Valve have run with this via Gordon Freeman - the game is designed to make the player play as if they ARE Gordon. He has some back-story, but the player ends up feeling as though they're the one fighting the combine instead of controlling some guy who's doing all the work. Hence the lack of cut-scenes or any concept of Gordon talking.
Wait, so I DIDN'T actually defeat the combine with little more than a crowbar? It was a game?
Sperm doesn't have pairs of chromesomes, it has only one. But you're right, if you make sperm from female stem cells it could only have an X chromesome, never a Y chromesome, so you'd only get female offspring.
The only inherent loss of genetic diversity would be the Y chromesome, which doesn't have much genetic information on it anyway. The wiki page on the Y chromesome points out that "the human Y chromosome itself contains only 78 working genes, compared to close to 1500 working genes on the X chromosome" and none of the 78 are "vital." For women anyway for obvious reasons.
As long as the female that the sperm are derived from isn't closely related to the female that produces the egg, it wouldn't seem like there would be diversity loss.
Ah, yeah, I initially wrote down Brittney, but then thought that was getting a bit dated and realized I didn't hate her stuff as much as BEP. Anyway, there was no need for me to be snarky. Sorry.
I wasn't sure where you were going until the end there. That would be entertaining. How long before we'd see the first attempts at defining a person as the result of a straight man's sperm fertilizing a straight female's egg in a marriage. Probably called "Defense of humanity" act.
And you almost generated humor there. If you had a lab maybe you could have actually been funny.
The big deal though is, I would assume actually several things
1. It's interesting enough that we can generate them in vitro. How sperm are made is better known than some other cell types, but now even the parts we don't know can be more easily studied, since you can watch it in a microscope easier. Changing conditions to determine what sperm need to develop is also going to be easier in a dish than it would to change conditions in a mouse testicle (I would assume, I've never tried.) For example, some big pharmecutical company could start a high-throughput screen of drugs on the process, they could identify some chemicals which would block the process and maybe make a male birth control pill. Maybe. There are many other applications for the technology too I'd assume.
2. We're close to curing some types of male sterility. If, say, you had testicular cancer or other... uh... trauma to your testicles that prevented you from generating your own sperm, this is a step toward that. You could take some of your cells (like skin cells), make them pluripotent (like embryonic stem cells), generate sperm from them, and then undergo IVF.
At least, a millionaire could. If he were willing to sort out the ethics of it for himself. Would be kind of stupid if you ask me, but so are a lot of things people spend their money on.
Sadly I think that's coming no matter what. The answer, which they won't like, is that embryonic stem cells are best for basic cell biology studies. You don't want to be using iPSC for that, because they're not true embryonic stem cells.
It's a sad state of affairs in the music world when 192 kbs is considered 'higher quality.'
I think that would depend on the quality of the music being played. If people are listening to, say, the black eyed peas, then vinyl-level sound is still low quality.
QuantumG spent his entire "conversation" trolling me rather than answer my questions. I don't understand why some people have to get so hostile just because they're hiding behind a handle.
Asking questions that have been answered elsewhere is a favorite tactic of certain trolls. Creationist trolls for example often say things like "Let me ask this: do we have any proof that macroevolution happened and made humans" and if you actually answer they'll launch into their standard arguments... I kind of thought you were doing that as well and mostly wanted to see what the arguments against the above points were going to be.
Induced pluripotent stem cells do currently look like they're better than embryonic stem cells and adult stem cells for theraputic uses. But for more basic biology, no. If you want to study how cells turn from stem cells into their mature fates, you don't want to study these things, because they're unnatural. You want to study the real things, embryonic stem cells.
A good example are the induced pluripotent stem cells themselves. You know how Yamanaka and James Thompson (they both were publishing at about the same time) discovered induced pluripotent stem cells? By studying embryonic stem cells. They identified the factors needed for iPSC from ESC, they validated the pluripotency of iPSC by comparing them to ESC.
Corporations set up separate legal entities all the time to mitigate liability.
If we were talking about a paper issue that would be great, assuming researchers could afford the cadre of lawyers that corporations use (which they can't). But we're actually talking about physical labs, not imaginary companies.
What exactly was stopping them from using the existing stem cell lines? I don't believe I've ever received a satisfactory answer for this other then "They just couldn't!"
Some labs may have been heavily invested in a line of stem cells created after that date. For example, switching to another cell line is incredibly wastefull if you've already spent millions on microarray analysis of a new stem cell line that happened to have been made after the magic date.
Some necessary stem cell lines have not yet been created. If you want to study an inherited disease, say one that causes brains to be malformed, you might want to study how neurons differentiate. Generating a stem cell line from an embryo that would have that disorder would be more convinient, not to mention more humane, than having carriers of the disease continually reproduce and harvesting the fetuses after they've started growing brains.
There's no guarantee that the existing stem cell lines are good for all things that ESC could be used for.
And it's an artificial distinction that pointlessly limits research in a developing field. If you have an ethical problem with ESC, using existing lines is still problematic. If not, there's no reason for the ban.
Not an exhaustive list, and I think if you searched there are plenty of people who have better answered questions like yours.
With induced pluripotent stem cells, they wouldn't need to look very far. Or take immunosupressants either. And then we can save hESC for research purposes.
Far better research is being done with adult stem cells and there are actual cures and treatments in testing or completed.
You wonder then why so many researchers at premier institutions are trying to study ESC when such credible sources as stemcellresearchfacts.com could tell them they're dead ends. I mean, it has FACTS right in the title!
I bet they the research will never lead anywhere so they can keep the gravy-train of state grants coming.
Sarcasm aside, no, the above statment is as wrong as you'd expect from such a biased source. hESCs are being used as research models in labs currently. If you want to study cell differentiation for example, you need to be studying some type of ESC. Studying embryonic cells maturing into, say, neurons will tell you something about how that happens naturally.
If you only care about applied research and think basic science research is worthless, you're in the wrong corner of the internet, and you should also keep in mind that embryonic stem cell research has already given us induced pluripotent stem cells, which are more promising for treatments than adult stem cells OR embryonic stem cells.
There was no ban on embryonic stem cell research. There was a ban on the federal government using tax dollars to fund embryonic stem cell research.
Sounds nice when you put it like that, but in practice it's extremely difficult to make sure you're not spending federal grants on your HESC research projects. And, you know, there's just not enough red tape and bureaucracy with medical research. The ban on federal funds didn't ban research, sure, but it was definitely an obstacle designed to hinder the research as much as possible.
The fear, rational or not, that seems prevalent in those with a 'conservative' mindset is not that the embryos are going to waste, but that if the discarded embryos are going to be used for stem cells it may encourage doctors to create many more than they need
I was of the understanding that the number of zygotes fertilized was limited by how many eggs they could collect from the donors. I thought (though I am not familiar with the process) that they give the egg donor drugs to produce more mature eggs at one time, then surgically collect the eggs and mix them with sperm, fertilizing in vitro. The sperm cells would obviously be in excess as always, so that all the competent eggs they scraped off of the ovaries will get fertilized.
So if a woman's ovaries produce, say, a hundred eggs when treated with the drugs, and half of them are capable of being fertilized, then you'd get 50 embryos. I'm assuming they don't dump all of them into the recipient's uterus, they'd maybe inject 10 to maximize the chances that one would implant. The remaining 40 are availiable for ESC.
In other words, I don't see where the doctors are modulating the number of embryos concieved right now, or any area the doctors could create more to meet any increased demand. The drugs used to stimulate egg production above normal rates are not without side effects and I've heard there's a risk of cancer with them, they're not going to give the women more, and I'm not sure that would do anything. It's not very cost effective to fertilize eggs one at a time, they're not doing that now. They fertilize all the eggs they can already, I would think.
What are you talking about? China could still invade Alaska, precipitating the whole thing. Especially with Palin stepping down, she was the only thing standing between the commies and the US!
Actually you are welcome to refuse to give out your SSN for any of those purposes. Of course the person on the other end of the business arrangement is also welcome to refuse to do business with you.....
And the current story proves that even that is pretty useless.
Not news to anyone who knows how SSN assignment works.
Yes it is. Knowing it's theoretically possible to figure it out is one thing. Someone actually demonstrating it can be done with high success rate is another. And it's news that matters because maybe this will force some change on the issue, dispels the illusion that it's a super secret identifying code that only you and X large organization knows....and maybe there will be a pony waiting for me at home...
Not offtopic. The blurb article mentions only that it would be magnetically controlled. Maybe that's their entire plan for keeping it from clogging the tubes (blood, not the internet). It very much seems like it could cause aneurysms, clots, strokes, heart attacks, and whatever it was Tony Stark had in the recent Iron Man movie.
I am not a doctor, nor do I play one in comic books.
Well that's a different style from usual/. posting. So it's technically not trolling, but still, reading the article? I have half a mind to teleport you in front of a robot firing squad.
From what I've seen, that's MORE japanese than american. Japan is pretty ethnocentric, they're a very homogenous island country. The corporate culture, from what I've heard, is also more "Conform or get put on the shit list," than over here. It's not as outright, but it's more widespread.
Slashdot Mirror
Valve have run with this via Gordon Freeman - the game is designed to make the player play as if they ARE Gordon. He has some back-story, but the player ends up feeling as though they're the one fighting the combine instead of controlling some guy who's doing all the work. Hence the lack of cut-scenes or any concept of Gordon talking.
Wait, so I DIDN'T actually defeat the combine with little more than a crowbar? It was a game?
In soviet Russia, clock alarms YOU!
Sperm doesn't have pairs of chromesomes, it has only one. But you're right, if you make sperm from female stem cells it could only have an X chromesome, never a Y chromesome, so you'd only get female offspring.
The only inherent loss of genetic diversity would be the Y chromesome, which doesn't have much genetic information on it anyway. The wiki page on the Y chromesome points out that "the human Y chromosome itself contains only 78 working genes, compared to close to 1500 working genes on the X chromosome" and none of the 78 are "vital." For women anyway for obvious reasons.
As long as the female that the sperm are derived from isn't closely related to the female that produces the egg, it wouldn't seem like there would be diversity loss.
Ah, yeah, I initially wrote down Brittney, but then thought that was getting a bit dated and realized I didn't hate her stuff as much as BEP. Anyway, there was no need for me to be snarky. Sorry.
Wow. Incest++. That's a term that I had hoped would never be invented.
I wasn't sure where you were going until the end there. That would be entertaining. How long before we'd see the first attempts at defining a person as the result of a straight man's sperm fertilizing a straight female's egg in a marriage. Probably called "Defense of humanity" act.
You seem to have missed my point there. By a lot. Sucky music at high bitrate = still sucky.
And you almost generated humor there. If you had a lab maybe you could have actually been funny.
The big deal though is, I would assume actually several things
1. It's interesting enough that we can generate them in vitro. How sperm are made is better known than some other cell types, but now even the parts we don't know can be more easily studied, since you can watch it in a microscope easier. Changing conditions to determine what sperm need to develop is also going to be easier in a dish than it would to change conditions in a mouse testicle (I would assume, I've never tried.) For example, some big pharmecutical company could start a high-throughput screen of drugs on the process, they could identify some chemicals which would block the process and maybe make a male birth control pill. Maybe. There are many other applications for the technology too I'd assume.
2. We're close to curing some types of male sterility. If, say, you had testicular cancer or other... uh... trauma to your testicles that prevented you from generating your own sperm, this is a step toward that. You could take some of your cells (like skin cells), make them pluripotent (like embryonic stem cells), generate sperm from them, and then undergo IVF.
At least, a millionaire could. If he were willing to sort out the ethics of it for himself. Would be kind of stupid if you ask me, but so are a lot of things people spend their money on.
Sadly I think that's coming no matter what. The answer, which they won't like, is that embryonic stem cells are best for basic cell biology studies. You don't want to be using iPSC for that, because they're not true embryonic stem cells.
It's a sad state of affairs in the music world when 192 kbs is considered 'higher quality.'
I think that would depend on the quality of the music being played. If people are listening to, say, the black eyed peas, then vinyl-level sound is still low quality.
QuantumG spent his entire "conversation" trolling me rather than answer my questions. I don't understand why some people have to get so hostile just because they're hiding behind a handle.
Asking questions that have been answered elsewhere is a favorite tactic of certain trolls. Creationist trolls for example often say things like "Let me ask this: do we have any proof that macroevolution happened and made humans" and if you actually answer they'll launch into their standard arguments... I kind of thought you were doing that as well and mostly wanted to see what the arguments against the above points were going to be.
Induced pluripotent stem cells do currently look like they're better than embryonic stem cells and adult stem cells for theraputic uses. But for more basic biology, no. If you want to study how cells turn from stem cells into their mature fates, you don't want to study these things, because they're unnatural. You want to study the real things, embryonic stem cells.
A good example are the induced pluripotent stem cells themselves. You know how Yamanaka and James Thompson (they both were publishing at about the same time) discovered induced pluripotent stem cells? By studying embryonic stem cells. They identified the factors needed for iPSC from ESC, they validated the pluripotency of iPSC by comparing them to ESC.
Corporations set up separate legal entities all the time to mitigate liability.
If we were talking about a paper issue that would be great, assuming researchers could afford the cadre of lawyers that corporations use (which they can't). But we're actually talking about physical labs, not imaginary companies.
What exactly was stopping them from using the existing stem cell lines? I don't believe I've ever received a satisfactory answer for this other then "They just couldn't!"
Some labs may have been heavily invested in a line of stem cells created after that date. For example, switching to another cell line is incredibly wastefull if you've already spent millions on microarray analysis of a new stem cell line that happened to have been made after the magic date.
Some necessary stem cell lines have not yet been created. If you want to study an inherited disease, say one that causes brains to be malformed, you might want to study how neurons differentiate. Generating a stem cell line from an embryo that would have that disorder would be more convinient, not to mention more humane, than having carriers of the disease continually reproduce and harvesting the fetuses after they've started growing brains.
There's no guarantee that the existing stem cell lines are good for all things that ESC could be used for.
And it's an artificial distinction that pointlessly limits research in a developing field. If you have an ethical problem with ESC, using existing lines is still problematic. If not, there's no reason for the ban.
Not an exhaustive list, and I think if you searched there are plenty of people who have better answered questions like yours.
With induced pluripotent stem cells, they wouldn't need to look very far. Or take immunosupressants either. And then we can save hESC for research purposes.
Far better research is being done with adult stem cells and there are actual cures and treatments in testing or completed.
You wonder then why so many researchers at premier institutions are trying to study ESC when such credible sources as stemcellresearchfacts.com could tell them they're dead ends. I mean, it has FACTS right in the title!
I bet they the research will never lead anywhere so they can keep the gravy-train of state grants coming.
Sarcasm aside, no, the above statment is as wrong as you'd expect from such a biased source. hESCs are being used as research models in labs currently. If you want to study cell differentiation for example, you need to be studying some type of ESC. Studying embryonic cells maturing into, say, neurons will tell you something about how that happens naturally.
If you only care about applied research and think basic science research is worthless, you're in the wrong corner of the internet, and you should also keep in mind that embryonic stem cell research has already given us induced pluripotent stem cells, which are more promising for treatments than adult stem cells OR embryonic stem cells.
There was no ban on embryonic stem cell research. There was a ban on the federal government using tax dollars to fund embryonic stem cell research.
Sounds nice when you put it like that, but in practice it's extremely difficult to make sure you're not spending federal grants on your HESC research projects. And, you know, there's just not enough red tape and bureaucracy with medical research. The ban on federal funds didn't ban research, sure, but it was definitely an obstacle designed to hinder the research as much as possible.
http://today.ucsf.edu/stories/ucsfs-kriegstein-says-bush-veto-disappointing-but-field-advancing/
The fear, rational or not, that seems prevalent in those with a 'conservative' mindset is not that the embryos are going to waste, but that if the discarded embryos are going to be used for stem cells it may encourage doctors to create many more than they need
I was of the understanding that the number of zygotes fertilized was limited by how many eggs they could collect from the donors. I thought (though I am not familiar with the process) that they give the egg donor drugs to produce more mature eggs at one time, then surgically collect the eggs and mix them with sperm, fertilizing in vitro. The sperm cells would obviously be in excess as always, so that all the competent eggs they scraped off of the ovaries will get fertilized.
So if a woman's ovaries produce, say, a hundred eggs when treated with the drugs, and half of them are capable of being fertilized, then you'd get 50 embryos. I'm assuming they don't dump all of them into the recipient's uterus, they'd maybe inject 10 to maximize the chances that one would implant. The remaining 40 are availiable for ESC.
In other words, I don't see where the doctors are modulating the number of embryos concieved right now, or any area the doctors could create more to meet any increased demand. The drugs used to stimulate egg production above normal rates are not without side effects and I've heard there's a risk of cancer with them, they're not going to give the women more, and I'm not sure that would do anything. It's not very cost effective to fertilize eggs one at a time, they're not doing that now. They fertilize all the eggs they can already, I would think.
What are you talking about? China could still invade Alaska, precipitating the whole thing. Especially with Palin stepping down, she was the only thing standing between the commies and the US!
They can't patent it because there's prior artery.
I think I pulled a muscle on that reach...
Actually you are welcome to refuse to give out your SSN for any of those purposes. Of course the person on the other end of the business arrangement is also welcome to refuse to do business with you.....
And the current story proves that even that is pretty useless.
Not news to anyone who knows how SSN assignment works.
Yes it is. Knowing it's theoretically possible to figure it out is one thing. Someone actually demonstrating it can be done with high success rate is another. And it's news that matters because maybe this will force some change on the issue, dispels the illusion that it's a super secret identifying code that only you and X large organization knows. ...and maybe there will be a pony waiting for me at home...
Not offtopic. The blurb article mentions only that it would be magnetically controlled. Maybe that's their entire plan for keeping it from clogging the tubes (blood, not the internet). It very much seems like it could cause aneurysms, clots, strokes, heart attacks, and whatever it was Tony Stark had in the recent Iron Man movie.
I am not a doctor, nor do I play one in comic books.
Yeah, you're right. Raise your hand if you've been killed by someone you offended on the internet...
No one! EXACTLY!!!
If you read the article
Well that's a different style from usual /. posting. So it's technically not trolling, but still, reading the article? I have half a mind to teleport you in front of a robot firing squad.
Funny, that's a typical Japanese attitude too.
From what I've seen, that's MORE japanese than american. Japan is pretty ethnocentric, they're a very homogenous island country. The corporate culture, from what I've heard, is also more "Conform or get put on the shit list," than over here. It's not as outright, but it's more widespread.