Even if the parent cell(s) were to have come from Mars, who really cares? Natural selection would have had distinctly different results on two separate planets. Our planet had a totally different environment, resulting in an extremely diverse ecosystem. The selection of life that has originated on this planet is completely unique to it - regardless of where the parent cell came from, we (and all the other life forms here) are most certainly a product of this planet.
You raise an interesting point in the debate of whether or not once in the hands of certain people such powers can be misused. But culture has changed immensely with the technological explosion seen in the last century. Now, scientific progress is made in the open, under the the watchful eye of millions. The sheer amount of protest groups for every last issue you can think of is a testament to this.
As said previously, a future where human life is custom made is a long way off. The meaning of long way off has changed though. Two years ago when I bought this slug of a computer, 1Ghz was a long way off. Likewise with the discovery of DNA. Gene identification and manipulation was a long way off when Watson and Crick made their discovery almost 50 years ago. The important thing is that today's culture is ADAPTIVE to such change. We are ready for change as it occurs, and quickly incorporate it into our daily routines.
The point is that in a project so open to public view as the HGP, such dark, futuristic visions are unfounded. If a bunch of bureaucrats can avoid nuclear war and proliferation, then I am quite confident they can manage to keep such technology out of the hands of those who would misuse it. This isnt to say Im happy with the job they do, with X many nuclear warheads floating about the US, but its a reasonably sufficient solution.
The creation of life, imo, is completely unethical. The populous in those countries that have the resources to actually develop technology to do such tend to agree. If for any minute I thought that genetic engineering would bring about war or destruction, or some devalued custom built life, I'd completely remove myself from the field. Of course, the inventor of the machine gun was trying to save lives, too...
Somehow, though, I have a strong feeling that civilization won't drop to such abuses of the technology. Responsibility with knowledge has been on the upswing. War itself is moving to the point where civilians should remain safe. We might never get there, but its reassuring to know that we are trying.
Im terribly sorry, but this method of criticizing Mr. Katz is something less than tactful, and makes people wonder who really is the unintelligent one.
As for Mr. Katz article, I fully feel that hes using the oh-so-familiar FUD tactic to imply that the HGP will have catastrophic effects upon civilization. Maintaining ethical use of medical treatments is of primary concern in most/all countries. Also, there is no guarantee that when we are finished mapping human DNA that we will have restriction enzymes (Those that cut DNA at a certain sequence) specific enough to nail one specific sequence. Human DNA is about 3,000,000,000 base pairs long. This means, on average, a restriction enzyme would need to recognize a sequence 16 base pairs long. (AFAIK, we have nothing this accurate thus far. Please correct me if I'm wrong.) Also, there are 2^32 ( (4 base pairs) ^ (16 pairs long) ) different restriction enzymes for making cuts at all these base pairs. Use a smaller sequence for recognition, you say? We can't do that because random cuts in DNA are normally an extremely ungood thing.
The horrid future of manufacturing babies that is painted is totally ridiculous. Regardless of how fast our technology advances, the numerous enzymes, the processing power, and the perfect accuracy neccessary to custom build a life form will be far too expensive for many years. And don't forget all the licensing fees for patented genes you'll be paying through the nose:). Single gene treatments for diseases are realistic future applications, and by the time coding fullblown human DNA from scratch becomes feasible, most countries will be prepared to use it responsibly.
Well, they can have a lot of fun porting that to other architectures. x86 is horrible in comparison with the register rich alphas. Aside from that, benefits from ASM are only reaped by using it to optimize those portions of code that the executable spens 90% of its time in. It really sounds like these guys wrote themselves a rather large and difficult to maintain and debug OS.
Slashdot Mirror
Budget was slashed for FF8. All of that was going to be more playable areas. A pity, ne?
Even if the parent cell(s) were to have come from Mars, who really cares? Natural selection would have had distinctly different results on two separate planets. Our planet had a totally different environment, resulting in an extremely diverse ecosystem. The selection of life that has originated on this planet is completely unique to it - regardless of where the parent cell came from, we (and all the other life forms here) are most certainly a product of this planet.
-Price
As said previously, a future where human life is custom made is a long way off. The meaning of long way off has changed though. Two years ago when I bought this slug of a computer, 1Ghz was a long way off. Likewise with the discovery of DNA. Gene identification and manipulation was a long way off when Watson and Crick made their discovery almost 50 years ago. The important thing is that today's culture is ADAPTIVE to such change. We are ready for change as it occurs, and quickly incorporate it into our daily routines.
The point is that in a project so open to public view as the HGP, such dark, futuristic visions are unfounded. If a bunch of bureaucrats can avoid nuclear war and proliferation, then I am quite confident they can manage to keep such technology out of the hands of those who would misuse it. This isnt to say Im happy with the job they do, with X many nuclear warheads floating about the US, but its a reasonably sufficient solution.
The creation of life, imo, is completely unethical. The populous in those countries that have the resources to actually develop technology to do such tend to agree. If for any minute I thought that genetic engineering would bring about war or destruction, or some devalued custom built life, I'd completely remove myself from the field. Of course, the inventor of the machine gun was trying to save lives, too...
Somehow, though, I have a strong feeling that civilization won't drop to such abuses of the technology. Responsibility with knowledge has been on the upswing. War itself is moving to the point where civilians should remain safe. We might never get there, but its reassuring to know that we are trying.
-BPrice
Im terribly sorry, but this method of criticizing Mr. Katz is something less than tactful, and makes people wonder who really is the unintelligent one.
As for Mr. Katz article, I fully feel that hes using the oh-so-familiar FUD tactic to imply that the HGP will have catastrophic effects upon civilization. Maintaining ethical use of medical treatments is of primary concern in most/all countries. Also, there is no guarantee that when we are finished mapping human DNA that we will have restriction enzymes (Those that cut DNA at a certain sequence) specific enough to nail one specific sequence. Human DNA is about 3,000,000,000 base pairs long. This means, on average, a restriction enzyme would need to recognize a sequence 16 base pairs long. (AFAIK, we have nothing this accurate thus far. Please correct me if I'm wrong.) Also, there are 2^32 ( (4 base pairs) ^ (16 pairs long) ) different restriction enzymes for making cuts at all these base pairs. Use a smaller sequence for recognition, you say? We can't do that because random cuts in DNA are normally an extremely ungood thing.
The horrid future of manufacturing babies that is painted is totally ridiculous. Regardless of how fast our technology advances, the numerous enzymes, the processing power, and the perfect accuracy neccessary to custom build a life form will be far too expensive for many years. And don't forget all the licensing fees for patented genes you'll be paying through the nose :). Single gene treatments for diseases are realistic future applications, and by the time coding fullblown human DNA from scratch becomes feasible, most countries will be prepared to use it responsibly.
-BPrice
Well, they can have a lot of fun porting that to other architectures. x86 is horrible in comparison with the register rich alphas. Aside from that, benefits from ASM are only reaped by using it to optimize those portions of code that the executable spens 90% of its time in. It really sounds like these guys wrote themselves a rather large and difficult to maintain and debug OS.