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China Ahead in Stem-Cell Research
Andrew writes: "New Scientist is reporting (for free) on the WSJ's China clones human embryos story: "Chinese scientists are claiming a great leap forward in human cloning - the creation of dozens of cloned embryos advanced enough to harvest embryonic stem cells."" The lengthy Wall Street Journal story is also on MSNBC.
But where are they going to put all these extra people?
The Blaster Master Fighting for Truth, Justice, and Evil Pie since 1979
When a Communist nation allows scientists greater freedom than a Democracy? Just saying...
China also ahead in cloning copy right CDs
"Yew must be dem clones I been a-hearing 'bout. Y'all look the same ta me."
</Southern Senator>
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
The nice part about evil, soulless facist governments is that they play by no rules, with no rules, with no consideration of the negative potential for science I agree that stem cells hold tremendous potential for good, but without pondering the Brave New World/Gattaca/(insert cliche book here) consequences, the future might turn out an ugly place. It is dangerous to wave flags and say we should follow in their footsteps. One cannot use the dark side of the force/The One Ring/etc. without becoming Darth Vader/Sauron/CowboyNeal.
The poor boy is now solidly stuck between his Oh So Rightous right wing religious supporters and the need to keep the United States up with the rest of the world in genetic research. It looks like science suffers at the hands of the Morality police.
Hasn't this happened before?... (Galileo, Darwin, ...)
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
Ok... so if you want to use someone else's organs, you hop on a plane to India... if you want to have pig organs grown for you, you hop on a plane to the UK... if you want to have stem cells cloned and grown into organs for you, you hop on a plane to China...
Is it just me, or does it seem that medical treatment is moving in the direction of taking a very large number of plane flights?
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I find it also interesting how the one main country with whom the United States has mixed in civil rights with trade agreements is the country that may end up further along in this line of research. Of course, one could say that Hitler had learned a lot through research as well. How far can we allow our morality to stretch to further the advancement of the human race?
For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
Briefly (I'm at work) this is exactly why the U.S. shouldn't ban this research. It's bloody inevitable. Our government is caving to a few screaming fundamentalists over one of the most important medical advances in history.
Who's going to pursue this more ethically? The Chinese, who've been alleged to use prisons as organ factories, or us?
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
The entire CHINESE WOMEN'S VOLLEYBALL TEAM all share ONE personality -- and have since BIRTH!!
Seems a little too relevant...
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
On one hand, they employ 'neighborhood-watch' for couples who might want a second child. those couples are then 'socially' pressured into getting an abortion. but on the other hand the gummint wants to clone humans... I guess they're going to require someone to have a license to produce humans... (much like a manufacturing license). But then the country is so good at piracy -- you know where that's going to end up. 'pirated copies' -- literally -- will be found on every chinease street corner. what's new?
If China gets to far ahead they will swarm us with...
Just think... billions of Chinese!!! ah!
I believe that, if you dig into some of the KGB stuff from the early 80's, the russians were (as a military experiment) working on human body modification through genomic experimentation and gene mutation/cloning. Alot of the documents are obviously still hidden away, but there was a site I visited last year that was a clearing house for recently declassified documents from the Moscow bureau.
While nothing specifically mentioned the cloning, analyists who had been looking for hints on space weapons, stealth bomber/fighters, and missing prisoners came to the conclusion that some of the rumors about human cloning in remote siberian research stations were not without backing evidence. This was due to a small trickle of the worst dissidents, those who had good health records and whom were fit and free from known genetic diseas in their families, were disappearing.
These stations still remain closed to the world and heavily guarded, and there are only rumors. Rumors like men being bred from birth with extra ribs and denser/thicker muscles and bones. Men who had enhanced senses of smell or night time eyesight.
A few of the people who went "missing" from soviet prisons for serious crimes were noted as re-appearing years later in soviet Marine Infantry brigades (spetznat) with clouded service records, but it is difficult to imagine Russia in the 80's having the technical knowhow or where with all to be able to "mutate" or modify already grown adults. I toss that one out though as an x-files kind of rumor that sure could scare the kids up around Mermansk.
Like I said, alot of rumors... but it makes you think. You gotta wonder what the CIA paid for too... there is alot of black budget money that doesn't get tracked beyond the agency front door... they managed to produce the Blackbird that way, and U2/TR1 as well as who knows what. I wonder if the gov't has dabbled in genetic mutation or embryonic modification/cloning...
Oh well, in direct comment to the article and posters here, let me go on the record that I think this is not a bad thing. China is not looking to increase their population (which they have difficulty controlling or feeding as is now)... they are doing research to A) Best the US and Europe at their own game, and B) come up with medical breakthrough that meet condition A and benefit their own society as well... maybe even boost their economy with something original that only they can produce, that being working genetic medicines they for once control under patent.
That looks like exactly what the People's Republic needs, more republican people!
It also helps that one can clone the important Party officials and make even truer the tradicional Chinese fascination for long term planning (not the 3-month Wall Street long term standard, mind you, the Chinese long term is measured in centuries). In the future, one will plan and have a clone to implement the plan.
I hope they remember to learn how to clone the rice, the pork and the fish, to feed all the surplus people they will be making.
China
pronoblem
The next man on the moon will be chinese too. They have a plan for manned mission in the near future.
Our science fiction always assumes that space colonization and the "future" will be dominated by western ideals, but as things are trending now, the future looks brighter for asia.
Source?
- Have a picture
many people have predicted (and it's becoming apparent) that Asia will lead the way in such biotechnology areas. People in Asia are not quite as brainwashed or blinded by Christian religious dogma, and probably don't mind conducting research that can improve the quality of human life.
While the politicians here debate, and try to cater to every consituency, by holding research back, the rest of the world will be able to run with the ball...
from the article...
Unlike most adult cells, whose functions are preprogrammed, embryonic stem cells can adapt themselves to a variety of specialist roles, filling in as heart or nerve cells.
so, let's assume i'm born, from an embryonic cell (cloned), and my heart goes bad. the doctor forgets to stick the embryo in the magic soultion that turns the "turn me into a heart organ" switch, and puts the cell directly into me.
does the embryo turn into a blasocyst and a developing baby/tumor? or would this "know" what to do? i know there's a specific solution that must be prepared to turn on all the genes to clone an animal, but would the body naturally tell this embryo what to do?
moox. for a new generation.
So in the future when you look at the packaging your replacement organs come in it will say...
"Made in China"
I suppose it was inevitable that while the majority of the world wrangles over the ethics of this technology, it would be developed anyway by a government with a total lack of them. While I am not opposed to cloning technologies on philosophical grounds, as a practical matter I trust the chinese government about as far as I can throw them.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
How about this: "Once I found a woman who was 9 months pregnant, but did not have a birth-allowed certificate. According to the policy, she was forced to undergo an induced abortion. In the operating room, I saw the child's lips were moving and how its arms and legs were also moving. The doctor injected poison into its skull and the child died and it was thrown into the trash can. Afterwards the husband was holding his wife and crying loudly and saying, what kind of man am I? What kind of husband am I? I can't even protect my wife and child. Do you have any sort of humanity?"
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
This would be a step backwards in court cases that rely on DNA evidence.
With people being truly identical in every which way (not including haircuts and stuff like that) including DNA, it would be nearly impossible to prove innocence or guilt of one of the clones in a court case that currently relies on such technologies.
Think about it...
"Your client was on the security camera and it was his blood on the floor"
"No, your honor, it was his identical clone with the same DNA - my client was nowhere near the place of the incident"
-kwishot
Column A
This is yet another reason why China scares me. Anyone upset over the American jingoism since 9/11 and during the Olympics should be blown away by the scope of Chinese nationalism, to say nothing of their singularly ass backwards system of medicine, politics, human rights, spam filtering, etc..
Column B
Kudos for this country for pushing the scientific frontiers of medical benefits to mankind. This forward-thinking is yet another sign of the benefits of not being caught up in corrupt fundamenalist political wackos. But since China's rich cultural heritage spanks the USA in longevity by about, oh, a factor of ten, it shouldn't be surprising where they're headed - it's only a matter of time before this technically advanced economic powerhouse dominates the globe.
Is it me or did Fraxis hit the nail right on the head when they put "Chairman Chang" as the leader of the "Human Hive" in Alpha Centauri.
..... Don't answer that.
Is it sick that I can still pretty much boil down much of the socio-political landscape in terms of a computer game?
So, do you have a better way of population control?
Yes, Capitalism and Democracy. As a population becomes more economically stable, the birth rate naturally decreases. In fact, I've seen some studies that show population will stop increasing around 2050 or 2100.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Of course they are ahead of us. We are a democracy and any substantial protest brings us to a screeching halt. (Think: nuclear power)
And as a totalitarian state, not particularly worried about ethics, foreign opinion, or foetuses, they have a very large source of research material.
But I expected better from many of you. They aren't doing this to increase their population. They aren't even doing this for stem cell research per se. They have plenty of stem cells from their very aggressive population control program. No, what they want is money. They want to clone embryos to sell to us squeamish westerners. They have to develop the technique of cloning them, so they can clone the stem cell lines we hypocritically approve of, then sell them back to us. What a wacky world we live in!
So in a nation where parents can only have 1 child, they are cloning humans...
Yeah, that makes sense.
"Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped." --Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915)
As if the USA is a democracy? First we arent a democracy we are a republic.
Second communism allows far greater freedom than capitalism IF the government is not corrupt.
Since 99 percent of all governments are corrupt including ours, a corrupt communist government is one the people cannot control. Our government is controlled by the top 10% of rich Capitalists not us, so how are we in any diffrent of a situation than the Chinese?
SSSCA, The Patriot Act, DMCA, These laws arent democractic at all, we didnt vote to have these laws in place, if we were allowed to vote the majority would vote against these laws, hey but some rich guys in suits and some representatives who are actually representing the rich guys in suits, they make the law.
A corrupt government is a corrupt government, Communism isnt bad on paper, its bad only because humans make it bad, and our government is bad only because we allow it to be.
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Because the USA is filled with Facism as well, perhaps we arent as bad as Germany, Russia, China, but we arent as good as some other places in Europe, or NZ either.
As far as freedom goes, Communism does have its benifits, one of them is science benifits greatly from it because scientists have complete freedom.
The only problem China faces is the fact that they have too many people and not enough jobs for them all, their government is out of order, right now we are entering the information age, resources and man power will matter less, information will matter more, and in this situation, the bigger population shall have more producers of information.
China and Communism benifits from this greatly, however because of their stupidity they are restricting information through censorship, if they ever allow their people to actually access the information then we'd be left in the dust.
Then again we have problems like that here (Copyright is a form of Censorship)
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Believe It or Not!
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
Easy to cast stones from over here isn't it? WE don't have to live shoulder to shoulder, packed like sardines into limited space as they must in China. WE don't (yet) suffer the same overpopulation problems China does NOW.
I fully support the intention of their population control measures, if not necessarily the way they are carried out. Perhaps economic inducements to smaller families would be better (here AND there). Instead of payrolling big families with tax deductions and crap like that, make people actually pay the real cost of their overproduction of kids.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
There is nothing that bans the cultivation of stem cells for medical research in the United States.
The only policy that President Bush has established concerning stem cells said that an existing set of stem cell strains (aprox. 60) would recieve federal funding. That's not the same as outlawing or limiting future stem cell research.
Other stem cell strains may be created, but not at federal expense. Medical Companies would need to use private financing to start future strains.
We have legalized abortion yet we respect human life all of the sudden? Come on. Be serious.
If Abortion is legal, Stem Cell research should also be legal. Its the same thing, the only diffrence is you are actually making use of the embryols for a purpose which can actually save lives.
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Doesn't China kind of have a little over-population problem as it is?
;-)
Like to the tune of 1.2 BILLION people!
Moderators need an additional choice: "Karma Whore" for people who cut-and-paste articles as their comments!
Its sad to think that I will probally be the last generation in my family to have known the USA as a technological superpower.
.. im registered as a Republician, and fairly conservative about stuff in general. I'm ironically a futurist. I think we should be more green, use cleaner technology, and improve our life/life style. But keeping the cost to future generations in account.
.. its TODAY that counts.
.. we are going to isolate ourselves from new technology .. new ideas. [fun experiment, ask your average religious right how much the yen is at .. or the euro .. and see if they know.]
.. and you will understand what i mean.] When a society isolates itself socially, it stagnates. They may have been a super-power economy once, but the bubble burst - and with that loss of economy, the last 40 years of growing pains are showing.
.. some to make a point, some to save time.
With increasing restrictions on scientific study, assanine patent law, and scientific monopolies - it seems everyone is out for either the buck or the moral highground. [or a political office.]
Hobbes would be proud, since he was the first to preach that to inturrupt the 'process' of god was a sin. Apparantly cloning (as well as violent video games and open source software) falls into this catagory.
Am i using a sweeping generality , you betchya`. Is it far from the truth ? not really as far as I would like it to be.
While i must say
Apparantly the way the govt slid the last 8 years, was to pander to the highest voting majority, go back to our 16th centruy religious roots, and avoid change.
change apparantly is evil. and will destroy our 'family' values. Whatever values they have 'saved' in 15 years when people are mutating horribly due to all the petrolium toxins in the air/water/soil won't matter
As the US becomes more and more self centered and less a 'world' player
Anyone see what japan did ? Japanese as a culture are rather xenophobic. [Just watch a 6 foot tall black man walk down a street in Yokohama
Incest between mother and son is common due to bonds formed from 'exam' stress. Rape and molestation is practicaly a way of life for young girls. And 12 year old prostitutes in the Tokyo/yokahama area are not only common, but ALMOST accepted. Theft and crime, once unthinkable (outside organized gangs) are becoming common place.
Again, im being general here
I just wonder, how much of 'protecting our values' Japan did 10-15 years ago. Are we repeating the same social mistakes? By refusing to let our scientists to explore? When our future is being decided by people who are holding onto beliefs that were founded 2000 years ago, when the world (to them) comprised of about 1/3 of europe - is that system equiped to handle the way the world is now ?
would you choose to program your new graphics application in C++ ? or COBOL ?
--Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum, non erravi pernicose!
Abortion is legal, which means sperms with eggs are legally not alive even if they are actually alive.
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I know this is extremely bad taste, but ..
Now you're really going to have to worry about what you've got in your dim sims.
Would mean we'd all be consultants, and start our own businesses, small ones of course.. Big business is actually bad for the economy because it decreases competition, innovation and people get paid less
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NZ is not capitalist either, you can go to college for free, hell you even get allowances from the government.
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The numbers can be a bit confused.
I was incorrect, the birth rate is a negative number, but the lowering death rate means the population is growing.
As for the Indian thing, I don't think wars are decided by how many men you can put in the field anymore. China has the largest population in the world (they still edge out India), but they're surrounded by less-populated countries who are more than a match for them in a fight (Japan, Taiwan, Russia, etc)
Not trying to be flamebait, but the fact is that a majority of the country did not vote for our president. Makes you wonder doesn't it?
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
I rarely bother to react to reactionary statements, but what with the distemper attendant upon a bout of the flu, bitchslapping an idiot has a perverse appeal.
Column A is vacuous and needn't be commented upon further.
Column B is idiotic. China's 'rich cultural heritage' is rife with xenophobic internecine warfare. The present regime is but the latest set of warlords. I've worked with and for Chinese families of substantial wealth, they were urbane, informed and loath to live in China. The Chinese mythos has long held the 'middle kingdom' will 'soon' rule the earth. It's quite funny to hear a chinese person self-deprecatingly state the inevitable rise to world dominance of the Chinese people. It's like they really don't want to rule the earth but destiny *is* destiny. China can barely feed it's people. The Three Gorges Dam is a grandiose scheme to implement a hydroelectric panacea. China historically came 'online', if you will, by development of a series of canal works, but the Three Gorges Dam is thought to be fundamentally flawed and might well silt up in plus/minus thirty years. Long stretches of China's rivers are dead. Environmentally China is a sludge pressure cooker overheating. China had damn well better scramble to advance every and any frontier of learning because in all likelihood when the shit (night soil) hits the fan over the next decade or two were all going to be splattered and forced to help clean up the mess.
cheersheuristic algorithm seeks stochastic relationship
insightful and funny but, sorry, they won't let me moderate. ;)
heuristic algorithm seeks stochastic relationship
So, I'm not sure where you are getting that the women were not fully consulted and also the part about human animal hybrids. Sounds like FUD to me... The article specifically said that the women were asked if they would like to donate the leftover eggs.
Secondly, the "animal hybrid" that you mention is rather inaccurate. US Scientists have been using all types of mammals eggs to test human DNA. In addition, there are a number of Human-Animal testing that are currently taking place. Read here So it's not unusual for this to occur in the scientific field.
Lastly, I agree with your last statement in that "we cannot hold back other countries technical progress." The main thing is that the East Asian culture has bred a totally different belief system that is not centralized on Christianity and/or a single god. There is very little stigmata towards donating unused eggs to research (It would otherwise be thrown out anyways) The belief is that it would probably benefit the society and science more through donating than from trashing the unused eggs.
Other Human-Animal Articles
http://cronkite.pp.asu.edu/med/Pages/clonself.htm
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/monke
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/science/DailyNews/
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
Sorry to tell you, but this has been and is currently a widely used Western Science technique. Read Here or Here
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
Amen to that!
Whenever we relinquish a technology because we feel we're ethically "above that sort of thing", we run the risk that the technology will be picked up by people with WAY less moral scruples. Relinquishment pushes technology into the hands of the unethical, the very thing we'd hope to avoid by relinquishing in the first place.
There's then this tricky problem: how do we keep a strong technical lead in an ethically problematical area of technology? Historically we've done it with black ops. Maybe that's what would work here. Then again, there have recently been advances that may make Bush's unfortunate decision moot: it is now possible to extract a stem cell from an adult human that is fully capable of differentiating into any cell type.
So now, maybe we can have our cake and eat it too. If the Chinese make huge gains using fetal stem cells, but we can do all the same stuff with stem cells from adults, then their putative technological lead becomes a tempest in a teapot.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
The Chinese, who've been alleged to use prisons as organ factories, or us?
And where is your proof to support that statement? Or is this just he-says-she-says-thingy?
I'll take "jingoism" and "nationalism" from Column A, and "heritage" from Column B.
Oh, and bring me my fortune cookies first so I can see how much the check is going to be.
Cloning? Wrong? Immoral? Unethical? Nonsense.
Show me one logical reason why "cloning" is wrong?
The sanctity of life? That's just bullshit we made up.
Playing god? More bullshit we made up. There is no god.
Growing a person to harvest him for organs? Well, we do have abortions, and if there's nothing wrong with abortion, there can't be anything wrong with that. As long as it isn't conscious, there's no big deal.
Cloning Hitler, Jesus, Socrates, Imhotep, or other dead persons? Well, their dead and have no say in the matter anymore. As for the concern of cloning someone who "was" evil, its ludacrous to think that doing so will result in the same person. Hitler wasn't a product of his genes. If Hitler had been born today, he probably would have wound up in a mental institute; or perhaps been a great artists; or who knows. But he wouldn't have been the holocaust-creating Nazi that we associate with the name. As for those people who believe that cloning such a person would result in the same end result, that's nonsense: every person makes their own decisions and choices. Hitler chose to become who he was; it wasn't forced on him by some quasi-religious concept of predestinaton.
Lets get over the irrational fear of human cloning. Its only the product of religious bullshit. Proof of point, in China, where the people aren't brainwashed by religion, they find nothing wrong with it; same in Britain.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Who are you to object to his imposing a global ethical standard on anyone? If ethics are a totally subjective ideal, then how can his act of imposition be considered wrong or right?
1. Hong Kong
2. Singapore
3. New Zealand
4. Tie: Estonia, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and the United States.
9. Tie: Australia, Chile, and the United Kingdom
12. Tie: Denmark and Sweeden
14. Finland
15. Tie: Bahrain and Canada
NZ is, according to capitalists, more capitalist than the U.S.
Who are you to impose a global ethical standard on anyone? Ethics is a totally subjective ideal and there is no act that can alone be considered wrong or right, even in the post S11 environment of today.
Your position is untenable. Do you really want to cling to ethics as subjective? It means that it is okay if a country decides to raise 98% of its people so that they can be slaves to the remaining two percent (literally slaves), perhaps they even get killed and eaten at age 35, when they have outlived their usefulness but still taste pretty good and serve as a good food resource for the 2%?Your bullshit argument basically amounts to saying that we weren't justified in doing anything about Hitler, because ethics is a subjective thing, and we can't impose our subjective values on somebody else or interfere with their own culturally valid ways of life. And should governments not impose laws that regulate conduct, since everybody has their own subjective interpretation of ethics?
after all, they are short on population and need all the people they can get..
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
By contrast, look at our American society in the West. We have debated the issue of cloning. We have expressed grave concern over its moral implications.
Actually, "the West" hasn't "expressed grave concerns" over the moral implications of cloning. You say this as if we, a unified body of First World nations, think cloning is eeeeeeevil.
Fact is, there's a great deal of disagreement on the subject - no unity whatsoever. And as the strongest objections seem to be made by religious fanatics with no scientific background in the biological sciences, I can see why the Chinese might find much of the debate specious and rooted in Western-style religious fundamentalism.
Hell, I'm an American and that's the way I see it. Yet another bunch of clueless idiots who've seen one to many 'evil clones kill people' horror flicks and think that this is somehow going to happen in real life....
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
I like Chinese.
I like Chinese.
There's nine hundred million of them in the world today.
You'd better learn to like them; that's what I say.
FreeBSD for the impatient.
Don't you think it would be pretty straightforward to grep any link for "goatse.cx", then flag the whole thing as a possible goatsex link?
I'm sure I could hack up a bit of code to demonstrate this, if anyone was interested. I wonder how much trouble goatsex trolls go to, trying to find out ways to obfuscate their goatse.cx links? Still, it keeps them out of trouble. Imagine if they turned their talents to something sinister...
Western European "socialism" is a long, long way from government control of the economy. It's more a set of policies on the part of the government to control the less humane tendencies of capitalism -- "capitalism with a human face," one might call it, if one were in an ironic mood.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.