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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."
I love reading about this stuff, but I can't help but think it's going to benefit my unborn grandkids a lot more than it will ever help me. I wish cryogenicists would freeze LIVING people so I can come back in a couple centuries. That would be cool.
oh great, everyone lives longer (or forever), the planet becomes over-crowded, and we haven't invented interstellar travel.
Can anyone else see where this is going?
...Linus Torvalds said,
"And don't EVER make the mistake that you can design something better than
what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a
feedback cycle. That's giving your intelligence _much_ too much credit."
Anybody ever stop and think "Hey, evolution takes place over a very long period of time...perhaps we shouldn't fuck with it?" Nope. Everyone seems to think that all we need to do is make everyone the ideal. Well, if you do that: A: It is no longer any sort of ideal, an ideal is supposed to provide a goal, a motivation to be a better person, or to train harder, etc. B: Whose ideal are we working toward? Hitler's? An aryan nation of blonde haired, blue eyed automatons whose only goal in life is to serve to the best of his/her abilities (which will be greatly amplified by the techniques spoken of above, and more)? C: Whose to say that it will be him/her? Maybe it will be an asexual being, since the genes can just be created. If we can make the genes in a lab, why should anyone be grown (yes, grown-not born, grown) with genitals or a sex drive? --- Think about it, if variety is the spice of life, and we continue on the path we have chosen, the future will be quite bland...
~ Change what you can, Accept what you can't Carpe Diem Baby!!!
I'm all for creating new organs out of stems cells, if its needed for life. I know many good people would have lived longer if all they needed was an organ transplant.
Science is good, but you have to keep it in check with average human prosperity. Its like the "Prime Directive," you have to follow it or theres drastic consequences you can never forsee. You wouldn't give a monkey a gun if you knew he could understand the consequences of using it. Same thing applies here in an obscewred point.
... my girlfriend does, she's working on a Ph.D. in skeletal muscle physiology. I cede my keyboard.
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While IGF-1 does wonderful things in mice, don't look for it at your local store or spam e-mail. Whatever people are selling in the spam shops isn't IGF-1, or anything remotely related to it. The real stuff is approximately $25 000 (US) per gram, which will treat 25 mice for a month, or one human for a day.
The problem with gene therapy is that it isn't available "now or soon", as stated in the article. The problem is that when the gene is injected, only a very small percentage of the muscle cells will express it. This means that delivery of the gene is very inefficient.
Adding onto this, there will be an immune response to the gene or the vector delivering the gene. This means that it won't hang around very long.
Next, there is a massive area to deliver to (all your skeletal muscle). And no efficient mechanism by which to accomplish this.
Basically, gene therapy is far from being a reality, let alone a mass market one that you could afford. To worry about gene doping at any Olympics in the forseable future is exceedingly premature.
The reason you can alter genes in mice is that their eggs can be manipulated in vitro . The manipulated eggs are artificially fertilized and injected into a pseudo-pregnant female. And while with this approach, only one cell has to be targetted, it still takes many many many months to create a transgenic mouse that expresses the proper genotype. Once that's done, you have to breed them - that's a lot of ass work for post-docs and PhD students.
Only a few daredevils, for example, would risk surgery to upgrade their vision from normal to extraordinary.
This is mostly because the surgery (lasic) has a potential to go horribly wrong and doesn't give much better than 20/20.
Athletes, enticed by fat contracts, Olympic medals, and fan adulation, will accept almost any health risk to steal an advantage.
yes. Believe it or not a survey of athletes I read, said that 90+% would take *any* drug to improve their performance with or without serious side-effects. The key was *not getting caught*.
Steroids and nutritional supplements-certified by home-run records and 350-pound offensive linemen-have already found their way to every major high-school sports program in the United States.
This is true. But the *only* supplement that has been shown in real clinical trials to work is creatine. ALL THE OTHERS ARE BOGUS. And steroids REALLY work. But their side-effects are really fucking bad.
Anyone who injects steroids can get very strong, but only if he lifts weights regularly
You don't *necessarily* have to lift weights for steroids to build muscle, but it helps a lot.
In recent years, doctors have been virtually dragging seniors to the weight room to get them buffed up. /.
Yes, this is because the benefit is FUCKING ENOURMOUS. take this to heart old people reading
The IGF gene is a multitasker.
Bad analogy. What they're trying to get at is that IGF genes turn on many other responses both at the genetic level and other. It turns on other genes and interacts with many pathways. It's a controler gene.
Both MGF and IGF-1 encourage muscles to grow. Yeah. just watch out for the shitty side effects.. like CANCER.
Goldspink hopes MGF could be a therapy for the sick and frail
Yes, here's the deal... Frail people, the elderly, those who are lacking in what these genes provide are the ones who will recieve the biggest benefit with the least side-effects. This is important.
The technique for inserting the gene into muscles is not complicated
Yes it bloody well is. don't lie. Right now, it's bloody complicated.
Although Goldspink's experiment resulted in Schwarzenegger mice, that doesn't mean that MGF will successfully pump up normal humans
Theres a bloody good chance of it tho. I'd lay money on it.
And as for IGF-1, it may have health risks that MGF does not
ok, let's make this clear. Don't take IGF-1. It DOES cause a lot of death-leading problems. heart failure AND cancer are just 2 of them.
Athletes are already experimenting with IGF-1
This HAS lead to deaths. It doesn't appear from the research that taking IGF-1 is safe at any level. But human trials are not done because we have laws in the U.S. against killing people for the sake of research.
On EPO:
Here is the trade-off. More bloodcells = slightly better performance & slightly increased risk of clogging your arteries. My opinion is nature worked out the proper ratio.
In fact, if you exercise regularly you will be amazed at how much you are rewarded.
You can start fucking around with your body. It can produce very large effects. But you're fucking with millions of years of evolution. You better have a good reason. There *might* be situations where it's beneficial. For example, humans evolved to fit an environment where food was a little more scarce than nowadays. That's why people are overweight. Evolution didn't get it wrong.. we changed the rules. But for a HECK of a lot of other things, evolution has found the perfect balance... don't fuck with millions of years of trial & error. That's all I have to say. Yes, if you have a genetic disease, then you're merely correcting the "error" part of "trial & error". Don't forget that without the error part there's no trial part and no improvement..
Look I'm really sorry if I've just laid drunken post on you guys. /. & gnu/Linux geek, a biochemist and a bodybuilder.
I just felt like saying something because I happen to be a few things. A
I felt like opining. Some of my opinions are based on research I've read for classes. Other parts are just speculation.
Liberty.
Since ice is crystalline, and crystals are inherently sharp, ice can easily damage any soft tissue.
There is research being done now that involves this neat little frog. The North American Wood Frog survives winter by freezing. It freezes during the cold, and actually thaws when the weather heats up. It can do this because of the excess of sugar stores in it's body.
Personally, I think that this is totally the way to go, so long as we can figure out a way to counteract the massive amounts of sugar we'd need to retain. It's all rather neat, imho. =)
But your post raises an interesting question: is beauty an absolute or relative concept? If through some genetic manipulation everyone becomes "beautiful" (by current standards), does that then fail to be beautiful? Is beautiful beautiful because of the (pleasant) way it differs from the "norm"? Or will we be in heaven living in a world of super models?
Food for thought...
Read reviews of shopping cart software
It depends on an arbitrary vision of what constitutes "superiority", and led to some truly barbaric practices, both in Germany and in the United States. I do not know how well the theory was received in other countries. I am, however, truly grateful that it is no longer accepted.
Eugenics was adopted in most major Western nations. The United States more or less led the way, Britain, Canada, several other countries soon followed. What's interesting to note here is that Germany actually came into the game extremely late compared to the rest of the Western world, and that the Eugenics laws in Germany were formed and passed before the instatement of the Nazi party. The Nazis just happened to take it up with a vengance.
A little history for the crowd: Eugenics rose from the ideas of Social Darwinism, which of course rose from Darwin's ideas of evolution, though Darwin was rather appalled by Social Darwinism and never supported it at all. Social Darwinism took the ideas of evolution and applied them to society. The idea was that society, like nature, would become increasingly better over time, by nature of evolution. Those who fit in well with society and contributed would help advance society, and those who were a drag on society would fall by the wayside, and the ideas taken on by society would evolve and become better, closer and closer to perfect. This caused great hope amongst the people - don't worry, there's nothing bad around the corner, because society will continue to get better indefinitely. Talk about cheery ideas.
Then someone had the bright idea of meddling. We cull our herds, we cull our crops. We breed the best with the best to make even better, don't we? Why shouldn't we do that to humanity? We'll take the best and brightest and encourage them to reproduce, often, and we'll... well, we'll cull the sick and useless from the herds so they don't taint the stock. And so they did. Eugenics laws involving sterilization of the sick, the feeble-minded, the low of society, were passed, and how. Leilani Muir is a perfect example. An Albertan girl, 'feeble minded', she was sterilized. Today, her IQ is measured at around the 90's, I believe, and she's perfectly capable of functioning in society. They didn't care. It was for the glory of society.
Eugenics laws were gleefully adopted by everyone... Then World War II came. The Nazis came, and they took Eugenics to the logical extreme, and the world watched in horror at what lay at the end of the path they all had decided to travel down. Laws were thrown out, lawsuits were filed, and everything went to shit. People realized that ideal society was something we'd have to work towards, that there was no free ride. Supposedly. Some governments, including some in Canada, took as late as the 1970s to repeal their Eugenics laws, even though they weren't being used. Sad, but at least it happened.
So, for anyone who thinks that racial superiority and the like was born with the Nazis, think again. Canadians, Americans, Britons, we're guilty, because we started it. The Nazis took it to the extreme all at once, but I fear that if they hadn't been so quick about it, that might've been the way the rest of our societies went.
Frightening.
--Dan