MIT Certifies Biological Engineering Major

chrisd writes "In same week that Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney reitereates his opposition to stem cell research, MIT has certified its first new major in 29 years, Biological Engineering. The boston globe has a solid writeup about the biotech major."

Comments

DNA Hack

[TheSync]

For those who want to start early to get ready for this, check out DNAhack, the website for amateur genetic engineering.

Ummm...

[Combuchan]

So, MIT is essentially doing what Rice, SUNY Stony Brook, Lehigh, Rice, Syracuse, and even Mesa Community College have been doing for a very long time now?

Yes, this is MIT, and they have a potential to become the leading institution in the field, but respected universites have already established programs. When MIT comes out with something revolutionary from their new program, then I'll be interested.

Embryos and Life and Fertility Clinics

[Concern]

I have a question, I am seriously, honestly just looking for more knowledge about this.

Leaving aside your religious or personal beliefs about the rights of stem cells and embryos, about which reasonable people can disagree... and about whether federal funding should pay for something versus should it be allowed at all (another entirely lively discussion)... is it true that there is a double standard for fertility clinics?

I have been reading about fertility clinic procedures that involve activities with embryos, on quite a large scale, that should seem objectionable to RtL advocates concerned with stem cell research. But I don't perceive the same kind of advocacy against IVF activities that result in the destruction of microscopic life, as I do against stem cell research.

I am not a doctor. I know that IVF involves harvesting eggs and fertilizing them en masse, then transplanting a few back to the mother and discarding the rest.

So:

Assuming you consider microscopic human life sacred, is this morally distinguishable somehow from stem cell research?

Is it actually the case that RtL advocates do oppose IVF as much as stem cell research?

OT, but needs to be said

[antifoidulus]

A line from TFA: At the same time, the government, which funds most scientific research in the country,
Does anyone else see something fundamentally wrong with that? I agree that the government should play a LIMITED role in R&D ie financing the stuff that nobody else is willing to take the risk and finance, but there is somethin fundamentally wrong with this country when the government needs to finance most of the scientific research in this country.
What ever happened to private R&D? Or is this just a symptom of the long term wrath of Carly Fiorna's, Sam Walton's, and Micheal Dell's actions: You don't need to make stuff, just market stuff. That is how you will get rich!
Dangerous precedent IMO.

Re:The motivation is religious.

[Rei]

> Without the concept of a soul, how can one feel pity/sadness for any organisms

And yet, we do. Clearly, we feel sadness for adults and children when they die. Most of us would feel sadness for a dog or cat, but not all. Some of us would feel sadness for a mouse; others wouldn't. Few of us would feel sadness for an insect. And almost none of us would feel sadness for an arbitrary glob of cells, even human cells, unless they saw them as a "person".

We feel sadness when something dies that we view as having (to some degree) the trait of "humanity". Without a "soul" in an embryo, it is hard if not impossible to apply that trait to what is otherwise a small cluster of minimally differentiated cells. It doesn't look like a human; it doesn't think like a human; etc.

Certainly, there is no "absolute meaning", no "absolute reason" to apply sadness to the loss of something showing "humanity"; however, there is no "absolute meaning" to anything in the world unless you're religious. Everything is as one defines it, and it's hard to find a person who defines their worldview in such a way that the loss of things with "humanity" is no big deal. Even the most brutal of dictators generally thinks that they're saving more humanity by destroying some of it.

Re:Before someone starts about "the ban"...

[American AC in Paris]

While it's all well and good to disagree with various politicians on a topic or two, people are pretending there's an outright ban on something, when it's really a "we won't pay you to do (thing) in (mode) with (condition)" situation.

Technically, no, it is not an outright ban. You won't get thrown in prison for doing it; it's not in violation of the law. You could use only non-federal funds and perform this research with impugnity.

When the federal government pays the lion's share of your lab's bills with a big grant, though, you can be damned sure that to do anything that might cost you that funding is, quite simply, professional suicide. The minute you use a single dollar of federal funds--say, some disposable plastic pipettor tips paid for by a federal grant, or five minutes' time of a lab tech whose salary is paid for by a government grant--the government can withdraw every penny of that grant. Goodbye, lab, livelihood, and years' worth of hard work.

...so, what do you do--carefully sequester your new stem-cell research and hope and pray that one of your postdocs doesn't accidentally grab a reagent from the wrong shelf, or that your first-year rotation student doesn't unknowingly save a dataset to a shared volume on a server paid for by federal funds? Hell, no. Not if you like having a lab, care about your research, and want your fifteen-odd researchers to stay productive and employed.