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Japan to Allow Human-Nonhuman Mixed Cloning
Sara Chan writes: "Japan has decided to allow combined human-animal embryos to be produced through cloning, which could result in mixed-species creatures. The intended purpose is to permit transplant organs to be produced in specially-bred animals. The original story is in a Japanese newspaper, but you can get an English summary here."
I was wondering when the Japanese would take the logical next step and transform cat girls from an anime fantasy to creepy reality.
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Needless to say the medical community would prefer the 'cut hunter' theory which is on the face of it hard to credit. Humand have been eating monkeys in that part of the world for millenia. What changed to cause HIV to hop from one species to another?
The people who promote these schemes in the name of science should not be allowed to claim (as they usually do) that opposition is due to ignorance and superstition. The Nuclear industry tried that one in the fifties, the result was Three mile island, Chernobyl and several thousand power stations throughout the world built on an intrinsically unsafe technology that is unecconomic to operate. If there had been more skeptical enquiry in the fifties and sixties we might have ended up with fission power systems based on intrinsically safe designs - CANDU, Pebble bed etc.
These issues are vastly more complex than the glib statements made by the genetics industry would have people believe. They don't really know what they are doing, if they did they would have decipherted the human genome and be able to explain how it does what it does.
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I find this disturbing. And I'm one of the people who can't understand at all why people are bothered by the idea of 'regular' cloning; I mean it really makes no sense to me. But allowing chimeras to be created? That's just something I never thought anyone would do.
Or am I misunderstanding what's actually going on. Are they simply doing things like creating human hearts in monkeys and the like? As with the tobacco plants we rigged up to create hemoglobin or insulin or whatever? I don't really see a problem with that, I guess.
I do see that they plan to ban 'regular' cloning, so I guess they don't want the whole 'mad scientist' thing going on. If it could really be used to ultimately cure sick people and make people more healthy then really (imo) it would be unethical to disallow it.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
My roomate has a thing for cat-girls and he's pretty excited right now. I however don't like this idea one bit. I mean most wild animals can kick a human's ass. Imagine a lion/man or and elephant/man. Smart and powerful. They'll take over. Just like exo squad, if you've ever seen it.
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IANAGeneticist, but my understanding is that insulin for diabetics is produced by injecting human genes into e. coli bacteria. So, aren't we already making human-nonhuman (in this case, bacteria) hybrids?
Which is exactly why we should get our legislature off its stupid ass and pound some sense into them. If we don't do it, someone else will, and profit greatly from it. We should be leading the way in genetic engineering technology, not following.
The next worldwide industrial boom will be Bioengineering. If people are willing to pay $1000 for a CPU upgrade, imagine what they would pay for blue eyes. Or broad shoulders. Or a high IQ. Or thick hair that will never fall out. Or straight teeth. The list goes on and on.
We need to be positioned well in this industry.
Knunov
Why do users with IDs under 100,000 or over 700,000 usually have the most worthwhile comments?
Humans and apes are 90-97% the same. What if I replace 70% of a human genome with the exact same genes from an orangutan or chimanze? How would you distinguish that from a cloned human?
Japan's first transplant procedure in 1968 resulted with the doctor being charged with murder because it wasn't clear if the donor was brain dead.
Aparently the taboo has something to do with Japan's Shinto and Buddhist beliefs. Here's a link: Japan Legalized Organ Transplants from Brain-dead.
Is this a step forward for mankind, or a step backward?
That is a good question. I guess the only way to figure it out is if we try it and see what happens. The scientific method demands experiments! There is no other way to know.
It does sound scary and rather gross, but it will definitely answer a lot of questions we have about nature and human life. Plus if it turns out that intelligence is inherited then we will have quite the future ahead of us. Can anybody say Uplift?
Superficial reading of the Ananova article would give one the impression that they are talking about a partly human chimera (it is hard to read "combined human-animal embryos" any other way); which would be a horribly unethical monstrosity.
What they're undoubtedly talking about (though I can't verify it since I can't read Japanese) are transgenic animals which express human proteins which is nothing new and posses no real ethical challenges (other than those involving the safety issues of xenotransplantation such as the real posibility for introducing various pathogens into the human population).
You see, Whatever created us gave us the ability to create life, and gave us the abilities we have by evolving us.
So anyone here who believes in god but isnt blinded by the bibles description of god, can understand that.
If we program a computer to do something the computer does what its created to do, whatever created us obviously created us to create and to destroy.
Thats basically our job.I belive theres supposed to be a balance in creation and destruction but right now we destroy more than we create due to greed.
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Oh hell... now this is going to give all those greasy Otaku one more thing to fantacize about: real-life catgirls.
(Catgirls, a.k.a. "Nekomimi", are a popular fetish amongst Otaku. If you hadn't noticed, of course.)
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
"I tell you the truth, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things [end of the world, etc.] have happened." - Jesus, Luke 21:32, c. 2000 YEARS AGO
This is one of the hardest verses in the gospels to interpret. Various views exist for what generation means.
Some take it as meaning "race" and thus as an assurance that the Jewish race (nation) will not pass away. But it is very questionable that the Greek term geneav (genea) can have this meaning.
Two other options are possible:
Generation might mean "this type of generation" and refer to the generation of wicked humanity. Then the point is that humanity will not perish, because God will redeem it.
Or generation may refer to "the generation that sees the signs of the end" (vv. 25-26), who will also see the end itself. In other words, once the movement to the return of Christ starts, all the events connected with it happen very quickly, in rapid succession.
All of the above commentary was taken from Bible.org.
So those who make up the left hand edge of the IQ spectrum, or are below average in strength, and maybe other arbitrary categories should live with their disadvantages - but we raise the bar for "normal" 20/20 eyesight, immunity against diseases, and other categories?
What do you think happens when we eliminate those on the low side of the average, we all become above average?
Besides, who died and made you God?
Human cloning? Far from being the "Attack of the Clones", nothing is more misunderstood than medicinal human cloning. Please, don't confuse the goals of The Human Cloning Foundation, the federation of misanthropes bent on finding a country willing to host their young Frankenstein adventures, with Medicinal Human Cloning.
The idea behind Medicinal Human Cloning (MHC) is to clone human cells at the cellular level, before cell differentiation. Cell differentiation occurs 2 weeks into the life of an embryo, when all the cells in the embryo stop being homogenous and, all at once, establish their own identities. Some become hand cells, some feet cells, some brain cells, some blood cells. This "magic" event is the point at which human life begins. MHC is the process of cloning human cells before this event.
The point of being able to harvest unlimited quantities of undifferentiated human cells is that these cells can become any cell in the body; they are "undecided", yet genetically matched to the recipient. The applications here are as numerous as you can imagine: tissue replacement, skin replacement for burn victims, manufactured organs custom-matched to the recipient. This is the promise we are debating; the lives of millions who could be saved by this procedure, from burn victims to heart attack victims.
This advance promises to revolutionize medicine. Not just technically, but from a societal perspective as well. If we understand anything about MHC, it is that it will be prohibitively expensive to apply to an entire population. An order of magnitude costlier than even heart transplantation, we are dealing with sums of millions of dollars per regenerated organ. And unlike transplantation, this technique will be able to prolong the life of anyone, indefinitely. As a society, we will soon be in the position of deciding the lifespan(s) of each of our citizens. Not because we control death; not euthenasia, but because we control life.
We've already seen this paradigm emerge with the "list" for heart transplants. The pathetic attempt at a "meritocracy" for deciding who receives a new heart has been a total failure, as evidenced by the case of David Crosby. The system is weighted in favor of the rich, against the poor. Will this paradigm dominate the field of Medicinal Human Cloning? Will only the rich live forever? Will money become the force of life? Not if we can help it. We will need to act decisively as events are set in motion.
We must establish a true meritocracy for the Immortality Revolution ushered in by advances in Medicinal Human Cloning. Like the Slashdot Moderation system, we could create a system of random "Moderators", if you will, who are picked secretly and randomly and given the ability to tag their fellow citizens as deserving or undeserving of the scarce asset of Organ Regeneration, financed by the state. You could rate your neighbor (-1 Stupid) for abusing his spouse, or your coworker (+1 Insightful) for fixing your printer connection. Those with the highest scores would receive the greatest medical benefit: Immortality.
Imagine a world where we never lost an Einstein, never killed a Bohr. Where great leaders like George Bush could advise us forever; where people like Noam Chomsky were but a temporary nuisance. This is the promise of cloning: not reproducing the husks of people but giving the gift of life to the greatest among us.
We must act swiftly when the time comes.
If guns kill people, then CmdrTaco's keyboard misspells words.
I don't know. This idea that men are the wimps of the animal world is a bit overdone, I think. Pre-human North America was chock full of huge critters that would make the Serengeti look like a suburban park. Then people got here and wiped 'em all out in a geologic wink of an eye. Let's face it -- even armed with weapons made from sticks and flint chips man is the most dangerous animal on Earth.
Of course it's the giant brain, opposble thumb and social cooperation that makes man really formidable, but it's hard to imagine a chimera that takes full advantage of human and, say lion capabilities. Can you have the lion's formidable claws and still keep dexterity? Or its powerful killing jaws and a mouth capable of articulating language?
Even some characteristics that at first seem like liabilities aren't. Our lack fur, scales, and general light build for example. On one hand, it leaves us relatively defenseless. On the other hand, it makes us offensively more formidable. A well trained runner can chase most game animals until they collapse of heat prostration.
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Maybe this will allow "directed evolution" of humans, just like Linux evolves (microcreation, but macroevolution). As long as the mods are Open Source, so that the species doesn't fork, that is. Unfortunately, the laws in most countries will push the research into the proverbial "back alley"....
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Genetic engineering is still very much an infant. The truth is that we're in the dark about most aspects of reproduction and development. Setting up loose guidelines for research is a necessary step, but rules of any real precision will end up by necessity restricting many promising avenues of research, while leaving open massive loopholes allowing unethical conduct.
... but we don't know how to fix it, can't predict what kind of phenotype will result from its genotypes, and, in any case, we keep discovering new genotypes that cause it.
For example, our genetic material contains vast regions of so-called "junk DNA" (introns) that don't appear to play any part in mRNA synthesis. Traditionally, introns have been thought of as line noise in the great communications protocol of life. But recent evidence suggests that introns have some kind of function -- we just don't know what it is, though everyone has their pet theories. Without knowing what introns are and what they do, large-scale genetic engineering is going to produce a lot of non-starters and instabilities.
Another example is the phenomenon of "imprinting," in which phenotype is dependent upon the gender of the parent from whom a particular allele is received. Imprinting, known about in one sense or another since the '20s, has only been recently intensively studied, and the practical effects of imprinting on genetic engineering are still unknown -- except that gender-specific methylation suddenly increases potential complexity a *whole* lot. (As one example, creating a child from two parents of the same gender ain't happening for a long time to come.)
The genetic code also contains a lot of internal redundancies (checksums in the communications protocol, to extend an already pretty homely metaphor), and once you get past the astonishingly complex genome, you end up in the proteome, which could, as a second-order effect, exist in a space orders of magnitude more complex than the genome that creates it.
Right now, we know a lot about specific genetic syndromes, many caused by a single homozygous allele. But our knowledge is nowhere near advanced enough to map geneotypic->phenotypic instances for 99% of the traits in existence. Trying to do more than that is simply beyond our current capabilities, and the daunting complexity of the issue places everything but simple corrective therapies and spooky biomechanical hybrids like the earmouse a long way in the future.
The upshot? You can change an allele or a dozen, but you may not be able to accurately predict the effects. Advances in genetics will continue to be specific and targeted discoveries that at best help small numbers of individuals. "Islands of Dr. Moreau" are comfortably far enough in the future that it may be our childrens' children who have to deal with the ethical issues.
To get an idea of just how little we know about genetics, read some of the synoptic literature concerning phenylketonuria, probably the most intensively-studied genetic condition out there. We can diagnose it, environmentally control it, even perform gross genetic therapy to cure it (by replacing the liver outright)
Still, I'd like to someday hear a dogcow go "Moof!"
Well, to those of you hoping for cat girls or whatever: don't get your hopes high.
What they would be aiming for is a pig (that looks like a pig, walks like a pig, and talks like a pig) that has a kidney with genetic makeup compatible to a humans (or a particular person). I'm sure you've all seen pictures of mice with human ears on their backs. Basically, they just want the organs; not a monster.
What they might get, in the process, is a mutant that most likely would not be capable of life (most severe mutants simply can not survive), much less procreate. So, if they do get a monster, it'll most likely die before birth, or while it's a baby monster, that has no way of making more little baby monsters.
That doesn't sound too bad does it?
Personally, I would be more inclined to question the ethics of the direction medicine in general is moving. It seems like our goal is to become infinitely upgradable...to defy death. But organisms are meant to die. Humans are meant to die. We, you and I, are meant to die. I think people should try and improve their qualities of their lives, rather than concentrate on living any longer than we're meant to.
But well, that has nothing to do with anything, I guess.