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The President, The State of the Union, and Genetics
At last night's State of the Union, the president said "Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research, human cloning in all its forms, creating or implanting embryos for experiments, creating human-animal hybrids, and buying, selling or patenting human embryos."
Jamie happened onto a link today which humorously and insightfully
addresses this bit from the speech. It's worth your time. Relatedly segphault writes "Ars Technica has an interesting look at scientific research and technology proposals included in Bush's State of the Union address."
Ok, here's one from kindergarten: Actions speak louder than words.
Ok, I'm fairly certain that I can find a lot of evidence revealing how many leaders of academia actually feel about George W. Bush. And there's a lot of documentation on his actual actions regarding science and research in the nation.
Harvard's Howard Gardner calls Bush's science adviser a "prostitute." And we all remember the Scientists and Engineers for Change organization compromised of sixty Nobel scientists and Tech Leaders. I'll let you guess out their stance on bush. Don't forget their open letter to the American people stating, " President Bush and his administration are compromising our future."
Remember, he only said he supports it. Let's see some actual actions to follow that up.
And if you have time to read up on Bush's actions in the science community, take a look at the Politics and Science in the Bush Administration. I find it hilarious that anyone could expect me to swallow Bush's "scientific research and technology proposals" when his actions are no more proposals than death knells.
Indeed, it seems the hardest issue regarding science that Bush is struggling with is how to silence it.
My work here is dung.
I think my favorite part of the entire speech was when Bush was discussing social security and mentioned how legislation for it had not been passed in congress last year, and the entire side of Democrats stood up and applauded.
"Could you put that in a memo entitled, SHIT I ALREADY KNOW!" - Sarge
Its not an article about the state of the union... its straight out poking fun of it. Granted, I know that slashdot is biased (far from), but don't be surprised to see pudge (editor and slashdot code guy) come in and start fighting back.
Me? I won't claim a side, just put on my asbestos suit and enjoy my charred marshmallow.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
...but I find it rather hypocritical when many slashbots trash corporations for creating genetically modified foods yet they see absolutely no problem creating genetically modified people. Either genetic modification is OK or it isn't, do we really need decisions made on the basis of how much you hate someone?
One would hope that Bush's statements on scientific advances prove that he is not anti-science, no more than pro-lifers are anti-women. It is silly (though convenient) to label someone with whom you disagree as evil - it doesn't make sense that any President would actively work to thwart something like scientific progress in general. It DOES make sense that a President would try to do what's best for the country, and that is where the disagreement lies.
Rather than saying "I am for progress and Bush is against it because I am Good and he is Bad", try to understand why his position is what it is - you just might discover that there are intelligent arguments on all sides of the table.
Rex is 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
While I doubt that the President's intent is to stop the manufacture of human insulin, I can't help but notice that legislators are historically bad at crafting good legislation on complex scientific subjects. Here's hoping the whole human-animal hybrid thing has the legs of the "stop steroids in baseball" and "manned mission to Mars" schticks he's thrown out in past State of the Union addresses...
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Put aside your hatred of Bush and judge on the merits. No, I don't agree with the position but it is a defendable position ethically. And there is a lot there I can agree with.
A ban on the "buying, selling or patenting human embryos" should be fairly universally acceptable, especially the bit about no patenting here amongst the slashdot hordes.
A ban on "creating human-animal hybrids" is more debatable but we damn sure better get a line drawn somewhere and we better do it fast or science is going to race out ahead of ethics and make one hell of a mess for someone to clean up.
And that leaves his call for a ban on "human cloning in all its forms, creating or implanting embryos for experiments" which is where most of slashdot parts company. Fine, lets have it out in Congress, again so some boundraries can be drawn up. And you liberals had better actually pass a bill this time because if you leave it to the courts like you did with abortion you will really get burned because of the shift in the Supremes. So lets actually debate it and come to a political decision we might all be able to live with this time.
Personally I'd like to see medical science be able to use some super advanced cloning tech to make me new spare parts from my own DNA so I wouldn't take immune supression drugs for life if I ever needed a transplant. But I don't really like the thought of creating and killing millions/billions of things that are/maybe/might be/could have been/sorta/etc humans to get there. I suspect a lot of folks are caught in that halfway position.
Democrat delenda est
A human embryo does not have a brain. Nor does it have a functional nervous system. Therefore it can neither think nor feel. Therefore, experimentation on them involves no suffering or loss of freedom (for the embryo).
An embryo is not a person, and only qualifies as 'human' by virtue of the DNA it contains. So, please tell me, why is this morally wrong?
If it is because this aspect of science should remain under God's jurisdiction, then I must insist that God has harmed us by not disclosing this information. We need it to fight the diseases which God allows to plague us, and to heal injuries that God allows to happen to us. This information qualifies as critical, need-to-know information, and if God won't give it to us, then we have no choice but to figure it out for ourselves.
Besides, "Thou shalt not use embryos in scientific experiments" isn't in the Bible anywhere. I read it cover to cover. It's not there.
So, again I ask, why is this *morally* wrong?
china enjoyed a heyday of invention: paper, fireworks, pasta, etc., while europe languished
later, before columbus, a chinese explorer, chen ho, was said to have discovered america... chinese officials burned his boats when he got back. were it not for this governmental backwardness, perhaps i would not be living in new york city with it's famous chinatown, perhaps i would be living in new szechuan city with it's famous europetown
after that ignomity, china continued to languish while europeans made massive strides in exploration and scientific discovery and invention, culminating in china's humiliation in the 1800s at the hands of european powers (the opium wars and the concession of hong kong, for example)
so obviously, with such backwards, luddite, anti-scientific thinking now on the lips of the west's most powerful leader, it seems we have a signal that it is china's turn once again (along with korea and japan) to pick up the reigns and lead humanity in the next era of scientific discovery and space exploration, while the west drowns itself in religious fundamentalist simplemindedness
maybe some centuries/ decades from now, the west will be humiliated by the east's wealth and knowledge, and be encouraged to pick up the reigns again, but for now, i see a changing of the guard in the world today in terms of scientific leadership and discovery
the east is beginnig to eclipse the west
and, as an american, that such idiocy and ignorance should be on the us president's lips, i am only deeply ashamed
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Don't forget that for every scientific, ones and zeros, logical, "scientific truth is the only answer" person out there, there's several thousand religious people who don't like science. How so many people can believe in something that has no proof, no explanation and no evidence baffles me, but they're welcome to their opinion. Until I'm proven wrong, however, I'm sticking with the evidence to the contrary.
No matter what you believe, things have really turned against the scientific community lately. The religious people out there now have enough people in power to push what they want through for quite some time to come. I guarantee it's not going to be the US who finishes solving the stem cell puzzle. Putting another conservative judge on the supreme court didn't help either.
On the other hand, there's this. Every time I get mad at people and wish they'd listen to reason, I remember what the communist states did to suppress religion, and how it didn't work. Replacing someone's core beliefs with unquestioning loyalty to the state is obviously the wrong way to go forward. You need an open society to prevent collapse. However, how do you move society forward while letting those who hold progress back believe what they want?
Most people don't realize that those who back Bush have exactly zero interest in Social Security.
The "Social Security" plans are designed to get amateur stock investors into the stock market, where the professionals, who back the plan, can take the amateur's money.
I think what Bush was trying to say is there's a fine line between doing genetic research that's good for society. And doing genetic research that's destructive to society because it has a possibilty of cheapening life.
Think about the implications of both scenarios for a min. In one way we find amazing life saving drugs, and in another we become slaves because life doesn't matter anymore. Yes, that is extreme in both ways but look at the way most people here are reacting to his speech.
Problem is I don't trust all scientists enough to let them do unlimited research. I also don't trust congress to lay down sane laws that govern the science research. Mainly because who knows what is right or wrong in this situation? The science behind genetics is still relatively new. It should not be strictly goverened by heavy handed laws that are laid out without some serious considerations of thier implications.
Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research [...] creating human-animal hybrids
It does sound rediculous, but how else are we to study human genes except by inserting them into animals? We can't breed, experiment on, and collect tissue samples from humans at will, so we have to use mice. You can't just study mouse genes, because who cares about mice?
I'm currently trying to clone the human FGF9 gene into mice so that we can study its regulation. What am I to do when chimeric models are outlawed?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Because "person" is a subject term, but almost everyone will believe that THEIR definition is "objective" and why won't the rest of you see plain logic? :)
I like toasted marshmallows.
Sure, it's nitpicking... Right... Thats why he has the lowest approval rating of any president other than Nixon. Because he is doing so well.... You do not have to be "radical" or even a "liberal" to think bush sucks, and will continue to suck. And this has everything to do with science. Will we get funding for ACTUAL science? Or Junk science - like oil company funded research that claims global warming is not happening? Will his cleaner domestic energy sources be real - or is he just saying that? Has he lied about things in the past? Should we trust him now? Is genetic engineering to cure MS wrong? Or is some genetic engineering OK and others wrong? Where is the line? What constitutes an experiment? Technically - life is an experiment. State of the union addresses are simply taxpayer funded campaign speeches.
My grandfather didn't think Social Security would be there for him. It is. My father did not think that Social Security would be there for him. It probably will be. For those of us who are farther away from retirement, Social Security will be there for us EVEN IF the baby boomers bankrupt the system. It's an extremely popular political program and Congress will do whatever they need to in order to keep it going in some form. Will they wait too long to fix any problems? Certainly. That's a given. It'll be a big, ugly, expensive mess with long term consequences, but at the end of the day we'll get our checks because there is no political future for the politicians who let Social Security die while they're in office. Count on it as a primary source of interest after retirement? Of course not, but it'll be something.
Remember RFC 873!
Maybe you guys disagree with Bush's proposal. But HOW would you change it? What would you remove? Is it valid to sell or buy a human embryo? To clone embryos? To make human-animal hybrids? As with all controversial issues, it's not possible to please everybody. So I'd like to ask slashdot what parts they agree and disagree with, and why.
The debate is premature unless we have a clear and reliable definition of what human life and personhood is. That's not as easy as it sounds, as it has to include everything that should be included and exclude everything that should be excluded. Is it legal for a parent to allow a child to starve to death or is it murder (easy one there)? But is it legal to remove the feeding tube from an anechpalitic baby, or not to provide the tube in the first place? What about cases like Terry Schiavo? At the point they removed her feeding tube, did she have all the legal rights and privilidges and obligations of a human person? What about charging for IVF? What about destroying fertilized ovums? How damaged does the ovum have to be before this is considered murder? What about bone marrow transplants if the stem cells it contains could be manipulated into becomming a person?
Want to declare all abortion illegal from the moment of conception? Then how can you avoid charging a pregnant woman who miscarries with (at least) involuntary manslaughter?
What's a human animal hybrid? Pigs chanting "Are we not men?" (Does anyone else find it ironic that Bush takes his cues from Animal Farm but not 1984?) How about goats with human genes to produce immune hormones in their milk? Where's the line? Want to make a law about it, and the line has to be drawn clearly and not in the sand.
Unless we decide, not just philosophically but legally, what it means to be a human, to think and feel and live as a human being does, there's no way to decide these issues.
Personally, I suggest that humanity resides in the brain. Life isn't defined just by a beating heart, or just by breathing. Those old methods of deciding when someone was alive and when they were dead didn't work well, and can't always be applied to featuses or people undergoing cardiac surgery. Id like to see some definitive evaluation of brain function based on remote fMRI studies. Before that point, a fetus isn't a real human being and so abortion isn't taking a human life. After that point, maybe restrictions on abortion would be defensible. If a patient is brain damaged and can't maintain that level of organized neural activity, then that person is brain dead, or more simply dead. Where exactly to set that point, unambiguously and as an absolute dividing line? I don't know, but then, I Am Not A Doctor.
Research on human tissue lacking that intrinsic humanity is acceptable, but manipulating people for research isn't. Find a way to direct a blastocyte to develop mature liver cells without developing the neurological capacity or humanity, and I don't have a problem with it. Why should I? It doesn't bother me if fibroid tumors are excised and treated as trash. Any other hunk of meat without the capacity to think and feel as a human doesn't get any more consideration.
What's remarkable is that the religious right and the policicians who cater to them take such an unbiblical view of these issues. According to the Holy Word of God, personhod is established by breath. The Bible explicitely excludes causing the death of a fetus from the "life for life" punishment system. A man who assaults a pregnant woman and destroys the fetus, as long as no other injury to the woman ensues, at most pays a fine. Therefore the fetus is not a human life. But what the Bible says God wants has nothing to do with how the religious pursue political power.
Okay, now, as Johnny says, "Flame On!"
In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.
Opposing human cloning, selling of human embreyos, and creation of human/animal hybrids is not extreme.
Cloning of entire humans is not extreme, but theres a lot of people who'd love to be able to replace a finger, or an ear, or get a skin graft after a burn... banning ALL THAT starts to get extreme.
Selling embryos -- ok, yeah, i think all of us find it repugnent when capitalism meets medicine...whether its fetuses or kidneys or even simply being denied the cure to your disease because the 90 cent pills you need are being charged at $2000 a dose (to cover 'research', 'development', 'shareholder profits', and 'litigation & insurance expenses'). Most of us will concede that the drug corps -need- to cover r&d, legal, and still lookout for the shareholder... but its still 'evil' to let a person die over few pills where the incremental cost of *those* pills was under a dollar.
And the creation of animal human hybrids? Again, sure rejecting the creation of the habitants of the Island of Doctor Moreau isn't 'extreme'. But what if you needed a new heart and they could grow the cloned your own heart inside a pig host, along with a supply of your own blood to use in the transplant operation? It would give you a heart that wouldn't be rejected, solve blood supply issues, and may neatly dodge the issue of cloning full on 'human beings' for organ harvesting.
Make up lots of objective goals and make the prize awards really big because you can afford to since you're paying for results rather than mere proposals to achieve results.
Making the real achievers of objective goals rich beyond their wildest dreams will lead to far more effective R&D spending of those dollars than will handing them over to life-time bureaucrats.
PS: A big problem is exemplified by a USA Today article about prize awards for technical achievement
Why is it that no one can see how much of an obscene mockery this use of the term "grand challenge" is?The fact that no one understands the difference between awarding a prize for achieving X vs awarding a grant for a proposal for achieving X is illustrative of why technology policy fails miserably generation after generation.
Seastead this.
Where human begins and ends is a fairly small subset of the genes which many animals share.
this was just a silly example please don't parse the technical issues ... I put as much thought into this as Bush ... well maybe a little more.
Athiests will never betray the concept of the seperation of Church and State. Athiests will never make policy based on the precepts of a particular faith. Athiests will never favour the moral code of one small group over their multitude of neighbours because they attend the same church. An atheist believes life is very precious because when you die, it's over. Some religious fundies are a little freer with human life because the afterlife is so much better if you're good, and if it isn't you deserved it anyway.
you are not thinking and feeling, either. In such a case, does that mean I am not taking your freedoms when I put a bullet in your brain?
Potential matters. When you are sleeping or unconcious, you do not have sufficient intellect to earn rights. What gives you rights is the fact that you will wake up and be an intelligent being. When this is not the case (for example, Terry Shiavo), we correctly deem that the hunk of meat that was an intelligent being no longer has rights, and should be cared for as per that person's wishes and contracts.
The "potential matters" principle is the only one that is consistent across a wide-range of situations. Here are some others: Imagine you had a real AI, sufficiently intelligent to deserve rights, living on your cellphone. If the batteries ran out, could you then destroy the phone? Does it make sense to say "I can't destroy the phone when the batteries are charged, but I can when they are empty"? Or how about this. What if humans started their lives as catapillars, then became butterflies, and then, after a second larvae stage became babies. Could we kill the butterflies? What if the situation ran backwards, and it went human-butterly-catapillar, followed by a spore stage that created new humans. Could we then kill the butterflies?
Another problem with your logic is that humans do not become intelligent enough to deserve rights until well after birth, unless you put the bar so low as many animals have rights. So now, you either are stuck with arresting people for manslaughter when they run over a cat and putting Fido on trial for killing a rabbit, or permitting infanticide. Which do you prefer?
The president says we should ban cloning in *all its forms*! Let's start by banning the oldest form of cloning -- identical twins!
Because obviously a human with the same genetic makeup has the same soul, thus leading to one clone never knowing if they're "real" or not! (Or is it a soulless evil, husk? I'm never quite sure what the Luddites believe.)
That's actually not true, for several reasons.
Firstly, most Americans don't vote, so it's hard to say whether they really agree with him.
Secondly, if you take the small number who voted for Bush, and actually ask them for their opinions on various issues, you find out something interesting: Bush supporters disagree with him on many major issues.
So the interesting question is: since most Bush voters are in favor of abortion, against the war in Iraq, in favor of reducing the deficit, and so on, why do they vote for Bush?
The answer is simple. It's also the single most important thing to understand about US politics, in my view. Here it is:
That's what the Democrats keep getting horribly, horribly wrong. They picked John Kerry, who nobody particularly liked as a person, even in his own party--a guy with the personality of a sack of wet sand, who spoke like a schoolteacher. They picked Al Gore, of the robotic demeanour and irritated sighs, and teamed him with Lieberman in case his displayed personality wasn't already enough to repel voters. They'll probably pick Hillary Clinton too.
What's even more odd is that once he had lost, Al Gore suddenly started displaying a personality and a sense of humor. So apparently the powers that control the DNC have this idea that pressing candidates into acting "presidential" (i.e. dull as all hell) is a good thing.
Meanwhile, the Republicans field a guy who has learned to convincingly fake a friendly Texas accent, and act dumber than he is. (e.g. the recent clowning when he couldn't get a door open.) It doesn't matter that he's from the exact same educated upper-class background as Kerry; he's learned to put on a persona that seems friendly and likeable to average people, and that's why he got elected.
Note that I'm not saying this is a good thing. It's actually pretty awful, because the best outcome is likely to be that White House policy is effectively random over time, depending on what the beliefs are of the guy who randomly happens to have the nicest personality. The worst possible outcome, of course, is that someone appears who is a raving fascist, but is a master showman who can appear to be a likeable man of the people. We all know how that turns out.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Analogously to criminal law, I use a standard which, mathematically, is probably somewhere between 2% and .1%. It does not matter which number you choose within that range, however. Why? Because a sperm has far, far less than a 1/1000 chance. So does an egg or a skin cell. However, a fertilized egg falls well on the other side (about 30% at fertilization, much higher a few days later after implantation). Therefore, where exactly we draw the line is rather irrelevant, as it is clear that before fertilization we are far to one side, and after fertilization we are far to the other.
I would say the same standard applies at the end of life. If Shiavo had a 10% chance of recovering, killing her would have been wrong, don't you agree? But the fact was that her chances of recovering were vanishingly small. That is why pulling the plug was ethical. Now, if a fertilized egg has a 30% chance of surviving, why would we also not grant it rights?
Yes, you can carry the "potential" argument to extemes. One could claim the lint in my belly-button has rights, because there are probably sufficient atoms to spontaneously rearrange into a zygote. But clearly, the probability of this is trivially small. Therefore we can safely discount it.
As a final point, I also believe in granting the benefit of the doubt. This is an important manner with lives literally hanging in the balance. We should error on the side of protecting life.
There's a wider variety of opinion on Slashdot than virtually any other webforum I've frequented.
That said, there is a HUGE difference between the genetically modified crops industry and genetic medical research. Very very very few slashdotters oppose GM crops in principle. Only a science-fearing luddite would be against such a thing. HOWEVER, if you take a good look at what's happened with companies like Monsanto, you'll see why many slashdotters are against GM food companies. Monsanto makes GM seeds, farmer A plants them, next door farmer B's fields get contaminated with GM seeds deposited by animals, Monsanto successfully sues farmer B for patent infringment. I think a lot of geeks around here are against patenting genes, especially the ones who are against computer code patents. Few here object to Bush's stance against patenting human embryos. Short-term (e.g. 14 years or less) copyright, sure, but patenting code, be it genetic or computer, is just messed up. On top of this, Monsanto has developed GM seeds with terminator genes and while they have yet to put these seeds on the market, it could lead to many small-time farmers being put out of business in addition to rising food prices. It might even affect the evironment quite drastically if cross-pollinated plants turn out to be sterile or stunted.
A lot of geeks here loved it when Bush made the declaration that we were going to Mars (though they were very rightly skeptical.) A lot of geeks here love corporations like Apple, Novel, Red Hat, even IBM. I'm all for fighting groupthink, but that doesn't mean exaggerating or inventing groupthink where none exists.
Stop modding this shit up! It's just not true.