they have added more to our lives than anyone else I've met. I can't believe that having the ability some day to remove that extra chromosome before birth would be an advantage. They've been the advantage in my life since they were born.
Life without differences...yuck! We'd be the worse for it in so many ways, not just uninteresting, but unaccepting and unforgiving and unloving.
Just a thought
Perhaps in the computing industry a bit, but not anywhere near the popularity [or lack of] that he has now. Within the next few years, if Mr. Hukunamatata starts shaking up the world of genetics as we know it, maybe then he will be world renowned like dictator Gates. Again, he's only well known to the world of genetic sciences at this point, much like emperor Gates was in the beginning...
Katz strikes again...
-- A computer without COBOL and Fortran is like a piece of chocolate cake without ketchup and mustard
Just what we need, one more place where they can totally f*ck up on their interpretations of child abuse.
(OT, can't resist) I've had people I know have cocaine and all sorts of other drugs out in a house where several children under the age of 10, where they don't do a good enough job. C'mon you call ahead of time, I can clean the place up. I've also known some of the best parents go through hell because their child broke a bone falling out of a tree or doing other things that kids do that get them scraped, bruised, cut. Those bastards need to revise there approach to doing things. I've got plenty more examples, but I think I've beat enough into my now completely offtopic rant...
-- A computer without COBOL and Fortran is like a piece of chocolate cake without ketchup and mustard
An article in Discover Magazine made note of the fact that so called genetic defects play a large role in the advancement of many different things.
The point was made that it might take up to 11 different defects to cause a person to be predisponsed towards being a homicidal maniac. It also pointed out that those same defects in smaller numbers are responsible for the kind of person who is needed in developement and research of new ideas.
If we are all healthy, happy, and social then we would never take the time to develope space travel, better foods, cheaper energy, better transportation, or any other desired thing.
You might as well throw art out also as happy people who try to do art are quite frankly boring.
The human race needs its so-called imperfections to continue to survive.
Jumping to correct solutions slowly is better than jumping to incorrect solutions quickly.
Couples wanting to have children could buy one and uhh, make conception more interesting (though many find it "stimulating" already, people answering surveys often state that they think about other things/people during sex, especially married couples).
Also, you could perform your own genetic enhancements at home. I can see teenaged girls doing it now.
"I hear that blonde hair is in this year. I could bleach it, or I could become a natural blonde"
I can see cyringes replacing makeup kits already.
Yeah, I'm being funny, but similar enhancements are mentioned in many sci-fi novels. One only has to read Neuromancer to read about punks who become lizard men and plug chips into their ears (or for that matter, look at the real lizard man, I'm sure that he'd love genetic enhancements to become more realistic).
It's coming. Cool, eh?
We're all different.
Eh...
what's even more distressing than that is that I can actually read through a whole katz article an there was not one reference to columbine in it?
could this be a bean pod hatched double of katz? Out to take over the world and fill all of the other extremely poor writing community with body snatching doubles who only write second rate crap instead of the pure poo that their originals shat out onto page?
I hope so.
How little public perception matters. Names and concepts of people get attached to ideas and inventions as intellectual handles. I'm sure neither Gates nor this PE Biosystems guy care what Katz thinks should be their respective rightful shares of credit and fame.
Stick to what *you* can control - to projects and efforts that *you* feel are important. If the rest of the world cares to heap fame on you - fine, otherwise, who cares? For the most part, none of us can control public perception (though damn if we don't try) - and the funny part is IT DOESN'T MATTER. I'd rather spend my time and energy creating and contributing to something more meaningful than the fickle winds of PR anyway.
-f
Not only that, but no form of the word, "corporatize", either.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Sounds like Gattaca. Well, not a gene sequencer, but genetic ID testers were all over the place.
Does anyone know if this is a publically traded company?
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
snip:
I'll spend my money and make my kids smarter, better, and quicker. This is the way it is, has always been, and always will be. You're kidding youself if you think otherwise. It just so happens that genetic engineering is the ultimate expression of this phenonomon. We've got lots of problems in society as is; This isn't the biggest. Might it be 100 years from now? Maybe. But I'll make sure my offspring have every advantage I can give them in that world, the same as my parents did for me, and the same as their parents did for them.
Selfishness and greed. Makes one wonder if the human race deserves to survive.
Wrong answer private. Animals do the same thing. They want their offspring to have better chances to survive than other animals. Its the law of nature. Survival. Members of the feline family have been known to eat offspring of other prides to ensure sufficent resources for their own progeny. Do they deserve to live? Its survival of fittest, and always has been. Do my kids "deserve" to survive more than yours? I dont know, thats a moral question. But I will do whatever it takes to make sure my kids will survive, hopefully NOT at the expense of others. However I would be remiss as a parent *NOT* to give them whatever advantages I can.
-- A Human Being is nothing more than mobile CO2 factory. Bow to the plants.
The fact of the matter is that we, as a society, are evolving. Technology advances at an incredible rate, and we as a species are forced to deal with it - and after a period of confusion, we do. This is hardly the first time some new advance has created a new paradigm in world view. When the wheel was invented, was it considered a possible abomination with massive abuse potential, or was it used as a catalyst for growth? During the initial stages of the computer explosion, did people fear and fret over the possibility that some insane mad scientist could (brace yourself here) do harm? The fact of the matter is that any harm done has been FAR outweighed by the overall good achieved bu any given technological leap forward. Genetics is no different - despite its broad potential for good AND harm. To think otherwise is to give into a paranoia bestowed more by science fiction than by logic and observation.
It is true that Beethoven had a mental disorder... I believe that he was posthumously diagnosed as Bipolar (also known as manic depression). The problem with being Bipolar is that it's a double-edged sword. In its most acute form, sufferers experience short bursts of wild creativity and frenetic activity which they wouldn't give up for the world, except for the insanity and burden of the extended periods of deep depression that they feel for most of the rest of the time.
:)
Numerous other artists also have suffered from this condition, which is why the stereotype exists that deression is artistic. However, even though these short bursts of wild creativity have benefitted humanity uncountable number of times, there isn't a single sufferer of this disorder who would wish it upon his or her worst enemy.
Thus, the dilemma exists: do we change our genes to eliminate this disease for the sake of humanity, or do we leave them alone for the sake of humanity?
Just a nice happy thought to keep discussion going.
---
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
If you have not read Humanae Vitae, you should read it. It's downright prophetic. John Paul II goes into even more interesting stuff in his "Gospel of Life".
Making a culture of death is this simple: You decide that certain identifiable social groups (Jews, Catholics, Irish, Goths or Geeks) are undesireable. You start a foundation to provide them with "genetic counselling" to help them have healthier lives. You get a bunch of like minded rich people to fund your efforts and lobby Congress to throw in some tax money for public service advertisements, and you get Hollywood to show people from the undesireable groups to be inferior, annoying, or evil. You tell the larger population that you are promoting genetic choices, and invite percieved leaders from the targeted groups to testify to the benefits of your "plans". Eventially, thanks to journalism scholarships, like minded people control the majority of the mass media, and are able to control what information the voting majority sees. You make sure you call your opponants anti choice in every possible sound byte. The new technology must become "safe, legal and rare." You never neglect to have stories of "hard cases" that prove some lives are not worth living. It will take a while, but the psycologically manipulated masses will begin doing your work, without direct government coercion.
After a few years, the inferiors will be sent by the welfare state to your organisation for genetic counselling. You, of course only offer reproductive technologies that effectively target these groups for elimination, all the while promoting your social theories in schools under the guise of science.
Think it can't happen? Think about the Irish, Native Americans, and Africans whose cultures were targeted and destroyed by slavery and genocide. In each case the dominant culture has used them as proof of its own superiority. Genocide has the same effect whether it's done with smallpox infected blankets, concentration camps, or visits from the late Margaret Sanger, whose racism is consistantly ignored by the media. Funny, you outlaw education, tradition and family, and you end up with violent illiterates.
How many people have to suffer a harsh punishment before "cruel and unusual" returns zero?
The consequences of genetic knowledge about ourselves may (or may not) have a vast impact on our society.
The people that make the machines that sequence the genes will not. If the machines do the job correctly, then who cares who makes them? If they don't work correctly, they will be replaced by ones that do.
To use the internet analogy - the net itself is having a tremendous impact on society; the fact that it is running on Cisco routers is trivial. If it comes to light that Cisco is exercising some kind of inappropriate control over the internet - watch how fast they come tumbling down!
I could replicate other people's DNA and plant it all over crime scenes! Imagine how much fun that would be!
joel
Such is the infinite Grace of Popeye.
Therefore there should be a small amount of people, like, 1,000 ppm. (parts per million). I pulled that number out of my ass though. I want to live in a world like Brave New World. Go read the book, VERY good book.
hlag
"Just the facts Ma'm" - Sgt. Joe Friday
Don't forget, the USSR was one of the Allies in WWII. The millions of Russians who died (the USSR suffered more casualties in WWII than any other country) certainly didn't die for the sake of Capitalism.
No, they died to keep their state free from German advances into eastern europe and Russia.
I probably should let this go, but the USSR was also vital in freeing small, still-western countries like Norway.
And one of NS's major enemies was communists, they usually ended up the same way jews, homosexuals and other 'deviants' did.
Also interesting to think about is that the Nazis' idea of perfecting the Arian race would be a lot easier to create using the discussed gene tech. Of course, then main difference now (hopefully) is that we don't kill the 'lesser' humans.
M.
I've always wondered what would make up for man stopping natural evolution - we're too successful, and it's too slow. I always thought eventually AI would come into the picture, but with the possiblilty of being able to engineer our genes in the next 25 years, maybe government will be bright enough to let us make choices for how we want our offspring be.
One problem, which can easily bee seen in heavily breeded animal races, is that they usually keep several not-wanted traits in addition to the ones we breed them for (color, strength, whatever). Usually, they also loose some wanted features, like intelligence, calm temper, whatever too.
This sums up to the problem of getting excactly what we want without any side effects. That's a lot more difficult than fiddling with genes. And we might not know when we know enough...
Another problem seen with gene manipulation is that the plants (they're still mostly there) seem to 'forget' the manipulation after some generations (no reference, just word-of-mouth from my dad, a professor in biology).
M.
I think your question around the concern of genetic engineering humans comes down to our view of humans, and the change that's happened in say the last 30-40 yrs. It's far different between understanding the matter that makes up things, and changing that matter to change a life. I guess you could also ask, what's the big deal about using the medical research the nazis published after experimenting on on the Jews in WWII? They were (in their minds) just dealing with what they considered (sub)-human matter ..
I think the point is that with more knowledge about the human condition comes greater responsibility. Now if the state of things in this world is such that money, position and stock value are of greater value than people in relationship, what will distinguish us from past generations that have created huge atrocities for large groups of people? What may improve the quality of life for some groups of people may in fact decrease the quality of life for other groups of people especially when people who insist on their rights will trample on the rights of others. There's much more to humans than just the materials they consist of.
--- "'Once the rockets go up who cares where they come down .. that's not my department' says Wehner Von Braun" --Tom Lehrer
make up your mind jon, is this about the Hunkapiller Syndrom or about the morale questions brought up by the Genome Project? you dedicate more than 60% of your article to a different issue than the one you're trying to address... if it was software it would be a trojan horse.
now I do have some comments regarding one of your points (the syndrom one): bill gates is not consider a predator/liar for the same reasons churchill is not considered a drunk and hitler is not considered a good schoolboy. people are remembered for their most important contribution. Bill gate's most important contribution, for most people, happens to be the fact that he owns the company that makes the software that made it possible for the "masses" to use computers. ask most people who is bill gates and they will tell you that he's the guy that invented windows (yeah right), not the guy who stomps on competition with a predator like agenda. that's just the way it is and the way it will always be (or do you relly think graham bell and alba edison deseve all the credit they get?). making an article stating that this is wrong is as relevant as making an article regarding how wrong it is for humans to lie or cheat or have sex when they're 12.
if you were trying to write about the morales of handling DNA related information, then say so, admit it and give us your comments. don't patronize us (me) and try to sneak your thoughts in using a different topic.
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
I too am perturbed by the goofy distinction that people like to draw between what is "natural" and what is "unnatural", as if humans are any less a part of nature than any other creature.
Having said that, however, I have to respond: we ARE different than the other animals, in that we have vastly more power to change our environment than most animals do.
Populations of living beings simultaneously adapt to their environment, and attempt to adapt their environment to themselves. Ideally, the result of many different species doing this all at once is a balance, called homeostasis, that is a healthy environment for a wide variety of creatures. For more on this, read about Lovelock's Daisyworld.
Humans modify their environment, just like any other creature. There is nothing inherently wrong with this. But we have the ability to do it on a timescale that is orders of magnitude faster than that of any other creature. The reason that we have the potential to do so much damage to our environment is not that we are (individually or collectively) more powerful than the planet -- we've got nothing on the motion of geologic plates -- but we operate on a different timescale.
Homeostasis is the product of many different species, all with different survival priorities and mechanisms, trying to change their environment to suit themselves. The result is a balance that is not ideal for any of them, but is generally good for all of them and more robust than an "ideal" solution would be. This balance can come to be because all the competing species are exerting approximately the same degree of influence over their environment, integrated over time. Humans have the ability to break that balance, because our actions can drive the environment one direction very hard for a few years, then reverse and drive it in some other direction. If we do this enough, we can really screw things up because there is never enough time for the system to come back to balance -- the system keeps looking for local minima, but is continuously driven out of them before it able to settle.
Anyway, this perspective on the human impact is relevant to environmental issues in general, and the impact of genetic engineering is no exception. I would also argue that you can look at cultural/social evolution through the same set of glasses (i.e. a complex and chaotically driven system that seeks a homeostatic local minima). In this case, the same arguements may pertain directly to the impact that, say, genetic screening and rational baby design will have on our culture.
"Research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing." -- Wernher von Braun
Heh. Do as you like. Nobody will ever care.
Tell me, has there been any technological advance that humans are morally, socially, or philosophically prepared for? I guess I'm disappointed in the commentary mostly because of lack of data (mentioned by others).
We've been genetically manipulating plants for 50 years. Heck, we've been controlling the output of plants (i.e. farming) for thousands more.
What was really needed in this article was how Dr. Michael W. Hunkapiller operates within the industry, what other experts in genetic mapping have to say about his practices, the possibilities, etc. etc.
managers...why god invented purgatory
>Nobody has voted on whether he or she wants
>to live in a world with only healthy, cheerful,
>smart and attractive inhabitants.
I don't want to live in a world where people get to vote on who they live amongst. If you think
genetic engineering is creepy, don't engineer your
children.
So the new process would be...
'course, if it was possible to change your own genes, hmm... "Maybe I'd like green eyes today, and I think that I'd like to grow three inches."
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
is fame really all that great? why does someone important need to be famous? isn't recognition for a job well done sufficient? anyway, if he was a household name, he'd need a security staff and i'm sure he isn't in the money like gates.
it is better to be no one and conquer the world.
You know, to me what is scary isn't the idea that genetic engineering will result in 'gene discrimination' or people seeking 'perfect' children. It's the idea that by definition, genetic engineering is mucking around with a billion-year-old mechanism that we understand little about. We have no clue how a wonderfully complex human brain is stored in just a few hundred thousand sets of genetic pairs. It might not be a case of digital computer memory, where a single gene (or even a group) can be flipped on/off and a particular response is be given. We might end up causing more illness and deformation than curing it, by upsetting a very careful balance. Would you start messing with your OS's kernel, if you didn't even know what sort of language it was written in? Or even if you weren't sure how it was digitally represented?
.
On a side note, it's interesting how people are obsessing with the idea of perfect children. Is this really a useful thing to humanity as a whole? Evolution is about change, and change does not come with conformity. Hell, you could even use the old abortion arguement: What if you 'cure' the next Stephen Hawking and he turns out to be a normal person instead of revolutionizing physics?
It's food for thought. Likely, genetics will outstrip us and leave us wondering where we got all of these nifty but hideously dangerous new toys. .
Where's the submit button??
Whats the difference, both of them just care about making MONEY. This "Hunkapiller" its not making all this for free...
first off, this is OT but...
Use an ad blocker if you dont want to see the ads. Check out naviscope, www.naviscope.com which does an excellent job.
Ah and Kharma? I've given up on that a long time ago. I'm here to speak my mind not kiss anyone's ass.
witty sig goes here
I agree, I think that Mr. Katz stories are irrelevent, unimportant and boring. I haven't taken him off my slashdot homepage, because I don't believe in censorship, but for real, someone needs to fire the man.
witty sig goes here
yup... I cant spell at all... my entire first 12 years of school were worthless... Just another reason the government sucks... all the money that gets spent on education and yet we still have computer programmers that cant spell pursue... I think it's disgusting.
YouTube & Google Video -> podcast http://castcluster.blogspot.com/
good for him... he also got shot in the fsckin head... so where did it get him really?
YouTube & Google Video -> podcast http://castcluster.blogspot.com/
Hunkapiller will become a household name as soon as everyone has to pay him money to get their work done.
Somebody somewhere is going to come up with the desktop computer equivalent of genetics and then we will all have to bow before somebody. It may not be Hunkapiller's company anymore than Xerox Parc or Apple for the computer. But it will be somebody.
Ugh, I rue the day.
That's sort of analagous to software manufacturers requiring that you keep a cd in the drive to run the program or some such copy protection nonsense. Can anyone tell me what happens to software like that within minutes of its release?
Exactly, someone comes up with a hack that disables it. Now how about a virus that reactivates those genes? Whammo, you have now pirated DNA-ware.
More likely, the company would remove anything and everything related to reproduction from the genome. This would make a genetic hacker's job harder, but still doable.
I wonder what a genetic hacker underground would be like? Obviously not until genetic engineering equipment comes down a great deal in price, but then computers cost comparative amounts in the 50's, right?
--
Dyolf Knip
Oh, right. An ungodly large number of people (the politicians, the geneticists, the secretaries, the families of everyone) will be able to keep a secret from a public who (at least for the first 20 or 30 years) would instantly go apeshit. And you're going to keep it a secret for 2 generations? Two words: bull and shit. Every single person who was in on it would want exemption for their family, but to keep the two groups separate, you'd have to tell the families of all the 'keep em smart' group (as well as they're friends and their families) so they could avoid everyone else. Hmm, probably several thousand people in the US alone, half of them unsavory lawyers and politicians just itching to make a name for themselves with some grandios public event (how about uncovering a major conspiracy for starters?).
Always remember: Two men can keep a secret if one of them is dead.
--
Dyolf Knip
Exactly. That example with the two girls was very poorly chosen. I'm very sorry that the chicks blame their mom for having them when she couldn't possibly know about her genetics. Just because they're too stupid to draw meaningful conclusions from this kind of information, it's no reason to put a hold on genetic research.
--
Dyolf Knip
Here's one guy: Moller. Do you know who he is? No? Shame on you! His inventions could change everything! That you know of Bill Gates and not Moller is just plain ridiculous. Your country must be stupid.
How about John Chambers? Who is he? Oh, just the CEO of the largest company on the planet. If you didn't know that, you and your countrymen must be stupid.
Go to hell, Katz.
--
Dyolf Knip
There is no point to this article. Maybe there
was before he wrote it. But all we seemed to have gleaned was Hunkapiller should be percieved as more important than Bill Gates because he is involved in the genome.
a tip... If you are trying to convince Geeks that
someone is more important than Gates (a rich geek) try throwing in what they have done for humanity (or even what they've done for geeks). Or any facts at all. "30 sequencers" isn't going to cut it.
SI is a good demonstration that genes are not the only issue, my wife does that stuff and I've seen some amazing changes in kids that would be considered non-functioning.
Ask the same question 20 years from now and Hunkapiller might be comparable to Gates.
Everything in this post is false.
The anecdotes specified here do not represent dangers of the use of genomics. They tell of the dangers of not using it as a precaution or as an extra qualification in the case of sperm donors. The reults of these tests mean the two daughters have a good chance of catching their developing breast cancer while it's still treatable. Because of the testing, they'll know to be on the lookout.
If these were meant to be counterarguments to the fruits of genomics, then they were poorly chosen.
Find the "slashdot troll" gene and eliminate these pitiable mutants from society, for their own good.
Scientists are practically by definition amoral.
amoral != immoral.
Anyone deluded to enough to think that genetics is the only factor in the making of beautiful, stable, and happy people is probably also sold on the idea that we need to lock kids in prison for 12 years and make them into neurotic consumers of whatever ABC leaves a message to watch on their answering machines.
Technology can never replace the innate spark that makes us human, undesirable genes or not.
In space, no one can hear you moo.
Sequencing genes is one thing, changing them is something else entirely. The human genome should be open source. Period.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Riiiiight.
And now it is a "syndrome" that the richest man in the world (until recently) is more famous than a leading venture capitalist in a field that most non-scientists don't yet completely understand.
I wonder what all the chickclickers think about this latest corporatist problem. Is it a threat to our inviolate personality? Good thing we have the sensemakers from the Open Media to raise our awareness of it!
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I guess that's what he means by "Open Media".
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Heh. The issues Katz raises are never new. He's in the middle of a f*ing series about online privacy, of all things.
For his next feature, I'm sure he will be trying to call our attention to the impact of these new-fangled "auto mobiles" on our society. :)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
"...Americans focus on all the wrong things."
"...you'll understand a lot about the irrational way Americans and American media deal with technology..."
What if we're not American? =P
>Why is it BAD for me to want my children to be >happy, healthy, attractive, and smart - as long >as my concern is helping them not controlling >them.
Wake up! Mistakes are made all the time based on good intentions.
Another thing: Where do you get the notion that genetically engineering your kids will make them happier? That is nonsense.
Suppose, hypothetically, I genetically engineer my kid and he grows up miserably because of it. Should i feel fine as long as my intent was to help them?
The simple fact that the American public focuses on pornography, crackers, and IPO's makes them important. If those are the issues that weigh heavily on the minds of the public, so be it. I'm willing to wager that nobody cares who implemented tcp/ip in unix or any other "important" technological issues. Nobody worries about the importance of the wankel rotary engine and it's importance to burning cleaner fuels in cars, so why should any care about the underlying processes leading to it's acceptance? That's what us engineers and programmers are here for, to care about what's at the heart of technological issues. My mom doesn't care how her house is heated, just so long as it is heated. If everyone took time to learn everything about all things in their lives, we'd spend all of our time getting nothing done, worrying about underappreciated scientists.
*everything* is Orwellian to cats.
I totaly agree with his views.
We have that power, cause evolution gave it to us, why wouldnt we have the right to use it ?
Animals have the power/sense to know if another is sick and decide not to mate with him, WE DONT, we had to wait several millenia to have the ability to do so, now that we have it after hard work and time, we shouldnt use it ????
I know its not clear cut, but my point is one to be considered with the others...
It sounds to me like Jon is obsessing about something that really isn't important. With any technology, there is always the potential for misuse. This technology is no different, there will be people trying to use it in unethical ways, for whatever reasons.
What does Jon suggest we do about his claims of unregulated genome terrorism? Create a Genome Police? That would just take us one more step towards being an Orwellian society!
Attention all planets of the Solar Federation! We have assumed control! - Neil Peart
huhum, ah, ever hear of body peircing? Where's the return on investment in that?
People will do stupid crap, it's in our nature. I saw a group of ten people all wearing goth clothing and crap when I went to Valley Fair the other weekend. All of them had "cat" eyes (I'm assuming they were contacts with shading), and three of them had points on the top of their ears. I promise you that if the technology is available, someone will use it. And even if it's a small group, when that small group branches off of the rest of humanity (the base if you will), they will have altered the course of evolution for their new 'branch' far beyond what regular mutation would allow for.
Bite my yammer.
>there was a good quote by oppenheimer in james gleick's book "Genius", to the effect that as a scientist, he had to believe that to know was ALWAYS better than not to know, even when that knowledge was dangerous. "god created this world, not us" (saw this in a post a bit down). if god created this world (i'm not arguing either way), i doubt that he wanted us to sit here and live in self-imposed ignorance.
:)
This was true of Oppenheimer's opinion before Alamagordo... not after.
On the train back to Chicago, he wrote in his notebook, "I have become Shiva, the destroyer of worlds."
His opinion was that, in taking on the capacity to destroy the world, men had become G-ds -- and thereby overstepped their capacity. Learning how to split the atom had released the Furies into the world -- an unknown and horrific possible destruction. Oppenheimer spent much of the rest of his life, along with other Atomic Scientists, trying to put them back in the bag.
This gained him little to nothing, exclusion from the labs he created, and government reactions like Harry Truman's "never let that bastard in my office again."
Scientists may create the technology, but once it has a useful effect for some other group, they never control it. The geneticists who think they'll be helping the world should keep this in mind -- once created, these technologies will be USED. And people like William Gibson seem to have a much better idea of how this will happen than any of the rosy-cheeked "oh, we're eliminating disease" geneticists. Obviously, as in the case of nanotechnology, Genome sequencing will fundamentally change how the world works, and there are profound military implications (particularly, in the conjunction of the two). Ever hear of assassination politics? Guess not... especially if you happen to be one of those overgrown children who work on the technologies which will make them possible
>Poor choice for an example, since no one has used a nuclear weapon (outside of testing them) since WWII ended over half a century ago. Maybe we can be trusted with these technologies after all...
Not true at all.
First, nuclear weapons, of all shapes and sizes, are built and used, will all sorts of profound consequences. A few examples:
1- Russia's placement of short-rance BCMs in Cuba, and the world situation that resulted.
2- Nuclear mining of the Western European Alps, which effectively eliminates the possibility of an enemy force crossing them.
3- Deployment of nuclear backpacks and field munitions, radically altering potential battlefield conditions (please remember that the US/NATO has never agreed to no-first-use on OUR territory).
4- Use of Depleted Uranium (DU) and other derivative rounds in NATO operations, and the creation of amounts of fallout that may exceed Hiroshima/Nagasaki.
Second, it is by no means clear that we have avoided significant military detonation -- and will avoid such in the future -- by anything but pure luck. Viz:
1) That Russia clearly planned an invasion during the Cuban crisis -- had placed 300,000 troops in Cuba when Kennedy declared to Kruschev, "there will be war."
2) That the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist's nuclear clock reached one minute to midnight five times.
3) That the US has ACCIDENTALLY reached DEFCON 2 over ten times.
Couple this with countries like Pakistan developing 60-megaton "citykillers*" on a wind-and-a-prayer budget, and the new world order doesn't seem all that safe to me. In fact, it has quite aptly been called "the new world disorder."
But active nuclear holocaust wasn't my point; it was that fundamental technologies will be USED once developed; they will be used by whomever can control them to manipulate power; and that this will have little to nothing to do with the pretty fairy tales that the children who created them told themselves while making them.
Which pretty much sums up the early development of nuclear munitions, Einstein to Oppenheimer to Mandelbaum. Teller is another story...
*FYI: past the late 50s, the US/USSR became committed to the "tactical" use of nuclear warheads, generally less than 50 kilotons in yield, most less than those used at Hiroshima/Nagasaki. The re-development of "strategic" nuclear weapons, capable of destroying cities in Terminator-esqe style, is a peculiar innovation of the previous few years.
"The takeover of the home genomics market takes another step today with the announcement of MSGene2018. Predictions are that the package will include Ensemble, the home PCR kit previewed here and a number of retro-virii brought back from the Gates Memorial Biological Research Centre in Antarctica. Critics accuse the company of 'mind-boggling negligence' and 'indifference to human life', pointing to the concerns raised over compatibility problems between the base-level human genome and new proprietary introductions such as IntelliGen, and Luminescence.
MS Spokesman Bill Gates 3.1 declined to comment publicly until the current raft of sterility cases reach the Supreme Court."
And just imagine TestTube, the Lab assistant: "It looks like you're making a baby. Need any help?"
StuP
Imagine a world in which most of the crops grown have terminator genes--they can't make their own seeds, and they tend to wipe out other plants. Think of it: you no longer have to pollute the water table with herbicides trying to get rid of unwanted plants. Instead, your own crops do the killing for you. Great idea, right?
Wrong. You don't have a seed stock any longer, so you can't plant your own crop. You have to keep buying these genetically modified seeds from someone else (possibly a large corporation, maybe from your local government). That person now has the power of life and death over you. Congratulations! By accepting the way in which this new technology is used, you've just forged another link for the chains that bind you.
Or how about this: a government decides that sooner or later, its citizens will start to wise up to the fact that it's up to no good and only wants to exploit them. Therefore, said government embarks on a long-ranging plan to slowly dull the population (just a few IQ points, really, you won't miss them) and introduce sequences that are linked to more tractable behavior. After fifty or sixty years, you have a population that isn't very sharp and is rather sheeplike in mentality. For the sake of your government, you make sure that at least some individuals aren't modified in this way, so that your regime has a supply of fresh talent. All it takes is a retrovirus slipped into a popular soft drink or a modified rhinovirus.
Of course it sounds like something out of a bad science fiction movie. Of course it sounds ridiculous. Who would do such a thing, after all? You must remember, ladies and gentlemen, that I am speaking of organizations that will stop at nothing to see their ends met, that will resort to the basest of actions and the cleverest of schemes to bring about their vision.
Be on your guard. Have a clear understanding of where your food and water comes from.
www.alarmist.org
If so, we'd have no need in antimononopization laws. MS case shows we need it.
Every secretary using MSWord wastes enough resources
Subj!
Every secretary using MSWord wastes enough resources
But what did you actually want to say with this article ? That genetical engineering is bad, bad, bad ?
That it will be abused by greedy corporations and evil individuals ? That we actually dive into a technology whose consequences cannot be handled ?Guess what, I agree with you on all counts. But this is a fairly lame repeat of (albeit important) issues you brought up in earlier features.
Actually the only real information value is that we all know now who Dr. Hunkapiller is.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
How about tinkering with your own genes to make subtle changes? (IANA Geneticist but...) Say somebody was going on a hike, they could tickle a gene or two to increase their stamina. Winter coming? Flip a gene and put on a little more fat for warmthm, we'll take it back off when summer comes so the bathing suit'll fit again.
Job change? Moving from an active-job to a desk-job? Change genes so that more blood/energy goes to the brain and enhance that critical thinking without gaining weight.
Lotsa possibilities in there, but should we open Pandora's box? And if so, should we attempt to control genetic manipulation? And if so, how? S'gonna be tricky...
Although I, personally, can't wait until we have "desktop" genome hackers, I also concur that many (most? all??) of the greatest feats in human history are the result of an "unhealthy" obsessive behavior.
Thankfully, I am making the assumption that, while some people will try to only have "beautiful people" offspring, leading to a "mass homogenization" of the popular genome, there will also be people like myself, who would want to engage in "experimental genetic therapy" (ie, "wouldn't it be great to have photosynthetic skin?", or "gosh, i'd love to be able to synthesize proteins from rock!" or "why don't i reactivate some mammalian tail genes?", or "you know what, i think i'll make sure that i don't have any genetic parity errors; time for the quintuple helix!").
You: Name one?
He's donated quite a lot of money to charity. He's created employment for thousands of people. Granted, he's not on the Pope's short list for Canonization, but that's exactly my point. I'm not defending the bad things he's done, only pointing out that, like everyone else, he does good things and bad things. If you want him to stop doing the bad things, you have to appeal to something good in him. If you only see him as the enemy, he will ever remain that.
Thye may also be a little too anti-freedom for some of the less Socialist around here.
Java is the blue pill
Choose the red pill
"We didn't create this world. God did. "
And you are ready to prove this, right?
Java is the blue pill
Choose the red pill
(Ha ha. Love the goth sig.)
While I agree that there should be a moratorium on genetic foods (a la bovine hormones), I don't think the best way to understand DNA is to be limited by ethical constraints. If someone wants to tinker with human zygotes in a lab, by all means do it. How else would we learn what the human genome does? The fact is, we are going to at some point HAVE to make gruesome mistakes.
Anyone: How many times you sat down and wrote a lengthy piece of code, and it compiled and run succesfully with zaero boogs? Not!!! All the planning in the world won't free us from the first pass of genetic fuckups.
We just need to stomach it and get over our naive nature to overinflate the value of life. It's just a machine, folks, a very complicated machine.
Oh yeah, although he'd probably wretch at my last comment, vote Hagelin.
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https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
So, they might be a little too anti-corporate for some of the more wealthy around here.
Xactly. Nader would be my choice if he wasn't so anti-wealthy. I share some Libertarian and Green ideals, but unfortunately I'm their target because I make more than 100k/yr. Funny how I'm villified by some of their supporters just for being a reasonably decent hacker...
I think that was offtopic...
But, I'll say it again:
Vote Hagelin 2000
I think he has a much better understanding and foresight necessary to handle the these heavy genetic and environmental issues better than Nader or Gore... unfortunately he lacks Gore's soft-money supporters, and Nader's teamsters unions.
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https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Ok, I can understand why you would take shot at the first part: obviously in your mind meditation smacks of Hinduism which smacks of religion in schools. Understandable. Personally, I'm compleletly appalled and embarassed by the Jesus myth and having the 10-commandments forced into schools. Ergo, John had better keep TM discussion out of the media if he hopes to be taken seriously by the (narrow-minded) masses.
However it is important to explain to people that an activity used in religious ceremonies doesn't make it a religious activity when used out of context. I don't readily see how you could defend relaxation techniques as being particularly 'religious', but it would be a fun debate.
As for part II, what's that all about? I never heard of that and would like to better understand it so I can rebuff it. (if it is rebuffable, that is...)
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https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Nobody has voted on whether he or she wants to live in a world with only healthy, cheerful, smart and attractive inhabitants.
Perhaps because anyone who wants to live in a world with only miserable, diseased, stupid, ugly people would by definition be insane.
I should point out that in a world with diminishing limited resources, and runaway overpopulation, that I feel fertility clinics and sperm banks are just wrong. I also feel that it is morally wrong to reproduce if you are knowingly passing on severe genetic disorders. To say that it's wrong to test sperm banks for genetic disorders is equivalent to saying that it's wrong to test food for toxic contamination.
It is also important to remember that only in the beginning will it be a matter of removing contaminated samples, eventually they will be able to remove the genetic defects themselves.
And one thing I haven't seen mentioned yet: it's not all genes.
The debate of nature vs. nurture is a very important one, and will not be solved for quite a long time.
You can pay ridiculous amounts of money to engineer your children all you want, folks. I'm just going to make sure mine have a good, strong upbringing.
-A. Aria, former molecular biologist
When I read the tidbit on the home page, I though who the hell is hunkapiller,even though I no about the HGP, I never paid attention to the names. Actually that names sounds like a BS name someone could make up for some little annectdote.
Jon Katz is an idiot.
Yes, and he's not a household name like other idiots, such as Bill Gates...
This arguably makes Dr. Hunkapiller one of the most important men in the world, since his company controls most of the machinery that makes such mapping possible. It's hard to argue that Gates, for all his billions, will have a fraction of his influence. Maybe if not for Gates, Computers will not be wild spread, and perhaps technology will not have advanced, thus the technology that helped Hunkapiller would not have existed, So how can you say that Gates will have a fraction of his influence? Life is funny like that, very small changes makes a big influence, for example, the guys that invented the transistor, you can give them credit for everything we have today, computers, cellphone, tv, vcr. Even the simple actions by a commoner on the street can really change the world in a big way, so don't come here telling us how great Hunkapiller is. Hunkapiller is not great, he is just another man, we are all important in one way or the other.
Time does not wait.
Moderate this up !!!!
I didn't get this sentiment from the article at all, though I can see this interpretation. I think Jon was highlighting that the possibility is of a world which may be homogenized.
The concern I have is that in "slightly modifying" a gene here and a gene there that we might accidentally remove traits from the population for which we don't measure (or for which we can't measure!).
By removing certain "issues" from the genetic chaos which is life, we will explicitly remove other characteristics of the human body, but we may implicitly remove characteristics of the human spirit.
We might pick up on changes to the human body (brain, brawn, whatever) and make various adjustments.
What truly concerns me is that we may remove something of the human spirit for which we could not recover.
Before people start reprogramming life by altering DNA on a commercial scale (i.e. in the same way Microsoft commercialized application software), they may first want to try to come up with a bugfree version of Windows! I, for one, would never want to have my kid genetically altered, and discover some hidden 'features' (read: bugs) in his DNA when he gets older...
Actually, while his article was very confusing and not well written, I saw some defense of his work and "donation" to the HGP, even if Katz doesn't agree with genetic modification in the first place.
How shall I explain this... Well, I'm sure that many people remember Gattaca, it has been mentioned in this artical. I guess so much that it is a good example. so I am going to make my own example. For the record I am a type one diabetic, this apparantly means that I always had a genetic predisposition to diabetes (well I did get it)
Take this company Celera, what is if they did manage to successfuly aquire a patent. Then lets suppose that they have the 'Diabetes Gene' and they sell it to a company, lets call it 'DiaTreat' (it doesn't exist, I made it up, and if it does, there is no relation to this example, and please do not sue me, I have no money).
So, DiaTreat develop a gene treatment to eliminate the Diabetes gene, but this needs to be done at conception (O.K. I have NO medical training, so if I am wrong, I am sorry) and since they 'own' this treatment they decide to put a sizable charge on this treatment. Now, I know that if I have children there is a high chance that they too will contract diabetes. Now lets suppose that I cannot afford it. So my children have this risk. So, now there is an easy test to find out the DNA (then, the future, not Now today) My children may not contract Diabetes, but insurance companies might not insure them, employers like the Emergency Services, Police and the Defence Forces could refuse to enploy them because of their RISK. Now, I'm not talking every corporation like in Gattaca, these people already have the power to refuse employment to me because i have diabetes... but there is a major difference between having and at a risk. everyone is at risk of everything.
I guess that the point that I am trying to make (oh yes there is one buried in there) is that it isn't the people that develop this technology that are the dangerous ones, it those who manipulate and use it incorrectly that are... look at the motor car, how many millions have did in motor accidents since their introduction? is that the inventors fault, no, is it the motor companies, no. It is those who use the motor car that cause the accidents.
O.K. Begining Rant... We as a society need to take responsability for such issues, this is much deeper than some technology getting out of hand, if our socity was healty (and lets face it, it isn't) such things would not happen, but because as a society (and I am not talking, Australian, American, English or any country, I am talking globally) if we took responsability for what happens within our socity the world would indeed be a much better place. O.K. End of Rant.
Maybe I'm an idealist, maybe I do not understand Social Science, maybe you think that I am a raving idiot, but that is my view and I feel that if people looked at the bigger picture and took note of what was actually going on in the world and not just what they wanted in their world there would be far less wrong with our society.
Leg Godt!
Gates, as is widely agreed, is pure evil. He defines the "step on the little guy to make a buck" philosophy. He has crushed countless promising software companies and holds the world's desktop users in a proprietary death-grip.
Doctor Frankenstien (sorry, Hunkapiller) has paved the way for numerous medical benefits. However, he has also paved the way for some of our worst nightmares to come true.
Maybe just sticking to p0rn isn't such a bad idea...
---
Gort! Klatu Barata Nikto!
A better analogy would be Philo T. Farnsworth, inventor of the Cathode-Ray Tube (and the man that Professor Hubert Farnsworth on Futurama takes his name from).
Yet Gates is a household word
Gates already was a household word, as in, "Open the gates of the mansion so Senator Bedfellow can park his Ferrari."
You must be a Delta or something. And that's a compliment.
Brave New World has everything to do with this issue. I have read it several times and the idea, not the method, is what makes it a very important window into the potential future.
In the novel, society has changed to a point that humans are grown for a certain purpose, and there is no responsibility inherent in choosing to bring a child into the world with another person. In fact, the lifestyle and culture is entirely based upon this one fact:
This is the essence of the similarity between the present time and that book. As a matter of fact, right now (not in the near future when pre-pregnancy gene testing has begun) people can see what the entire genetic makeup of their child is before they have to call it a child. And that is why they do not have any responsibility, as in the novel. They can change their mind and there is no physical record of their choice. If someone on the 'human assembly line' in BNW decided to empty one of the tubes, there would be no record of that choice.
When someone gets a genetic readout of what their offspring will be like, and uses this as a basis for whether they will have children, then he or she is performing the same action as those that performed the alterations to the testtubes in BNW.
Sarge
Could we stop ourselves from becoming human instead of staying monkees? Nope. Technology is the same thing. We cannot really stop it even if we wanted to. The more you forbid something, the more people want to know about it. The real problem here is that when you become "PERFECT" and that you can't catch disease, have abnormalities and live forever, where is the challenge of life? Life become so easy for you that you get bored like hell. Why do you think the suicidal rate is so high these days when it was almost nil 50 years ago? People are bored. 50 years ago or more, people worked so much that they didn't had the time to think about anything else and it gave them a continuing challenge, but today you can sit on your butt, claim welfare and survive that easily. Not much life threatening situation anymore and people feel less alive. I don't say we should works harder, but live better! What we do in our lives isn't really life important. Always a distraction, but not really fulfilling inside of us. So all in all, we can become better geneticaly, but spiritualy, nothing will have changed at all even with better body. We aren't evolving the right way so very soon we'll hit a wall that might smash us more than we believe. That we'll have to see...
If you think the 'digital divide' is an issue now, wait till the rich can not only better educate their kids, but buy them better genes as well. Permanently stratified society.
Just because we fear that man's dark side will get the better of him doesn't mean we should stop research. We just have to believe that we'll be ready to use that knowledge wisely when we do get it.
I have to wait a few days?? Screw that. Oh wait, I will. Never mind.
"I live in a world of make-believe, with faeries and leprechauns and tiny little frogs with funny hats."
Genomics has got to be the scariest thing that I can imagine happening to our global society. The powers that genetics have, the promise of curing horrible diseases and defect are truly awe inspiring and not inconsiderable, but the awful likelihood of misuse is greater. Our world is just not yet ready or responsible enough to handle such potent knowledge.
The form of genomics that has people scared has a name -- eugenics. We've done it in the animal world for centuries, even millenia. However, as Jon Entine notes in his book on the genotypic advantages of certain genetic populations in sports (review coming to TOTK.com Sports at some point), humanity has this nice habit of sleeping around. =)
It will be interesting to see if humanity is willing to breed along such lines. In some ways, it's already being done with sperm banks, etc. I don't know that it's the right way to go, but I can't make everyone's decisions for them.
See, the nasty bit with this is that genetic research has so much power to fix what's currently wrong (as taken from the norm) with the human organism in the singular. It remains to be seen whether we take the next step into attempting to improve on the human species . . . and I don't think that will be very pretty.
--
<><
-- Geof F. Morris
And, if one believes in a god, one shouldn't use its name as a mask to oppose the use of the mind that S/He/It gave to us.
Science discovers a kind of truth, sometimes that truth can be molded into technology. Sometimes that technology has two sides, a beneficial side and a non-beneficial one. It depends on the individual to decide which side is used. Nuclear fission, which you mentioned, gave us both nuclear power and nuclear weapons. Do you blame the scientists who discovered nuclear fission for the decisions of the politicians? And do you really think it was the german scientists during the third reich who set up the holocaust concentration camps? You don't think that, say, Hitler and Goebbles and Himmler had a little more to do with all that?
Scientists aren't the enemy, science isn't an abomination in the eyes of a god. The real enemy is ignorance and closed minds, which are the real causes of abhorrent actions like the holocaust.
The next time you see nazis lurking in the shadows, check to make sure whose shadow it is; it might be yours. Not just you in particular, AC, but everyone. Sometimes what we see on the outside is what comes from deep within.
Anybody seen the movie Gattica? (gattaca?)
Jon, had you heard of Bill Gates in 1981? I doubt too many people were familiar with the name back then (except for maybe some BASIC hackers who had, uh, corresponded with Mr. Gates). Yet in the two decades since, Bill Gates and his company have (indisputably) changed computing -- changed it to the extent that now the vast majority of Americans can correctly identify him. Perhaps when Dr. Hunkapiller has served another 20 years in this capacity (and become the richest man in the world doing so) then he will occupy the same place in the American consciousness.
However, I'm not entirely sure the analogy fits. Bill Gates set out with a mission to put a computer on every desktop, in every home. (In other words, World DominationTM.) That is, by nature, a very public mission. I'm not sure that Dr. Hunkapiller will seek to occupy the same niche.
In any case, I think it's far to early to draw any conclusions from the relative fame (or is it notoriety?) of Bill Gates.
yours,
john
..that mister Hunkapiller needs to read the book called 'how to indoctrinate the world' by Bill Gates. Maybe then he will be known better ;)
Is any one else sick of the ignorant suits(marketers, politicians, etc...) that like to spout out a lot of BS and get in the way of real scientists when they have no clue what they are talking about?
"The 85 I fear they don't got a clue."
Only a very select few care enough or are adventurous to venture from well-trodden paths -- this is certainly true of OS's and probably would be no less so of genetics. And generally people only change when there is a good reason too; people aren't very apt to "experiment" with their own bodies unless they expect a good return on investment.
And since evolution is on a large scale, there's no reason to think that small aberrations will affect the course of evolution.
I guess you didn't read your history very well. If you did you might remember that Hilter had the Pope's blessing for a while. A lot of people joined the Nazi Cause because it had God's blessing. They were doing God's will. As far as the 'white-coat guys' are concerned, who is being more amoral? Them for developing our understanding of our own genetics, or you for labeling them as being amoral and having bulging brains? As far as I'm concerned, it is not the scientists who need to understand the consequences of their work but rather the rest of us. We are the ones who will inevitable decide how this technology will be used.
"once created, these technologies will be USED."
Poor choice for an example, since no one has used a nuclear weapon (outside of testing them) since WWII ended over half a century ago. Maybe we can be trusted with these technologies after all....
What does this have to do with liberalism????
You guys are having a totally pointless flame war. Haven't either of you grown up enough to know never to get in a religious debate?
No computer of any sort will ever be able to predict exactly what events are going to occur in a human life, how those events will be percieved, and how they will affect the physical structure of the brain. This somehow relates to what you were saying....somehow....don't ask me how....
I worked at Applied Biosystems from 1990-1999, and I worked with Tor on the 3700. I agree with Tor's description of Mike Hunkapillar. I too was very impressed with the corporate style that Mike supports. I was always impressed with the fact that his 'office' was the same as everyone else, although maybe a few sq. ft. bigger. Mike does eat in the company cafeteria same as everyone else, and always demonstrated respect for other employees. BTW, I hear from those that worked with Mike in the early years of AB that Mike is an avid trekkie. As to the agressive business practices. I expect there is some truth to them, especially for the 3700, which was behind schedule and facing the prospect of being upstaged by the MegaBace machine. Probably FUD played a role in their marketing plans. In addition, the creation of Celera looked to me somewhat like a marketing play to upstage the MegaBace. PE Bio gave Celera a lot of money which went back to them in terms of a huge pre-order for the 3700, at a time when the MegaBace looked to be coming out first. I could go on, but alas I should get some work done for my current employer...a spinoff of Applied Biosystems. I would definetly work at Applied Bio again, if only they offered a competative stock option plan.
Running a simulation of the effects of a single point mutation over the period of your lifetime is a problem that makes the human genome project look tiny in comparison. Today we can't even successfully model how a single protein folds, and the problem of modeling even a single cell for a few hours dwarfs the 'Protein Folding Problem' by tens of orders of magnitude. Any 'human simulation' scheme is going to have computational requirements that make the combined computational resources of todays internet look miniscule. (Desktop sequencers will make intel and cisco rich beyond even their wildest dreams.) As for a defense mechanism, your body already has "ICE" against other things modifying your genetic code. It's called "The Immune System."
You're exactly right. The amount of work left to do makes the human genome project look like a brainstorming session between some generals at the beginning of a war. All the really interesting things are yet to come.
Sequencers are data collection peripherals. P.E. Biosystems has more similarities with a manufacturer of milling machines, electron microscopes, or wave soldering equipment than to cisco or microsoft. Although P.E. Biosystems occupies an interesting and important niche in the market, it is just that.
The interesting and revolutionary work is done elsewhere, and the real industrial powerhoses will probably be the firms which manage and interpret the data that is collected.
2 different arguments I'm afraid. and BTW hindsight is a poor argument. Anyway...perhaps we can look at the problem this way. There is a individual and we want to promote the best the healthiest, the smartest, etc. for that individual. A personal ubermensch as it were. Couples or single parents have a wide lattitude of what they consider 'advantaged', or better. For some it would be healthier or longer living. For others it would be smarts. For others still it would be some of the left brain activities like ability to paint or sing or write or do television commercials. For others yet it would be pure physical attractiveness. I can imagine some parents wanting their children not too too smart in lieu of being better socialized . Fine. That's the individual.
Populations have different criteria for wanting to engineer the person. Perhaps you friendly local government wants to reduce antisocial behavior or learning disabilities or the tendency to smoke rock. And the hell with everything else. Just not their problem whether the the resulting person is fat stupid and short lived or not. Populations really have no interest in individual performance whether that's mandated by science, gov't or evolution. It's simply not important. What is important is that those traits that drag down the population on average be eliminated or reduced. That is, eliminate the sickest or most violent 10% and the average performance of everybody else starts to look pretty damn good. The population as a whole does not benefit if you think your offspring have a better chance when they are right handed, left brained and a have a good golf swing. But the individual can benefit from unique tweaking if that person's parents made the right choices. <Let's hope the ability to make good choices about one's children is a trait that must be left in the pool>.
Anyway that's all I can think of for now.
It took years for Bill to get to the point where his name was common knowlege. And it's difficult to blame individuals too much for the fact that the cult of personality hasn't built around him yet. When it comes to this sort of thing, it's very much driven by the media, and until they start breathlessly describing everything that he does, he won't enter the popular mainstream culture.
It's possible that 10 years from now, we may talk about him that way, but it's too early now Jon.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
Hmmm, don't think "Hunkapiller" is poised for mass brainwashing ala "Gates"; would seem to induce more snickering than boot licking syncophantic genie-ass worship.
But another syndrome in the ascendancy of trendy diseases is Sensory Integration Dysfunction!
Have a fun day
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
saying what is perfect (which is subjective anyway)
As subj suggests, used to be "what is perfect" is "what survives to reproduce", or "what gets chosen as a mate for reproduction" - I guess with custom genetics the latter will predominate. I mean, looking at pet cockatiels, I'm wondering: Why do they have that orange dot over their ears? What POSSIBLE contribution to survival does it or other seemingly unimportant features impart? Or is it the result of many years of sexual selection, where cockatiels just prefer mating with other birds with orange dots over their ears? So if someone makes or passes a genetic alteration, it will survive if all potential mates don't scream, "ew, yuck!!" and run away.
Have a fun day
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
If anyone has read the Iain M. Banks 'Culture' novels, you might know where I'm going with this..
Genetic manipulation is fine and could push humans into the next stage of 'evolution' if you will. That all depends on the society that governs genetical manipulation is 'grown up' and 'civilized' enough to be able to accept it in every day life and not discriminate. Self-modification based on needs of the environment or even person will COULD be a viable future and a healthy one, providing EVERYONE involved is mature enough to handle it properly.
Of course, the Culture novels are an idealistic concept but I think anyone who reads them would see that genetic manipulation is shown to 'work' in those stories as the Culture is sufficiently advanced to be able to handle it properly.
At this stage of the game though, it's anyone's guess what will happen. And more and more people will guess (probably correctly) that there will be problems before there's the 'utopia'.
--
Delphis
It's WAY easier to modify the genes of a single cell than to get an entire mass of cells to accept the same modification.
The "genetic therapy" trials that that have gone on involve getting just enough cells to accept and express the gene (two separate problems, both siginificant) to produce some substance or other that the body lacks. Theoretically, then, you could design extra genes to make, say, growth hormone (that don't respond as well to the signals that normally turn off production when the 'normal' level of the hormone is reached) - but then you have to deal with the variable amount of the gene that will be expressed - will the baby be essentially normal, or a severe acromegaly victim?
No, I think 'whole body' genetic therapies will ALWAYS be limited to "getting the body to make just enough of a substance that is completely missing from it to keep the host from suffering severe disease". Cosmetically (as another poster mentioned), you could do things like increase melanin production (or, conversely, produce 'antisense' RNA that inhibits melanin production), but then again, it'd still be hard to keep from getting a "mottled" effect. (Plus, if the government funded any of the research, we might have to listen to Al Gore telling us he invented black people :-) )
Now, vat-grown tailored ORGANS, on the other hand, make an interesting possibility. There you might run into some mild abuses - imagine a tailored liver that produces extra alcohol dehydrogenase and acetaldehyde dehydrogenase, to be used as a replacement liver for a chronic alcoholic. Then again, though, there's the issue of expense. Insurance may cover the liver replacement surgery, but probably not the premium cost of a "special order" liver.
Joe Sixpack is dead!
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
First: Gates has only started donating to charity very recently--long after he become the richest man in the world. Some might even argue that this is an attempt to soften his image. In Seattle, only a few short years ago he was famously stingy--with everyone.
Secondly: Yes, Gates is the founder of a company that writes checks to thousands of people. But does this fact alone mean that his contribution is a positive one? If you take the position, like me, that Gates is, in fact, a monopoly, you would certainly not see it this way. Gates didn't create the "computer revolution" through some genius. Gates rode it. Worse yet, by stiffling competition, he's significantly reduced everyone's wealth (except for MS's of course).
Lastly: I agree with you that it is foolish to paint things in black and white; atleast to the extent that it blinds you and lessens your ability to fight back. This does not mean, however, that people don't do selfish, greedy, and immoral things.
In the case of Gates, I don't think his intentions are malicious per se. Rather, I think his actions are selfishly motivated, actions that many humans might commit in the same situation. What's more, I believe that Gates actually believes a lot of the stuff he says...I've seen it before in others. When you start to lie enough, and repeat it to yourself enough, it becomes truth to you.
Windows DNA... (wait, that's taken already) Anyway. BSODs on genes would just be bad. And literal. New meaning to "Abort, Retry, Fail?" I suppose.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
Jon,
You're making an appeal to morality. Morality on the basis
of what? One of the key problems with our culture's attachment
to postmodenism is that there is an acceptance of moral relativism.
The problem with moral relativism is that there is no objective basis
for determining right and wrong. This means that there is nothing
to which you can philosophically appeal for making a judgement of what
is right (or wrong.)
Ideas have consequences, people!
The outcome of our rejection of moral absolutes provides us with no
compass when it comes to making decisions about genetic engineering,
abortion, and all other issues.
Keep on failing to think through your philosophies and their consequenses.
"When they came for the Jews I did not stand up and fight, because I was
not a Jew.....when they came for me, there was no one left to fight for
me." The issue in that illustration demonstrates that there is a
RIGHT and a WRONG. Moral relativism provides no basis for knowing
right and wrong.
Our culture has been sliding down the slippery slope for 50 years.
Just a few more years of this trend before we collapse under the weight
of our thoughtlessness and selfishness.
Cling to morality with a solid foundation and you will have a basis for hope!
Respectfully,
Anomaly.
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
"Paranoia self-destroy-ya"
_______
2B1ASK1
We all know that once a medium brings pornography to its customers, it becomes wildly popular. We all know how Cable became a hit once Cinemax brought us porn, and the internet became popular once it was considered the prime choice for porn-carrying. So, I envision a future where everyone has, not a computer, but a home genomics kit, on their desk, from which they attain their porn. Once the human genome is fully understood, this will be no problem and we will be able to alter human growth so that the birth cycle of a test-tube baby is days instead of months, so we can have a fully-grown sex-person of one's choice.
Of course this is all speculative. Any suggestions?
(Remember, I'm always kidding)
-Leo
Agreed - why must we panic over every new technology. Why is it BAD for me to want my children to be happy, healthy, attractive, and smart - as long as my concern is helping them not controlling them.
I have a sad suspicion that some people have so identified with being an "outgroup," being ostracized, that the idea of genetic engineering is threatening. "Oh no, the world has more beautiful stable and happy people, what value is there in being ostracized and thus cooly angst-ridden?"
Technology produces results and repercussions. Let's review those and make our choices. But let's stop whining about changing the world - the world is always changing. Let's make decisions instead of just panicking.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
Not to be disrespectful, but what is the point of this article? Hunkapiller is smart? Gates is bad? Corporatist america ignores talent?
We just needed to know about Hunkapiller and why we should know about him. Trying to put a sociopolitical spin on the man's life and work only serves to degrade his achievements by making them part of a screed.
So let's give the guy the credit he deserves, but let's not drag him into rants and screeds, since he obviously deserves better than that.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
"Nobody has voted on whether he or she wants to live in a world with only healthy, cheerful, smart and attractive inhabitants."
:)
;-\
I vote "Yes."
You mean smurfs, don't you?
Most of the world's greatest art and many scientific breakthroughs were made by obsessive maladjusted freaks.
I vote "No".
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Our world is just not yet ready or responsible enough to handle such potent knowledge.
And just how would you know when the world is ready? Do you have a handy metric to measure the humanity's readiness for applied genetics? And who is going to make the judgement, anyway?
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Do you think these future humans with twisted spines, diseases, mental retardation, deformities, etc, etc, will THANK you for not allowing their parents to correct these things?
Not allowing? Where did you get this idea? I was not talking about what should be allowed and what should be prohibited. I just made an observation that a world composed of perpetually cheerful uniformly beautiful people who are always happy because their genetics will not allow them to be any other way doesn't strike me as a good place.
This is not an argument to forbig genetic meddling, far from it. It's more a counterpoint to the possibility of government-imposed mandatory happiness: "No, Ms.Smith, we cannot allow you to bear this baby to term because he is likely to be significantly below average in height and have slight autistic tendencies...". A bit of reflection (and reading of SF) should convince you that left to themselves a lot of people would choose pop-culture stereotypes, but a noticeable minority will choose something that will make an average Joe Schmoe blanch. And that is a good thing, too.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Self-important judgemental jackass. Not everybody needs to care about the same things that you do. And those of us who don't are not "wrong" or somehow less intelligent or less morally-concerned than you are. We just lead different lives.
Yet another crusade/devil's advocate piece with all the necessary ingredients to get Slashdot people posting, and the ad-counters rolling over.
Sheesh.
Jon Katz is turning into Jesse Berst - it's the same trick.
"This guy is being compared to the great SATAN, Bill Gates!!!!"
Get over it, Katz. Try some proper journalism for a change.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Only a very select few care enough or are adventurous to venture from well-trodden paths -- this is certainly true of OS's and probably would be no less so of genetics. And generally people only change when there is a good reason too; people aren't very apt to "experiment" with their own bodies unless they expect a good return on investment. [bold mine]
Yeah right, my little sister's still waiting for those nose-ring dividends to roll in...
And since evolution is on a large scale, there's no reason to think that small aberrations will affect the course of evolution.
Again I disagree. Over the course of generations of human reproduction, the numbers would probably fall in the "butterfly flaps wings in Africa, starts monsoon in Bangladesh" range of mathematics. Small changes now can easily multiply their effects over generations. Nothing major in our lifetimes, but we might be a different race 1000 years from now, and the change, for better or worse, will be enabled by this early gene research.
-jpowers
-jpowers
is deep water. And needles. And meeting the perfect woman and having her turn out to be...a Christian. ;P
Half Serious: My creators were a couple of stoned hippies who couldn't bother to lie to me about Santa Claus.
Full-on Serious: We are all threatened by any ideology which leads its followers towards intellectual sloth. There is a level of stupidity below which you cannot reason morally, and this is where ideological amoralism starts. The "any price for my faith" concept is just fine as long as you're the one paying it. The second you Bible-thumping halfwits try to take other people's minds and lives as yours to sacrifice, I'm going to be there to call you on it. Example:
It's time we excercised some common sense and put a stop to this madness.
Implication: you have a right to stop someone from doing scientific research which directly and immediately harms... no one. You do not. You DO have a right to keep science from affecting you or your children directly, but not by stepping on someone else's curiosity and free will. Wait until they offer the treatment, then say 'no'. See how easy that is? And no one has to get shot.
I work at a non-profit cancer research organization that tests drugs to help people get well again. All year round I get e-mail off the webpage contact link: "Cancer is God's will, stop trying to change God's plan." Oh yeah? Well, your God made people so their organs go ballistic and eat them alive. That is going to stop. Either He can come down here and fix it Himself, or we'll do it for... ourselves.
We will take responsibility for our own destiny, because there is no morally acceptable alternative. The morally unacceptable alternatives include: letting people die for no good reason at all, letting "nature" push us around, or leaving it all to God's will. There is no fundamental difference in these, when they all result in inaction.
And fear...well, I live right down the street from where John Salvi took an AK-47 to the employees of a women's clinic. I lived in FL when some asshole did the same with a shotgun. Do whatever you want with your amoral, responsibility-denying religion, just don't fucking include me.
-jpowers
-jpowers
Okay, so we fought the Nazis for the right to have a capitalist society whose successful members strive to do everything the Nazis wanted to do to the human race. I could, but won't, argue with you on that. I just find it very amusing logic. :)
Why is giving your children an advantage bad? Why is successsful capitalism a threat to anyone? Let's put it this way.
Capitalism run amok is threatening individual privacy and freedom. You have a choice -- capitalism or freedom. What would you choose? A rich slave, or a poor but liberated man?
Genetic manipulation run amok will allow certain people to be decidedly superior than other people. You have a choice -- genomics or equality. What would you choose? Do you really think that you'll be in the top tier of humanity? What happens when someone else emerges as decidedly (and legally) better than you?
History has shown that when a group of people are oppressed and their liberties threatened, it presages turmoil and bloody conflict. Things that threaten our liberty must be applied with caution and monitored closely, because if they become a dominant force we may no longer be able to stop them, short of a total revolution. Genetic manipulation invites caste systems and prejudice. If it is not applied cautiously and equally to the entire race, it will be a precursor to hatred and war.
You have a choice -- advance into the future at full speed and invite conflict and armageddon, or take it more cautiously and let morality guide our tech. What would you choose?
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
Selfishness and greed. Makes one wonder if the human race deserves to survive.
Wrong answer private. Animals do the same thing. They want their offspring to have better chances to survive than other animals. Its the law of nature. Survival. Members of the feline family have been known to eat offspring of other prides to ensure sufficent resources for their own progeny. Do they deserve to live? Its survival of fittest, and always has been. Do my kids "deserve" to survive more than yours? I dont know, thats a moral question. But I will do whatever it takes to make sure my kids will survive, hopefully NOT at the expense of others. However I would be remiss as a parent *NOT* to give them whatever advantages I can.
Yes, animals do the same thing. No need to go as far as the feline family -- primates have been observed killing the children of their competitors in their tribe. It's natural to compete against your own race, to use any means necessary to make sure your genes live on and theirs dies out.
But we're not animals any more. Animals can't alter themselves and their progeny with precision and imagination. Individual animals can't destroy their entire race, or the entire planet, with short-sighted competition and greed.
If we continue acting like animals, determined to get any advantage we can get over our fellows, then there's a good chance we'll all perish -- in designer plagues, in unforseen genetic damage, or in good old fashioned caste warfare. Aren't just just as remiss as a parent if your meddling insures that they and their world die in a bloody conflict?
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
nobody can 'corner the human genome market'.. that'd be like saying you can corner the market the recipe for chocolate chip cookies.
first of all there's a million ways to make a cookie, and the directions for doing so are already available everywhere.
The latter statement may be true, but it's irrelevent in the realm of patent law. If patents are being granted for the sole use of an important gene, once discovered, then it doesn't matter that everyone else now knows about the gene and had it concealed in his/her body all along. Patents, by their very nature, prohibit anyone from achieving a certain result, irrespective of how anyone goes about doing so. It doesn't matter that there are millions of ways of putting together a human being so as not to include that gene, since the vast majority of the current installed user base (us) already rely upon that gene's existence. It's concerns like these that make patent reform in this area imperative.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
The Federal Reserve caused the Great Depression, by deflating the currency. Depressions usually only last seven years, except that FDR's policies caused a depression *within* the depression ('33). It was only as bad as it was because of governmental intervention.
As for your second paragraph, well, I just got an apology letter along with a credit on my bill along with a $5 calling card from Hell Atlantic. Hell Atlantic is a big company by anyone's standards.
Natural monopolies are extremely rare. Pick any monopoly that affects your life. Its existance is predicated in government intervention in the market (yes, even Microsoft -- where do you think they got their copyright from?). Yes, companies try to merge to form a monopoly, but without government intervention, the monopoly cannot be sustained.
I don't think consumers (such as you) understand enough about economics to be allowed to regulate it through government action.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
True, as far as it goes. However, corporations are regulated by the market. If it doesn't please a sufficient number of people, a corporation goes out of business.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
The real question is, is Hunka-whoever a geek who was harassed for being an outsider in a neo-apocalyptic Columbine-esque highschool? This sounds like a job for the open-source youth-driven New Media, Jon.
Well, the bigger issue about this is passing on a potential condition to someone (via the sperm bank) that is unaware of the condition. Prior knowledge of many medical conditions allows one to use a larger set of prevention, and can aid a doctor in diagnosing a problem at an earlier stage, when it can be treated more easily. If the sperm bank had this knowledge, and the to-be-parents that chose 'him' were aware of this, they may or may not have made the same decision, but they would have been aware, and that is what makes the bigger difference.
If I know that there is a history of (alzheimers/heart problems/cancer/asthma) in my family, should I not have children, since sometime late in their life, they might have to deal with these problems (assuming no advances in medicine)? I don't think that's the case. Would I anonymously donate my seed without it being accompanied by the proper information. No, I don't think that is right, either.
A family that I know had two children, the second of whom had Cystic Fibrosis. After consultation with their doctor, it was found that the chances of any of their children being affected was about 25%. They went ahead and had a third child, who was healthy, but they took that chance, because of the joys of being a parent, and the fact that they could provide a good life for their children, even if a life was shortened by a disease.
Tough decisions, and a lot of ethics. A perfect race may seem great, but what will we sacrifice to get there?
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
exactly - Katz's article is completely subjective and unimportant. How many of our lives are currently affected by computers? How many of our lives are currently affected by high-speed gene sequencers?
The thing Katz is forgetting in his usual attempts at fear-mongering in the name of editorializing is that as soon as gene sequencing becomes an important social issue--that is, as soon as someone proposes using the results of the HGP to start tinkering with the genome of a baby in a major way--we will get a crash course in who the players in the field are by the press. Just as we got a crash course in who Bill Gates was in '95 when the Feds went after Microsoft big-time for the first time in a press-worthy way.
Just as I'm currently getting a crash course (no pun intended) on the Concord after one crashed in France this morning, by CNBC.
The press doesn't bother telling us about people who aren't currently affecting our lives. But as soon as someone pops onto the cultural radar in a big way--for example, as soon as someone creates a successful fusion reactor (for example), I can guarentee that within 48 hours we will have an in-depth biography of the scientists who successfully created the reactor, the companies and universities who were working on the reactor, the reactions of the existing power companies, and all of the other details ad-nauseum.
Self-important judgemental jackass. Not everybody needs to care about the same things that you do. And those of us who don't are not "wrong" or somehow less intelligent or less morally-concerned than you are. We just lead different lives.
I have to agree. The fact of the matter is that while paranoid people like Katz may have visions of Gattaca dancing in his head, the reality is that the HGP currently only affects the potential long term investment outlook for the large pharmaceuticals. For someone who tends to watch CNBC in the morning (because I can't stomache Regis and Kathy Lee), I actually have heard of many of the players in the HGP--because at least in the relm of the drug companies (and people who may buy drug company stock), it's important stuff.
But just as soon as the results of the HGP affects more than the bottom line of a half-dozen large pharmacuticals, we'll get the in-depth biographies, the timelines, and the movie of the week.
There is a big difference between what is seen as "aggressive tactics" in business and playing God. You can't compare anti-cometitive tactics to genetically engeneering an army of mutants. Just because Gates has a counterpart from a business perspective in the Genomics field, doesn't mean we are in for Gattica.
Oh, and if the Government thought something was going on, don't you think they'd step in like they did with MS? People are going to be very careful with things like morality.
Being with you, it's just one epiphany after another
Genomics is scarey, yes. The only way you will be able to change how the technology impacts your own life is to understand and develop it, not stick your head in the sand. I'd be far more worried about the thousands of Nuclear Missiles that are locked and loaded as we speak than any possible impacts 20 generations down the road from sequencing technology. Personally, I'd be suprised if life, on Earth, anyhow lasts that long. People are violent and irrational animals in groups, and they do horrific things like try and exterminate each other for as long as history has been recorded.
Personally, I would LOVE to know what each gene in my body does. DNA is fascinating; It's life's source code, and we don't even know what the symbols are yet! What we have is a really bad dissassembly and the odd bit of text to figure out what's going on. If there's one thing that makes life interesting to me, it's learning new stuff. And this certainly qualifies.
If our world is ready to stare down nuclear anhillation every single day for as long as homo sapiens contines to breathe on this planet, we're ready for Genetic Engineering. I'd rather see resources spent on engineering human genomes than engineering an airborne Ebola. Which your tax dollars subsidize, along with stockpiles of lots of other biological and chemical nasties. You think Brave New World was bad? Take a look at what a modern aerosol neurotoxin will do to your insides in a few minutes. And the USA is a world leader in "weapons of mass destruction" aka "facilitators of government genocide".
..don't panic
Here's something else. How is genetic engineering any different than picking a mate who's smart, looks good, and/or has a good family health history? Let's think about this: You can spend a lot of money chasing a signigigant other, and in my own current (serious) relationship, one of the factors is that she's good looking, and _very_ smart. If my kids did the same thing, and their kids did the same thing - the result would be the same as if I had imparted genes to them artifically, in that the offspring from these relationships would _undoubtedly_ have a genetic advantage over their peers. We do with with animals all the time.
How is this any different? Money and resources are involved along the way in just the same manner, as is genetic makeup.
..don't panic
I live in Canada; But I sure as hell have a Blue Cross card in my wallet just like all my American friends, and if you saw what a trip to the dentist or a few extra tests cost, or glasses, etc, you'd be shocked if it came out of your wallet. We have a two-tier system in Canada. Nobody just wants to call it that.
..don't panic
If you want it that way, probably. But there are other choices. BTW, I once read in scientific american that Bangladesh has better health care (for ex. fewer dead babys per 1000 births) than some areas in the USA. Does that make you proud?
I'm Canadian, and our health care is OK, but it's in shambles. And I give near $2,000/month under threat of imprisonment (income tax!) to the Canadian Government to have a system that works, and they piss it away. Privatize it; Get a system that works for poor people; But don't bitch at me when almost half of my income is taxed. Or maybe you americans would like a what, 46% income tax? Huh?
..don't panic
Why don't you get off your high horse! What kind of aristocrat are you? Sure, there are flaws to any kind of society, and capitalism's happens to be a separation of haves and have-nots.
I don't know what kind of world you live in. I'm not going to spend my money on your kids. I'm going to spend them on mine, and if that makes the world less equal, tough noogies. I plan on teaching my children the joys of learning and education just as I was, and I'll give them all the tools I have to do that. If I can make them more resistant to cancer, I'll do that too, just as I'll make sure they can go to the best school I can afford. You do the same, we'll toss in a few calls to rand(), and let the best man win. The society gets ahead that way. And who's to say my cancer-resistant offspring won't mate with your intelligence-enhanced offspring to create cancer-resistant intelligent-enhanced kids? People think that the gene pool is small. It's not. Is freaking *huge*. There are enough people on the planet so the gene pool will NEVER be hurt. Ever. Unless we nuke ourselves into oblivion.
But that doesn't mean we have to try to increase that flaw! No system is perfect, "pure" capitalism just leads to greed!
I don't argue this. Life's not fair though, and I'll use all the tools I can to make sure that my kids have a running head start on the evil world.
One of the major tenants of western democracy is equality. Don't try to tell me that you're more equal than others.
I thought that was communism. One of the tenants of western society is FREEDOM. You are free to do what you want if it does not harm others. Equality - economic equality - is fundamentally communinst/socialist in nature. Sure, we're all "equal" - your life is worth no more than mine - but I would bet money our bank account statements are different (you probably have a lot more money than me!). I'll spend resources I have as I see fit, you do the same. Just don't tell me I can't spend them on making sure my kids aren't gimps.
..don't panic
From Katz' article:
> Nobody has voted on whether he or she wants to live in a world
> with only healthy, cheerful, smart and attractive inhabitants.
Katz, I just can't let this one pass without comment. Your faith in "democracy" frightens the hell out of me.
This isn't something that anyone should "vote on" - at least not at the ballot box. No politician should be granted the power to tell us what to do with this technology. This isn't about "corporatism" vs. "JonKatzism", it's about self-determination.
And as long as we can keep the lawmakers' hands off our bodies, we'll ALL get to vote on this -- with our genes.
Choose 'em good, they propagate. Choose 'em bad, they don't. Evolution's the ultimate self-regulating system. So the first century of widespread human genetic tinkering will be littered with failures. SO WHAT?
All this talk fundamentally boils down to an increase in the mutation rate, combined with a possible increase in the ratio of beneficial (== more-likely-to-propagate, like bigger brains, breasts, and buns) mutations to harmful (== less-likely-to-propagate, like $DISEASE_FOO) mutations.
The system has functioned for three billion years in the face of more abrupt changes. It's sufficiently robust to handle this. If we screw up, our descendants look back at our mutants and laugh at our naivete. If we pull it off, what comes out 1,000 years down the road may not even be recognizable as human. But if it's rad-hardened, can breathe methane as well as oxygen, and has an IQ of 300, is that really such a bad thing?
i dunno, man --
to my way of thinking, gene manipulation by parents is just another tool to be used in an effort which is quite old, and not even that powerful a tool, compared to some others.
so, the basic aim here, the one we're worried about, is for parents to make life easier and happier for their children.
now, paper currency does this, and investing does this, and moving to the suburbs does this, and sending the kids to private schools does this, and getting the kid a lifetime subscription to Abercrombie and Fitch Party of Five magazine and online identity boutique does this. Constant innundation by ads causes conformity, but we don't condemn parents for tacit enforcement of the cultural norms for letting kids watch Dawson's Creek. Should we? Maybe, but the assertion that diversity is endangered by the sudden ability to choose genes in a fashion which is more powerful than the long-standing ability to provide a sheltered, culturally homogeneous environment -- it's unproven, at best.
Way i see it, if McDonalds, the Gap, and the Oprah Book Club haven't managed to stomp out cultural diversity, the ability to gene out, say, dwarfism -- i just don't see it.
Nonetheless -- a single authority, a private one, dictating the manner in which this process takes place, that's lousy, but for entirely different reasons.
god is just pretend.
Well, at least you're teaching your minions to fetch the right caffinated beverage! :)
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!
Its interesting to look at the results of GM foods to see how bad things could get if we decided to start tampering with people. (and/or continue with plants).
One interesting point in GM foods is how if you modify one plant, and that plant is grown outside the lab that you've now lost control - those genes can propogate to any plant that a bee decides to carry that pollen to! Oops!
Lets make up an example (not too far from reality). Lets say a monster tomato plant, with genes that give it the ability to resist frost - given to it by an Artic Char Salmon is grown. Lots of tests are done, it works great! The tomatoes are sampled by a large test group - no problems. Looks like everything worked according to plan! So, its time to grow the tomatoes out in the real world, out of the lab now. One day, a bee decides to pollenate the tomatoes. But on a whim, the bee decides to fly waaay down the road to an apple orchard.
That bee decides to sit on an apple tree, and now the fish allergy I have gets triggered when I eat an apple! How's that for a wonky effect - the scientists never saw that one coming! I mean, how could they? The tomato didn't seem to cause people with fish allergies any problems! Thats the problem with not understanding something fully - you can't percieve all of the secondary effects! UNTIL ITS TOO LATE! THOSE GENES ARE NOW 'out there' IN THE WILD! You can't get that bee back, that pollen is spread wild in the wind!
How about recessive genes? How can you possibly understand all of the interrelationships in something as complex as a human being if you can't figure out a tomato?? Cancers, growths, deformaties, defects that might not be present right away, but what about the next generation?
Until we can understand ALL of the effects, primary, secondary and all the interactions, why can't we keep it in the lab?
MONEY! I can grow bigger tomatoes if you just gimme some of those seeds from the lab!
So. What to do. Seems easy to me. Just don't go there.
But that flies right in the face of our societies need to explore, to experiment. Who can we trust to do it right? To experiment, but to keep it in the lab? And making sure that people arn't screwing with human genes - keeping it to plants and animals?
I would argue that we can't trust anyone. I think we should ban the whole mess.
Please show me how my logic is flawed. I'd love to know how we can reap the benefits of genetic modification without screwing up the world we have today.
What might be considered best by you for your children may not be the best for your children.
If you knew that you'd have an intelligent kid, but they would be motivated toward art instead of engineering? Would you abort them?
You might consider giving your kids a predilection for doing good at engineering good, but what about the rest of society? Will they look toward fashion models? Football players? Actors? How many soccer-mom's are there would would pay thousands for their kids to have the perfect body for playing soccer? Or acting? Or playing football?
Finally, look at the realm of 'disease' the lines for what is abnormal are VERY malleable. After Columbine, wearing black trenchcoats and liking certain music is considered abnormal. Have you ever heard of human growth hormone? It was origionally given to people who had a genetic flaw and would not grow past 4 feet without it. But being taller is a positive trait. Parents with genetically normal, but short, kids were fighting and getting HGH for their kids.
Should you treat being normal, but short, as if it were a disease? Is it ethical to allow parents to experiment on their children?
We have limitations of what parents can do to their children for a reason. To protect them until they can make their own choices. This does break down in a few cases (circumcision), but overall, it's true. If we give people free (genetic) reign to do as they choose, that would be tantemount to sanctioning child abuse.
Furthermore, what might be best for an individual, say a peacock with a longer tail, may not be the best for a group when everyone evolves into long tails where they get eaten and die.
--
Aw man, we really gotta limit Katz' access to simplistic one-sided "thought-provoking" movies, or else we're going to get a lot more of this FUD. And now I'm really worried, since I noticed another poster mentioned reading Huxley's Brave New World. What if Katz learned to read? Good god! Just think of the material he could remake into post-Columbine geekgeekgeek...
Can your IM do this?
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
and I thought that Caltech scientists came up with the method to allow high-speed sequencing of the genome. But hey, I could be unfairly biased in remembering facts there.
Seriously, the issues Katz is raising aren't new. 4 years ago I was at a summer program at UPENN and we discussed the moral and social impacts that this knowledge would have. We also got to talk to Dr. Kaplan, UPENN's resident Ethics dude who seems to be quoted more often than any other ethics dude by newspapers.
The genie is basically out of the bottle and we aren't prepared yet to deal with all of the information we are going to have at our disposal from the sequencing of the human genome. We could very quickly end up in a world akin to the one portrayed in Gattaca. I feel I should make a reference to Brave New World but I haven't read it, so I'll let someone else chime in with that.
We could very quickly be facing a host of problems, but like I said, it's nothing new. Anything from life insurance being denied because your genetic code signifies you are "high-risk" to an employer refusing to hire you due to something unfavorable they find in your genetic code. There has been legislation bandied about to possibly preserve the privacy of genetic testing, so that insurance companies and employers wouldn't have access to your genetic information, but at the same time insurance companies are lobbying so that they will be able to have said information once it becomes available.
I'm not even going to get into the whole Eugenics issue. That's a hideous mess and I simply refuse to go there.
Moller
Aside from the obvious philosophical/engineering arguments about what would constitute a "perfect" human, frankly I'd be happy if I had some kind of genetic defect which made my standard of living lower, and could fix it.
It's that interim period, where you can detect the defect but not fix it, where society is going to struggle.
There is, of course, the problem of deciding whether or not something IS a defect (and possibly WHO gets to decide such things), and what you want to do about someone who disagrees with you.
So what.
I don't know the genetic history of a woman before I marry her, and I won't marry her on that basis. If I decide to have kids with her, I probably won't know if there are any genetic syndromes in her family that will get passed down to our children. Should I divorce her if I find out that there are?
It's always been a lottery the way we've been doing it for thousands of years. So why should the above sperm bank situation be any different? The counsellor has no ethical business interfering in the lives of the families involved, no matter what she knows about the donor.
Churchill, Beatovian, and Hawkin(g?) are not ADHD, cerebral palsy, and mental illness. They are individuals in whom the largely random factors causing greatness overlapped with the largely random factors causing various disorders. I argue above that had they never been born, they would have been replaced by other individuals -- in whom the chances of greatness would have been the same. If we assume that excelling as a human is independent of the presence or absence of disabilities and diseases (as evidenced by the many great, non-disabled people out there), then the number of great people we prevented from existing due to disability would be equal to the number of great people who were conceived as a result.
- Michael Cohn
-----
Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
No. Celera is run by Craig Ventner. PEB makes the sequencers that are used by Celera (and everyone else in genome research). Katz used the correct analogy once, then he threw it away.
Am I the only one who, even after reading that huge spill, still doesn't care who Dr. Hunkapiller is?
The government was getting nowhere fast in dilineating the human genome (while spending billions of dollars), and then Celeron comes along with a new technique that gets it all done in record time. People like me who have fatal genetic diseases in our family stand up and cheer, but to the Katz's of the world this just means disaster -- a comparison to Bill Gates pretty much seels Hunkapiller's fate in Katz's mind. I guess it's wrong for jocks to pick on geeks, but okay for Katz to engage in ad hominems against businessmen revolutionizing their field.
Except, over here on the outside of Comics Land, genome sequencing isn't about who gets born or not. No genetics firm wants to (or will be allowed to, IMO) decide who gets born. They might make certain genetic tests available to parents, but that's happening already. But last I heard, the US government was fairly Xian Fundamentalist when it came to fetal termination. Somehow I don't think they'd be very keen on insurance companies, for instance, refusing to cover and children resulting from a particular zygote. That's just asking for and Abort, Retry then Fail scenario, which the Warren Hatches of this world would probably find more repugnant than I do.
Honestly, I sometimes wonder why Katz doesn't just present questions for discussion. He's pitching to an audience that is too intelligent to be gulled by his fallacious rhetoric. I mean, there's a paragraph there that amounts to "Geneticists compare Hunkapiller to Gates, Gates has just been called a liar and predatory monopolist by a federal judge, therefore Hunkapiller is a liar and a predatory monopolist." That's one hell of a non sequitor, Jon. Try a little harder to make your points next time.
Frankly, the best way to have made the point would have been to interest the audience in Hunkapiller: if we should be interested in him, it shouldn't really take more than a quick explaination of why and a good number of the readers should be, right.
Well, I for one couldn't care less about Hunkapiller. I am interested in how health care, insurance, and government will start using his and his competitor's services. But I don't think I'll be dealing with him directly ever, so I don't see the impact.
Maybe I'm exhibiting Hunkapiller syndrome.
Or maybe that's a crock.
Ushers will eat latecomers.
IP is just rude.
Is there any torture so subl
- genetically modified food on every dinner table,
- (the SF nightmare of) genetically modified soldiers in every army,
- genetic therapy for a variety of illnesses (e.g, Genetic treatments to regrow severed spinal tissue),
- Genetic testing of babies for 'defects' (inc. heart disease, ALS, wrong sex, wrong hair color, too short, etc.)
- Gene splice designed bacteria generating otherwise rare hormones
- genetically engineered 'live' vaccines (harmless but carrying critical marker proteins to sensitize the body to the 'dangerous' target microbe)
etc.Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Genomics has got to be the scariest thing that I can imagine happening to our global society. The powers that genetics have, the promise of curing horrible diseases and defect are truly awe inspiring and not inconsiderable, but the awful likelihood of misuse is greater. Our world is just not yet ready or responsible enough to handle such potent knowledge.
Never argue with a man carrying a water buffalo
I'd question the assumption that genetics will have a bigger effect on the individual's life than computers. What impact will genetics have on your day to day life? Certainly, it may alter the overall course of your life but likely not your daily routine. Vaccinations had a profound effect on humanity. They eliminated a tremendous amount of human pain, suffering and death. We don't wake daily thinking of how lucky we were to have received vaccinations. Medical care is pretty much taken for granted until you need it. When you do need it, you're profoundly grateful for awhile but soon you're healthy again and you go right back to the same daily routine. The computer revolution altered the way our society functions. I sit down at a computer every day. My day to day life is profoundly different than it would have been without computers. I don't see genetics having that kind of daily impact for a long time, even if the overall scope of its impact on humanity is more profound.
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
Changes what they are or what they would have been? If you're doing this to an embryo, are you changing a person or are you determining what they are about to become?
I know I'm just twiddling semantics here, but I think it's actually an important point. There's a big difference between changing a person to stop them behaving in a way you don't like or aren't proud of, because that's a whole other can of worms, but if you start defending the rights of the unborn, or potentially the unfertilised, then you're getting into familiar territory, and the comparison with abortion becomes inevitable.
If we ascribe to ourselves the right to abort an unborn child, we're nothing more than hypocrites if we then start forbidding another from changing an unborn child, and we don't have the moral high ground either because they can just answer, "Well at least I'm making them more capable of doing well in society, rather than killing them".
On a related point, your argument can be extended to mean that if two people get together and have a child that inevitably will carry some terrible inherited traits from their parents (disease, ugliness, something even more controvertial...), then they're doing something equally terrible, as they are in effect selecting the genes they will pass onto their child... Genetic manipulation (provided it is first properly understood) would be a selection of genes that would enhance rather than reduce (one would hope).
Please note that I'm following on from previous posts rather than replying to them so don't take offence!
Oh and another point - I'm not saying that I approve of genetically modifying people or future people, I'm just making a couple of points because I'm interested in the discussion! I think that deals with all of the disclaimers.
Salocin.com
But it sure can do some great things to the wrapping.
Salocin.com
Why stop there? How about "I can't type two-handed and drink my coffee at the same time, so I'll just use the ol' splicer here to grow a third arm..." or "My skin needs to be green to match this Halloween costume, so...".
Of course, if you are going to start sprouting limbs and stuff you would need something to give you the required mass and energy to do it. The point is there are a lot of possible genetic mutations beyond just improving what we have now. X-Men might be far-fetched, but mutation is a key component in evolution. What will this do to the evolution of the human species? Will there be just one species, or will it split?
Maybe people will become as addicted to hacking their own genes to see what happens as some are to getting more tatoos after their first... Make it illegal, and you have the basis for a really warped futuristic Miami Vice story. Hard-core users keep going back to the neighborhood underground gene-splice pusher to get another inch of height, pupils like a cat, an extra finger or two, higher neuron density, bigger ****, whatever. Coming soon to a future near you...
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Artificial intelligence or natural stupidity?
Artificial intelligence or natural stupidity?
Guess which wrote this...
The world of Precious Moments is "a world with only healthy, cheerful, smart and attractive inhabitants." Vote YES to Precious Moments!
Seriously, futurists have hypothesized that we are evolving larger brains (and associated larger heads). Because our machines do more of our work for us, we can get by with smaller bodies. And with overpopulation, competition for the opposite sex is becoming fierce; teardrop-shaped eyes tend to attract chicks. Someday all our moments will be...
PRECIOUS MOMENTS®.<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
There is a definate fear in teh disabled community especially that by using genetics you are in fact devaluing people by saying what is perfect (which is subjective anyway)
TO offer counselling to pepeople who might possibly have a chance of an inherited disease is ludicrous. We all have our faults. My father was born with Spina Biffida but lives a normal fulfilled life. We all carry imperfections which are what make us.
Genetic research is a good thing, but we have to be careful about the morality and ethics of applying that knowledge. Otherwise we'll all live in the brave new world of conformity.....
Working for the (other) man
that no one envisions a world with a gene sequencer on every desktop!
Except of course the writers of Star Trek Voyager. Not only can they sequence DNA with a device the size of a Palm Pilot, they have a holographic doctor that will do it for you if you're lazy.
The one thing they can't do is shut down holographic programs when they go sour. Apparently kill -9 doesn't exist in the 23rd century.
(I'm referring to last night's episode shown on UPN)
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Obviously there are the "sinister" motives, but let's ignore those for the moment. Let's resist the temption to morph Gatesmania into Hunkapillarmania.
The two most relevant examples I know of come from science fiction. That lends them no credence whatsoever, but does portend a few consequences.
The first comes from one of Clarke's Rama series, Rama Revealed, IIRC. (Don't ask me WHY I kept reading the Rama series THAT long, I don't know.) He describes a spacefaring race that had expanded nearly to Earth sometime in the not-so-distant past, then died out overnight. The reason: they had been tampering too much with their genes, and some lurker vulnerability propagated too far into their population. It wasn't very fully explained, but think monocultures, think Irish potato famine.
The second described a time in the life of a "normal" girl going to high school with "enhanced" kids, and feeling really down on herself because she wasn't as beautiful, bright, strong, etc, as her classmates. Then, around the 18th birthday, a particularly popular "designer gene" turned out to have some terrible lurking flaws that took that long to show up. About a third of that age began going into convulsions and having mental problems, and most of them died.
OK, these are horror stories, and may not come true. But then again, when "market dynamics" come into play, how farsighted are we really? How likely are we to just start using freon all over the place without knowing the long-term effects. Then, even when we get the warning, it's considered far enough in the future that we STILL don't want to do anything, because there's too much profit in the freon status quo. Eventually we got it right, but I don't remember being paranoid about the Sun when I was a kid.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Like the girl in High School who mocked your interests in "dorky computers" while she gabbed about 90210, your foray into what to her was a meaningless and obscure topic probably changed your life for the better. How are we being any different if we fail to see the alternate topics being presented to us, choosing instead to settle into our own comfortable lifestyles, and deciding, like that popular cheerleader, that the world revolves around our interests, rather than our lives being dependant upon the spin of the world?
-pjf
Yet this simile keeps being used. These traits are relitive. When (or if) the change comes, one generation will become used to it, as we are used to medicine now. Our great grandparents would be agog with what the medical industry can do today, compaired to when they were alive.
Yes, we need to set some gound rules for how this information is used, no, it won't destroy us overnight.
Change is Gods way of telling us we are not dead yet.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
The neanderthals and homo spaiens existed together for a time... the neanderthals died off...
why is it necessarily a Bad Thing for the have-nots to die off? In general people who Have have it for a reason...
The government has to provide the right to PERSUE happiness... if you want these things for your children you can bust your ass and get it... many people do... The government subverts the natural order plenty...
YouTube & Google Video -> podcast http://castcluster.blogspot.com/
Ummmm....great arguement, but it fails to make sense in the respect that no one is being FORCED to "end a pregnancy" if there is an anomaly detected. Some parents to be CHOOSE to keep the pregnancy, because of religious and moral reasons. Take for example the Iowa McCaughey's, they chose not to abort some of their children even with warnings that the kids would probably be affected with some severe disabilities (in fact, two of the kids have cerebral palsy and most of those kids are developmentally delayed).
Also, just think about the general debate about abortion rights in the US. Most polls have found that there is a huge majority of the people who sit in the middle of the debate, qualifying their support with "I'd support abortion only in the cases of rape, incest or if the Mother's life was threatened." What people are not saying is "If the alpha-fetal protein test comes in a little low and my kid is probably going to have Downs syndrome, I have the right to abort."
This is another view of the world.
----
Einstein was a mega-superstar when he was still alive. Probably the most famous a living scientist ever was in the 20th Centrury... even much more so than Carl Sagan or Stephen Hawking.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Um. I'm not always the first to stick up for Katz, but I think that was the whole point of his article (such as it was). He even used the expression "the Microsoft of..." as part of his stern warning about Hunkapiller.
Slamming Katz is great fun, though... so I won't hold it against you that you reacted a little too quickly. :)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Gene testing and mapping are proceeding far ahead of humanity's ability to prepare for it or consider it. As testing becomes increasingly common, individual humans are already overwhelmed by social, moral and philosophical questions. Researchers at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston have recounted how a woman who'd had ovarian cancer was tested for recently-isolated breast cancer-related gene mutations, mostly for the sake of her two adult daughters. But when she told them she tested positively for the cancer gene, her daughters were so upset they stopped speaking to her.
Katz: I realize your desire to be sensational and 'thought provoking'. I know you are required to write things that are 'out there'. But the above instance is irrelevant to the point I believe your trying to make.
My Mother has died of Cancer, My Father has survived prostate cancer for the last 5 years. My 20 year old sister has been in remission from her cancer for 2 years now. The doctors tell us that my two 'healthy' sisters and I stand an 87% chance of experiencing some form of cancer in our lives.
Is it the fault of my family members?
Obviously fucking not.
By your publishing a re-counting of this story, for whatever purpose (i cant see one), you are attempting to associate the feelings of the daughters to be a natural reaction in a society unprepared to realize this data so 'easily'. By publishing such a story, you appear to rationalize the actions of the 'two daughters'. You present the idea that it is 'acceptable' or 'justified' for them to have acted in this way. Whatever point you are trying to make, you did not. The actions of these two daughters are obviously shallow, immature and misguided. Under NO circumstances is such an 'opinion' justified.
Even if the world is unprepared to accept the 'responsibility' of unraveling our genetic mystery, it is obviously irrelevant if a family (first person relationships) cannot be conducted in a more compassionate and enlightened manner.
A story by Jon Katz that doesn't contain the phrase "post-Columbine" or associate the main topic with geek-repression?
You're losing your touch, man!
I didn't say it would be easy. Let's see...
He's definitely never coveted his neighbor's Ass, nor his neighbor's Wife. He may also have kept the Sabbath holy a couple of times. Never during all his presentations at Comdex did he take the name of the Lord in vain. And he hasn't killed anyone as far as I know. I mean come on... the guy may be a monster, but he's not Wicked!
This is a very real concern, as anyone who has followed the exploits of Monsanto can tell you. Companies that license genetically modified organisms have "reach through" rights which give them control over the offspring of the organisms purchased by consumers. Farmers are required to sign licensing agreements which prevent them from saving any seed for planting -- they have to purchase new seed every year from Monsanto.
What if human genetic modifications were licensed similarly? How much would you pay to forever eradicate schizophrenia from your offspring? Would you be prepared to pay perpetually, as you would for life insurance? Would you be prepared to have your offspring become wards of the state if you fail to pay? I'm being somewhat alarmist, I know, but these things are better played out in speculation than in retrospect.
This may have been brought up earlier, but one thing I never see amidst all the mights and maybes are the things that _will_ definately happen if all these medical breakthroughs take place.
Imagine a world without cancer, heart disease, or other serious diseases. A world where people live many years longer. A world where people stop dying... (at least for a period of time till things catch up again).
If overpopulation is a problem now, what will we it be then... oh, and will the "working age" people still have to support all the population over age 65? even when they live to be 120?
The difference between Hunkapiller and Gates is that people will freely admit there are downsides to software, and at least pretend to consider them, if only briefly. No one bothers to consider that there is a downside to genetic/medical innovation as well.
Of course I use Microsoft. Setting up a stable unix network is no challenge
none.. they both don't give a hoots about Katz
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Katz' point here ins't necessarily about the morality or amorality of gene manipulation. he did that in an earlier editorial about a month ago. The point it looks like he's making here is that fifteen years ago, no one knew who Bill Gates was and look where we are now? Perhaps had we paid some attention to him, we wouldn't have some of the problems we have with him now.
By learning what we can about the pioneers of genetic technology, and especially the people and companies who are out in front right now, we may be able to stave off problems in the future. After all, Kunkapiller seems to be a corrolary to Gates, at least in his behavior so far. How much larger a hint do any of us need to keep an eye on him?
All the man's saying is "Pay Attention"!
What you are forgetting is that you cannot define healthy without unhealthy, or cheerful without sad, and attractive without unattractive. If everyone was attractive, it would be the norm and have no meaning to you.
Time does not wait.
obsessing about what's not important --... IPO's
And this doesn't fall into that category... because? Let's face it - Celera Genomics is a business company, not a science company. This isn't for the good of the country. The Human Genome Project is important, not some Celera Sell-The-Patent-License, Inc.
I can't believe you fell for the marketing that paints Celera as anything less than the Microsoft of the biotech industry.
They're becoming obsolete. Scientists want to experiment on the human genome because they can. Corporations want to exploit the genome because they'll make money. The average person wants to have perfect children and have them live as long as possible. Opposing the advancement of genomics is by far an unpopular choice. Do most people care if they are eating genetically altered foods? If such foods were labelled clearly, would people stop buying them? Doubtful. Besides, what is the difference between direct genetic manipulation and indirect cross breeding and active mate selection? The second deludes us into thinking what we produce is "natural", when its simply another form of man-made.
Believe me, I'm as scared as anyone when I think of what might happen should this technology become easily accessible, or if it remained controlled but controlled by the wrong people. Its just that most people don't care. This type of issue will only come up when people start dying. Until then, its just a non-crisis.
"I live in a world of make-believe, with faeries and leprechauns and tiny little frogs with funny hats."
Great, so now I'm accountable for what genes my kids inherit? Super. I can't wait until my son gets to high school and sues me for passing on my pizzaface genes. The little ingrate!
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
It is by spending ourselves that we become rich.
Then someone will opensource the genome allowing folks to grow extra fingers to post to /. faster.
----
"i'm part of the problem." http://www.ridiculopathy.com
You could compare them to JP Morgan and Albert Einstein. I'm pretty sure JP Morgan was much more famous in his day and Einstein was probably barely known, but now Einstein is well respected. And while Morgan might be remembered, the general population knows and respects Einstein more. I guess its just another example of artists finding fame when ag=fter they die and the degredation and superficiality of pop culture.
"The 85 I fear they don't got a clue."
pronoblem
Do we remember Philo T. Farnsworth, the man who invented Television (Patent No. 1,773,980)
NO!
The credit goes to John Logie Baird, presumably because he was more charismatic in his presentation!
Farnsworth died in 1971, hardly recognized for his contribution to Television, or fusion research.
It's tragic to me. Did you know Farnsworth even
had prototypes of COLOR TV in the late 20's? How
long did it take to catch up with that? That's a good decade before color film even!
Do we remember Nathan Stubblefield as the inventor of radio? NO! Even though he demonstarted a wireless telephone in 1885! He demonstrated it to
large groups in 1892, and people were impressed.
Bear in mind, Marconi was 17 in 1892...
In 1902, Stubblefield even demonstrated ship-to-shore voice radio.
He died in 1928, broke, and obscure.
Granted, Marconi's contributions to broadcasting went far beyond the proof-of-concept type of work
that Stubblefield did, but...
Stubblefield and Farnsworth were hackers.
Marconi and Baird seem to have had much more
"suit appeal."
Examples abound in the history of technology.
Look at Tesla and Edison. Theremin and Moog.
Jobs and Gates.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
The difference between Hunkapiller and Gates is that no one envisions a world with a gene sequencer on every desktop!
I've said it before and I'll say it again - the usual panicky arguments about parents getting together at a clinic to meet with a genetics specialist to start their own private Master Race(tm) are completely silly.
While this type of clinical treatment, when it finally becomes available (if ever) will be a legitimate and wonderful thing for, say, couples with infertility problems or severe heritable genetic disorders who want to have children, I just do not see how:
Will EVER replace the more traditional method:
- In.
- Out.
- Repeat as necessary.
Which is much less expensive and lots more fun for the couple.Joe Sixpack is dead!
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
Isn't sequencing the Human genome the equivalent of dumping the ROM's? Don't we now have to understand all the details of what it means, which, it seems to me, is orders of magnitude more complex? I'm sure a lot of progress can be made by twiddling bits and seeing what breaks (in the lab, or with lower organisms, I wouldn't expierment with people!), but isn't there a lot more to do (i.e., decades of work) before we become Gattaca?
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
The gap between the rich and the poor sucks. Welcome to a Capitalist society. We killed millions of people in WWI and WWII so we could have a capitalist system.
No. We killed millions of people so that we could have a Democratic system, rather than a fascist one. Democracy was supposed to insure freedom. Now capitalism has evolved to the point where it is threatening that freedom, and people are beginning to realize that run-away capitalism is not mandated by our Constitution.
I'll spend my money and make my kids smarter, better, and quicker. This is the way it is, has always been, and always will be. You're kidding youself if you think otherwise. It just so happens that genetic engineering is the ultimate expression of this phenonomon. We've got lots of problems in society as is; This isn't the biggest. Might it be 100 years from now? Maybe. But I'll make sure my offspring have every advantage I can give them in that world, the same as my parents did for me, and the same as their parents did for them.
Selfishness and greed. Makes one wonder if the human race deserves to survive.
We need to stop thinking about what is best for individuals or for their progeny, and start thinking about what is best for the race as a whole. There are too many things looming on the horizon that can destroy us in toto for us to be squabbling about advantages for the individual.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
One response is that it's wrong for the same reason that olympic athletes aren't allowed to use performance enhancing drugs -- if some do, then all must in order to compete effectively.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
i mean, you can make the connection if you really want to, but to me, it's a bit of a stretch.
nobody can 'corner the human genome market'.. that'd be like saying you can corner the market the recipe for chocolate chip cookies.
first of all there's a million ways to make a cookie, and the directions for doing so are already available everywhere.
this guy may have the corner on (de?)sequencing machines, but so what? i'm no lab rat, i don't really care. this is a much smaller market than gates goes after, cornering these small markets is not uncommon. if you do some looking around you will find lots of niche software companies that have their respective areas relatively cornered, and i'm sure the same is true for these kinds of mechanical applications.
i think it was just a slow week for jon and he had to try to come up with something sensational, but i think this one was a failure
...dave
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
Reminds me of a Monthy Python song:
"Every sperm is sacred,
Every sperm is great,
If a sperm is wasted,
God gets quite irate."
And that is exactly what is wrong with the current state of genetic engineering. Already, we see on a limited scale the separation between the haves and the have-nots in the world of computing. The white-middle-class-computer-programmer group by far has a huge advantage in life (not that other groups can't succeed; they just have more obstacles). Do we really want a world where those with money are smarter, faster, stronger, and healthier than those without?
Get off your high horse. We do this now and we've done it for centuries. I have better health care, better education and better resources than the people down the street because my parents were educated and have money. I don't want to think about how much all those books cost or how much I spent on computing gear. How much does post secondary education cost in the United States of America, especially the 1st tier stuff?
No, I'll bloody well spend money on my kids, and I'll be damned if anyone tries to stop me, or tries to tax away my advantage. Do you think that the poor schmuck on the street gets the same medical attention you do when HE has a heart attack? Where do you live?
The gap between the rich and the poor sucks. Welcome to a Capitalist society. We killed millions of people in WWI and WWII so we could have a capitalist system. I'll spend my money and make my kids smarter, better, and quicker. This is the way it is, has always been, and always will be. You're kidding youself if you think otherwise. It just so happens that genetic engineering is the ultimate expression of this phenonomon. We've got lots of problems in society as is; This isn't the biggest. Might it be 100 years from now? Maybe. But I'll make sure my offspring have every advantage I can give them in that world, the same as my parents did for me, and the same as their parents did for them.
..don't panic
It's called fecundism, and it is a pretty big issue for a lot of religious groups, particularly the monotheists. Most religions that embrace fecundism have their background in being the tribal god of some specific group of people. The commandment 'be fruitful and multiply' has a lot of meaning for a tribe that may be in careful equilibrium with a lot of other groups. A change in breeding rates could be the difference between holding onto your land or going extinct due to conquest or assimilation. Unfortunately, most of these doctrines have never been updated for a modern world where the size of the population can eventually exceeed the ability of the planet to provide resources. A religious scholar recently wrote a letter to the Pope protesting his stance on contraception based on the ideas of fecundism being the root for much church rhetoric on the issue. He also brought in the perspective of non-fecundist religions (Buddhism was the example he used) as an alternative view of the role of human reproduction. I doubt it would sway the Pope, but it is in interesting read in Tricycle if you're interested.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
That might even be worth saving up for
And that is <b>exactly</b> what is wrong with the current state of genetic engineering. Already, we see on a limited scale the separation between the haves and the have-nots in the world of computing. The white-middle-class-computer-programmer group by far has a huge advantage in life (not that other groups can't succeed; they just have more obstacles). Do we really want a world where those with money are smarter, faster, stronger, and healthier than those without?
IMHO, this is one place where the government <b>must</b> step in and subsidize it when it happens, possibly according to tax bracket or something similar. Gaps between the haves and have-nots are acceptable in computing, but when it comes down to a matter of life, the government has a duty to step in and make it equitable, just as they have a duty to license car drivers.
--
Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
While I can't think of anything good coming out of pagers squealing and cell-phone conversations in restaurants, libraries and theaters, I think that embryonic prenatal genetic testing can do nothing but good. People will get children with better potential rather than the luck of the draw. Knowledge of the way that certain genes work is all but certain to lead to ways to work around defects; if you can administer a drug to cut the expression of genes on chromosome 21 in the developing embryo and fetus, Down's Syndrome (caused by a redundant chromosome 21) could disappear! That's just one example.
Trying to prevent us from knowing ourselves at the genetic level, and using that knowledge, means throwing away every possible benefit in addition to (maybe) holding off the ills. You can look back into history and see what previous attempts to stop the clock would have done; how would you like a shirt to cost a week's wages? That's what you're voting for when you mindlessly oppose all change. Opposition must be targeted to real problems or it will be neither credible nor effective.
Work for a better world. Vote with your offspring.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
The reason why hunkapillar (or whatever is name is) is less famous than the evil Bill is because you can't buy a sequencer in a supermarket. Since the general public has absolutely no use of a sequencer why should they care about this bloke?
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
An excellent response. I would just add that if eugenics == Nazism, then our society badly needs to throw off the fascistic fetters of our incest prohibitions. In the distant past, our ancestors noted that close relatives who mated tended to have messed-up children. But now our 21st-century enlightenment enlightenment reveals that this was because of bad combinations of genes -- you know, those things it's immoral to tamper with to make a better life for your children.
In fact, every time we are attracted to an intelligent or beautiful individual, we're hearing a genetic call to SELECT good genes to pass on, improving the survival potential of our own. But large chunks of that attraction are also due to the environmental aspect of child-rearing, as well as our own developed intelligence and preferences, so it would be desirable even if inheritance were a total crapshoot.
Consider also that not passing on genes -- even in the form of killing an already-fertilized egg -- isn't just stopping a potential individual from existing. If it were, the argument that "life with an incurable disease is better than no life at all" (what bioethicists call the "gift of life" argument) might be convincing. But these parents will probably have another child, one which might not have the genetic ailment. In this case, you might as well say that having the first child would have been depriving the second of life!
- Michael Cohn
-----
Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
The costs... well, costs per sequenced base pair are certainly lower, but if you don't sequence a whole genome and don't have a sequencing service handy, manual sequencing is much cheaper and works just fine, thank you. The reason is, that sometimes you just don't want to sequence hudreds of thousands of bases, you just want to see whether you got the right PCR product, whether your mutagenesis worked, what organism does a certain sequence come from. Sometimes? No, not sometimes. Most of the time for most biology labs *those* are the primary reasons for doing the sequencing.
Besides, the method hasn't changed greatly over past few years. I mean, the chemical reactions. They are good, fast, reproducible and applyiable both in automated sequencers and when sequencing manually. But -- come on. Sequencing is not science. It's boring. It gives you basis for scientific work, but that's all. "Landing on the moon", my foot. V2? Not even V2. I don't thing there is a good metaphor for that. After all, it is collecting a really huge amount of data without knowing it. Like, before the Polish broke the Enigma, they had to collect some encrypted messages -- and that's what the genome projects are all about. In our case, the principle of the code seems to be partly known, but the one-time keys have to be broken each day de nouveau. Here the metaphor ends, because finding a working model of a genome complete with the proteome and transcriptome and regulation will be... well, let me put it this way: I wonder whether it will be possible to finish it before the end of the next century.
Cheers,
January
Jon Katz is an idiot.
Its not their fault they don't know about issues not properly covered in the mainstream media.
I can't stand when people sit there and say something along the lines of "What won't Bill Gates come up with next." First, that supposes that he is something that he's not, which is the guy doing the bulk of the programming. Second, it discounts that there is anybody else working at all in IT. Third, it discredits the hard working people at M$, (yeah, I'm a linux advocate, but they must be doing something over there).
People don't concentrate on what's useful or good tech, they'd rather look at eye candy and what M$ tells them to. They don't think about actual technological issues. They seem to forget that when they were kids, they had to go through a boot sequence and didn't have a mouse, now it's "too hard" to even type anything ("Why can't I just click?").
This is more than just technology though. Politics, school systems, sex, drinking, religion, it's all obscured and commercialized and nobody does any real thinking anymore. People say that AI has to behave intelligently, be sentient. I say that most people don't have those qualities, and I could simulate them. I can predict EXACTLY how most people around me will react to anything to the point where if I was manipulative enough, I'd always have my way because I'd just write down a set of instructions and talk the right talk.
It's not just technology, people don't want to think anymore.
We're all different.
Eh...
One day my children will look back and laugh at the "300 Gene sequencers should be enough for anyone" statement.
I find the Hunkapiller - Gates analogy a little spurious. As mentioned in passing in the NY Times article, the analogy with IBM of the early 80s is a little more appropriate.
PE Bio's equipment is very popular and most labs that sequence use PE equipment. And... unlike Gate's product, Hunkapillar's product is good. PE Bio does have a near monopoly in the sequencer market, but... sequencers from other companies have a reputation of unreliability (this may not be true, this may be in the past, but the perception exists nonetheless). Is it still a monopoly if the best (or perceived best) equipment has the lion's share of the market?
As for the FUD over genetic testing in Katz's editorial . . . Hunkapillar has no control whatsoever over that. The output of sequencers or other genetic analysis machines is fairly useless until analyzed. If this analysis is done on a Windows PC, do we then blame Bill for genetic discrimination . . . or if the analysis is done on a gnu/linux box do we blame RMS or Linus?
Hunkapillar's interest in Celera gives him some control over genetic information . . . but PE Bio sells their machines to anyone and those machines are entirely out of Hunkapillar's control as soon as they leave the factory.
Apparently, Celera announced they intended to reap huge profits from selling licensing fees to access human genome information, apparently contravening their agreement with the Human Genome Project, and they didn't bother to indicate in their statements concerning expected future profits that the HGP is dedicated eventually to making all this information public.
What Celera had in mind was a system rather like Westlaw, where they would essentially hold intellectual property rights over the human genome.
Anyone in their right mind would oppose this fascist, I. G. Farben-under-Hitler-type company from holding some sort of monopoly on the human genome.
The three classes of stockholders suing Celera were understandably pissed, but the lawsuit has brought out some interesting information concerning this frankly evil corporation.
"Starting with Tokyo first," he added.
I've heard that said about male pattern baldness, which is particularily distressing.
I mean, I've neither got male pattern baldness (my grandfather died last year, 98 years old, with a veritable mop of white hair), nor do I have any known congenital or inherited predisposition to any diseases. Maybe I speak from a position that I don't fully understand. But come on, let's enjoy those little human failings and vulnerabilities we have. They're what make us interesting.
Having said that, I have a nose bigger than Pinocchio, Cyrano De Bergerac and Nicholas Cage. Combined. In fact, when I'm tired, its sheer mass upsets my center of gravity and makes me fall over. When I sneeze, it's a seismic event; it makes the San Andreas' worst look like a mere sniff. And the expelled winds will remove even the most tenacious trailer parks from any piece of southern Florida real estate. If I breathe deeply inside a car, I can implode the windshield.
And ya know what? I'm cool with it. While I have a very aerodynamic profile, I'm a good looking guy, though I'd never be one of the world's Brad Pitts or John Kennedy Jrs. And for that, I'm grateful. I'm grateful that I'm not that good looking, because if I were, I think people might be afraid to approach me, or might brand me a snob. On the other hand, I'm glad I'm good looking. My nose is the division between the two; I've been asked for autographs by people who thought I was either Wil Wheaton or Jerry O'Connell, and, in fact, when I'm facing someone straight on, I look very much like the two of them combined. A quick turn of the head, and they give me a phone number but cease to ask for autographs.
(The other great advantage is the propositions I get in bars. I'm 6'4", and women come up to me. They stare at my nose the way men stare at breasts. They take a look at the size of my hands, then look at the size of the shoes I'm wearing, then look at my nose from as many angles as they think they can without me noticing. Of course, I always notice. A couple of times, I've been asked directly just how big I am... You know. So, things that we perceive as detracting from our appearance aren't necessarily a liability.)
I'm glad to be me, with all my strengths and weaknesses; things that genetic alteration could have changed perhaps at the press of a button in the future, things that would now require immensely painful plastic surgery. Who cares? I am who I am; I'm grateful to be who I am.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
But because we humans are so goddamn different, we need to contemplate the issue forever. Why? Genetics is something that we control for our benifit, but when we do, we are simply acting as an agent of evolution. We have the power to remove those undisirable from the gene pool, just like animals do by choosing who they mate with. Why is this any different? Do we not belong to the same kingdom? Do our actions present any different options than those posed by evolution?
Suppose we wish to make a minature human, about the size of my arm. We can do it with genetics, or we can do it the same way we created a Chiuaha from a wolf. No genetics necessary.
Most of the people fall into the trap of the "human chauvinist pigs" - when we create something, it is different than when "nature" creates something, because we are not part of nature. It's somehow "dirty" and "unnatural". Well, so is your pet cat or dog.
Just because we have the power to create does not make us dirty, or unnatural. We simply wield the power of evolution the same way that nature wields it. It is not wrong, unless you believe that we are "different", which is a morally immature opinion.
"Nobody has voted on whether he or she wants to live in a world with only healthy, cheerful, smart and attractive inhabitants."
:)
I vote "Yes."
It us understandable to be surly sometimes.
I see a lot of uncorroborated stuff here. Hunkapiller is just like Bill Gates? Hunkapiller is managing the future of the human race? Please.
Of course, this is another article which is meant to raise our hackles and get us ticked off about another subject. Give the Human Genome Project time to really do some work before we decide that "Hunkapiller Syndrome" is totally evil and on it's way.
You really want to get ticked off, read the history of nuclear power and radiation. You'll see the stupidity and viciousness that came through that.
BTW - hey, Jon, if I want to seem tons smarter then everyone else, I too, can come up with a name no one has heard of and try to make people feel dumb. It's a bad tactic - don't use it.
A lot of editorializing, here. It would be nice to hear from someone inside that industry on what this company and person are like, and how much of this is Slashdot-headline-fodder and how much of the MS/PE comparison is valid.
Any hard facts?
Actually, aside from fixing up little things like health, I can see do-it-yourself-genetic-engineering becoming popular primarily through COSMETIC application.
The first time someone comes up with a pill with a retrovirus in it that changes your natural hair/eye/skin color, they're going to make billions, genetic engineering will become a widely accepted reality in "fashion conscious society", and the Klu Klux Klan will have a mental meltdown trying to apply their standards of racial purity to a population trying out new "looks" every other week...
Qouth Mr. Katz:
"This arguably makes Dr. Hunkapiller one of the most important men in the world, since his company controls most of the machinery that makes such mapping possible. It's hard to argue that Gates, for all his billions, will have a fraction of his influence. Cornering the code of the human genome is the kind of monopoly that makes Gates look like a street-corner vendor."
This is point where the whole comparison breaks down. Hunkapillar isn't a corporate man; he's a scientist. Gates wants power and influence, and Hunkapillar wants knowlege. It's a different quest. In fact, check out this quote from a Fox News article (Venter is Hunkapillar's business partner):
"Venter says it's not a gene monopoly he's after, but information. In fact, he plans to publish all the company's findings on the genome. By immediately publishing their work, Venter and colleagues intend to make the base knowledge of the human genome unpatentable."
So, they're trying to open source the human genome, not embrace and extend it! This represents a totally different mindset, and simply cannot be compared to Gates' capitalist obsessions.
-- V was its Victim who cried out "But why?" --
So, this guy has an inheritable syndrome that causes heart trouble, and feels that its wrong to pass on these genes.
I take it he also felt that it was wrong that his parents should have conceived him, since he would have had a much more thorough life if he had never existed.
I am a firmware engineer in Applied Biosystems (formerly PE Biosystems). I was one of the people who developed the 3700 DNA analyzer, as well as a a couple of other instruments before this one.
Mike Hunkapiller is my boss's boss's boss's boss. Four levels. Compare to HP, Microsoft, or even Sun, and you will find that this is a very flat structure.
Hunkapiller sits in 2nd floor on one of the "Bay Towers" (the first two buildings you see on your right as you come west across the San Mateo bridge). In the floors above him are the software development and software product test teams. He sits in a cubicle, along with everyone else. He eats lunch in the cafeteria.
Those groups are going to move out of those buildings and onto the main campus (next to it), yielding more space for our neighbour, Inktomi. Instead, Applied Biosystems has just bought some property in Pleasanton. Mike Hunkapiller is currently lobbying for, and seeing if it is possible, for those people who live in the East Bay and want to work there to move to Pleasanton, and the remainder to stay on the main campus in Foster City.
You get the point. He has fostered a very informal, casual, and respectful culture in this company. People are allowed to enjoy themselves and to be Nice. :-) I.e. trusting, creative, personable. (Except IT, of course). The last employee survey showed that we had one of the highest motivated work force anywhere.
If he was Bill Gates, or Larry Ellison, or even Craig Venter (of Celera), he would be a lot more ego-driven. The company would be made into an image of his mind. We would have a lot more procedures, "employee agreements", and a lot less fun.
I have friends working both in Microsoft, Oracle, and Celera. I know what I'm saying here.
Sorry if I sound a bit exaggerative here. I do really like people like Hunkapillar, and there are plenty of them here. Even if they are a dying breed in corporate America at large.
Yes, Applied Biosystems dominates the market for DNA analyzers. It always has. That has nothing to do with "monopolistic practices" or such rubbish. Mike Hunkapiller, Leroy Hood, and a couple of others, invented electrophoresis scanning. The company has always had the edge, and always made the best equipment. People here want to do a good job. And it certainly has the best field support apparatus.
So, sorry JonKatz, but your sensationalist huff-puff upsettedness about the world (and anything that sounds like a suitable target for your "corporate America" label) is probably best applied to your own pidestal.
And iff you haff doubts about our genuine motifation to help mannkind, vee haff very effektif mezods off deelink witz you. Ve vill just allter your genes to make you look like ze monkey you are.
Nobody has voted on whether he or she wants to live in a world with only healthy, cheerful, smart and attractive inhabitants.
Great idea, Jon. Not everybody should be healthy, cheerful, smart and attractive? Are you saying that we should deliberately create sickly, miserable, idiotic, ugly people -- just to AMUSE the lucky ones? Are you saying that if we have the technology to make people's lives dramatically better, we should withhold it from some of them to add a little "flavor" for the rest of us?
I don't know who would resign their children to the fate of being the 21st century equivalent of circus freaks and court jesters -- but maybe you'd like those to be your kids, Jon.
-IT
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
Other complex issues are already arising from genetic research -- parents seeking "perfect baby" are being given the option of avoiding the conception of children with certain illnesses. On the surface, this is a significant escalation for humanity in the war against disease, yet there has been little public discussion of the moral and ethical considerations. Nobody has voted on whether he or she wants to live in a world with only healthy, cheerful, smart and attractive inhabitants.
First off, I won't get into the fact that sequencing genes is nothing more than effectively counting them. I'm not a genomics wizard but my Dad is (albeit Plant genetics, but, hey). It's an important first step, but this is more akin to the V2 rocket launches by Germany than it is landing on the moon. I suspect this is why nobody has heard of Professor What's-His-Face. That, and he's not the world's (2nd?) richest man, so your comparison sucks, Katz. IMHO, Biologists are too concerned with drawing pictures than looking at ways to engineer life, which is where this research is going. Bacteria are wonderful little machines, as are plants, and their power will be harnessed.
What I'm interested in is why people freak out when you concider applying this to your kids. The obvious one is to concieve many children - fertilize a lot of eggs - and then sequence the genomes and see what good 'ol mother nature did for you. I'd sign up for this in a second; I would not think twice (nor would my current SO) about aborting a clump of cells that is going to have a miserable existance, albeit by my standards, but I'm the one creating that life, not your diety of choice. YMMV.
The best comes when you think about a latter step; Changing the genes of your kids to make them better (tm). Looks don't bother me; The kids can look like their old man, he obviously found a mate. What about intelligence though? Contrary to popular belief, it's hundreds if not thousands of traits that combine to make a good whatever(Engineer, in this case). If I could give an edge here, I will. You're fooling yourself if you think this technology can be stopped, too - because it'll be done in some country, because there's a lot of interest in this.
I've always wondered what would make up for man stopping natural evolution - we're too successful, and it's too slow. I always thought eventually AI would come into the picture, but with the possiblilty of being able to engineer our genes in the next 25 years, maybe government will be bright enough to let us make choices for how we want our offspring be.
Mind you, this tech isn't going to be cheap. But, I'd rather leave my kids improved genetic code (resistance to Cancer, maybe?) than a big chunk of money when I die. That might even be worth saving up for.
Kudos.
..don't panic
First thing you have to consider when making such analogies is that the market of PE and Microsoft is very, very different. It is a little harder to fool a scientist then it is to fool someone buing a home computer. You know, you tell one of them scientist fellas "this is 100% better" and he asks you what did you use as a negative control and where did you submit the paper with the detailed descriptions of experiments. And when you tell him, he actually goes to the library to read the paper, and maybe repeats one or two of the experiments, usually demanding a trial period for your machine or a sample of the chemicals. (Some even say, they do not buy chemicals at all, with all that company representatives in the house. But I'm digressing.)
You keep in mind your goal, you stay in touch with other people using the same techniques, you read a lot. My institute bought recently a quite expensive machine for so-called real time PCR; there are three companies producing such machines, and PE is one of them. Getting opinion, testing the machines, reading etc - I even was to two workshops - took a couple of months before we bought the PE machine. Funny thing is, it had definitely the worse marketing: everybody seems to know about another one, by Roche, which is called LightCycler, and has a mega-cool design, crossed with some piece of a futuristic ST device. PE machine is computer-ivory, takes more space, looks very old-fashioned and you can hardly spot any advertisments for it. It is not much better then the other one and definitely has some weak points (software, for example, is very crappy), but it seems much more -- reliable.
And that's the point about PE. They have a good opinion due to two things. First, the know-how: they are good at it. Technical support which I encountered was always exactly what the name says it is, and the workshop was excellent (however, that by Roche was not bad either, and definitely much more splendid). The other one is, the machines are really, really good. We have one PCR machine that has been working without any problems for the last ten years. A whole genome was sequenced with that single machine (admittedly, the genome is about 3750 times smaller then the human genome, but 1996 it was the seventh or so genome sequenced). PE PCR machines are quite expensive, so now we are using two by Eppendorff, but if we had that dough...
On the other thing, they are agressive, definitely. And I hate that thing with Celera, which is, IMO, the worst way of doing science. And I don't like anything that is set out only for money (as opposed, for example, to the university, which is set out only for making lives of some grown-up childrens more interesting and buy them more toys. Like, for example, a real time PCR machine). But PE is far, far away from being a monopolist, and the quality of their products is very high. So they are as far from MS as it is only possible for a large, international company (international? did I say international? You want to hear something about MS polish language support?).
Best regards,
January
this kind of uninformed writing (in journalism and advertising alike) was despised enough by hackers that they invented an acronym to classify it -- FUD. the posts that are represented here, with talk of "perfect babies" and "playing God" and such foolishness speak of a community that obviously is not armed for rational discussion of a serious issue.
there was a good quote by oppenheimer in james gleick's book "Genius", to the effect that as a scientist, he had to believe that to know was ALWAYS better than not to know, even when that knowledge was dangerous. "god created this world, not us" (saw this in a post a bit down). if god created this world (i'm not arguing either way), i doubt that he wanted us to sit here and live in self-imposed ignorance.
it is true that as we probe deeper into the heart of nature, we progressively become more of a danger to ourselves. but with this loss of innocence, we become closer to finally being masters of our own lives, and to really understanding our place in the working of all things.
"perfect babies" (i also saw this post elsewhere). you know, you perform your own kind of genetic engineering when you pick a mate with whom to breed -- selected for physical and intellectual attributes which you hope to preserve (albeit in a crude, haphazard kind of way) along with your own traits in subsequent generations. to be able to augment that kind of selection with the ability to delete disease causing genes -- that's great.
sure, there will (eventually) be people who blow a considerable amount of money making their children into blonde-haired, blue-eyed (there is nothing wrong with blonde hair and blue eyes) little volleyball players, but really, for every three or for dozen of those children, someone with real vision is going to have a child who is genetically predisposed for intelligence, wit, and compassion. and against even a handful of such children, those "perfect babies" don't stand a chance for survival. And aside from all of that, my guess is that most people will still elect to reproduce the old fashioned way.
Oh yeah... about the article itself. Having the genetic sequence is like having a billion page book that is written at odd patches in french, spanish, german, bengali, english, and swahili; and worse yet, the book actually contains about one million different storylines, the sentences of which are all woven in and around each other. We have no way of understanding or using this information, and the common conception that there is some gene that controls this or that feature of a person is just plain wrong. for a bare handful of traits, this is true; but many genes code in different combinations with many other genes for widely disparate information, the grouping of which often seems lacking in serious rhyme or reason. And the interpretation of all of that kind of information will take more than superfast computers -- it will take decades of cleverly designed experiements and careful research.
so everyone quit whining and stewing, read that copy of "Future Shock" one more time, and work on teaching yourselves and your children to live responsibly in a world where you might have to have questions about yourself answered that you wouldn't even think to ask. We should work on making ourselves worthy of this kind of power, rather than fearing it, because it is inevitable.
Stop making these people out to be cartoon villains or heroes. The real answer to your question is that being famous is irrelevant to issues of public concern. You seem to be saying that fame or infamy is a measure of one's importance to society. While it may be true that infamous people are well-known, the actual reasons for their infamy are far more important than their 'top-of-mind' rating in focus groups. As others have pointed out, genetics has been widely discussed for several years. People are already aware of the issues -- they only need data to help them understand the risks and benefits of genetic engineering, and you haven't provided any. If you think Hunkapiller should be more famous, perhaps you should get him an agent.