DNA isn't being manipulated. The nuclei are just swapped. Mitochondrial DNA is physically separate from the rest of your DNA. This is a very non-slippery slope.
Regarding parental rights, the women donating the egg sans-nucleus has no parental rights, which would seem reasonable. Of course that's up to the government, all parental rights in a society are governed by that society via its government. If a lab makes a mistake, then presumably the unfertilized eggs would be destroyed. If by that question you meant if there was a mixup in the lab, then presumably it'd be identical to any other IVF case where there's a mixup (apparently this has happened, though people don't usually end up finding that out until the kid is born).
That's nice, unfortunately the rate limiting step isn't processing time or RAM or the cost of sequencing. The rate limiting step is our understanding of neurobiology and developmental biology. Even PZ misses some of the complexity. One of the really difficult problems is figuring out all of the electrophysiology of the brain (spike timing dependent plasticity...of every area, all of the electrotonic structures and how they're modulated and how that and post-secondary modifications muck with everything, etc.). It'll be 10 years before the Blue Brain Project is really show something super cool in this regard, and that's a single cortical column of a mouse brain...
Kurzweil doesn't even know enough to understand what would actually be required to do what he's saying.
I am convinced, that the drug industry is doing a lot of evil things, and that most bodies like the FDA are actually ment to protect the interest of drug companies (e.g. drugs with same ingredients cannot be sold if they are from India, Canada, etc..) and not the end users'.
So you're a conspiracy theorist. Do you also believe that the government is covering up the evidence for alien abductions and the the UN is secretly plotting to take over the US? What about water fluoridation, is that a secret plot by the communists to implement mind control or steal our "precious bodily fluids?" All of those conspiracy theorist beliefs are equally absurd.
So I recommend making a search on your favourite torrent site or even youtube for "Are Vaccines safe"
Right, because when I want accurate and timely medical information the first thing that comes to my mind is "Hey, I'll see what a bunch of random non-experts on Youtube have to say." If you want to actually learn something useful, try searching on pubmed. You can also read the Cochrane Reviews on the subject if you want the predigested non-definitive summary (being a scientist and not a clinician, I prefer the original literature to the reviews, but of course I'm not busy seeing patients).
By the way they want to make H1N1 shots obligatory in Costa Rica - where I live - and there will be a huge resistance to it as everyone is scared of the shots' side effects, and the fact that it had very little - if any - testing.
Sheesh, the H1N1 vaccine is no different from every seasonal flu vaccine ever made, with the exception of this one likely being more accurately targeted (and thus having higher efficacy). We've been using these things for decades, and you can search pubmed to see studies looking at their safety and efficacy.
You can also make a search for flu shots and alcheimers, shots and tumors and find a scary amount of hype and facts....
You can also search for timecube to learn the true theory of everything. Try searching the actual literature and see what science finds. You do remember science right? Its the thing that gave us the internet, drastically increased our lifespans and largely eradicated previous scourges like polio and measles. Funny how useful that science thing has turned out to be...
About the only question of interest here, is "what took the Lancet so long?"
I can partly answer that. Papers are only ever retracted when there is near absolute proof of fraud (and there are usually lots of lawsuits surrounding them at the time). Essentially, everyone waits as long as possible to try and cover their butts legally. The GMC ruling gave the Lancet cover to fully retract the paper without getting slapped with a lawsuit (the absurdity of British laws surrounding libel and slander is evidenced by the whole Simon Singh kerfuffle).
I agree that this is a wholly unsurprising occurrence. 10 or so of the coauthors already retracted the findings, which was the only way they could salvage their careers. I know Wakefield will never retract, but of course when you're a paid shill that's unsurprising.
The "meat broth" they speak of is DMEM or something like it. Most of that you could purify from plants or bacteria or any other such source. The tough thing is that, currently, you usually supplement the DMEM with some source of serum (horse or bovine) and perhaps chicken egg extract. So, depending on what's needed, you might be able to produce meat using fewer resources and, therefore, more cheaply.
Yeah, those darn elitists with their moving from lower to middle class and getting scholarships so they can attend better colleges consequently thinking they might have a better understanding of issues revolving around discrimination and poverty.
It's what he thinks someone might possibly someday do (this all seems to be premised on something Geithner said as a brief aside). Must be a slow news day.
To give more examples, a lot of the transgenic mice used in disease research have human genes inserted into them. There are also many stable hybrid cell lines that are used daily in research (usually mouse/human hybrids). Bills like this are created by people who obviously have no clue what they're talking about.
My thoughts exactly. Having played in band I'm annoyed when I hear the "sizzle" sound that low-quality mp3s produce from cymbal sounds. But if I didn't have that frame of reference then I probably wouldn't care.
Businesses spend a lot on health care. By increasing the efficiency of the medical profession we should be able to decrease costs so businesses (and individuals to an increasingly greater extent) can allocate their resources to other matters (such as reinvestment). Granted, there are a number of assumptions in that, but that's at least on of the the reasons for putting this in the stimulus bill.
You might try the term personhood. Soul has a lot of baggage attached to it and other commonly understood connotations. As you noted, sentience isn't the bar anyone actually uses (infants wouldn't pass). Perception changes throughout development critical periods and consciousness probably has similar problems (though I agree with you that it's by far the best word you proposed). Personhood contains most of the same concepts as consciousness but lacks the less desirable connotations (the joys of making up words).
Anyway, your overarching point about the subjectivity of assigning consciousness/personhood/whatever to such things stands (I wouldn't make such an assignment to an embryo but that's just as subjectively correct a position as someone who would).
This is only true if you believe that personhood happens at the moment of conception. Otherwise, there's no moral problem with this. These embryos wouldn't be grown until "birth" (the meaning of which sort of fails in this discussion)...likely not even remotely close.
Having the o-chem will not allow a doc to DETERMINE its effects (nor did I say that it would)
From your original post:
Organic chem gives the ability to the doc to understand HOW these drugs interact.
So yes, that's what you implicitly said. If you can look at a structure and determine with what and how it interacts then you can determine its effect. But, of course, you can't do that (yet at least)...that's why we do large scale screens to find new drugs.
What is useful is knowing what the drug targets (across concentrations) and the molecular biology that's involved in the results of those interactions. That's not organic chemistry, it's biochemistry and molecular (and eventually cellular and systems) biology.
Organic chemistry is useful when you have a drug that's great at treating one thing but has a nasty side effect and you're able to determine that the method of these effects is different (i.e. some portion of the compound is involved in one effect but not the other). Then you can tweak things for higher specificity (and do lots of testing because odds are you just screwed something else up). But this is not the purview of the clinician.
Clinicians need to know less about organic chemistry and more about the higher level (in the programming language sense of the phrase) sciences such as molecular/cellular and systems biology. Thankfully, they spend a lot of time in medical school studying the latter, so they have a clue what they're doing.
But of course, I'm just a neuroscientist that actually works on human disease and has worked with people that do drug design and discovery, so it's not like I know what I'm talking about.
It was just a year in high school and some research in the medical library at the local university, so I'm not really sure what that says about my first few levels of 'medical support'.
Your experience is sadly common. I know a lot of physicians both personally and professionally (I'm a neuroscientist that works on human disease), and there are very few of them whose opinion I would trust. While the pre-med and med. school process are good at weeding out the low performers, they're also good at weeding out people who prefer to know subjects more than a centimeter deep. You end up with a majority of people who seem to excel at memorization of facts without fully understanding them (largely due to time constraints).
The only benefit of O-chem to a pre-med is that it provides a basis for taking biochemistry. The stuff learned in O-chem is largely useless to a clinician, while that learned in biochemistry is far more worthwhile.
Just so others know, what you wrote about organic chemistry allowing clinicians to look at a drug structure and determine its effects is completely absurd. If that were possible then we wouldn't need drug trials or large scale screens during the drug discovery process.
You seem to lack even the most remote understanding of what you're talking about.
Errr, no, she was already vetted during the primary...how much more is needed. The only thing they'd want to know would who contributed to Bill's presidential library. Only the bloviating media ever thought she was in the running for VP.
You meant that oil is one of the most inelastic products in existence...otherwise demand would strongly anti-correlate with price (demand has gone down a bit, but there's only so much cutting back consumers can easily due).
In many cities the police won't respond to an accident unless someone is injured. This is why getting the contact info of any witnesses is so important.
In the off-chance that your troll rating is incorrect:
To delete an item, use command-delete (you can also empty the trash with control-shift-delete). This helps prevent accidental deletions (though with the now ubiquitous implementation of the trash can that's not such a big problem these days).
When typing text, you can toggle the function of the delete key by pressing function (fn). I'd prefer distinct keys for backspace and delete as well, but find I use the regular delete key functionality ~90% of the time anyway, so at least for me it's no biggie.
You can find a lot of the keyboard commands under "System Preferences"->"Keyboard & Mouse"->"Keyboard Shortcuts".
There are probably some intro to Mac usage classes you can take to familiarize yourself with the differences from what you're used to.
This is discussed numerous places. A quick google pops up this article from the San Francisco Chronicle during the 2004 race. It's really one of the sad things about Nader. He has some good ideas but he often undermines his goals with his actions.
Krugman has been on an anti-Obama tirade as of late (though his work is generally good). The various fair analyses that have been done indicate that both plans will cover about the same number of people. The only real problem with Hillary's plan is that mandates are unpopular and we're unlikely to get enough Republican support for the thing to actually pass (they're not going to go for the wage garnishment that she recently talked about, even if it does make sense). Obama's plan has the advantage that it will pass. He's even stated that he's open to the idea of mandates later if they seem needed and can be passed.
Slashdot Mirror
The GUIs are fine unless you need to run anything in parallel (e.g., mcmapply). Those almost never work in a GUI.
DNA isn't being manipulated. The nuclei are just swapped. Mitochondrial DNA is physically separate from the rest of your DNA. This is a very non-slippery slope.
Regarding parental rights, the women donating the egg sans-nucleus has no parental rights, which would seem reasonable. Of course that's up to the government, all parental rights in a society are governed by that society via its government. If a lab makes a mistake, then presumably the unfertilized eggs would be destroyed. If by that question you meant if there was a mixup in the lab, then presumably it'd be identical to any other IVF case where there's a mixup (apparently this has happened, though people don't usually end up finding that out until the kid is born).
In what world do you live where your cheapo home projector is the equivalent to that required in a drive-in?
"post-secondary" should read "post-translational"
I should really proof read
That's nice, unfortunately the rate limiting step isn't processing time or RAM or the cost of sequencing. The rate limiting step is our understanding of neurobiology and developmental biology. Even PZ misses some of the complexity. One of the really difficult problems is figuring out all of the electrophysiology of the brain (spike timing dependent plasticity...of every area, all of the electrotonic structures and how they're modulated and how that and post-secondary modifications muck with everything, etc.). It'll be 10 years before the Blue Brain Project is really show something super cool in this regard, and that's a single cortical column of a mouse brain...
Kurzweil doesn't even know enough to understand what would actually be required to do what he's saying.
I do not want to join a fight about all this.
Then maybe you shouldn't have posted.
I am convinced, that the drug industry is doing a lot of evil things, and that most bodies like the FDA are actually ment to protect the interest of drug companies (e.g. drugs with same ingredients cannot be sold if they are from India, Canada, etc..) and not the end users'.
So you're a conspiracy theorist. Do you also believe that the government is covering up the evidence for alien abductions and the the UN is secretly plotting to take over the US? What about water fluoridation, is that a secret plot by the communists to implement mind control or steal our "precious bodily fluids?" All of those conspiracy theorist beliefs are equally absurd.
So I recommend making a search on your favourite torrent site or even youtube for "Are Vaccines safe"
Right, because when I want accurate and timely medical information the first thing that comes to my mind is "Hey, I'll see what a bunch of random non-experts on Youtube have to say." If you want to actually learn something useful, try searching on pubmed. You can also read the Cochrane Reviews on the subject if you want the predigested non-definitive summary (being a scientist and not a clinician, I prefer the original literature to the reviews, but of course I'm not busy seeing patients).
By the way they want to make H1N1 shots obligatory in Costa Rica - where I live - and there will be a huge resistance to it as everyone is scared of the shots' side effects, and the fact that it had very little - if any - testing.
Sheesh, the H1N1 vaccine is no different from every seasonal flu vaccine ever made, with the exception of this one likely being more accurately targeted (and thus having higher efficacy). We've been using these things for decades, and you can search pubmed to see studies looking at their safety and efficacy.
You can also make a search for flu shots and alcheimers, shots and tumors and find a scary amount of hype and facts....
You can also search for timecube to learn the true theory of everything. Try searching the actual literature and see what science finds. You do remember science right? Its the thing that gave us the internet, drastically increased our lifespans and largely eradicated previous scourges like polio and measles. Funny how useful that science thing has turned out to be...
About the only question of interest here, is "what took the Lancet so long?"
I can partly answer that. Papers are only ever retracted when there is near absolute proof of fraud (and there are usually lots of lawsuits surrounding them at the time). Essentially, everyone waits as long as possible to try and cover their butts legally. The GMC ruling gave the Lancet cover to fully retract the paper without getting slapped with a lawsuit (the absurdity of British laws surrounding libel and slander is evidenced by the whole Simon Singh kerfuffle). I agree that this is a wholly unsurprising occurrence. 10 or so of the coauthors already retracted the findings, which was the only way they could salvage their careers. I know Wakefield will never retract, but of course when you're a paid shill that's unsurprising.
The "meat broth" they speak of is DMEM or something like it. Most of that you could purify from plants or bacteria or any other such source. The tough thing is that, currently, you usually supplement the DMEM with some source of serum (horse or bovine) and perhaps chicken egg extract. So, depending on what's needed, you might be able to produce meat using fewer resources and, therefore, more cheaply.
Those patients have been studied and the variant in them (CCR5delta32) is different from this pseudogene. Work related to CCR5delta32 is ongoing.
Yeah, those darn elitists with their moving from lower to middle class and getting scholarships so they can attend better colleges consequently thinking they might have a better understanding of issues revolving around discrimination and poverty.
It's what he thinks someone might possibly someday do (this all seems to be premised on something Geithner said as a brief aside). Must be a slow news day.
To give more examples, a lot of the transgenic mice used in disease research have human genes inserted into them. There are also many stable hybrid cell lines that are used daily in research (usually mouse/human hybrids). Bills like this are created by people who obviously have no clue what they're talking about.
My thoughts exactly. Having played in band I'm annoyed when I hear the "sizzle" sound that low-quality mp3s produce from cymbal sounds. But if I didn't have that frame of reference then I probably wouldn't care.
Businesses spend a lot on health care. By increasing the efficiency of the medical profession we should be able to decrease costs so businesses (and individuals to an increasingly greater extent) can allocate their resources to other matters (such as reinvestment). Granted, there are a number of assumptions in that, but that's at least on of the the reasons for putting this in the stimulus bill.
You might try the term personhood. Soul has a lot of baggage attached to it and other commonly understood connotations. As you noted, sentience isn't the bar anyone actually uses (infants wouldn't pass). Perception changes throughout development critical periods and consciousness probably has similar problems (though I agree with you that it's by far the best word you proposed). Personhood contains most of the same concepts as consciousness but lacks the less desirable connotations (the joys of making up words).
Anyway, your overarching point about the subjectivity of assigning consciousness/personhood/whatever to such things stands (I wouldn't make such an assignment to an embryo but that's just as subjectively correct a position as someone who would).
This is only true if you believe that personhood happens at the moment of conception. Otherwise, there's no moral problem with this. These embryos wouldn't be grown until "birth" (the meaning of which sort of fails in this discussion)...likely not even remotely close.
Having the o-chem will not allow a doc to DETERMINE its effects (nor did I say that it would)
From your original post:
Organic chem gives the ability to the doc to understand HOW these drugs interact.
So yes, that's what you implicitly said. If you can look at a structure and determine with what and how it interacts then you can determine its effect. But, of course, you can't do that (yet at least)...that's why we do large scale screens to find new drugs.
What is useful is knowing what the drug targets (across concentrations) and the molecular biology that's involved in the results of those interactions. That's not organic chemistry, it's biochemistry and molecular (and eventually cellular and systems) biology.
Organic chemistry is useful when you have a drug that's great at treating one thing but has a nasty side effect and you're able to determine that the method of these effects is different (i.e. some portion of the compound is involved in one effect but not the other). Then you can tweak things for higher specificity (and do lots of testing because odds are you just screwed something else up). But this is not the purview of the clinician.
Clinicians need to know less about organic chemistry and more about the higher level (in the programming language sense of the phrase) sciences such as molecular/cellular and systems biology. Thankfully, they spend a lot of time in medical school studying the latter, so they have a clue what they're doing.
But of course, I'm just a neuroscientist that actually works on human disease and has worked with people that do drug design and discovery, so it's not like I know what I'm talking about.
It was just a year in high school and some research in the medical library at the local university, so I'm not really sure what that says about my first few levels of 'medical support'.
Your experience is sadly common. I know a lot of physicians both personally and professionally (I'm a neuroscientist that works on human disease), and there are very few of them whose opinion I would trust. While the pre-med and med. school process are good at weeding out the low performers, they're also good at weeding out people who prefer to know subjects more than a centimeter deep. You end up with a majority of people who seem to excel at memorization of facts without fully understanding them (largely due to time constraints).
The only benefit of O-chem to a pre-med is that it provides a basis for taking biochemistry. The stuff learned in O-chem is largely useless to a clinician, while that learned in biochemistry is far more worthwhile.
Just so others know, what you wrote about organic chemistry allowing clinicians to look at a drug structure and determine its effects is completely absurd. If that were possible then we wouldn't need drug trials or large scale screens during the drug discovery process.
You seem to lack even the most remote understanding of what you're talking about.
Errr, no, she was already vetted during the primary...how much more is needed. The only thing they'd want to know would who contributed to Bill's presidential library. Only the bloviating media ever thought she was in the running for VP.
You meant that oil is one of the most inelastic products in existence...otherwise demand would strongly anti-correlate with price (demand has gone down a bit, but there's only so much cutting back consumers can easily due).
In many cities the police won't respond to an accident unless someone is injured. This is why getting the contact info of any witnesses is so important.
In the off-chance that your troll rating is incorrect:
To delete an item, use command-delete (you can also empty the trash with control-shift-delete). This helps prevent accidental deletions (though with the now ubiquitous implementation of the trash can that's not such a big problem these days).
When typing text, you can toggle the function of the delete key by pressing function (fn). I'd prefer distinct keys for backspace and delete as well, but find I use the regular delete key functionality ~90% of the time anyway, so at least for me it's no biggie.
You can find a lot of the keyboard commands under "System Preferences"->"Keyboard & Mouse"->"Keyboard Shortcuts".
There are probably some intro to Mac usage classes you can take to familiarize yourself with the differences from what you're used to.
This is discussed numerous places. A quick google pops up this article from the San Francisco Chronicle during the 2004 race. It's really one of the sad things about Nader. He has some good ideas but he often undermines his goals with his actions.
Krugman has been on an anti-Obama tirade as of late (though his work is generally good). The various fair analyses that have been done indicate that both plans will cover about the same number of people. The only real problem with Hillary's plan is that mandates are unpopular and we're unlikely to get enough Republican support for the thing to actually pass (they're not going to go for the wage garnishment that she recently talked about, even if it does make sense). Obama's plan has the advantage that it will pass. He's even stated that he's open to the idea of mandates later if they seem needed and can be passed.