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Playing God with Monsters
Howard writes "Horrified by "There Be Monsters Here" tales, some members of Congress called for a ban on DNA research in the mid '70s. Because those calls were rejected, millions of people around the world can now hope for DNA-based vaccines against AIDS, malaria and other deadly diseases that have destroyed lives, communities and nations. Here's an illustration: The name of Joseph DeRisi keeps coming up in connection with deadly diseases. No, he's not a modern-day Typhoid Mary. Just the opposite. The University of California, San Francisco researcher is using his own custom-built DNA microarrays to look inside the "minds" of some serious serial killers. The "minds" are genes, and his home-brewed gene chips helped solve the SARS mystery earlier this year. Now, DeRisi has chosen malaria as his next victim. For the complete commentary, please go to Howard Lovy's NanoBot."
you speak of the availablity of genetic research as being of benefit to humans.
But that same genetic research, without a doubt, will ensure that humans will be genetically engineered into another species vastly more advanced than us, thereby meaning our own de-facto extinction.
I have learned to be sceptical when people speak of 'progress' - progress to what? You wish to eliminate all human discomforts? You will eliminate humanity in the process.
I am a molecular biologist. I regularly read the news about criticisms of genetic engineering and stem cell research. I think that perhaps I should spend more time talking to my non-science friends about the positive things that have come from genetic engineering - insulin, the genetic testing (Tay Sachs screening is a good example), and so on. It is nice to read of more good examples in a not-completely biology setting.
just give me my steak in a grapefruit and i'd vote to pass any legislation to lift bans on genetic research!
peace,
-Grokent
There's a good article at Wired about the current state of affairs in the battle against cancer.
t ml?pg=2
The End of Cancer (As we Know it)
Diagnosis. Chemotherapy. Radiation. Slow painful death. No more. A new era of cancer treatment is dawning. Meet three scientists who are using the revelations of the Human Genome Project to reshape medicine.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.08/cancer.h
They talk about micro-arrays, among other things.
John Kerry is a Joke!
I work in the Developmental Neurobiology Dept. of a large children's cancer research hospital (which shall remain nameless, but let's say it rhymes with "paint food"). I use stem cells on a regular basis (human embryonic kidney 293 cells (or HEK-293 for short)). And ya know what? I've never had the guv'ment come take my cells away.
Any legitimate researcher can get stem cells with little or no effort. Thus, all the fuss is quite pointless.
That being said, the "ban" is fairly pointless as well (although most researchers regard it as the purely political move that it was). There is a lot of potential to be had in this field, and the government shouldn't be stepping on any toes.
You are comparing apples and oranges. Are you not? The ban on human stem cell research using federal money (private still allowed?) from embryos is due more to morals than fears about monsters.
Didn't they recently find that stems cells from baby teeth worked just as well? This should solve any moral arguments.
"Oddly, eventual wide acceptance of that information did not lead to the fall of the Church." Oddly, not everything has to be taken absolutely literally. Have you ever heard of a metaphor? While I don't want to get into a long debate about the veracity of my beliefs, suffice it to say that I doubt that stone age people would've understood a literal account of creation. "The first thing moralist do is attack any new science." That's right, generalize! I can be punished for another person's actions simply because I subscribe to a similar set of beliefs! "Our Fearless Leader told us stem-cell research and human cloning would be morally wrong. (Dropping bombs on Afgan and Iraqii civilians, well, that's okay.)" I for one want a leader with the balls to stand up for what s/he thinks is right. Whether or not the people decide to keep himm/her in office is up to them. I'll just leave the Afghanistan/Iraq issue. Nothing good will come out of that argument.
How about artificial tissue-based heart valves? This topic is fresh on my mind because my grandfather had open-heart surgery to replace his aortic valve replaced a week ago. They elected to go with 1 of the 3 mechanical options instead of a tissue-based replacement. The available tissue replacements consisted of two options: pig or human. Pig heart valves have an average life of 7-9 years (in part due to the average lifetime of a pig). Human valves last much longer; however the human donors are usually elderly and their valves have already seen their fair share of mileage. Finding a young human donor isn't as common as finding an elderly human donor. Since heart disease runs in my family, I'm quite interested in any and all medical advancements in this arena. Genetically engineered hearts sounds quite promising.
While I like Microarrays, they have a number of drawbacks:
- Noisy, the signal to noise ratio is almost unusable, unless you have REALLY BIG changes in RNA expression ( which is what they are measuring ). In the case of SARS I imagine that the differences were pretty high, so that it was relativley easy to detect the affected genes.
- Sequence, in order to make an array, or "chip", one needs to do a whole-cell extract for the target organism, extract the RNA, reverse-transcribe it, sequence it, figure out where on the sequence it is, make sure it isn't a spliced form of some other gene, then spot it onto a slide. Basically you get the EST library. Not easy to do, still kinda unreliable.
All accounted for, I don't think that anyone is to the point of making monsters or playing god. In order to do that, we first need to figure out how to get cells to change their DNA which we are still at least 50-75 years away from doing.Off topic though it may be: 'From 1613, however, Galileo unambiguously asserted that the earth literally moves around the sun and popularized his views in snappy Italian rather than the arcane Latin of the universities. This put his work at the top of the seventeenth-century bestsellers list, but it did not endear him to his academic colleagues. Galileo was first and foremost opposing Aristotle, not the Bible, and for the majority of early-seventeenth-century astonomers, this put him on the fringes of "science"; his was not a cutting-edge theory but and ancient Pythagorean view that had been discredited by Aristotle. On the other hand, Galileo's relations with the Church were cordial. The orthodox story tells us that his telescopic discoveries "gave unbounded alarm to the Church. By the low and ignorant ecclesiastics they were denounced as deceptions or frauds." But this is not so. Far from being constantly harried by obscurantist priests, he was feted by cardinals, received by Pope Paul V and befriended by the future Pope Urban VII who, in 1620, wrote an ode in his honor. The historican George de Santillana observed in 1958 that "it has been known for a long time that a major part of the Church intellectuals were on the side of Galileo, while the clearest opposition to him came from secular circles."' 6 Modern Myths About Christianity and Western Civilization, Phillip J. Sampson, pg 37.
Yeah, I'd put money on genetic cures, I'd even give you 2:1 odds.
I don't want to belittle the danger posed by biological weapons, especially in this day and age where air travel can spead a pathogen far and wide in short order. Man continues to increase the efficiency and speed at which war can kill. However, the number of people killed by disease every day, during peace or war has historically dwarfed the number of people killed by war, so I think progress is more likely to have a larger impact there. Did you know 6,000 people are killed every year in the USA alone by tainted meat, far more than were killed on 9/11, yet we aren't spending billions of dollars to improve the purity of our food supply. Did you know more people died in the 1918-1919 flu pandemic than died in enemy action in WW1?
Now the biggest flaw in my argument is that most of the people in 3rd world countries that die of diease, die of preventable or curable diseases, but lack adequate medical care. So even if science develops "miracle" cures for malaria, dengue, the flu, AIDS, SARS, etc. why would that have any effect on poor Africans?
I'm not sure if that makes me an optimist or not, but it is a suckers bet, since if you win I probably won't be around to pay you.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
Let my bias and background be clear - I am an ethnically Jewish atheist/humanist in graduate school in molecular biology.
Obviously - I am not concerned about the welfare of balls of cells roughly a millimeter in diameter. The creation of blastocysts, using in-vitro fertilization, to make clonal stem cells, does not trouble me in and of itself. No different from tumors or flakes of skin.
However, when this is done, women need to undergo egg donation. The health effects of this procedure may be severe; study has been inadequate. If we do find a medical application for this technology, economic pressure on young women to donate eggs, which can already be considerable, could increase. In underdeveloped nations, unscrupulous individuals could collect eggs using highly unsafe techniques.
If it were possible to grow entire organs in isolation, using these clonal stem cells, that would be my sole concern. In fact - I outright predict that this will be possible for some applications, and that blastocysts will be produced for this purpose.
As a result of stem cell research, we might figure out how to grow a Kidney in a tube from a single cell (or induce regeneration of bits of Kidney in a healthy adult, or what-have-you).
Otherwise, the way to get clonal organs would be to implant the blastocysts in a mother and bring the resultant embryos to term and then harvest the clonal individual for organs.
If the stem cell research which the pro-life crowd opposes is not done, or is not successful, this will be the only way to grow organs. Since I think there is a real, moral, distinction between early abortion and infanticide, I wish to avert this possibility.
Horror upon horror - It ought to be feasible to deliberately introduce horrible birth defects (especially if we can figure out how to fast-grow embroys in vats) such that the clonal individual didn't develop a brain. If you only needed to make a Kidney, you might kill all the embryo's nerve cells or something. Raise your hand if you think this is no worse than flushing a fertilized ovum down the toilet.
In addition to being gross, such technology, if widely adopted, would I think lead to the devaluation of human life; a charge which has been leveled, baselessly, against the practice of abortion, but which has real force in this case.
At this point in the discussion I would like to remind everyone - the original articles discusses applying molecular biology to the study of PARASITES, not people. While it might be possible to use clonal stem cells to fight malaria somehow, that is in no sense the technology that is being used.
Here's an explanation of what DNA microarrays (the technology being used in the original article) actually do.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
To summarize, if Galileo had said "The Earth revolves around the Sun" and left it at that, he probably would have been ignored by the Church. Instead he said "The Earth revolves around the Sun, which contradicts Church doctrine, so the Church is full of idiots who are utterly, completely wrong about this, wow, look how stupid they are!" Big difference.
This is overstating the case in the other direction. He simply wrote his book as a Socratic arguement. One voice would ask a question or make a statement based on "common sense" and the other would decimate the "common sense" idea based on logical arguement based on simple facts both accepted. Some people in the church thought the common sense character represented them. Galileo said it didn't, it represented his own arguements and the logical arguements were just mouthing Copernicus as a devil's advocate. Obviously this didn't didn't hold much water since anyone reading the book knew the "common sense" was nonsense and Copernicus was right. Galileo thought he could get away with speaking the truth because he was friends with the pope who very much liked science and Galileo's ideas. He thought the pope would intervene on his behalf, but the pope was in the middle of a political war and dropped him as quick as Mr. Clinton dropped Dr. Joycelyn Elders for speaking another unpopular truth.
In other words he just had terrible political timing. We all know politics still effects science as much as we wish it didn't. That Jesuit probably did some good things to deserve the honor, just like some usually incomprehensibly idiotic seeming politicians sometimes do even today.
Galileo was nothing but political road kill.
Besides if it weren't for the Inquisition, my City of New York wouldn't have had it's first mass immigration of Jews and Muslims, and we wouldn't have had the Flushing Declaration (of human rights for all taxpayers) affirmed by the Dutch, and so we my have never had that freedom loving language in the Declaration of Independence or even the Bill of Rights.
According to the work of Robert O. Becker, the assumption that regular cells cannot dedifferentiate is in fact not just a false belief, but one which has been shored up at great expense by orthodox medicine. The phenomenon of normal cell dediferentiation, (a skin or bone cell into a 'stem' cell) can be observed at the site of tissue wounds in not just salmimanders, (which can regrow whole limbs), but in humans as well. (Who, even though they cannot, do not for extremely interesting reasons.)
Apparently, vanishingly small micro current DC electricity is used by complex organisms to tell cells what to do during various stages of growth and tissue repair. --I came upon Becker's work while reading up on Electromagnetism and its effects on human neurology.
I was blown away by what he had discovered over his long and lettered career. Becker is one of the 'real' ones. Look him up.
-FL
I'm not trying to ignore the ethics debates, which are important in their own right, I just want one of those smiling, talking heads to come into my lab and maybe learn how to run a gel. Learn how to purify some plasmid DNA, know how we feel as we trudge through the boring bits just to get to the exciting data. And then understand how far we are in basic research from "curing cancer". I want someone to understand the man hours involved and what we have invested in this stuff.
You know, I don't work with human stem cell lines. I don't work with cute fluffy animals. I do happen to work in a lab which does breast cancer research, but we don't all go around wearing little pink ribbons all the time.