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Genetically Modified Humans Born
sh64109 writes: "According to this article that just popped up on the BBC, some children were born recently with modified genes. The modification was made to mitochondrial (not nuclear) DNA so only the girls (if there were any) will be able to pass this on. The purpose of the mod was to correct an infertility problem."
That is neat, but when will we have genetically modified children that would be able to fight amazon woman?
however, I think it is really neat that we can use genetic engineering to solve problems like this...It always looked nice on paper, but now that it has actually been accomplished, I bet a lot of more people will have a little more respect for this sort of thing. It would be really nice to prevent diseases and stuff using genetic engineering.
The anti-salmon
I thought that genetically modified humans were being born all the time. How else do you explain the fact that we're all different?
Except for twins and other freaks.
Dancin Santa
Sure Cloning is newer than Gen Mods but it is less dangerus on a small scale.
I.e. The downside of cloning is when you have lots of identical people with many of the same weakneses. A single incorectly modifide subject however can wreck onknown havoc.
I.e. What if there realy is an "evil gean"
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
I wonder if I can "meta-mod" these babies. I think they have been modded up too much :P
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Oh bother.
Is there a website where you can order these? I'd like to have maybe 5-6 of these modified girls done right now so that they can be available to provide entertainment for my retirement party in about 20 years.
I'd like red hair and freckles, perky breast gene set to "on", and hold the fertility.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
"Genetic fingerprint tests on two one-year-old children confirm that they contain a small quantity of additional genes not inherited from either parent."
The truth (tm):
Baby is genetically tested. Genes exist that don't match either parent. Wife, afraid of admitting that she was fucking the plumber, tries to explain it "Our child was genetically manipulated by them scientists."
...to CORRECT an infertility problem. On an overpopulated planet. Great.
Did it ever occur to anyone that perhaps there's a REASON some people are infertile?
I might sound overly harsh, but if this continues, we'll have lots and lots of perfectly healthy, long-lived, incredibly weak and fragile human beings walking this planet.
Let the flames begin.
El riesgo vive siempre!
From the nice quote box on the BBC Page
[This] is the first case of human germline genetic modification resulting in normal healthy children
St Barnabas Institute for Reproductive Medicine researchers
Does that imply there has been genetic modification resulting in not so healthy children? Just wondering...
Wow, is it just me, or is this article really down on genetic engineering? It seems like it has one paragraph on what was done, then the bulk of it is various people saying why it was bad, how it wouldn't be allowed in the UK, etc. Why isn't there any "This is a great step forward" commentary? Or at least, more explanation of why it was done? To hear the article say it, it sounds as though infertility was a mere excuse to violate the "germline"; but since when is the germline sacred? Personally, though, I'm proud to hear about this; I hope that in the future, we can see more people doing more with genetics to make us all better suited to our environments (which, after all, is radically different from the one we evolved in).
So I guess this means that gene splicing, etc was NOT involved. And what they did was to add mitochonria from one person into the cells of another.
Sort of similar to replacing whole chromosomes, though that could be the next step.
Sort of like hacking code by replacing whole sections of code. This should be safe, as far as the children goes.
But the can of worms it opens...
I do not mind it by itself, it is just that I do not know of any agency that I would feel comfortable in trusting with this sort of thing.
That, ultimately, is the problem. Who do you trust?
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I wonder how long until all the quake mod geeks become human mod geeks.
"Our new auto-aim mod for the standard U.S. soldier causes instant and accurate targeting of the enemy ..."
Will skin color be considered a "defect?" How about height? In the future how will those who's parents were not wealthy enough to modify their babies have a fair chance in the world?
Watch the second ending to GATTACA on the DVD version. There is a very real possibility of this technology being abused beyond anyone's imagination. It is quite possible that this slope is just too slippery to continue down.
When nuance becomes the only objective we lose the ability to function
Darn mutants! Turn 'em all in!!!
You want fries with that?
Dancin McSanta
Can you imagine how much a kid would get picked on in school once the other children learned they were genetically modified? Or even the reaction from adults?
I'm not arguing about this particlar experiment. I have no expertise in genetics. From what I understand, this didn't seem to be some huge step (it's not like they were alterted for more IQ).
I'm just saying in a world that hasn't even overcome racism or religious intolerance, these kids could have a hard time.
These critics will be looked on as niave luddites at best (racist at worst) in a few decades. How will these children feel about being called "wrong in principle"?
On the other hand, will there be a "godhatesclones.com"* in 20 years?
*Yes, I know they're not clones, but its the same concept.
Cheers
How long will it be until Virtual Hideout has a "Cool Humans" mod section?
The One,
The Only,
--The Kid
the liberator who destroyed my property has realigned my perception
www.quantumheresy.com
it was going to happen here (the good old U S of A).
;)
What's next?
"My family has a history of heart disease, doc. Can you fix it? You know, for kids..."
"My family has a history of obesity, doc. Can you fix it? You know, for kids..."
"My family has a history of being ugly, doc. Can you fix it? You know, for kids..."
I guess everything will be alright, since without federal funding, all scientific experimentation will fail utterly anyway.
The modification was made to mitochondrial DNA
Per Qui-Gon's statements about young Anakin having a high midichlorian count... I wonder if you could genetically modify your own race of jedi warriors...
- passion
"There is no evidence that this is a possible valuable treatment for infertility," he added.
So without knowing if it would do any good, someone went ahead and did it. I have always lived by the saying to "look before you leap." I wish others did the same.
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There's no point in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes. -- Dr. Who
Imagine a Gattaca-like future 100 years from now, when everybody's DNA is vigorously scrubbed free of defective genes. Maybe people have different skin, hair, or eye color, just for fashion's sake, but internally we all look pretty much the same. Wouldn't this drastically increase the risk of some killer pathogen taking advantage of such a uniform field of hosts?
Nature is sloppy, but it tends to be highly resilient. Human efforts, on the other hand, tend to be much more focused, but also highly brittle.
Do domain names matter?
We are walking right down the eugenics path.
Frankly, this is no better than a Mengele experiment.
That was one of the reasons I went into BioChem as an undergrad.... help change the world. I became a code monkey to feed my family, but my heart is still there.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
[Bold emphasis mine.]
Why no announcement of this experiment before the babies were conceived? Why no "Genetically Modified Pregnancy Continues On Schedule" articles? Why no "Genetically Modified Babies Planned. 'Race of Supermen Possible,' Claim Scientists"?
I wonder if the births would have ever been reported at all if the GM humans had not been born healthy? I'm guessing the scientists would only want to bring attention to a successful story, and bury news about a failure so that the media wouldn't crucify them for trying to "play god."
But still, I have to wonder how many times they might have tried this and been unsuccessful?
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You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
The scientists who argue for human germline modification make some interesting points. For example, they point out that we've already been altering the gene line by simply treating diabetics with insulin--if that diabetic then goes on to have children, we have increased the number of defective genes in the population. Same with cystic fibrosis. And yet, obviously nobody would argue against life-prolonging treatment for the "genetically challenged". So what's wrong with treating the germline for the positive?
The article itself says that all the functions of mitochondrion are as of yet unknown. Suppose whatever genetic problem was causing the infertility was also linked to a congental disease which was likely to be fatal sometime during the life any offspring. The infertility might be a case of natural selection. The mother, who is carrying the disease, was rendered infertile, thus preventing the passing on of the bad gene, strengthening the species. But science steps in and finds a way to make her fertile anyway. Now her offspring not only are carrying the bad gene, but are now also fertile themselves, ensuring that they can reproduce and pass it on to their children. Shortly after that, they die some horrible death caused by the gene, but it's too late - they've already passed it on. Science and progress are great, but perhaps there are some things we shouldn't be tampering with given what little we probably know.
How long until cannibals start complaining about not eating genetically altered humans?
--The space between my ears was intentionally left blank--
Last time I checked, the population of the earth was growing out of control, thanks to medical treatments, etc.. But I really do think we should be focusing on ways to fit more people or earth, or populate the moon or mars or at least something before we work on ways to keep people living longer and having more children.. I'm sure this would be flamebait but hey, its the honest truth.. if we don't figure out something soon it'll be like China all over the world, with everyone sleeping in drawers and showering in the kitchen.
..There's a-dooin's a-transpirin'
Now the old joke has come to pass.
Help fight continental drift.
Over population is.
The LAST thing we need is genetically engineered mutants who are MORE likely to reproduce.
Perhaps I'm missing something here, but it seems to me that people as a whole have ANY problem reproducing. Now only if they could fix the stupidity problem...
If cloning were done by dividing an original cell into two, then yes, it would be fairly safe.
Cloning is usually done by taking cells from a living creature, however, and placing them into a newly-emptied egg cell. This is dangerous like you wouldn't believe, because the DNA of the clone is prematurely aged. The telomeres at the ends of strings are much shorter, and eventually the DNA degenerates and cannot be copied. Cloned animals (including the famous Dolly, IIRC) often exhibit serious problems after only a few years of life.
As for the reduction of diversity, this is only the case for mass cloning. If the population is cloned entirely, thus doubling its size, there is no problem with loss of genetic diversity.
The planet might be able to support 30 billion people, but I wouldn't want to live there.
"The purpose of the mod was to correct an infertility problem."
The mod itself was performed by Kyle of HardOCP.com using a dremel tool, artic silver heatsink compound, and ten 180mm high output fans. When asked why he was modding babies, Kyle replied "Modding computer cases was too easy. Now that I have modded babies, I plan to overclock them and see if they can play Quake ]|[ faster than unmodified babies."
Thomas Pabst of TomsHardware.com stated that "... the modded babies are imperfect, and will need further revisions before we can accurately ascertain performance enhancements."
The modification was made to mitochondrial (not nuclear) DNA so only the girls (if there were any) will be able to pass this on.
This is incorrect. Recent (5-10 years ago) it has been shown that mitochondria do migrate from father to child.
How? A sperm cell is basically a protein capsule with DNA in it, and a tail on the back end. However, around this tail there's an enormeous amount of mitochondria present, which create energy for the tail to function.
When an eg is fertilised, the sperm cell head fuses with the egg cell. In a number of occasions this fusion also includes part of the tail, and with the tail these mitochondria.
Even if the amount of mitochondria present is very small compared to those provided by the mother, they can get the upperhand if they are 'fitter' (e.g. multiply faster)
Therefore, genetically modified boys (because the mother can get a boy) can pass on the modified genes. Although in this case no genes were modified, but just recombined.
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
Maybe it's a bit offtopic, but when i read this the next thought came up. What happened to adoption? I still think adopting a child and give him parents is a better solution than adjust the patents and give them children. This will just create more hungry mouths to feed.
Maybe there sould a ethical law that for every child you give life to you should also adopt a child in the 3rd world. Just to geve them a chance also.
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Privacy is terrorism.
If a tourist can pay 20 million US to go to the international space station, then what's it cost to have genetic mods? Better to know of this out in the open then find out the hard way, that you have become smaller pray.
3 S.E.A.S - Virtual Interaction Configuration (VIC) - VISION OF VISIONS!
So is humanity 1.1b compatible with 1.0? So far they're stable, but they haven't had a lot of uptime thus far to brag about.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Is there anything moraly wrong with it? No, vague maybe, but not wrong.
This is not moraly vague beacuse its altering genetics, its vague because of very limited knowledge of mitocondrial dna. The bulk of dna research done to date as been concerning cromosonal dna. The effects of altering or swapping mitocondria are incredibly unknown do to very little research in that area. There is still debate in the scientific community as to what exactly mitocondria do.
We konw some of what they do, and some of how they work, but have far from a complete picture of evertying they do, or all of how they work. We don't even know when and where we got them. It's plain that we just dont know enough about them for this to have been a scientific experiment.
You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely.
Recently, the US government passed regulations saying that genetic experiments will not be conducted on humans. This is most certainly a back door taken advantage of, because technically, the ova is not a human being until it is fertilized by spermatozoa.
I find myself subtly worried about this. On the one hand, it's a good thing if this means an easier, safer, and beter way to improve fertility. This is what medical science is supposed to be doing. On the other hand... it seems a bit early, doesn't it, to start actively messing with genetics?
Now, technically, this wasn't geneering, it was simple injection of mitochondia into ova. (Were they fertilized or unfertilized? I think I missed that in the article if they mentioned it.) This is a good thing! But we really don't know everything that mitochondia EM in a cell. While it's not genetic engineering, it's cellular engineering so early in development that it might have unforseen effects. These kids have mitochondrial DNA that belongs to neither their parents. While I don't think it's unethical, I have to wonder if this really is a path we want to start down at our level of knowledge.
And what the HELL is this "US Government Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee?" When the heck did our government cobble together this? It sounds like the seeds for some sort of genetic regulatory agency. Okay, maybe I'm paranoid, but I don't like it when my governm,ent starts making esoteric and little-known agencies that start issuing legistlation or making any srt of decisions that impact me. The Federalist Society and Trilateral Commission and Council on Foreign Affairs are already plugged into our events too much. Or maybe I've just been playing Deus Ex too much.
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
"I am an Adept of Tantric VAX."
It looks to me like the people quoted in this article were trying to score points with the Catholic church; maybe the authors were too.
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Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
Yikes. Natural selection should be allowed to happen naturally. It's not nice to fool with mother nature.
only the girls (if there were any) will be able to pass this on
I'd hope that if they've already been born, at least someone knows whether any of them were girls.
The shareholder is always right.
Who says that there haven't been 4 gens of previous failures in this "experimental programme"? Since when did any kind of privately funded R&D project make it's findings public without being successful? That sounds like a recipe for tumbling stock prices to me...
Knowing the current trends in IP law, I'm very surprized that the scientists didn't modify the babies so that they would be *unable* to reproduce. Unauthorized reproduction would be a violation of their IP rights, after all.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
It really bothers me that people keep describing this as a genetic modification. It's no more of a modification than fertilization itself, or less ethical than a kidney transplant (where you also end up with three people's DNA somewhere in your system)
I'm a little unsure as to why they did it though. They imply that the mitochondrial transfer will save the children from having the same infertility genes as their parents. However, the maternal grandmothers would have had the same "bad" mitochondria...and still managed to have children! So the procedure can't be that useful.
The baby only has one ass! He's useless to me, I'll have to kill it.
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Hmm... Nope. I don't see it in the old testament anywhere. There's no evidence that it's unethical. Even despite the fact that these kiddos now have a better (Unfair) chance of having their own kiddos one day, I don't see how it is in any way unethical.
Now 'Stupid' is another matter altogether. Think about it for a second. Haven't the vast majority of gene scientists come forth to agree with the fact that the complexity of the human genome lies not in the number of genes that exist, but in the way they interact?
Who's to say that having an extra set of Mitochondrial DNA won't snafu those interactions somehow? Yeah, it's nice to think "Hey, that's where the problem is, so why don't we replace those parts", but where the hell is the animal testing to see what happens when baby mice and rhesus monkeys have too many Mitochondria? I see no references to the research in the (very sensational) BBC article.
Also, there's the fact of 'Natural Selection' to consider. Something is wrong with those genes if they're not being passed on. Now these kids have a set of 'bad' Mitochondrial DNA along with their 'good' M-DNA. That gets passed on to their kids, and so on. What other problems are lurking in that 'bad' DNA along with infertility? A tendancy toward cancer? Schizophrenic or psychotic behavior? Yeah, it's harsh to say that you can't reproduce because you got damaged genes, but hey, You're genes are damaged! Are you really sure you want to give those to your kids anyway?
There are a *lot* of really good options for people who want kids but can't have them. It is more difficult to adopt than it is to just have a child, but there are millions of homeless children all around the world.
Rather than making it easier for people with bad genes to have children, why don't we concentrate on streamlining the adoption process and make it easier for people to adopt children from underprivaleged nations around the world? Let's have social justice before we start muckign around in the old gene-code there, pals.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
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Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
With all of the good medical care technology that we have now, those born with problem genes are not being weeded out by natural selection. We are no longer evolving. Since the problem genes are being passed on to future generatiosn instead of disappearing, the amount of medical care each person needs will rise until either:
1. The total cost becomes prohibitive, medical care is less available and people start dying in greater numbers before they reach breeding age.
or
2. The problem genes are replaced.
Our choice will be large scale genetic engineering vs. a large scale die off.
The planet might be able to support 30 billion people, but I wouldn't want to live there.
why? you probably wouldn't even notice it. have you travelled across the u.s. and seen how empty it is? sure, some parts of the country and the rest of the world are somewhat crowded - but vast areas of land are virtually empty. but as someone else pointed out, resource distribution would be the main problem. hopefully that will be solved before there are 30 billion people.
This has nothing to do with human DNA as in the genome, the double helix we all think of. This is our main source of genetic information and defines the majority of our genetic characteristics.
Mitochondria are organelles (subcellular organisms) which are necessary for our cells to produce energy. Without them we would die. Mitochondria are stand-alone units in our cells. Our cells' DNA cannot produce mitochodria. When we are conceived, there are mitochondria in our mother's egg cell. When the zygote divides, the mitochondria divide too. All the billions of mitochondria in our cells are descended from those which come from our mothers eggs.
Because of the mitochodria's relatively autonomous existence and reproduction, many scientists believe they are actually a seperate life form (something similar to a bacteria, for example) which "moved in" to our cells, creating a symbiotic relationship and resulting in the basis for cellular life on earth.
It appears to me that what these scientists have done is take genetically unaltered, presumably healthy mitochondria out of an individual's cell and implanted them into the egg cell of a mother who's mitochondria are presumably defective. This is not, to my mind, genetic modification, although the resulting children do have some genetic material in their cells that their mothers don't have.
What's causing the ruckus is these are the first children born with modified "germ" cells (i.e. sperm or egg). The changes should change every cell in the body - if succesful they will all contain the healthy donor mitochondria. Ethically I don't see the issue - You can put another person's heart in someone's chest, but not an organelle in an egg? Mitochondria are probably alien to our cells anyway, so to me the ethics of this is a pretty grey area. Anyway, it's a long long way from Gattaca in anything but abstract conception.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
No population problem? Tell that to all of the Wildlife that humans are encroaching upon. Tell that to the atmosphere which is suffering from too much carbon dioxide and not enough oxygen.
I guess you are right in a way, though. There's no population problem, just too many humans. Replace some with Siberian Tigers, Giant Pandas, etc and so on - and don't forget to replace a few greedy Brazilians with some foliage for the Amazon Rainforest (where a lot of Earth's oxygen is converted.)
Even the suggestion that Earth can maintain a lot more population is an insult to anybody even mildly interested in the state of the environment. Humans are the WORST thing to ever happen to this planet and I'm including the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs and the effects of the ice age.
Don't just complain - DO something about it!
I believe the Gene-ie is officially out of the bottle.
(apologies to David Weber from whom I first learned the term Gene-ie for a genetically engineered human)
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
What you do not take into account is that solving this "distribution problem" means leveling the consumption of an average American to the level of "an average human", at least to a quarter of the present, probably much more.
Presently United States accounts for 25 % of world's carbon dioxide emissions while having only less than 5 percent of the population. Additionally, the food consumption should drop even more, not to mention the decrease in living space. And as the population keeps growing, we're having less and less resources per capita left.
So, next time you accuse someone using arguments like "Because we all know, you got here first and you don't want to share." make sure your arguments are not as misguided. We will all need to drop our consumption of fossil fuels, mineral resources etc. to survive, and, IMHO, it would really help to also reduce our fertility.
As long as there are resources for everyone, human beings will continue to multiply until such a time comes that there AREN'T resources for everyone. The same is true of pretty much any creature on this planet. We expand to fill all available spaces.
Not that I'm for population controls, or intentionally limiting resources. I would just prefer it if we humans would plan to strike a balance with the resources available in order to maintain a sustainable growth.
Since most of the energy we as human expend goes towards creating materials that can't (or don't) reuse and recycle, I think the logical conclusion to our brief stay on this planet will be total depletion of usable resources.
It seems to me that if we should be looking for long term replacements for the resources we're consuming.
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Ewige Blumenkraft!
Ewige Blumenkraft!
I'm speaking from a socialogical, not biological, point of view. They're both grouped into the "playing god is wrong" claptrap.
We are gods, just a little unpracticed.
Cheers
I used to think that it was wrong to genetically modify an unborn child, but at the time I hadn't really thought about it. My answer was more of a reaction to the question and the idea that we hadn't done it before, things are working pretty well right now, let's keep things status quo. But by going status quo we don't learn anything, and there is actually a lot of good that can come from digging deeper into genetics. Can we honestly say it would have been better had we not explored space and the planets beyond Earth? Would we even know as much about Earth as we do now?
I once read or heard the idea that every few billion years, there is a kind of rebirth of the Earth and its inhabitants. The key to keeping the species alive is to use the time you have to learn and develop ways to survive the destruction and live to see the next rebirth.
An interesting theory and if true, we need to get beyond the fear of "playing with genetics" if we are to gain enough knowledge to continue our survival.
Finding the limit to experimentation is tough. How far do we go before we go too far? Maybe there is a point in which we start damaging ourselves more than helping. If we don't dig any deeper tho, how will we ever find that point and how long will the human species survive?
Me and my friends always get into this argument, they are against genetic engineering, while I am for it (yes, I realize that the article is not talking about true genetic engineering). There are some facts that we need to face as humans, several people mentioned that if we fix all of humanities internal problems, some pathogen could come along and wipe us out, maybe, but you forgot to take something into account. Many people say that genetic engineering is not ethical because it gives peole too much power over their children (and the rich could do it while the poor couldn't). Well folks, I hate to tell you this, but we NEED to do genetic engineering. Slowly but surely the human genetic code is going down the drains, we are introducing and keeping so many genetic imperfections that they are bound to start causing real problems soon. For instance, how many people do you know that need glasses? Or have asthma? Or are just genetically disposed to being over(or under)weight? The problem is, were we creatures living the wild, natural selection would take care of this. In the cave man days if you couldn't see a mammoth to kill it, you were't going to bring food back to the tribe, which meant no one was going to breed with you, and that your genes wouldn't get passed on. Then of course there is attempting to run away from a saber-toothed tiger when you start to have an asthma attack, on obvious difficulty to future breading attempts. Unfortunatly, since we are civilized we can support those people who wouldn't otherwise survive, they breed, and a new generation gets the bad genes. Look around you at how bad things have gotten, 9 out of 10 people that I know wear glasses. While some people (like me) just barely need them, I know of at least 3 people who can NOT function without their glasses. We need these things out of the species, and quickly.
/* Of course I'm real, but can you prove it? */
States with massive surpluses of food and resources also tend to have low (or possibly enforced low) birth rates. Thus you get large inputs of resources and a small number of people to share them amongst.
Contrast to the so-called developing world where you get less in the way of food production and either fewer resources or resources that are owned by conglomerates combined with massive reproduction rates. This isn't a population problem, you can only support a given number of people on a certain amount. It's the numbers coming into the system.
Look at 'civilised', literate, well educated countries. They have low birth rates. Each child has more oppertunity to learn and has a higher concentration of investment put into them. This isn't just good planning; areas where infant mortality is high and there's a lack of good nutrition and medicine are going to require high birth rates to gaurantee a small number survive.
We have to remember that it isn't too long ago that the countries we consider now to be civilised and developed had their own underclass of civilians, who had large families with the problems involved in supporting and educating them, with the vicious cycle of their offspring ending up in the same low-paid areas their parents did. Not to mention the effect of Catholicism.
There is a population problem, not maybe in the absolute numbers but where they are concentrated. You can provide all the support you want to areas such as africa but until they are able to cut down the birth rate that support will be spread incredibly thin. I don't advocate killing anyone, but drastically reducing the number of new people to feed, educate, house and provide employment for is, in my mind, the hallmark of a developed society (amongst many other things of course outside the scope of this thread).
"Don't get mad, get a monkey!"
Look, there are all these oh-so self-righteous religious and non-religious zealots talking about how "immoral" it is to genetically engineer human being, or how "immoral" it is to use gene-therapy on people to fix genetic problems: that is their morality. No one else gives a damn. If you do not like the idea of genetically modifying a human being, then DON'T DO IT. But don't tell other people that they have to follow your morality. If someone wants to use genetically alter their gametes to create a genetically altered child, that is THEIR right to do so. If someone wants to use gene therapy to alter their own genes, to alleviate a susceptibility to a certain disease, or for any other reason, that is THEIR right. Simply put: MY body, MY right. Why don't we stop with the over-dramaticization of the issue here -- this is not the end of the world.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Because I put the rights of existing people above the rights of potential future people who don't exist yet.
Don't get me wrong, I want the future to be a nice place, if for no other reason than my son (who actually exists) will be there. Heck, I hope to be there, too. But I don't think we need to go killing off existing people; maybe, just maybe, we should consider limiting our own reproduction instead.
No, it's not easy. My wife wants a bigger family than I do, and it's a source of some tension. But I do think it's irresponsible to have a huge family these days. Understandable but irresponsible.
There is no propulation[sic] problem! There is a resource distribution problem.
Okay, quoting Dieoff.org, "Approximately 99% of the world food supply is derived from terrestrial ecosystems with the percentage from aquatic systems shrinking (Kendall and Pimentel, 1994). The availability of arable land at world level is less than 0.27 ha per capita, lower than it has ever been in history, and much less than the average of 0.7 ha per capita in the United States (WRI, 1994). Note that 0.5 ha per capita has been suggested as the minimum requirement for a diverse diet of animal and plant food products (Lal, 1989)."
How do we get enough food these days? Fertilizers! How do we make them? Fossil fuels!
We are using up fossil fuels faster than they are being replaced. Obviously, we will run out of them someday. The energy in fossil fuels ultimately comes from the sun. We are using more energy today than actually arrives from the sun. We will run out of fossil fuels eventually.
So what will we do to make the fertilizers to grow the food to feed everyone? If you're so concerned about people of the future, why aren't you working on this mathematically certain problem they will face?
Just remember, the life you abort might have grown up to save yours.
Who said anything about abortion? Unless you think life begins at erection...
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
I want to build my own roads. Or, more correctly, I want building roads to be handled by the market. I don't really have any plans of going out and learning to pour asphalt or anything myself. If we were in early soviet Russia, and having this argument, would you tell me "all you libertarians who want to grow your own food, raise your hands"? Or maybe in modern northern europe, you could say "all you libertarians who want to pay for supporting the church out of your own pocket, raise your hands"?
Imagine, next thing I may be advocating private provision of health care, or of education. Both of which, I might add, are provided much better by the market than by government.
Remember, this is a government by, for, and of the people. The government has no needs. People have needs that are difficult to meet through means other than by government. Don't confuse the means (government) with the end (a free, productive society).
You've been reading too many enviro-nut websites. Get out a little more often, maybe try to learn hang-gliding.
Now all the school children will just have something else to antagonize this poor little kid for:
Mutant mutant,
we made you in a dish...
Revelations 0:0 - The beginning of the end
Right now, the current population problem could be solved by solving the resource distribution problem, but that's short-sighted. If population growth continues at its present rate, the planet's in for lots of trouble within the next couple centuries.
There's nothing wrong with procreation, but [intentionally] having more than 2 children is irresponsible.
So will succeeding generations now come with changelogs instead of birth certificates?
why? you probably wouldn't even notice it. have you travelled across the u.s. and seen how empty it is? sure, some parts of the country and the rest of the world are somewhat crowded - but vast areas of land are virtually empty.
Well, I live in the second-least crowded state - Nevada - with two people per square mile - so I think I'm qualified to give some input on this.
In Las Vegas, the population exceeded the capacity of the land to support it long ago - it pipes in a majority of its water from California, at a gigantic cost to everyone.
In Reno, we manage to get by through our sound policies of raping the Truckee River and Lake Tahoe, watering our lawns only 1-2 times a week, and, every ten years, being formally denied showers for a couple weeks. I hear there used to be fish in that river. But, when I was 17, and on the cross-country team, I ran right across it. My socks got wet; my pants did not.
In Fallon, Nevada, there isn't easy access to natural sources of water, so most citizens drill shallow wells to get at the ever-lowering water table. These wells tend to be loaded with concetrations of arsenic as high as 1,000 ppb. The result? One of the largest and most alarming leukemia clusters in the U.S.
Certainly the earth can support a larger population than six billion people if resources were distributed correctly - but don't try telling me that you could alleviate L.A.'s overcrowding problem by 50% by moving half of them to Winnemucca (Recent town billboard: "Winnemucca! Now with paved roads!"). Nevada would be dry in a week - and we'd have to make do with gin.
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
Does it occur to anyone else that we might be living in a time where a real "Dark Angel" could be made? With all the knowledge that we have about genetics now, it may indeed be possible to make a human being with "better" characteristics than "average." Someone who would be as quick as a mongoose and as strong as a bear? I don't know. The possibilities are endless to speculate about. But then you have to ask yourself that if it *were* possible (and it *will* be someday), wouldn't this kind of technology be just as power-unbalancing as nuclear weapons? Now what 3rd-world dictator with a lot of money can you see trying to get just such capability? A couple spring to my mind right now.
Acts 17:28, "For in Him we live, and move, and have our being."
No, the worst patents can do is prevent them from becoming teenage parents, which most would say is a good effect. Patents are 20 years from filing right now. Assuming you file on the day you implant the egg, that means the patent expires around the kid's sophomore year of college.
hmm... anyone remember how many people lived on Trantor, from the Foundation novels? (that was the planet's name, right?)
This'll probably get modded down, but....
You can imagine what the Team Fortress gene-mod would be. You're either blue or red, you very much think 'in the box' and you like to stereotype everyone. Oh, and you get very possessive of your things.
The Action gene-mod. John Woo is your god, and Michelle Yeoh is his prophetess. Why do things halfway? You can drink soda from akimbo cans! You can dive through life with great vigour!
Counterstrike gene-mod. Too bad the world is all either for you or against you... unless they set the friendlyfire chromosome to ON, then it gets interesting.
Aliens TC gene-mod. Axed by 20th Century Fox. All your telomeres are belong to us. Besides, human body and acid blood just didn't go well together. Unless you're Sigourney Weaver.
DXMP gene-mod. You start thinking that, not only is everyone out to get you, but they, like you, have the ability to hide a sniper rifle, GEP gun, and a brace of LAMs in nothing more than a black leather trench coat. The US Genetic Regulatory Agency gets particularly nervous about this mod....
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
"I am an Adept of Tantric VAX."
So, gee, it's a *good* thing that what used to be beautiful forest with some of the best singletrack on the east coast of the United States was just clearcut????
Too many people, 'needing' too many things, building too many fucking golf courses and driving too many miles in cars while throwing away tons of trash a day, encouraging it by eating at places like McDonalds.
We're fucking it all up people.
Not enough oxygen? Where do you live, Mars?
You obviously have some kind of really twisted hatred of people, and spend way too much time reading wacko environmentalist propoganda. I just hope someone like you never gets any kind of power. We don't need another Stalin or Hitler or Pol Pot.
As far as I'm concerned, this planet ain't worth a plugged nickel without people to benefit from it, and while I certainly don't condone the actions of those who destroy the environment, and am certainly not totally blameless myself by virtue of being a U.S. citizen, I'm also not some Earth-worshipping hippie who considers humanity a cancer on the planet. The fact that a human being is alive is reason enough for him or her to exist.
p.s. I'm not implying all environmentalists are wackos, but GemFire, you have certainly bought into their logic-free rhetoric.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Before I get to the point, I'd like to state that, to a degree, I have no problem with genetic manipulation to breed out certain "bad" traits, genetically passed-on diseases and such, that make for a miserable life for the afflicted person and all involved.
However...infertility happens in nature because of overpopulation...it's a mutation to control the size of the species' population. I'll ignore all the whining "But I have a right to have a child too!" comments...because, well, no you don't. (Not to mention most people I know shouldn't be allowed to have kids anyway as they're completely incompetent parents) Natural selection says we're breeding to friggin much...we're making more problems for ourselves by bypassing this. I actually wrote an essay for a class several years ago that proposed banning infertility treatment, and noted that it was well received by those with a little common sense and intuition, and was frowned upon by the "Me first" people that have problems visualizing anything that doesn't put their personal feelings first.
But what do I know, I'm just a geek.
This message brought to you by the Council of People Who Are Sick of Seeing More People.
So are Nevada's water problems the fault of people in general or because some people are stupid enough to grow a lawn in the desert?
To paraphrase Sam Kinison: Move to where the water is!
Rick
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Our agricultural methods have already led to the desertification of the worlds richest lands, namely the fertile crescent that was the birthplace of our civilization. The once fertile Tigris and Euphratis valley is now desert, primarilly because the land was farmed until the soil simply died and was consumed by an ever-growing dustbowl.
Similar agricultural catastrophe is believed to have played a signifigant role in the downfall of the ancient Mayan civilization, and has plagued other agricultural regions as well.
Already in the world's so-called bread-basket (the American mid-west) we have lost well over half of the topsoil that was here just a century ago. Wind and water erosion, coupled with agricultural procedures which are not sustainable, are literally killing the land.
Is there a way to perform agriculture without killing the land? Yes. Is there a way of doing so and feeding even half of the people currently residing on the planet? No, not even if every square inch of arable land were converted, with the sole purpose of creating food for humans (read: no more parks, no more building above ground, no more wildlife refuges, no more wildlife).
Worse, it would do no good. You could use every square inch of the planet to produce food for humans, and have the most effecient distribution system possible, and there would still be widespread starvation. Why? Because populations always grow to meet their supply of food, whether that population consists of rats in a cage or humans in the wild is immaterial. "Meeting the supply of food" in a biological sense doesn't mean everyone is well fed, it means that the poluation is as large as the food supply will permit, which generally means that a significant portion of that population is living on the edge of starvation.
Population pressures aren't just a question of getting what was grown today into someone's mouth, or about elbow room to build a house, it is a question of sustainability. Daniel Quinne has written some excellent works on this very subject (and its ramifications). "Ishmael" and "The Story of B" in particular are quite insighteful and thought provoking.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
And what do you mean by that? I don't mean to judge, but do you know what you're talking about?
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If I understand the article correctly, DNA is NOT being inserted into mitochondria. The children are not "genetically modified" in the traditional sense. The mitochondria from mother 1 had a defect, so mitochondria from mother 2 was injected into the haploid egg or single cell diploid embryo. The term for this is cybrid (CYtoplasmic hyBRID). This is a technique that's been used before when working with cell lines that have had their mitochondria killed off through exposure to ethedium bromide for ~3 months (rho0 cells). You kill off the mito, then repopulate the cell with mitochondria you want. In this case, it sounds like the children have a mixed population of mitochondria. This would mean that females could still pass the defect to their offspring.
This sounds like you're installing the latest patch for your Linux/Windows software. Dear God what have we come to...
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+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
...but do you think it'd be on the web? :)
Slashdot 's editors are dickheads
People make good cat food. That's all.
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OTTERS RULE.
Yeah, but until the patent expired, during those fertile adolescent years the kid would be in possession of a circumvention device...
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Try? There is no try. There is only do.
because mitochondrial dna is only passed from mother to offspring, in the late eighties some scientists were able to reconstruct a "mitochondrial eve."
;-)
i'm not talking about one original human mother, i'm talking about a mitochondrial genome that existed eons ago that we all share as our common heritage. they plotted a slow constant rate of mitochondrial mutation versus cytoplasm taken from people from all over the globe to arrive at this. you backtrack from all the different mitochondrial dna versions that exist today and reconstruct the common mitochondrial ancestor. sort of like triangulation: you can actually calculate how long ago this common ancestral mitochondria lived and what it's genome was like.
the point is that you can do a sort of "genetic archaeology" with mitochondrial dna because unlike our regular chromosomal dna, which is always being swapped and reshuffled like a giant deck of cards sexually and via transposons and all sorts of wacky chemical promiscuity... mitochondrial dna is relatively stagnant, change-wise. that's because:
1) it's only passed down from one parent, the mother (no recombination)
2) it has a very tiny amount of genes, many orders of magnitude smaller than a single chromosome
3) it is the cell's fuel supply and is extremely vital to survival... so tinkering with it is very dangerous and most mutations would immediately result in dead offspring and never get passed on.
so what?
well it's kinda "neato" to think that in 1,000 years a future "genetic archaeologist" can probably trace the mitchondrial tweak mentioned in this article to all of these children's offspring down the generations... a different kind of mitochondrial eve here, if you will, with a different kind of original sin: tinkering with the human genome...
i'm no religious freak, but the parallel is somewhat profound if you please
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Likely, though he is being over policitaclly correct in naming only Catholicism as a religon in creating overpopulation problems, Hinduism, Confusism, etc. are also bad for this, though lately with the sex selection going on fundmentlist of Hinduism are going to shoot them selves in the foot. (Way to many boys to girls) Simular things in China also happend. Fact is that many religons/culture worship large families which is not a good idea in modern world. Though on the other hand most first world populations are going to be on the decline in a few years once the boomers start dieing off.
Grey (Chris Lusena)
I browsed through but didn't see one thing that I think should be addressed that I thought would be really neat, well, counting on the way you feel about certain things at least. Take Lesbian Couple, both totally fertile, but wanting children. take one who wants to carry child, carry out this process with the significant others cells. Perhaps even fertilizing the cell with sperm from the significant others family for a donor. As the article states, children with two mothers.And the realisation of a wish that I know many of my female friends have. Pretty damn neat.
-Amber
Without deviation from the norm,progress is not possible. -Frank Zappa
Even scarier (and more exciting) is the notion that we might actually be able to learn or decide how to shape our own stuff, and that Mother Nature has led us to this point, and that it's all part of a Plan.
Just thinking about this stuff makes me woozy. It feels like the vastest area of unknown territory I've ever contemplated.
TomatoMan
-- http://frobnosticate.com
World fossil energy consumption for 1995 was in the neighborhood of 340 quads (1 quad = 10^12 BTU). 1 BTU = 1054.4 joules, so call it 3.58*10^17 J. The Sun delivers about 1360 watts of power per square meter of surface, or about 1.18*10^8 J/m^2/day. The Earth presents a disk roughly 3200 km in radius, for an area of about 3.22*10^13 square meters. 1.18*10^8 J/m^2 * 3.22*10^13 m^2 = 3.80*10^19 J/day.
Conclusion: The Earth receives more energy from the sun every fourteen minutes than humanity uses (from fossil sources) in a year. (Nowhere near that amount is stored in fossil form, but that's not what you said.)
You should qualify your statements and check your numbers. You should also note that your claims assume current technology; if someone starts farming green algae to produce hydrogen and feeds that to a Haber-process plant to make ammonia, bingo, you've got non-fossil nitrogen fertilizer!
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spam spam spam spam spam spam
No one expects the Spammish Repetition!
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
We humans already breed like fucking rats -- as long as there are huge rotting piles of dead, unwanted babies lying around, infertility ought to be considered a blessing.
There is no environmental problem that couldn't be solved by reducing our population to reasonable levels.
"Society is like a stew. If you don't keep it stirred up, you get a lot of scum on top. " - Edward Abbey
Myth #2: Asthma is caused by your surroundings. Fact: Asthma may be TRIGGERED by your surroundings only if you have a predisposition to it based on genetic factors.
Myth #3 Inserting Mitrochondria into an egg is Genetic modification. FACT: BS (barbra streisand). It is no more genetic modification that transplanting a kidney. Understand this: Mitochrondria ARE NOT CODED FOR IN OUR GENOME! They are passed on FROM THE MOTHER AND NOT FROM THE FATHER AT ALL!!!!!
Myth # 4 Sperm Mitochondria are passed on. FACT: the Egg executes any Mitochondria found in the sperm. Mom's Sperm Executes Dad's MITOCHONDRIA!
And exactly how do these religions create overpopulation problems? I can't speak for the others, but nowhere in the Catholic catechism does it say "Thou shalt have more than 2 children."
I regularly hear the oft-perpetuated myth that the Catholic Church believes sex is evil. Then I hear how the Catholic Church is causing overpopulation problems. Well, which is it?
The truth is, the Catholic Church has teachings about birth control that are rooted not in a desire for reproduction but for spiritual (openness to God's actions) and sociological (esp. respect for women and marital relationships) reasons. Now I'm not saying I agree with all of those teachings, but we ought to become educated about them before we go misrepresenting them.
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No condoms, no pill, no caps. If you have sex it is for procreation. The catholic church has not relented on this stance. There are many countries, not only developing ones, that are predominantly catholic, and thus practice no birth control except against the wishes of their God. Not something to be taken lightly, no matter the logical arguments.
Cathlocism is a very wide ranging and influential religion. It is also one that proscribes either abstention or no birth control. This is not a logical way to reduce overpopulation or the problems associated with it.
I know about it because in the previous generations in my family the philosophy of no birth control was quite apparent. My grandfather is one of *13* brothers. There's only one generation between me and the rampant birth levels of what many might consider a backwards civilisation.
"Don't get mad, get a monkey!"
Myth # 1 Sperm Mitochondria are passed on. FACT: the Egg executes any Mitochondria found in the sperm. Mom's Sperm Executes Dad's MITOCHONDRIA!
See my response above. The Catholic Church's stance on birth control results from concerns that have nothing to do with reproduction. Perhaps that's how the teaching originated, but today there are higher spirtual and sociological reasons. Not that I always agree with them, but we do need to take care, become educated and most importantly, think and pray about it.
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The planet might be able to support 30 billion people, but I wouldn't want to live there.
Look at the population density in Manhattan. Now look at the amount of money people pay to live there. Boy, being crowded must suck really bad for folks to shell out that kind of green!
Now if I were a troll, I might point out that it's all those people that want to live by themselves out in the middle of BugTussle that are the really selfish SOBs. All the money and resources spent to run infrastructure (water, gas, sewer, roads, telephone lines) out to those loonies!
Think of how much better it would be for the environment if we packed every living human on the planet into, oh, say, Ohio. Anyone in the world that you wanted to visit, anyplace you wanted to work would just be a few hour's drive away! And most of the rest of the planet could get on with being human-free. And talk about diversity, every race, culture and religion known to man would be within a few hundred miles. That should break down some old barriers!
I was making a point that the post I was responding to did the same thing. I then proceeded to state what I believe the issues really are.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Humans are the WORST thing to ever happen to this planet and I'm including the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs and the effects of the ice age.
But on the other hand, this planet is the best thing that ever happened to humans.
Here's something to think about: This planet gave birth to us. Perhaps our welfare (at the cost of the rest of the creatures) was it's plan all along - a mother sacrifices a good deal of her bodily resources when giving birth, maybe that's what's happening now. The earth is giving us it's riches so we can be born into the Greater Universe.
Ah, bullshit. We just like to have fun, drive fast cars and post on Slashdot. Gimme another Quarter Pounder!
It's called Modern Medicine. The cures and therapies of the 20th Century have allowed millions of people with health problems and physical defects to survive long enough to reproduce. Thousands of previously self-weeding traits, from bad eyesight to a weak heart, have in effect been engineered into the population simply by keeping the average person alive longer.
In contrast, direct genetic manipulation holds the promise of fixing medical problems without also propagating them. It is a natural step forward in the evolution of medicine.
> I guess you are right in a way, though. There's no
> population problem, just too many humans.
Well, here's a different spin for you. Too many humans for what? If there were really too many humans, we'd start dying off for lack of resources to live.
> Replace some with Siberian Tigers, Giant Pandas, etc
> and so on - and don't forget to replace a few greedy
> Brazilians with some foliage for the Amazon Rainforest
> (where a lot of Earth's oxygen is converted.)
What is it that makes these beings intrinsically better than the humans you'd replace with them? Why tigers as opposed to carrier pigeons or flies or mushrooms? If diversity is your goal, I have to ask why you only chose endangered mammals and forest in a particular area.
> Even the suggestion that Earth can maintain a lot more
> population is an insult to anybody even mildly interested
> in the state of the environment. Humans are the WORST thing
> to ever happen to this planet and I'm including the asteroid
> that killed the dinosaurs and the effects of the ice age.
Actually, it's only an insult to those even mildly interested in the current state of the environment. As per your statement about humans being the worst thing that ever happened to the Earth, why is it that the state of the environment before humans came around is a "better" state than the state we're in now? If biodiversity is the most important factor in your equation, then by a huge margin the asteroid (some scientists think it was a comet) that wiped out the dinosaurs by fundamentally changing the Earth's environment is the winner, since it eliminated many more different species than the paltry efforts of humans to date. But again, why is the particular state of biodiversity we have today any better or worse than then, or Precambria, or any other time, for that matter?
I have discovered that in large measure those that say that humans beings are "destroying the Earth" are more accurately stating that we're slowly altering the environment toward rendering it unsuitable for higher mammalian life. This isn't destruction of the Earth by a long shot. The Earth will go on in this state, and most life forms will adapt to the new environment, just like what happened to the Earth during every Ice Age. It would truly suck for humans and other higher mammals, but the Earth has been there before and will be there again.
Please don't interpret this to mean that I think that humans should therefore rape the planet until it won't support us any more. As a human myself, I'd really like to see the Earth continue in a state compatible with the continuation of my species. My post is simply to make you think about why you consider any species as intrinsically more important than any other, and to remind you that the Earth won't take personally the damage we do to the environmental state, but we as humans should. Let's make sure we're angry about the right thing here.
Virg
> These subsidies in part are used to compensate farmers
> for intentionally underproducing to restrict supply and keep
> commodity prices up so they can better meet their operating
> costs (exactly what the economic sense of this is is beyond me...
> please correct me if I'm wrong).
The reasoning for this has to do with how commodities get priced by the market. Since commodities are by definition homogenous (my corn won't sell for significantly more (or less) than the next guy's corn), the price is tied very tightly to supply. Assume the whole market uses 100 pounds of corn. If there's only 50 pounds available, the price climbs as people outbid each other for the corn. If there's 100 pounds, the price drops. If there's 120 pounds, the price drops further. This is where the "no-grow" break point comes in. If all the farmers grow more than the market demands, then some of the corn goes unsold. If you don't want it to be your corn that goes to waste, you have to lower your price. There's a point at which you have to sell your corn for less than it costs you to grow it, or you can't sell anything. This affects every grower, not just you, since if you lower your price, now the next farmer must lower his lest he get stuck with silos full of unsold corn. The subsidies keep growers in aggregate from growing more than the market wants, so each grower can earn enough to make a profit, and the growers that would have flooded the market make money on the corn they didn't grow, so they have no economic reason to grow it and muck up the market price for everyone else.
BTW, there has always been an argument made for growing that corn (or what have you) and sending it somewhere that it's needed, but those arguments usually neglect to count in the cost of getting the goods to those other places, which is usually considerable, so they tend to be dismissible based on cost.
Virg
Are we there yet? No. Not even close. This is only the beginning. Will things be wierd? Yes. Horribly, wonderfully wierd. But hopefully not catastrophically wierd.
As H.G. Wells said in "Things to Come" (1936). Our choices are "All the Universe, or nothing. Which shall it be?"
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If we don't change direction soon, we'll end up where we're going.
The Catholic Chruch recognizes the procreative and unitive aspects of the sex act. The Church simply teaches that every act must be open to new life. It does not, not, not teach that the act is a mechanical, evil necessity devoid of meaning beyond its biological aspects.
While true, this doesn't really have anything to do with the Church encouraging population growth.
To be fair, that's not the goal of the teaching. Abstention is often the right answer, especially for non-married couples. Within the marriage relationship it is obviously much more difficult to accept.
I'm not claiming to have all the answers. This is a very difficult question, but it's important, I think, to understand the reasoning behind these teachings. Making blanket statements without the background knowledge is dangerous. That is what I am responding to.
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Phew. Fortunately it was not _nuclear_ DNA.
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The Cap is nigh. Time to get a fresh new account.
yeah, the whole Golf Course thing is whacked. THAT has got to stop. Golf produces nothing. Except maybe a few stupid movies. (now, Caddyshack was pretty funny though. . .)
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
All Your BASE PAIR Are Belong To Us.
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The Cap is nigh. Time to get a fresh new account.
My in-laws live in Phoenix, where it is against the law to have a lawn.
Rocks, cacti, that's about it.
Also, there is an ordinance against streetlights, so it's really fucking dark out at night, which is bad if you're driving or walking, but good if you're sitting out in your back yard looking at the night sky.
All the building that's going on out there is just fucking crazy, when you think about the fact that they live in a desert. But then again, they do try to do some things right.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
You might as well cruise on over to Salon and read this article on the subject of Charles Darwin and the state of Louisiana. It seems they have condemned Darwin as a racist and the root cause of all worldwide racist activities from the Holocaust to the Klan. It gives them a wonderful reason for quashing the teaching of evolution in their excellent public schools.
Apparently this idea has caught on in many quarters, so it's predicted to be a tough year for evolution. The ironies of Louisiana condemning anybody as racist are just too subtle and numerous to comment on.
Cheers,
Annie
DUCT TAPE: The Election Supervisors' Secret Weapon
While true, this doesn't really have anything to do with the Church encouraging population growth.
It also doesn't do a single thing to discourage it. They also have ignored appeals either from the people themselves or representatives on their behalf to discontinue this practice; mostly from areas where high birth rates are holding the countries in question back. Birth control liberates females to the same sexual freedom that males have. The child can also (potentially) have the concentrated upbringing and education that a large family cannot.
We are discussing the minor points of religious ideology at the expense of the major argument here. My reference to catholocism was only meant as one example where proscribing zero birth control can be detrimental. Feel free to argue the benefits, I just can't see them myself. I don't see any way we can justifiably allow continued large birth rates in any society which wants its population to advance beyond subsistance.
I reiterate; the birth rates in advanced countries are generally significantally lower than developing ones. Anything which then continues to force these countries to over reproduce does them nothing but harm (this is by no means limited to cathlocism; there is also basic sex education and cultural predilictions at work here; even in areas where men are told repeatedly that multiple sex partners can lead to a high risk of contracting AIDS they still continue to have multiple partners, in high risk areas, with the resultant pregnancies and spread of disease: attitudes and practices still practised by plenty of men in our so-called developed countries).
"Don't get mad, get a monkey!"
--
Man's genetic code has been modifying since the beginning of man.
Got friends?
Ooooo! I'm so scared. We're going to run of fossil fuels. I know it's true because technology would never advance. There have been no signicant advances in technology in the last 100 years, why would there be any in the future.
Repent! The end is near.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
This is an excellent and important point, but it is based on the premise that Mother Nature knows better than we do what's right and wrong.
Which is demonstrably false. Mother Nature knows nothing. Selection has no higher plan other than the favouring of genes that make you more likely to live long enough to breed and to be able to breed successfully enough that your genes are spread to future generations, based on whatever the environmental conditions are at the time. Which is fine in a situation where the conditions in your ecosystem stay reasonably static over time, but works rather less well in a situation where the favoured conditions vary between pretty much every generation. Like the situation that we've been in for the past few hundred years, for example. We're able to predict the future better than nature is (we stand some chance of being right. Nature "assumes" that conditions are going to stay the same as they currently are, which is pretty much the least likely outcome), so imposing our own selection pressure on the genes at an earlier stage is more likely to lead to "well suited" individuals than just letting nature get on with it.
This doesn't mean that I'm in favour of genetically modified humans. The social considerations are pretty fascinating and damned difficult, and when we screw up it's likely to be pretty graphic.
at least not if the company knows about the gene mod in the first place...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Are stupid or something?
No, it dosn't say you are supposed to have more then two children, but it does say that you are not supposed to use any birth control. That combined with the fact that people like to have sex means that there will be a lot of people.
It dosn't take a fucking super genious to put two and two together....
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"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
100 billion souls in the giant CITY/PLanet of Trantor...R.Archfeld Serethai
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We are a MINOR bump in the geological road the Earth is/has traveled. With a mere 40,000 year span we have caused less damage than the Dino's did using FARTS. It is the Ultimate HUBRIS to assume that HUMANITY can even effect things in a Geological time frame...
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While true, this doesn't really have anything to do with the Church encouraging population growth
It dosn't matter WHY the Church dosn't want you to do these things.
If I got drunk, and ran over some and killed them. It wouldn't matter why I did it the person is still fucking dead.
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"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
is the US produces a HUGE surplus of food which we sell to the rest of the world. I could see a 25 % cut in GreenHouse gases if we cut back on food production to just that which the US needs. This policy could kill two birds with one stone, less greenhouse gasses AND a RADICAL DROP in world population due to starvation. Ask any expert in world affairs and I bet you'll find they agree that the next BIG war will be fought OVER/FOR FOOD.
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Golf courses are an environmental HAZARD. They USE MORE CHEMICALs than ANYTHING but an agri-bussiness farm. The land around a golf course is polluted by over-fertilization, the animal life that is lured into these seemlingy healthy zones is likewise poisoned and pass the contagions to their tainted offspring. A natural course would be ANOTHER STORY entirely and IF THERE IS such a thing I'd love to hear about it.
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...Mitochondrial DNA...
I've always wanted more mitochondrians... Are these babies strong with the force???
Oh wait....
--Gfunk
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
Your response attempts to say "No, that's not what the Church wants..." but you are unable to deny it; you claim that allowing abstinence means that the Church does not encourage large numbers of children. That is naive beyond belief. You talk of the danger of speaking without background knowledge, yet what the poster stated was accurate.
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Nicotine free Amish .sig.
Sheesh, this comment has been made at least twice tonight, and I've barely read 20 of them so far. If you truely believe that medicine is keeping weak-gened people alive, then you have three choices.
a) Live with it, make it where people need millions of drugs before the age of two just to stay alive.
b) Blow up hospitals or someone destroy medical science.
c) FIX THE FRICKING GENES! Sheesh! If you honesstly believe what you just wrote, fixing genes is a good thing! Sure, we can't fix all diseases, but we can fix inheritable ones.
If medicine keeps a person alive, with bad genes, and they have a kid, with fixed genes...duh, everyone came out ahead! And with this tech, eventually we'll get rid of or reduce things that are bad, but don't kill people before they reproduce, like Alheimers and (tendence towards) high blood pressure.
-David T. C.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Hey, let's think how we could use genetics to piss off EVERYbody and make 3 mistakes all at once!
I know!
Let's find another way to cure infertility so the world can be more overcrowded! The last thing we need to do is sink those research dollars into learning how to house and feed the humans we already have. Sure, we need more momentarily coddled and then ignored brats popping out of american women who don't care about the overpopulation problem as long as THEY get to have their 2.2 kids.
Second idea: Let's make genetically-altered babies at their parents' whims. Not only do we completely piss off the religeous right to the point where they mght stop shooting abortion doctors and start shooting genetics researchers, and not only do we piss off civil rights activists (at least those with any sense and commitment to their cause), we may yet manage to set the world at war when some neo-nazi parents specify that their offspring will be blond, blue eyed, and have a predilection for torturing the helpless. Or better yet, let's start making crippling or permanent changes to helpless children that they'll have to live with. Let's make ANOTHER reason for kids to hate their parents, and not just giving them dorky names! Who needs Ritalin when we can genetically moronize Jimmy before birth?! He'll be very docile when born.
Third way to strike out: let's completely forego scientific responsiblity and peer review and just do it for the fuckin money. I mean, hey, why not? What did we become researchers FOR? Certainly not to, like, expand human knowledge in an ethical and methodical way. It's all about the Benjamins baby, and these new superbabies are worth a hell of a lot per head!
Can we name the next one "Khan"? =)
Assholes. My girlfriend is going to be a genetics researcher. Thanks to unethical fools like these she'll probably get killed by some suicide bomber to make Jebus happy.
-Kasreyn
"Intolerant people should be shot." - the best one-sentence troll I have ever seen.
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
If I could be genetically modified into a meat ball, then when ever I'd get hungy I'd eat my self slowly, so as to regenerate before I ait my entire body.
I don't have any hard data about what happened in the ancient lands you mention, but those people probably didn't manage their soil nitrogen correctly. Or maybe the natural changes in the earth's climate altered weather patterns and rainfall went somewhere else.
I have lived in Nebraska most of my life (currently Omaha) and most of my family are dirt farmers. Guess what? Not one lick of topsoil problems here. Nature has a wonderful way of making more. The farmers just have to be bright enough to manage the flux and prevent a major negative swing.
We are growing so much corn the free market price for it is a whopping $1.80 or so. Why? Because the farmers are growing 150+bu./acre corn, sometimes 200+bu./acre. Just 50 years ago irrigated land that produced 120bu./acre was good. Non-irrigated land does better than that now. We grow so much corn in this country now our wonderful government is paying farmers to STOP growing corn. Eat more Corn Nuts, Doritos and Taco Bell, and of course juicy, tasty, beef. Every corn nut/chip/torilla and steak adds to my inheritance.
In all seriousness, how could the MD's who performed this be so arrogant as to think that they had the right to act unilaterally, irregardless of the "safety" of the "procedure."
It will most likely be proven that this procedure is safe, after the fact. In the meantime I assume the donor mitochondria were screened for rare, but inheritable mitochondrial diseases?
After all, we do have a complete mitochondrial genome too, right? And of course we have been looking at it long enough that we know what a healthy mitochondrial genome looks like -- we can read it forwards and backwards, eh?
At the very least these "doctors" should lose their licenses. At the most they should be charged with crimes against humanity and brought before an international tribunal. The human genome carries the most fundamental definition of "human". To experiment with that, even at the simple level of mitochondrial manipulation without previous debate -- or trials in non-human subjects -- is completely inexcusable.
These babies may be OK. What if they weren't? Don't these doctors accrue some penalty for performing experiments on humans?
This may be "science", but it's certainly not good science. It may be beneficial in the long run, but it is purported that so were some of the experiments performed by the Nazis. The end does not justify the means.
I am by no means a Luddite, I do believe there is promise in genetic manipulation, and I welcome careful research. Unfortunately, this was not careful research. This was show-boating with God's toys.
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!
http://www.kathleensworld.com/mitochon.html.
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!
A month ago I've read from somewhere that growing genetically modified plants without a license is prohibited (somewhere in the world), and, if such plant is found, one has to destroy them immediately.
Let's see whether that will apply to human beings.
See... this is exactly the reason why we don't have any women reading Slashdot. You keep scaring the hell out of them. ;-)
No, they just changed the region code.
But yeah, the theory rests on the fact that mitochondria, like bacteria, have a circular ring of DNA, have no organelles, their large ribosomal subunits are 70s (as opposed to 60s in eukaryotes) and their small ribosomal subunits are 30s (as opposed to 40s in eukaryotes), and they have roughly the same set of replicational, transcriptional, and translational machinery (which differs markedly from what eukaryotes use).
Other parts of the eukaryotic cell that may have once been prokaryotes are chloroplasts (only in plants) and peroxisomes.
I still don't accept this argument. Women have always had the same sexual freedoms men have. BOTH sexes have a responsibility if a child is conceived. Birth control can exacerbate the objectification of women because sex no longer has consequences. One night stands are hurtful. Sex before marriage is hurtful, because the physical intimacy expresses a level of commitment that may not be there. If the relationship fails, both parties are hurt more than they would be had abstinence been practiced.
Within the married relatioship, I personally have many questions and concerns which need much thought and prayer.
Nobody is forcing anyone to over-reproduce, or reproduce at all. Sometimes it is a necessity for families in such countries to be large, either because they are agrarian, have low child survival rates or for some other reason. I fear that birth control is being touted as a simple solution, and it just isn't.
--
The key thing you need to remember is that clever does not equal fit. It all depends on the environment who or what is the fittest.
If we (repeatedly) stuff an average university maths student, an Arnold Schwarzenegger type, and a hungry lion in a pit without any tools and wait for their to be only one survivor, the fittest will come out, even if on average it ain't the student. If we repeat the experiment adding a mathematical puzzle that gives right to escape when solved, the fittest will survive even if it is sometimes is one of those stereotype fat geeks of maths with unbelievably strong glasses and no sense of normal social behaviour.
--
Linux user since early January 1992.
I fully agree on the point of freedom you bring up. Maybe I don't live in Amerika, but that doesn't change much about my point. Here in Europe there also is freedom. An other thing we have in common is wealth. Something that is missing terribly in a continent as Africa. Just as endless opportunities are missing there.
The good thing about heaving wealth and freedom is that you are able to share with or help less fortunate people.
Ofcource there is a bifference between an adopted child an your own "flesh and blood". But my point is that instead of spending thousands of dollars on IF you also can adopt a child and spend that money on helping the less-fortunate.
This will not give you profit or personal gain, but it WILL make others who have no opportunities a little bit happier.
THAT is a thought that, I think, is missing not only in Amerika, but also in Europe.
I could (and love to) go on about this, but I'd rather do it by E-mail than here.
AC, feel free to react.
---
Privacy is terrorism.
The Mitochondrian Research Society
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!
OK people, here's the deal.
This isn't genetic manipulation. Period. End of story. This "technique" is not applicable except to the other 150 women in the world who have the SAME infertility problem, and want a child badly enough to actually go through this media hell that the uninformed press (and some people on slashdot, unfortunately) put them through.
--Begin Knowledge Base--
The reason the "genome" is different is because the eggs have someone else's mitochondria in them. This goes back to an old item of evolutionary interest, mitochondria are almost symbiotic bacteria. The theory held by many (I'm not sure about the "most", but at least many) is that mitochondria were orginally separate organisms which existed as symbiots. The cells kept them fed, and gave them food, the mitochondria allowed cells to perform respation/oxidative reduction to produce more energy per molecule of sugar, which is the basis of all "breathing" life. The idea is that the mitochondria slowly lost their autonomy, and became "organelles". But here's the kicker:
They reproduce by themselves, only importing a couple of things from the cell around it. This means that you could trade mitochondria with someone and your "genome" would change, but the only thing that really happened is that you traded one set of mitochondria for another.
--End Knowledge Base--
So, when you have defective mitochondria in your eggs, they can't produce enough energy to keep a fetus alive. To fix that, scientists added some that worked, and they replicated themselves and the eggs were healty. That's it. It really is a dead end of research. Nothing more will come of it. Really. End of story.
Go read an important article.
hmmmm?
Let's put it this way. I think it's a moral obligation for the stronger and the wealthiest to protect the weaker and to give them the opportunities to reach a higher standard of living. Just becaust you're able to help them.
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Privacy is terrorism.
There have been many insightful comments regarding natural selection and insuring it continues, without introducing genes into the 'gene pool' which violate nature and eventually could lead to disease and other problems.
In the future, when genetic modification is common in terms of cloning and before/after birth modification (and it will be: read: purpose of the genome, it will happen eventually), I'd imagine we will have a gene registrar or index where all modifications are certified and controlled, thereby controlling the gene pool. This way, we can maintain certain natural proportions and only genes which have become 'free' can be used (assuming there will be no natural selection at all anymore and all people will be completely managed by technology).
I guess you can think of it as genetic CVS (no howls, please). The point is you just can't go adding to parts of the program willy-nilly, as we have all seen what one person can do to an otherwise stable foundation. I'm sure this seems like a frightening future, but it will be necessary as modifications of this nature are continually done and introduced into the huge dynamic of the world population everyday. The only thing I would be concerned with is the control of the organization responsible for regulating these modifications: it will literally have control over humanity. I can tell you right now all ICANN chairs are ineligible for a position.
"I'll just chip in a bit for RedHat: I actually have that installed on my university machine." - Linus, '95
- Forbiding Birthcontrol
- Promoting large families (less Catholism these
days)
- Forbiding sex outside of marrage, thus cause earlier marrages, with out birthcontrol, and more
socal pressure to produce children. Which since
they stared earlier they will like have more.
These often combin with cultral pressures to make this worse. e.g. Your not a man if you haven't got your wife pregent, you must have at least two sons.Note that in the first (and second) world the effects are less because we are more worldly and thus more likely to ignore such thing, and because children have been an econmic burded to their parents longer and older than many of the devopling contries.
Grey (Chris Lusena)
To all you folks who modded me up to 5 and back down to 0. It's been a while since my karma was that far under 50. Getting it back up will be fun.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
You are so right.. who the hell are we to decide to fix things that probably shouldn't be fixed. Regardless if they is or isn't a god, we shouldn't be tinkering with something that we don't fully understand.
http://www.1053.org -=We use big words=-
Despite the fine response put forth by the AC who responded before me, I'd like to add a few things. First of all, you're quite right that cartels can affect the economics of the situation in the commodities market (OPEC springs readily to mind), but that's specificaly because of the market, not in spite of it. Cartels affect the market by affecting supply. The only way the two farmers in your example can affect the price of corn is to produce less than the 100 pounds the market demands, which is exactly what the subsidies aim to do. This is real life economics at work, not board game rules. Supply and demand never takes a hike in the commodities market, which is why it's such a rough market to be in.
As a side note, your mention of unions is interesting but irrelevant to the commodities market. Unions affect labor cost, which is just part of the cost of production for commodities, and the commodities market does not care how much it costs to produce any given commodity, only how much of it there is. Unions only directly affect price in manufacturing industries, like the auto industry, and since automobiles are not commodity items, this point doesn't matter.
Virg