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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.
Of course, according to Star Trek, the Eugenics wars took place during the 1990s, so these supermen must already be among us. I'm sure that when the footage is de-classified, we'll all enjoy a bunch of fascinating documentaries on how these scientists already did their stuff back in the 70s....
In the year 2000, genetic enhancements will make everyone look super beautiful, the downside being everyone will look exactly like one another. Ahhh... Don't you love conan obrien?
...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.
He can code large masses of programs with a single keystroke, Absorb boxes of pizza with nary a thought, never shaves for days on end! It's... Internet boy!.. Genetically modified so that... oh.. wait.. we already have people like that...
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
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?
I never thought I'd see the day when only two of these were spam, and the others were actual opportunities of a lifetime.
"Make your penis 3 inches longer."
"Grow Muscle Mass without exercise."
"Horny cheerleaders wet 4 u"
"Run virtually forever without breaking a sweat."
Good luck to the SPAM Assassin folks if I can't tell the difference.
---Just check your e-mail in-box.
(checking).....(done)
Well, I've got a very high potential of increasing penis and breast size. And if I act now, I'll get double the 'supplements'.
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...
...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."
Great, now all the old folks will leech my social security momey fovever. As if social security wasn't screwed already.
If those damn aliens had a decent QA team I wouldn't need any enhancements.
No. Genetic engineering != eugenics. They're two completely different ideas.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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!!!
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.
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.
Actually, Eugenics programs started in the United Stated and culminated with the forced sterilization laws found in many areas.
The Nazis got the idea from Americans.
That's the killer application that genetic engineering solely needed. oh yeah.
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?
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
That may need a little elaboration, as the two touch on related areas.
Eugenics is a theory which holds that certain individuals are innately superior to others, and that the superior few are vastly outnumbered by the inferior many. If you accept these two premises, then it follows that the inferior many are sure to reproduce faster than the superior few, with the result that the characteristics of the superior individuals will be lost. Basically, a eugenicist sees the world in terms of a conflict between those with big brains and those with big dicks. In order to improve the species, therefore, a eugenicist will attempt to discourage the inferior from procreating, and encourage the superior.
The biggest problem with this theory is figuring out how to tell who's superior and who's inferior. The answer depends on how you ask the question, and on what your beliefs are about what would constitute a "superior" human being. The Nazis believed that a certain physical type was superior -- blond hair, blue eyes, extremely fair skin, what they called "Aryan". They conducted experiments attempting to further these characteristics; for example they would take a pair of brown-eyed twins, and inject chemicals into their eyes in an attempt to change the eye-color to blue. This particular study was carried out at Auschwitz by Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death.
If, on the other hand, you are an American eugenicist, what you do to separate the inferior and the superior is come up with the Intellectual Quotient Test and administer it to all schoolchildren. Those who do well are deemed fit, and allowed to do things like take college prep courses in high school. Those who are deemed unfit are only allowed to take classes in, say, technical arts, thereby preparing them for a lifetime working as drones in a factory. Also, you get laws passed in many states requiring the forced sterilization of any person below a certain IQ level who attempts to reproduce. You might also conduct studies such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments which were begun with the understanding that the subjects would be black because black men are naturally more lascivious than white men, and therefore more likely to have syphilis. These experiments were funded by Congress, continued for four decades, involved hideously painful procedures like spinal fluid taps, and worst of all the subjects were never told that they had syphilis. By the time they found out, it was far too late for any of them to seek treatment.
Eugenics is no longer an accepted theory. 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.
Genetic engineering, on the other hand, is a technique for the modification of living creatures by altering their genetic structure. It could very easily be used for eugenics, but has other more benign purposes as well.
There are two kinds of genetic engineering. One involves the modification of an existing organism. For example, take a child afflicted with cystic fibrosis, a genetic disease which causes the lungs to fill with mucus, thereby making it extremely difficult to breathe. That child might be treated by inhaling a vapor of specially created viruses that insert themselves into the affected lung cells and alter their genetic code in such a way that they stop producing the mucus. This is also known as gene therapy.
The other form of genetic engineering involves modifying an organism before it starts growing. Thus you might take a fertilized egg and modify its DNA prior to its implantation in the wall of the mother's womb. Since all cells in the body ultimately derive from that egg, your modification would change the fundamental nature of the adult organism. Genetic modifications have been carried out on plants, for example to make them resistant to a particular disease, or to increase the per-acre yield of a food crop. You yourself have probably eaten such genetically modified food. It is quite common in America; less so in Europe, where there are a great many people who protest against it.
Genetic engineering is a field which has enormous potential for good -- the elimination of genetic diseases like cystic fibrosis. If two people are aware that their child might suffer from CF, they could perform an artificial insemination of an egg which had been "fixed", or avoid the disease simply by choosing an egg that wasn't affected in the first place. On the other hand, genetic engineering also has a staggering potential for abuse. A genetic engineer could not only cure diseases, but also create entirely new ones. The new disease might be used in biological warfare. It is conceivable (though currently not possible) that genetic engineering might be able to create a contagious mutagen -- a virus that would spread throughout the population, and make a particular modification within the bodies of the victims. Imagine if the Nazis had been able to create a virus that would alter the eggs and testicles of those who contracted it. They could have ensured that the next generation would be blond and blue-eyed, against the will of the parents.
Then, of course, there is the danger that we might screw up. We know a lot about genetics now, but there's even more that's not well understood. Sequencing out a full human gene doesn't mean that we understand how all the parts interact with another. There are large portions of the genome that don't seem to do anything (introns) . . . but then again maybe they do, and we just haven't figured it out quite yet. Then there's the fact that one sequence of DNA might control or contribute to three or four different finished structures. If you alter it to give a child green eyes, you might also cause the child to be bald. (That's just an example, I have no idea if the sequences controlling hair production and eye color are at all related.)
Basically, we don't know enough at this point to engage in wholesale manipulation of human genetics. We should not outlaw it -- the genie is out of the bottle, and if we tried outlawing it, the research would merely be undertaken by unethical scientists with little or no oversight. On the other hand, we should NOT perform modifications of human beings without a clear idea of what we're doing and a damn good reason to do it. Giving your kid a particular eye color is NOT a good reason for genetic engineering. Avoiding cystic fibrosis is acceptable. Engineering for more abstract qualities -- musical talent, mathematical skill, linquistic ability -- should be avoided at all costs until we have some idea what the hell we're doing. We don't even know if those qualities are controlled by genes; in the process of trying it out we might very well screw up and make some truly horrible mistakes. Note that many autistic people are also extremely good at math.
Then there are the social issues. Genetic engineering is expensive. If we're not careful, it could become a way for the wealthy to reinforce their dominance over world affairs. It is natural to want to give your child every advantage in life that you can; but doing so can simultaneously disadvantage other people's children.
In short, genetic engineering of humans is problematic. It could provide some unparalleled benefits to the human species . . . but it is also an ethical minefield, and could easily be turned to selfish or downright evil purposes.
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.