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Speeding up Evolution
DaytonCIM writes ""We can rebuild him. Make him stronger... faster..." Slate.com has a great article on next generation gene research that promises to build "Supermen" or "Superwomen" out of us all. Insulin-like Growth Factor genes to make us stronger without ever visiting a weight room. EPO to generate more red blood cells and enable us to run "forever." Engineered human "Blood" to speed up evolution, so that we become less susceptible to disease and injury."
...and when we change all our DNA to be coded a certain way, we'll find some strange illness that affects what would have been 0.02% of the opulation now threatens to wipe out mankind.
Speeding up evolution means lots of mutations and lots of death of everything not better. Mucking around with the genome is not evolution, it's just mucking around with the genome. Blah...
My neighbor's kid has some syndrome where because of some genetic hiccup the kid has no upper body strength. No, I not saying the kid's a wimp, I'm saying he can't swallow or breathe on his own.
Apparently, the current thinking is that through gene therapy there's at least a possibilty the kid could be cured, ('cept there's a moratorium on gene therapy).
So, being super people is I guess all well and good, for me I'd just like to see this kid not have to eat through a tube.
Let me start out by saying, I've lost a contact lens, so I apoligize for the spelling in advance. I'm having a hard time seeing. That said......
The Cold War wasn't the only arms race going on. There's one that exits every day inside each one of it us. It's a race between various pathogens and our immune system. Oddly enough, DNA plays a HUGE role in the functioning of the immune system as a whole.
Did you realize that the reason that African-Americans have sickle cell anemia is that it is an evolved immune response? In order to develop the disease, you must inherit 2 recessive "defective" genes. But if you have only 1 "defective" gene and one "normal" gene, you are immune to malaria. Malaria is a mosquito borne disease that kills more than a million people a year in Africa. My point with is that genes that seem to be "bad" to us, might only seem "bad" because we don't have the whole story.
We've spent either thousands or millions of years, depending on your point of view, on this planet with our pathogens. They change us and we change them. We know that this happens because we can sit in a labratory and observe it. Antibiotic resistant strains are a prime example of this. I happen to call it evolution. Just as wolves thin the deer herds, making them faster, smarter, and stronger, so must the wolves become faster, smarter and stonger to continue to catch the deer. When you consider the amount of time that we humans have spent living with our various bacteria, parasites, etc. , it's logical to me that is happing with us on a microscopic scale.
Genes are very complicated things because they encode all sorts of information about how you function an unbelievably basic level. There are genes that encode the proteins that make up the cell wall. There are genes that encode the proteins that make up the receptor sites in cell wall. And guess what, mine don't look or work like yours! So I'm near sighted. My whole family is near sighted. My whole family also lives to be a 100 and it's a nice healthly 100, too. I suspect that there is some correlation since the ones that aren't near sighted died in their late 80's and early 90's.
The tinkering with plants hasn't gone as well as most of the public has been lead to believe. They figured out how to make cotton that didn't need to be dyed. It grew as red or blue. Well, they released it. People planted it and now they are being sued. Their neighbors are getting all kinds of odd color combinations in what was supposed to be their white cotton. There's also a "pest resistant" corn. Now that the corn flea beetle and corn worm can't eat corn, what will they be going to go after next? Or, worse yet, will they evolve in to a superpest that can eat the "pest resistant" plants? If they can eat the "pest resistant" corn, will they be able to eat the other "pest resistant " crops we're getting ready to release. We've created other "superpests" and a whole host of other problems with our use of chemicals because we really didn't understand the ramifications of what we were tinkering with - DDT, DES, MRSA, STSS, and a whole alphabet soup of acronyms. These are just the ones I can name off the top of my head.
This is a really really good example of "Just because you CAN, doesn't mean you SHOULD". They don't understand what the side effects to the environment are with a simple thing like colored cotton. They sure aren't going to understand the full ramifications of making changes to humans any time in this century. Anybody that thinks that is a good idea, should probably get some IQ points spliced in to the DNS sequence.
Queen BHDGary secures my bank
Sorry, but "faster, bigger, better, stronger" is not what evolution aims for. Mice, deer, worms, and rabbits somehow all managed to survive. And the saber tooth tiger, mammoth, and lots of other big, strong, and ferocious species have died out. Even for crocodiles, most of them get eaten before reaching adulthood. Evolution creates more of what survives, and small wimpy creatures that have a lot of sex are at least as successful as ferocious hunters. Furthermore, bigger muscles and other traits that we may think of desirable usually come along with quite a few problems, otherwise we'd already have them.
The more news I read about genetic research, the more sure I am that the future promised by Gattaca will come true. I don't really mind genetic research but what really scares me is the possibility of a division this might create. I mean there is this rich western world where people will be able to afford the benifits of this kind of research, where children wud be born with longer lives, more intelligent etc. , which in turn would make them even richer and then there is this poor world where ppl can't afford basic healthcare, leave alone genetic research, where thousands die from malaria every year and they would keep getting poorer. I am not very sure if I am for such research.
What's under yellowstone?
Sure restriction enzymes are costly, but at least they're legal enough to give to 2nd year biochem students like me. Also you can buy a gene printer (known as an oglio synthesiser) from Bioron or ABI for about $12,000.00 used. That can print up arbitary DNA sequences for you without much fuss, and then you can DNA ligase them together into whatever you want.
All this is legal, and getting cheaper (Moore's law... blah... Blah...).
Whether the rich or the poor or both get the benefits and/or curses of the technology depends on the laws and the cultural aspects, not the science.
Unlike plutonium which is a relatively rare and dangerous element, the the chemicals that this technology uses exist in every cell of your body. You didn't think that your cells went and sliced and diced DNA without the benefit of restriction enzymes did you?
Furthermore, are your gender politics assuming that all the rich people who go for this technology are male? I find your logic there rickety at best.
The lefty types, being the minority, are scared not in spite of choice, but because of it.
How many parents in America want a brunette child with a stocky figure in a girl? I'm not sure if you're a parent yourself. If you are I'm pretty hopeful that you would tell me that you wouldn't trade your baby for anything. But suppose you were not a parent yet, but about to become one. the doctor shows you a gattaca style menu of possible babies and one of them is the cookycutter bobbie model from snowcrash. And you think to yourself "Nobody will ever call her fat. Or demean her for her appearance. She will fit in in every way. And there's no way in hell I'm going to chose the one with glasses."
And thus, in nine months time, you look down your street at the identical babies in identical prams being pushed out of identical houses into identical ford broncos and realise that the Madison Avenue types who booked 30 seconds during the superbowl outsmarted all of you... except the family down the street who are new here and could only afford a No-Diseases package.
Now imagine if that was true, imagine what it would be like if you were the only UNmodified girl in your class. Would the teasing over being different get easier, or worse? Imagine if your parents had modified you for brains rather than looks and the side effects involved a hairy neck and small horn-like protrusions on your forehead.
Never underestimate the herd mentality. You'll find as many barbies walking the streets as there are people drinking coke today. The pepsi generation will be populated entirley by ken.
God help those whoes parents decided to choose something unpopular or obscure, because your birth-body is one thing you can't throw away when it becomes unfashionable.