Slashdot Mirror
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."
No, it means "Start of Life" is a more interesting and eye-catching headline than "Start of formation of diploid zygote and progression to cleavage"
So if I mate with a fruit fly and she doesn't conceive....I'll know why.
The question is not whether the freshly-fertilised egg is 'alive', but whether it can be considered human. For example, St. Thomas Aquinas* considered an unborn boy to have a soul at 40 days, and an unborn girl to have one at 80; before those times, he saw the foetus to be non-human. At what point to we declare the bundle of multiplying cells to be human, and at what point are they afforded the same rights? I doubt these new findings will bring much insight to this rather contentious question.
* A-level Ethics and Philosophy pays off again!
And tomorrow the stock exchange will be the human race
God is dead.
I dunno, I generally regard cleavage as being eye-catching.
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)
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
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).
...
Yawn. The idea that humans have those characteristics and other intelligent social animals don't is dogma, no more. My dog is more self-aware than a lot of people I've known
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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?