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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."
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
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.
But has it been confirmed? By Netcraft?
the layman's guide to computer science
Nietzscraft would be more appropiate ;)
"All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog." Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
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?