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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?
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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?
The Nazi doctors were allowed a great deal of freedom with their expirements. Just saying . . .
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 future might turn out an ugly place.
I believe the present is an ugly place. Read a newspaper. Look at some pictures of dead Palestinians, and think how complacent the US is in their deaths.
And as for "evil, soulless facist governments," are you implying that the US is any better? We only ban this research because of the religious right. Get religion out of government and we'd be doing this, no question.
A nation allows more "freedom" to its corporations than its dissenting individuals? It's called Capitalism.
Property is theft.
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.
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.
Ok troll, i'll play.
Democracy != absolute freedom.
A democratic nation can certainly limit freedoms, and any fruitful democracy does. In this case the democracy has thus far decided (although not clearly in one direction or the other) that the moral cost of stem cell research is not worth the scientific gain. Arriving at this decision is complex and cumbersome process.. that is the wonder of democracy. The people have effectively put controls on this research themselves.
A communist nation (or dictatorship) has another method of arriving at decisions. In this case a single ruler (or single party) gets to make the decisions about what freedoms to limit. Traditionally China has placed great limits on the freedom of its people, but in this case the ruler has chosen to let stem cell research continue. This shouldn't really be surprising, it is certainly easier to convince a communist leader with limited responsibility to the wants of the people to pursue a potentially controversial policy.
This mirrors what we saw in the Soviet Union. They accelerated their space program because the leadership had limited responsibility for the lives of the people involved. They didn't have to care what the people thought.
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So in the future when you look at the packaging your replacement organs come in it will say...
"Made in China"
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.
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!
And apparently, so are the people of China, who if current trends continue will soon have cures for all kinds of diseases which will continue to kill and cripple Americans.
Well. Actually, we're not arguing about socialism vs. capitalism; we're arguing about socialism (the government controls the economy) vs. fascism (the government chooses a few large corporations to control the economy, and everyone else can go to hell.) China is getting steadily less socialist because socialism generally doesn't work very well; the US is sliding into fascism because that's what capitalism tends to become if We The People don't pay attention. Real capitalism is an infinitely better choice than either, but right now nobody seems to have the will or interest to maintain it. News flash: capitalism is hard work.
What does all this have to do with science? Simple. Science flourishes in a zeitgeist of free inquiry and skepticism. Neither socialist bureaucrats nor fascist oligarchs are friendly to such a zeitgeist, because it threatens their power. Both socialism and fascism tend to be profoundly conservative, in a sense that has little to do with the traditional left-right dichotomy. It's a sad irony that Communist China is doing a better job of breaking the stranglehold of that kind of conservatism than the US is.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
The biggest problem with /. is that some very smart people who know a lot about one specific field, think they're qualified to comment (and +mod) on things they know nothing about.