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Start of Life Gene Discovered
gollum123 writes "The BBC reports that scientists from the UK and France have may found a gene responsible for controlling the fertilization of a new egg." From the article: "The HIRA gene is involved in the events necessary for the fertilisation that take place once a sperm enters an egg. Faults in this gene might explain why some couples struggle to get pregnant despite having healthy sperm ... Although their work in Nature is based on fruit flies, the same genetic processes are present in humans."
Does this mean that people are willing to acknowledge that fertilization is the start of life for individuals in a species that reproduces via sperm and egg?
So if I mate with a fruit fly and she doesn't conceive....I'll know why.
God is dead.
And they would need suicide bombers—why? Kick back, enjoy life and watch your hatred's work progress via multigenerational warfare.
One wonders if gene therapy is a possibility. Could this gene be "repaired" allowing couples previously unable to conceive to have children? If so it may spell the end to births of "litters" as those are mostly due to fertility drugs.
I stole this sig from a more creative user.
"bootstrap code"...
:-)
Anyone know if it's an Award or a Phoenix?
(In any case, the ramifications are stupendous - literally
seems that we're learning something new about genes every day,
like the story yesterday about Black Death/Plague and HIV)
But gene therapy using viruses generally doesn't affect the testicles or ovaries - see that's the part that carries the genetic information and spreads it to the offspring - and AFAIK, AIDS targets only white cells.
Besides, if permanent, inheritable gene therapy had been discovered, there wouldn't be any cases of Down syndrome and other diseases, because people would've been vaccined already!
heck, we could have vaccined people with the delta-32 gene and get rid of AIDS once and for all!
But guess what, we aren't there yet.
Who gives a fuck if it is a 'human life' under undefined terms, or under your defined terms, it is a living organism for crying out loud!
So, I should stop eating plants? They're living organisms! In fact, they're still alive when I eat them!*
* assuming they're fresh - fast food salads notwithstanding.
Don't trust any concentration of power.
Then so is eating turkey. Once a year millions of turkeys get slaughtered for a feast. And what have they done to you ? Did they plan to assassinate you ? No it can't. It is a living organism for crying out loud ! What in the world makes you think you have the privilege, oh I'm sorry, the 'right' as you call it, to take the life of an absolutely helpless innocent turkey ? I'll answer that last one for you ... they taste nice ^_^
The Dutch will inherit the earth. If not, we'll settle for a bit of ocean. Beta delenda est!
While I tend to agree with you that any viable cell that may become a human being must be treated with the same respect a fully developed one demands, I would not force other people to live under my beliefs.
It is curious many people (don't know your position about this) who object to abortion never do so about death penalty.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
Praise God, who in His infinite wisdom and omnipotence, used the same genetic methodology in fruit flies as He used in that created in His image.
He works in mysterious ways, so don't bother to wonder why He couldn't optimize the system in each species.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Where do I sign up?
I am a strict materialist, as you seem to be. Therefore, I agree that organic life has no "animating spirit" that fundamentally distinguishes it from non-life. In that sense, you are correct that life is just "an elaborate pile of goo".
On the other hand, human life exhibits some characteristics that are currently beyond all scientific explanation. In particular, I am thinking of free will, conciousness, and self-awareness (which are all probably words for the same underlying phenomenon). No one has the slightest idea how these characteristics arise in a human (and, puzzlingly, don't seem to in any other form of life).
While this doesn't necessarily imply that humans have "souls", it does leave the question very much up in the air. Therefore, it is entirely possible that your personal pile of goo is home to some extremely unusual processes. Some have speculated, for example, that quantum mechanical uncertainity is at the heart of free will. In this sense, the difference between "human" and "a bunch of cells" is an immense one.
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
This means that modern medicine will soon be able to detect infertile couples by testing for the HIRA gene and help these couples reproduce, for example through early in-vitro fertilization (early while the woman is young and has little pregnancy risk).
Of course, this means that the descendants will also carry HIRA, thus greatly increasing their chances they'll require assistance to reproduce.
This is like a repeat-customer wet dream for a clinic chain owner, you know. When the IVF clinic owner's kids will inherit the clinic, they'll also inherit a sound customer base.
It reminds me of these PC repairs technicians that just reinstall Windows on the same spyware-laden machine every month instead of training their customers to use Linux or a Mac. Repeat business.
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
I have never met any American, left, center or right, who is at all pleased with the "mass slaughter of Iraqi and Afghani children".
Can you provide even one example?
Or are you just making "#$# up?
Under your logic, you would also permit murder of fully sentient adult humans! After all, you wouldn't want to force your belief that murder is wrong upon others?
It is perfectly logical and self-consistent to use force in order to prevent one person from harming another. I daresay you would hate living in a world that did not adopt this general standard.
Why hand-optimize the system when you can use genetic programming to optimize the system to perfection? While you may never get as good a result as if you'd gone in and tweaked all those millions of genes yourself, you're letting the system do all the hard work and the end result will be "good enough" to perform its job efficiently. It's exactly the way I'd have done it!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
An unborn child can hardly stand up for itself. Would you say we shouldn't try and stop parents killing their 10-year-olds?
It is curious many people (don't know your position about this) who object to abortion never do so about death penalty.
While I'm personally very anti-death-penalty, a child is almost the definition of innocence. You can't compare wanting to stop people killing their children - which is how most anti-abortion people I've spoken with see what they're doing, I'm not saying they're right or wrong - to wanting to stop criminals who have killed other people being killed.
I am trolling
He's probably referring to the book by Roger Penrose and Martin Gardner (both brilliant minds, to be sure) called "The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics". In that book, Penrose makes a rather detailed argument for the fact that the essence of human-ness, whatever that is (consciousness, creativity, free will, etc...), the thing that we are desperately trying and failing to create with strong-AI efforts (AI that *really* can operate on a human level, not the stuff that gets marketed as "AI"), depends on some quantum effects in the brain. I haven't actually read the book (but I should), only seen reviews of it.
I'm guessing he's just getting very technical about an idea that I've also always harbored about human intelligence vs AI - that a lot of the "magic" of how the human brain works boils down to have a good random number generator deep down inside every neuron that has a small chance to perturb the neuron's normal output and give you something unexpected. A quantum probability effect somewhere within the neuron would fit the bill nicely. On the scale and complexity of the brain, that small probability of "error" (as opposed to how an otherwise relatively rigid neural network would perform) could give rise to creativity, and also break loops (a problem detailed by Hofstated in the GEB and MMT books - how can you construct a peice of (sufficiently complex) software such that it will never get stuck in an infinite loop regardless of the inputs? You really can't - but a true AI needs that capability, or it will get stuck often. Small random perturbations in neuron decisions gaurantees that you won't keep re-executing the same response to the same feedbacked stimulus over and over and over)
11*43+456^2
We all seem to understand that when we're talking about adults
This is an essential point. I was starting to counter your "bum" example with the addition of the conceit that this bum was not sleeping, but surviving on your blood ("but I'll die if you don't let me feed for the next... 9 months!") when I realized that's a dead end in more way than one.
We *aren't* dealing with an independant adult, or even an independant *organism*. A fetus is not a bum, and it is not sitting in a steakhouse with you. The mother can't just say to the zygote "look, I won't hurt you, but let's just go our separate ways". We are dealing with what is initially a single cell, that is gradually going to resemble a human infant more and more until (finally) it is developed enough that it can survive independantly, at which point the mother's body will hopefully force it out of her at the right time and without complications.
Do you see how this is so complex? Suppose you could perform an abortion by teleporting the fetus out of the womb without otherwise harming it in any way. Okay, so the mother isn't "killing" it, she's just no longer allowing it access to her body (but of course it will die, because it cannot survive as an independant organism). I'm obviously playing with semantics here to make a point -- do you think she might have this right?
This is the real root of the pro-choice argument for me -- that her right to control her body trumps the right of the potential human growing inside her to control her body.
Personally... if my wife got pregnant right now (and we aren't planning on having a child yet!), we would not abort it. I don't think of a fetus as "just a random bundle of cells", etc. -- but if my wife changed her mind and decided to have an abortion I don't think the courts should be able to override that decision and force her to endure the 9 months, massive hormone changes, physical risks and side-effects, PPD, etc. etc. on behalf of the fetus.
[Thanks for replying -- I'm finding this a very interesting conversation!]