Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.