Anything to come out of those vats would probably need most of the 12 artifical nucleotides, which aren't found in any apreciable quantity outside of the vat. If any gets out it would quickly starve. Not to mention that depending on the conditions that they are evolving under, there might be more immediate problems for anything escaping. Early life evolved under anerobic conditions, oxygen is pretty toxic to cells. They're probably generating these things under anerobic conditions to mimic what were thought to be early conditions of the earth and to maybe encourage things to start growing. I would expect that any bugs growing in this system would be poisoned by oxygen once outside pretty rapidly, much as bacteria from early earth would. Also temperatures are probably much higher in the vats.
Since the vats are -probably- extremely rich in all 12 artificial nucleotides, devoid of oxygen, and very warm in all places, there wouldn't be any advantage or reason for the bugs to evolve ways of overcoming those conditions. There'd be no reason for them to develop ways of making their own artificial nucleotides since they're provided. In fact that would probably be a detriment, since any way of converting one of the natural 4 would be costly to the cell in terms of energetics and would have no gain, they'd quickly be out-proliferated by their bretheren who don't waste energy on things like that. In other words, once stepping out of the vat, they'd be presented with an extremely harsh environment they're totally unprepared for.
I am of course making some assumptions there. I guess we can't rule it out entirely, but there are millions of unlikely apocalypses you can't completely rule out.
Subject confusion I think. They designed the system to produce evolving artificial bugs, which are the ones doing the evolving. Also they set the system up to evolve (design), but they arent' directing the evolution?
Green goo actually, or maybe grayish-green goo would be more appropriate.
On a more realistic note, those 12 artificial nucleotides they seem to have put in there probably aren't found in the environment make it unlikely anything to come out of it will get very far.
I do of course realize that "probably" is an issue for some people who seem convinced that any possibility, no matter how small, when it comes to biological nightmare scenarios is an absolute certainty (specifically biology ones, they're more rational when it comes to the chances of the hadron collider destroying the earth). Suprised no one has tagged "iamlegend" or "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" yet.
No, the fact is that the iphone is a piece of crap that doesn't do anything special.
Wrong: there's that one app that displays a zippo lighter, and you can open up the zippo and light it, and then if you tilt the phone the flame ACTUALLY MOVES!
Yeah. Put THAT in your pipe and then use that app to smoke it.
No matter what the guy said, it's odd that "fun" would factor into "influential." Two totally seperate things as GP pointed out so well with ET. It's especially ridiculous when you consider the aspect of history: pong isn't on there? The original super mario bros is at 17?
It seems that the people who made this list for guiness were 15 year olds who were drunk off of guiness at the time.
There's plenty wrong with that list. One that struck me: THREE grand theft autos on the list. Another: Lego Star wars, the complete edition. It's nuts.
Okay, well then assuming either they watch it in japan, or get the fansubs and happen to speak japanese, because to a non-japanese speaker that's just going to sound like "blahblahblahblah." Speaking from experience, I do watch fansubs and only started remembering what they said when I started taking japanese.
Another finding: the excuse for not doing your japanese homework "I'll just learn it by watching a lot of anime" is a whole lot more fun but absolutely does not work, at least for some people (sample size = 1).
This is the Japanese version of "brought to you by $SPONSORS" that any anime or Japanese television fan would recognize as they say it after the credits of nearly every show.
Assuming they're watching it in japan. I'm pretty sure when they bring shows over here they don't keep the ads. Which is a shame given that they're much wierder than the ones that we have over here.
Except the image that at least I'm seeing looks like it was taken with a camera phone taped to the side of the lunar lander. Either that or eclipses on the moon look very pixelated.
(I'm guessing they actually have higher quality photos, just thought it was a bit funny)
Its either because some people still think we didn't land on the moon, some people were making fun of people who think we didn't land on the moon, or someone thinks that the images are photoshopped. Or just stills from "The Ring."
Your words about "laws can't contradict physics" when talking about how anti-genetic-discrimination laws are doomed to fail, I imagine people were saying similar things when racial discrimination laws were passed. Do you think we ought to throw those laws out as they'll never work and blacks will always be discriminated against?
The genetic engineering destroys civilization bit, you get off on a nice rant I admit, but how do you know where undeveloped technology will take us? You seem so sure that it will end with complete dehumanization. I'm not sure where you get that certainty. Is it because that's the only outcome you can imagine, or is it because that's the only outcome that can happen?
Re:One gene != one characteristic
on
Designer Babies
·
· Score: 1
Or are you trying to say that because we have only found one purpose for a given gene means that there must only be one purpose?
I'm saying people aren't going to be messing with the vast majority of the 20,000 genes. Loss of genetic diversity is going to be pretty insignificant for that and other reasons I described. Natural selection doesn't have this effect of homogenizing everything for that same reason: even strong pressure on a few superficial traits doesn't make everyone clones.
Re:One gene != one characteristic
on
Designer Babies
·
· Score: 1
Big companies will patent genes to screen for, for purposes of extending lifespan, avoiding certain disease etc, and the exhorbitantly high cost of licensing those patents will mean that noone can ever select for the best of all genes.
Not that the patent system isn't messed up, but it's not as bad as you just described. The only thing you need to pay if you want to sequence a genome is the cost of actually doing it, there are no licensing fees for if you have gene A. I'm not sure whether or not people have patents or copyrights on individual natural genes, I've never heard anything to that effect, the only genes I've heard of being patented are artificial ones IE ones that don't exist in your genome now.
Re:One gene != one characteristic
on
Designer Babies
·
· Score: 1
In a few hundred years, it's forseeable that parents will want children with "proven" sets of genes for an athletic child with long lifespan, high intelligence.
Lets worry about that when that gets a little closer. The chances of a killer virus are increased with airports more than this may.
Re:One gene != one characteristic
on
Designer Babies
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
If people do this a lot and tend to make the same choices, the genetic diversity of the human race will be reduced, leading to greater susceptibility to widespread disease and genetic problems in the generations to come.
They're not choosing on the vast majority of the genes in the human genome. Your hair color, for example, doesn't really confer any selective advantage when it comes to resitance to infectious disease. Diversity, even among those superficial genes, also probably won't be lost. A lot of the genes people want to select for are already rare, if this catches on I'd expect red-headedness to increase dramatically (its at something like 1% right now). And there's going to be some auto-balancing anyway: if everyone wants to have blue-eyed blond-haired children you know what's going to suddenly be a lot more attractive to that generation? Brown eyes and brown hair. And they'll select that in their children.
Sky: still not falling.
Re:This too was foreseen
on
Designer Babies
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Ok, now it's happened. And as a society we lack the moral fiber to even say it is a bad idea. Forget making an actual judgemental moral decision and declaring it "immoral" or "wrong". We can't even agree it is a bad idea and will almost certainly have bad consequences.
I find it odd that you're not only assuming it is wrong and bad, but you're saying questioning it at all is a sign that we're doomed. NOT questioning imposed morality and superstition is what will doom us (see the dark ages and crusades, and in fact most wars for proof.)
I wouldn't take it as a given that their nightmare scenario will be all or nothing. We allowed abortion, we are now apperantly allowing this... I'm missing the links to generic big bad thing. Who says anything bad will come out of it? Besides you and them, that is.
This isn't designer babies anyway. The fundies are still wrong.
Re:What's the big deal?
on
Designer Babies
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Good point, this is in no way -designer- babies, there's no design, just rejection of the ones you don't like.
When we start being able to specify that our kids have wings or eye lasers, THAT's when things get awesome/scary.
What he said was iPS cells have the same risks as embryonic stem cells. The only difference is, in the last 6 months, (I don't remember exactly when) researchers have turned the stem cells green with fluorescent markers.
Previously, the stem cells caused nasty tumors because maybe 2% of the stem cells never differentiated and caused tumors once they entered the body. Now, with the green markers, researchers are able to pick out all the green cells at the end, because the differentiated cells are normal. The end product is 100% differentiated cells, with extremely minimal chance of causing a tumor.
To sum it up, the tumors could be caused by both embryonic stem and iPS cells, but it's the fluorescent markers that actually prevent the tumors now. Hope I helped you out in some way, my first time ever posting on slashdot, long time reader though.
There are ways of sorting fluorescently marked cells (called Fluorescence Assisted Cell Sorting FACS, for once a straightforward name) to where you'll be able to get only the differentiated cells, but it's very low yield and expensive. What they're probably going to do next is try to get differentiated cells to express genes that confer resistance to different drugs, so when you add the drug, the differentiated cells would live and all the others would die. That's much more efficient and is a common strategy for getting only cells which have foreign genes.
I'm familiar with some cell-type specific markers for differentiation, there are genes that turn on in cells once they've stopped dividing and are young neurons for example, but it would be helpful if there were a gene that came on in any differentiated cell, be it neuron, epidermal, liver, ETC. Was he talking about a specific differentiated cell type or was it a universal one?
Slashdot Mirror
A virus that infects single cells which have 8 nucleotides I don't is a virus I laugh at.
Anything to come out of those vats would probably need most of the 12 artifical nucleotides, which aren't found in any apreciable quantity outside of the vat. If any gets out it would quickly starve. Not to mention that depending on the conditions that they are evolving under, there might be more immediate problems for anything escaping. Early life evolved under anerobic conditions, oxygen is pretty toxic to cells. They're probably generating these things under anerobic conditions to mimic what were thought to be early conditions of the earth and to maybe encourage things to start growing. I would expect that any bugs growing in this system would be poisoned by oxygen once outside pretty rapidly, much as bacteria from early earth would. Also temperatures are probably much higher in the vats.
Since the vats are -probably- extremely rich in all 12 artificial nucleotides, devoid of oxygen, and very warm in all places, there wouldn't be any advantage or reason for the bugs to evolve ways of overcoming those conditions. There'd be no reason for them to develop ways of making their own artificial nucleotides since they're provided. In fact that would probably be a detriment, since any way of converting one of the natural 4 would be costly to the cell in terms of energetics and would have no gain, they'd quickly be out-proliferated by their bretheren who don't waste energy on things like that. In other words, once stepping out of the vat, they'd be presented with an extremely harsh environment they're totally unprepared for.
I am of course making some assumptions there. I guess we can't rule it out entirely, but there are millions of unlikely apocalypses you can't completely rule out.
Subject confusion I think. They designed the system to produce evolving artificial bugs, which are the ones doing the evolving. Also they set the system up to evolve (design), but they arent' directing the evolution?
Where are the tax cuts Obama promised for 95% of us?
AEGIS ate the economy, so there's no money left.
Green goo actually, or maybe grayish-green goo would be more appropriate.
On a more realistic note, those 12 artificial nucleotides they seem to have put in there probably aren't found in the environment make it unlikely anything to come out of it will get very far.
I do of course realize that "probably" is an issue for some people who seem convinced that any possibility, no matter how small, when it comes to biological nightmare scenarios is an absolute certainty (specifically biology ones, they're more rational when it comes to the chances of the hadron collider destroying the earth). Suprised no one has tagged "iamlegend" or "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" yet.
No, the fact is that the iphone is a piece of crap that doesn't do anything special.
Wrong: there's that one app that displays a zippo lighter, and you can open up the zippo and light it, and then if you tilt the phone the flame ACTUALLY MOVES!
Yeah. Put THAT in your pipe and then use that app to smoke it.
No matter what the guy said, it's odd that "fun" would factor into "influential." Two totally seperate things as GP pointed out so well with ET. It's especially ridiculous when you consider the aspect of history: pong isn't on there? The original super mario bros is at 17?
It seems that the people who made this list for guiness were 15 year olds who were drunk off of guiness at the time.
There's plenty wrong with that list. One that struck me: THREE grand theft autos on the list. Another: Lego Star wars, the complete edition. It's nuts.
Okay, well then assuming either they watch it in japan, or get the fansubs and happen to speak japanese, because to a non-japanese speaker that's just going to sound like "blahblahblahblah." Speaking from experience, I do watch fansubs and only started remembering what they said when I started taking japanese.
Another finding: the excuse for not doing your japanese homework "I'll just learn it by watching a lot of anime" is a whole lot more fun but absolutely does not work, at least for some people (sample size = 1).
I know what you mean. Earth blocking sun? Happens every night to me.
This is the Japanese version of "brought to you by $SPONSORS" that any anime or Japanese television fan would recognize as they say it after the credits of nearly every show.
Assuming they're watching it in japan. I'm pretty sure when they bring shows over here they don't keep the ads. Which is a shame given that they're much wierder than the ones that we have over here.
... it's the earth.
Except the image that at least I'm seeing looks like it was taken with a camera phone taped to the side of the lunar lander. Either that or eclipses on the moon look very pixelated.
(I'm guessing they actually have higher quality photos, just thought it was a bit funny)
New Godwin rule: all /. discussions inevitably end in the mention of DRM or the RIAA.
Its either because some people still think we didn't land on the moon, some people were making fun of people who think we didn't land on the moon, or someone thinks that the images are photoshopped. Or just stills from "The Ring."
My god... my phone just rang...
This is why those types of idiots have to be resisted at every single step of the way.
Hey now! I like to mess with australians as much as anyone, but calling them all idiots is just going to far!
By that definition they would be forced to censor censorship.
Hopefully that would be accomplished by making everyone in the country watch 2 chicks one cup.
Your words about "laws can't contradict physics" when talking about how anti-genetic-discrimination laws are doomed to fail, I imagine people were saying similar things when racial discrimination laws were passed. Do you think we ought to throw those laws out as they'll never work and blacks will always be discriminated against?
The genetic engineering destroys civilization bit, you get off on a nice rant I admit, but how do you know where undeveloped technology will take us? You seem so sure that it will end with complete dehumanization. I'm not sure where you get that certainty. Is it because that's the only outcome you can imagine, or is it because that's the only outcome that can happen?
Or are you trying to say that because we have only found one purpose for a given gene means that there must only be one purpose?
I'm saying people aren't going to be messing with the vast majority of the 20,000 genes. Loss of genetic diversity is going to be pretty insignificant for that and other reasons I described. Natural selection doesn't have this effect of homogenizing everything for that same reason: even strong pressure on a few superficial traits doesn't make everyone clones.
Big companies will patent genes to screen for, for purposes of extending lifespan, avoiding certain disease etc, and the exhorbitantly high cost of licensing those patents will mean that noone can ever select for the best of all genes.
Not that the patent system isn't messed up, but it's not as bad as you just described. The only thing you need to pay if you want to sequence a genome is the cost of actually doing it, there are no licensing fees for if you have gene A. I'm not sure whether or not people have patents or copyrights on individual natural genes, I've never heard anything to that effect, the only genes I've heard of being patented are artificial ones IE ones that don't exist in your genome now.
In a few hundred years, it's forseeable that parents will want children with "proven" sets of genes for an athletic child with long lifespan, high intelligence.
Lets worry about that when that gets a little closer. The chances of a killer virus are increased with airports more than this may.
If people do this a lot and tend to make the same choices, the genetic diversity of the human race will be reduced, leading to greater susceptibility to widespread disease and genetic problems in the generations to come.
They're not choosing on the vast majority of the genes in the human genome. Your hair color, for example, doesn't really confer any selective advantage when it comes to resitance to infectious disease. Diversity, even among those superficial genes, also probably won't be lost. A lot of the genes people want to select for are already rare, if this catches on I'd expect red-headedness to increase dramatically (its at something like 1% right now). And there's going to be some auto-balancing anyway: if everyone wants to have blue-eyed blond-haired children you know what's going to suddenly be a lot more attractive to that generation? Brown eyes and brown hair. And they'll select that in their children.
Sky: still not falling.
Ok, now it's happened. And as a society we lack the moral fiber to even say it is a bad idea. Forget making an actual judgemental moral decision and declaring it "immoral" or "wrong". We can't even agree it is a bad idea and will almost certainly have bad consequences.
I find it odd that you're not only assuming it is wrong and bad, but you're saying questioning it at all is a sign that we're doomed. NOT questioning imposed morality and superstition is what will doom us (see the dark ages and crusades, and in fact most wars for proof.)
I wouldn't take it as a given that their nightmare scenario will be all or nothing. We allowed abortion, we are now apperantly allowing this... I'm missing the links to generic big bad thing. Who says anything bad will come out of it? Besides you and them, that is.
This isn't designer babies anyway. The fundies are still wrong.
Good point, this is in no way -designer- babies, there's no design, just rejection of the ones you don't like.
When we start being able to specify that our kids have wings or eye lasers, THAT's when things get awesome/scary.
What he said was iPS cells have the same risks as embryonic stem cells. The only difference is, in the last 6 months, (I don't remember exactly when) researchers have turned the stem cells green with fluorescent markers.
Previously, the stem cells caused nasty tumors because maybe 2% of the stem cells never differentiated and caused tumors once they entered the body. Now, with the green markers, researchers are able to pick out all the green cells at the end, because the differentiated cells are normal. The end product is 100% differentiated cells, with extremely minimal chance of causing a tumor.
To sum it up, the tumors could be caused by both embryonic stem and iPS cells, but it's the fluorescent markers that actually prevent the tumors now. Hope I helped you out in some way, my first time ever posting on slashdot, long time reader though.
There are ways of sorting fluorescently marked cells (called Fluorescence Assisted Cell Sorting FACS, for once a straightforward name) to where you'll be able to get only the differentiated cells, but it's very low yield and expensive. What they're probably going to do next is try to get differentiated cells to express genes that confer resistance to different drugs, so when you add the drug, the differentiated cells would live and all the others would die. That's much more efficient and is a common strategy for getting only cells which have foreign genes.
I'm familiar with some cell-type specific markers for differentiation, there are genes that turn on in cells once they've stopped dividing and are young neurons for example, but it would be helpful if there were a gene that came on in any differentiated cell, be it neuron, epidermal, liver, ETC. Was he talking about a specific differentiated cell type or was it a universal one?
Great first post by the way!