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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."
Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research [...] creating human-animal hybrids
Bush wants to be the last of his species?
Trolling is a art,
Mr. Bush, you're breaking my balls here. You're breaking my balls...
If this signature is witty enough, maybe somebody will like me.
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
Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit... creating human-animal hybrids
I suspect that Bush is pissed because this all hits just a little too close to home.
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
creating human-animal hybrids
Wiretaps, schwiretaps, HE'S GOING TO BAN FURRIES.
Thank you, Mr. President.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
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!
Yeah, and Bush also wants to go to Mars.
Just cause he says it, doesn't mean it'll happen.
Too many Republicans oppose is extremist views on science. And those that don't will someday get a disease that has a potential cure in hybrid/cloning studies, and will then oppose the agenda.
Not panicked, yet.
This won't be the first warning sign. Once RvW starts to bend, THEN it is time to panic.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
The President said "egregious"? I don't buy it...
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
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
If you have examples of the same people making both arguments, you have a point. Otherwise, just chalk it up to the fact that a bazillion people post here, and it's likely there are a lot of people on both sides of the issue. "Slashdot" is not a guy with two sets of opinions that contradict, it's a lot of people with their own opinions in one place.
I'm not opposed to GM anything. I do, however, wish we'd spend a little more time testing things out before deploying them on a large scale, and a little less time suing farmers whose crops accidentally cross-pollinated with a patented GM species next door.
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?
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.
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?
It's well documented that Bush's anti-science stance is quite real. Bush has been critisized by virtually every scientific discipline for his interferrence with basic scientific research. Unlike those trained in the scientific method, Bush draws his conclusions first, then cherry picks or suppresses any research that supports/challenges his predrawn conclusions. Not only does this represent a poor understanding of the scientific method, it's any incredibly stupid way to form public policy.
When all else fails, run.
My friend, I was in the food service industry for over four years of my young adult life. It has been ingrained into me to be able to tolerate some of the worst forms of human communication.
... well, I'd rather not go through with that again ...
To those who think they break me through mere text, I welcome their assault. To those who have a glass of merlot and a full plate of prime rib to throw into my chest
My work here is dung.
I'm all for genetically modifying humnity. The human race is so pathetic that we need to improve ourselves anyway we can.
That's exactly how I feel about GM corn. Fucking stupid corn.
Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research [...] creating human-animal hybrids
he's only worried about EGREGIOUS abuses of human-animal hybrids, and i believe an egregious is half egret, half religious person (egre-gious)
so i support the president's narrow, case-specifc take on this issue, it makes sense, because we don't want a bible-thumping skinny bird strutting around now do we?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
...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,
"Genetic modification" is an abstract term. It covers a vast range of disparate concretes.
"Killing people" is an abstract term too, and most of us recognize there are situations were killing people is ok and situations where it is not. A lot of people would find the following amazingly shallow: "I find it rather hypocritical when many slashbots trash murderers for killing people yet they see absolutely no problem with soldiers killing people. Either killing people is ok or it isn't."
There are, of course, some who take such a black-and-white stand on killing. But most mature individuals recognize that not all killing is the same--even some of the more extreme pacifists will admit that killing in self-defense as a last resort is justified.
So it is with genetic modification. My own critique of GMOs is simply based on the certainty that the genes will get loose. The issue with Monstanto et al is not that they are genetically modifying organisms, but that they are willfully releasing those organisms into the environment, where their modified genes (particularly the Terminator) will certainly do great damage to innocent people by reducing their yields. This is evil, pure and simple.
Genetic modification of lab animals for medical research is a different situation entirely. Far from being flung willy-nilly into the common environment they are kept very carefully isolated. There is some risk they will get lose, but their numbers are fantastically small compared to crop plants, and the risk of harm coming to innocent people from them is nil in the ordinary sense of the term.
So it is possible to be in favour of GMOs for medical research and against GMOs for agriculture, because "GMO" is an abstract term that covers things almost completely unlike each other in every respect. Just as knowing that something is an apple tells you nothing about whether it is good to eat (is it rotten? crab? poisoned?) so knowing that someone is creating GMOs tells you nothing about whether they are doing good or evil.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
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.
Divorce rate stats are fun to play with. Here's another way of looking at it:
Roughly 66% of first time marriages last until one, or both, partners die. Thus the 33% who get divorced once are also fairly likely to get divorced a second time.
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!
If you genetically modify, say, corn and plant it in a field, if your modifications have some unforeseen consequences, you could have already cross-pollenated a huge area before you could do anything about it.
If you genetically modify a person, the short term consequences are that you screwed up one person. It would be 20 years before you have to start worrying about the tainting of the entire gene pool.
-- dR.fuZZo
Obviously God does not want us to mess with genes or embryos. Even though I have no religous documentation to back this up, it's what I think, so let's just go with it, okay?
PS: That whole "THOU SHALT NOT KILL" thing doesn't apply to fighting for natural resources or the march of freedom. Uh, because that's also what I think. Ain't it amazing how often God agrees with me?
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.
Bush is anti-science.
Anti-abortionists are anti-women.
I guess according to the OwnedByTwoCats School of Shitty Logic that Anti-War people are also Anti-Soldier, and Pro-abortion people are anti-life.
Hi, welcome to the wonderful world of terrible generalizations and inflamatory rhetoric, say goodbye to rational debate on the way in.
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?
Some people like to argue that the current administration is actually increasing funding for research, something in the order of billions of dollars. True, missions like the one to Mars, which may not be feasible, do get more attention. Now, let me illustrate what effect the actual decrease of funding in nuclear research has on science. Last year, Dr. Christoph Leemann, Director of the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (JLab) sent a clear message (read it!) to all staff and users at JLab. This is alarming! For most people outside the scientific community it is probably hard to imagine what the loss of 45 jobs at JLab means. The situation at other labs, such as the Brookhaven National Laboratory is very similar, if not worse. Let me assure you that this cut has serious consequences for a lot of people at many research labs and universities in the US. We will see how this changes education in the US.
There is more information available at the APS Public Affairs web site.
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.
"The NSF's budget has increased every year during the Bush administration."
That's a totally meaningless statement. The NSF budget has increased almost every year since its inception, regardless of presidential administration.
"Oh yeah, and the NIH budget doubled[pdf] from 1999 to 2003. For several of those years, a man named George W. Bush was president."
Yeah, that's nice. Bush also added an entirely new research arm to the NIH (bioterrorism), capped NIH budget growth to 2.5% in 2004 and 2005, and is proposing a nearly 30% cut in NIH funding in 2006. He's a real friend to the sciences. But, hey...at least he dramatically increased funding for weapons development! Yay!
Seriously...you have to be either stupid or willfully ignorant to think that George Bush has done anything to help the sciences. And IAAS, so I know what I'm talking about.
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?
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.