That's not quite fair. Not that I like Hasbro.
Gaming companies terminate products continuously. The thing that Hasbro _doesn't_ do is come out with new products, not really. Avalon Hill discontinued, well, not 80%, but a lot of the products they made each year after only a single run. They did another discontinuation cycle when Hasbro bought them and then stopped releasing anything really new. Had Hasbro bought Avalon Hill yet when they reissued Titan? When they discontinued V:tes, I was personally disappointed, but they would probably have done that anyway.
Finally, I think that equating simplified with dumbed-down is absolutely backwards. Yes, younger children can play the new D but it's also a cleaner, better game (I'd still rather play messy shadowrun, but nonetheless.) The subsequent editions of Magic are also better; I _like_ the previous rules because of nostalgia, I remember how much fun Magic was before I got entirely tired of it, but the rules don't need to be complicated if the play isn't.
Incidentally, I need to plug Shadowfist, which the best TCG ever, no contest.
There is not, at present, any reason to believe that telomerase is active in most cancer cells. Efforts to assay for it's activity have as yet come out negative or inconclusive. There are definitely cancers without active telomerase.
For those slashdotters without a background in genetics, let me explain - most linear DNA chromosomes (like in people) have a bunch of gibberish at each end; this is because, when you duplicate something in the way linear DNA is duplicated, you lose a little off of each end. Telomeres (of which there are thousands, as I recall, on the end of each chromosome) are duplicated by a different mechanism. So, when a cell copies it's DNA, a telomere is lost, and telomerase (in those cells in which it is active) comes in and tags on a replacement telomere. Unlike other parts of the chromosome, this telomere is not a copy of what is on the opposite strand; it is copied from a special template that the telomerase enzyme carries with it. In cells without active telomerase, if and when they divide (which most cells in your body are not supposed to do) the telomeres are lost - if the telomeres ran out you'd start losing DNA on the chromosome itself. However, there are so many telomeres that a tumor, for example, would have to grow to the size of a small city before this happened, so it's not an issue. However, for complicated reasons which, I'm afraid, you computer types really wouldn't understand, it may matter how MANY telomeres you have on each end of a chromosome - no one's exactly sure why, but turning on telomerase in mice definitely does SOMETHING, and it IS NOT preventing the mice from "running out" of telomeres.
However, it is commonly agreed that a shortage of telomeres, even though these clones may suffer from it, is not what is causing these immune deficiencies or the mental retardation in the cloned mice.
On a side note, the NYtimes article talked down too much. "Reprogram the DNA" my ass. That's simplified to the point of being BS.
I agree with other posters that people with no particular background in genetics can, and indeed should, comment on this highly important topic. Cloning, I think, is perfectly ethical in and of itself, but there are a number of ethical issues, including in particular the health of the young women used as egg donors, and of the treatment of clones who may be grown as organ farms, that arise about and around cloning and the opinions of people with no background in genetics are as valid as the opinions of the previous poster and myself.
Dr. Preatorious is a character from Frankenstein. I'm still a graduate student. Wouldn't want to mis-characterise.
1) Previous poster didn't actually answer the question. My estimate (as someone in the field) is that if the popular will was there we could reliably clone someone, making from one to five viable, healthy fetuses out of about 200 individual attempts, within a few years. Yes, this would involve throwing away several dozen defective fetuses, and some of these "healthy, viable" fetuses would turn out to have defects that we hadn't caught. It would of course be extremely expensive. That is to say, while cold fusion is a theoretically-maybe-possible pipe dream (like quantum computing) human cloning is definitely possible, but will never be "reliable" on an individual trial basis, will always be massively expensive (unless and until we learn to culture human germ line cells,) will always produce at LEAST a dozen times as many "waste fetuses" as viable ones, and will always produce more retards and suchnot than conventional reproduction - if you want to make a reliably healthy clone of someone you're going to have to grow spares.
3) Eventually, we will learn to clone people without higher nervous systems, and (relatively) ethical people will get organs cloned like in all the near-future sci fi. A public outcry in the west will not prevent rich people from getting their cloned organs, sooner or later. I tell you, and you will believe me, that this will happen. The degree to which clones will be grown for organs and even-more horrifyingly slaughtered, I'm not sure of, but we'll see it at least attempted within our lifetimes. The ability to grown clonal organs (which will always require growing a whole bunch of extra body)
Cloning will also arise as a (hugely expensive) fertility alternative for the genetically chauvenistic. Because of the health effects on the young woman who are forced to repeatedly ovulate so that their eggs can be harvested, this is a BAD THING. If that angle can ever be eliminated by advances in biotechnology, then it'll become a harmless way for vain rich people to waste huge amounts of money.
Oh, nothing could be further from the truth, my friend. If you're growing up a body for organs anyway, the retardation is a BONUS. In general, only one cellular system fails - occasionally, you get a mouse with a multiplicity of defects, but they're generally inviable anyway. So, if you tried to make a hundred clones of somebody (which is what you'd have to do,) you'd expect about 90 failures (assuming some refinements on present technology)and a smattering of gimps of various sorts - flippers and suchnot, but mostly retards and immune suppressed individuals. I wouldn't want a liver from the immune suppressed kid, but his retarded twin brother's liver is probably fine.
Takes away some of the ethical qualms if they're subhuman, don't you know.
I have a chinese friend of mine with a lab whose willing to start growing flipper babies for use as organ donors by next week-end. Only problem is - we feel bad about wasting the extra meat. Then we thought - hey, tastes just like pork. We could slip it into hotdog meat, or, sell our own special gourmet line of minced flipper baby pie.
"This is why evil will always triumph over good. Because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet
For some reason the article calls it the Children's Internet Protection Act. Maybe they thought changing the "online" in the ODA to "internet," would help make it more constitutional, since the internet is still somehow federally mandated (that was a joke.)
All your base are censored.
I quote:
>To
> eat oil, say, thus providing a good >way of getting rid of oil slicks? Or to degrade >plastics previously considered
> nonbiodegradable?
Firstly, the way genetic engineering works, you copy proteins, even whole chemical pathways, from existing organisms. For example, you might (conceivably) create photosynthetic bacteria that live in smokestacks (refering to a previous article.) You'd do this by cloning the genes for photosynthesis into something that lives in undersea vents - there are a great many more technical hurdles than that, but it's conceivable.
Now, there is no (known) naturally occuring organism that *efficiently* consumes petrochemicals. That's why there are big deposits of them underground. In order to make a bacteria that efficiently eats petrochemicals, you'd need to generate such a pathway yourself, from scratch. Unless someone comes up with something really clever, which is of course possible, it's not going to happen. The combinatorics of solving this sort of problem by brute force (i.e. making a new protein that chews up (CH3)n at warp speed and generates ATP to boot) are several orders of magnitude greater than the number of fundamental particles in the known universe.
Finally, as other people pointed out, bacteria that eat plastic in an oxygenated environment might not be the best things to have around, eh? It'd depend on exactly how they worked, you could arrange so that they ate plastic relatively slowly, and so that you were 99.9% sure that they wouldn't evolve another factor of 100 in consumption speed once you let them loose, but it'd be another layer of difficulty.
Depleted uranium is far more dangerous as a chemical contaminant than for it's radioactivity. Thus, they could use these bugs (or a genetically modified variant) just to convert the DU rounds we dropped all over the balkans into a harmless salt. Also, chemical reactivity is what makes storage of nuclear waste dangerous - it leaks out of / dissolves barrels, catches fire, and so forth, not because of the rads it puts off, but because it's chemically nasty.
(incidentally, I spelled the name wrong. How do I change it?)
Music is more than data; but it's not more more-than-data than sofware, cinema or literature. All of which benefit from being as widely distributed as possible; culture flourishes as culture producers (which is just a sugared term for "content provider," but nevertheless) gain readier access to one another's work. I won't bother to repeat the rosy technofantasies of the anarchists who infest this server like so many sarcastic body pierced rats, but there's a possibility of real enrichment of the human condition with this technology, and the "shortsighted" people are the people trying to get in the way of that.
The real problem is: how can a musician, or anyone else producing a cultural product, once the distribution of culture is itself free, make a dime? Musicians like Metallica shouldn't have a problem. Aside from live touring, there are all sorts of things they can do - merchandising, for example. Really famous musicians, for that matter anyone selling about half a million records like the relatively popular underground bands which demographics indicate my fellow slashdotters like, can make a perfectly respectable living for themselves and their lawyers, without the revenue from actual album sales. Another poster was reiterating the argument everyone always makes about that guy who wrote Catcher in the Rye... he was a real recluce... anyway, he wouldn't want to go on speaking tours. Someone that popular could make a fortune just by sending a request that money be sent to him at a P.O.Box.
The problem, and it is a problem, is that the new system of music distribution is growing up organically, and it isn't doing what it should be doing, which is to provide a system of economic support (with dignity) for those really marginalised musicians who the RIAA isn't even interested in.
In the hayday european classical music, musicians and composers made a living through what amounted to various forms of patronage (which is also what album sales represent, incidentally.) Now, I don't believe that culture should be dicatated by rich people, which is the case under the CURRENT system, but I digress, patronage is the real promise of online music distribution. We need to build a logistical system so that an artist, with perhaps only 5,000 patrons/viewers/listerners/fans scattered around the world, can make a living from their work.
Aside from the solution that seems obvious to me (it involves the government paying people after counting hits...) how do people think you would do this, from a nuts and bolts perspective? Keep in mind that fraud is still a real problem, and you have to take steps to protect people's reputations (or maybe you don't?) Much more interesting question than "should music distribution go on-line" which is, of course, a moot point.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not quite fair. Not that I like Hasbro. Gaming companies terminate products continuously. The thing that Hasbro _doesn't_ do is come out with new products, not really. Avalon Hill discontinued, well, not 80%, but a lot of the products they made each year after only a single run. They did another discontinuation cycle when Hasbro bought them and then stopped releasing anything really new. Had Hasbro bought Avalon Hill yet when they reissued Titan? When they discontinued V:tes, I was personally disappointed, but they would probably have done that anyway. Finally, I think that equating simplified with dumbed-down is absolutely backwards. Yes, younger children can play the new D but it's also a cleaner, better game (I'd still rather play messy shadowrun, but nonetheless.) The subsequent editions of Magic are also better; I _like_ the previous rules because of nostalgia, I remember how much fun Magic was before I got entirely tired of it, but the rules don't need to be complicated if the play isn't. Incidentally, I need to plug Shadowfist, which the best TCG ever, no contest.
There is not, at present, any reason to believe that telomerase is active in most cancer cells. Efforts to assay for it's activity have as yet come out negative or inconclusive. There are definitely cancers without active telomerase.
For those slashdotters without a background in genetics, let me explain - most linear DNA chromosomes (like in people) have a bunch of gibberish at each end; this is because, when you duplicate something in the way linear DNA is duplicated, you lose a little off of each end. Telomeres (of which there are thousands, as I recall, on the end of each chromosome) are duplicated by a different mechanism. So, when a cell copies it's DNA, a telomere is lost, and telomerase (in those cells in which it is active) comes in and tags on a replacement telomere. Unlike other parts of the chromosome, this telomere is not a copy of what is on the opposite strand; it is copied from a special template that the telomerase enzyme carries with it. In cells without active telomerase, if and when they divide (which most cells in your body are not supposed to do) the telomeres are lost - if the telomeres ran out you'd start losing DNA on the chromosome itself. However, there are so many telomeres that a tumor, for example, would have to grow to the size of a small city before this happened, so it's not an issue. However, for complicated reasons which, I'm afraid, you computer types really wouldn't understand, it may matter how MANY telomeres you have on each end of a chromosome - no one's exactly sure why, but turning on telomerase in mice definitely does SOMETHING, and it IS NOT preventing the mice from "running out" of telomeres.
However, it is commonly agreed that a shortage of telomeres, even though these clones may suffer from it, is not what is causing these immune deficiencies or the mental retardation in the cloned mice.
On a side note, the NYtimes article talked down too much. "Reprogram the DNA" my ass. That's simplified to the point of being BS.
I agree with other posters that people with no particular background in genetics can, and indeed should, comment on this highly important topic. Cloning, I think, is perfectly ethical in and of itself, but there are a number of ethical issues, including in particular the health of the young women used as egg donors, and of the treatment of clones who may be grown as organ farms, that arise about and around cloning and the opinions of people with no background in genetics are as valid as the opinions of the previous poster and myself.
Dr. Preatorious is a character from Frankenstein. I'm still a graduate student. Wouldn't want to mis-characterise.
1) Previous poster didn't actually answer the question. My estimate (as someone in the field) is that if the popular will was there we could reliably clone someone, making from one to five viable, healthy fetuses out of about 200 individual attempts, within a few years. Yes, this would involve throwing away several dozen defective fetuses, and some of these "healthy, viable" fetuses would turn out to have defects that we hadn't caught. It would of course be extremely expensive. That is to say, while cold fusion is a theoretically-maybe-possible pipe dream (like quantum computing) human cloning is definitely possible, but will never be "reliable" on an individual trial basis, will always be massively expensive (unless and until we learn to culture human germ line cells,) will always produce at LEAST a dozen times as many "waste fetuses" as viable ones, and will always produce more retards and suchnot than conventional reproduction - if you want to make a reliably healthy clone of someone you're going to have to grow spares.
3) Eventually, we will learn to clone people without higher nervous systems, and (relatively) ethical people will get organs cloned like in all the near-future sci fi. A public outcry in the west will not prevent rich people from getting their cloned organs, sooner or later. I tell you, and you will believe me, that this will happen. The degree to which clones will be grown for organs and even-more horrifyingly slaughtered, I'm not sure of, but we'll see it at least attempted within our lifetimes. The ability to grown clonal organs (which will always require growing a whole bunch of extra body)
Cloning will also arise as a (hugely expensive) fertility alternative for the genetically chauvenistic. Because of the health effects on the young woman who are forced to repeatedly ovulate so that their eggs can be harvested, this is a BAD THING. If that angle can ever be eliminated by advances in biotechnology, then it'll become a harmless way for vain rich people to waste huge amounts of money.
Hope that's clear.
Oh, nothing could be further from the truth, my friend. If you're growing up a body for organs anyway, the retardation is a BONUS. In general, only one cellular system fails - occasionally, you get a mouse with a multiplicity of defects, but they're generally inviable anyway. So, if you tried to make a hundred clones of somebody (which is what you'd have to do,) you'd expect about 90 failures (assuming some refinements on present technology)and a smattering of gimps of various sorts - flippers and suchnot, but mostly retards and immune suppressed individuals. I wouldn't want a liver from the immune suppressed kid, but his retarded twin brother's liver is probably fine.
Takes away some of the ethical qualms if they're subhuman, don't you know.
I have a chinese friend of mine with a lab whose willing to start growing flipper babies for use as organ donors by next week-end. Only problem is - we feel bad about wasting the extra meat. Then we thought - hey, tastes just like pork. We could slip it into hotdog meat, or, sell our own special gourmet line of minced flipper baby pie.
"This is why evil will always triumph over good. Because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet
For some reason the article calls it the Children's Internet Protection Act. Maybe they thought changing the "online" in the ODA to "internet," would help make it more constitutional, since the internet is still somehow federally mandated (that was a joke.) All your base are censored.
I quote:
>To
> eat oil, say, thus providing a good >way of getting rid of oil slicks? Or to degrade >plastics previously considered
> nonbiodegradable?
Firstly, the way genetic engineering works, you copy proteins, even whole chemical pathways, from existing organisms. For example, you might (conceivably) create photosynthetic bacteria that live in smokestacks (refering to a previous article.) You'd do this by cloning the genes for photosynthesis into something that lives in undersea vents - there are a great many more technical hurdles than that, but it's conceivable.
Now, there is no (known) naturally occuring organism that *efficiently* consumes petrochemicals. That's why there are big deposits of them underground. In order to make a bacteria that efficiently eats petrochemicals, you'd need to generate such a pathway yourself, from scratch. Unless someone comes up with something really clever, which is of course possible, it's not going to happen. The combinatorics of solving this sort of problem by brute force (i.e. making a new protein that chews up (CH3)n at warp speed and generates ATP to boot) are several orders of magnitude greater than the number of fundamental particles in the known universe.
Finally, as other people pointed out, bacteria that eat plastic in an oxygenated environment might not be the best things to have around, eh? It'd depend on exactly how they worked, you could arrange so that they ate plastic relatively slowly, and so that you were 99.9% sure that they wouldn't evolve another factor of 100 in consumption speed once you let them loose, but it'd be another layer of difficulty.
Sam
Depleted uranium is far more dangerous as a chemical contaminant than for it's radioactivity. Thus, they could use these bugs (or a genetically modified variant) just to convert the DU rounds we dropped all over the balkans into a harmless salt. Also, chemical reactivity is what makes storage of nuclear waste dangerous - it leaks out of / dissolves barrels, catches fire, and so forth, not because of the rads it puts off, but because it's chemically nasty.
(incidentally, I spelled the name wrong. How do I change it?)
Music is more than data; but it's not more more-than-data than sofware, cinema or literature. All of which benefit from being as widely distributed as possible; culture flourishes as culture producers (which is just a sugared term for "content provider," but nevertheless) gain readier access to one another's work. I won't bother to repeat the rosy technofantasies of the anarchists who infest this server like so many sarcastic body pierced rats, but there's a possibility of real enrichment of the human condition with this technology, and the "shortsighted" people are the people trying to get in the way of that.
The real problem is: how can a musician, or anyone else producing a cultural product, once the distribution of culture is itself free, make a dime? Musicians like Metallica shouldn't have a problem. Aside from live touring, there are all sorts of things they can do - merchandising, for example. Really famous musicians, for that matter anyone selling about half a million records like the relatively popular underground bands which demographics indicate my fellow slashdotters like, can make a perfectly respectable living for themselves and their lawyers, without the revenue from actual album sales. Another poster was reiterating the argument everyone always makes about that guy who wrote Catcher in the Rye... he was a real recluce... anyway, he wouldn't want to go on speaking tours. Someone that popular could make a fortune just by sending a request that money be sent to him at a P.O.Box.
The problem, and it is a problem, is that the new system of music distribution is growing up organically, and it isn't doing what it should be doing, which is to provide a system of economic support (with dignity) for those really marginalised musicians who the RIAA isn't even interested in.
In the hayday european classical music, musicians and composers made a living through what amounted to various forms of patronage (which is also what album sales represent, incidentally.) Now, I don't believe that culture should be dicatated by rich people, which is the case under the CURRENT system, but I digress, patronage is the real promise of online music distribution. We need to build a logistical system so that an artist, with perhaps only 5,000 patrons/viewers/listerners/fans scattered around the world, can make a living from their work.
Aside from the solution that seems obvious to me (it involves the government paying people after counting hits...) how do people think you would do this, from a nuts and bolts perspective? Keep in mind that fraud is still a real problem, and you have to take steps to protect people's reputations (or maybe you don't?) Much more interesting question than "should music distribution go on-line" which is, of course, a moot point.
shandelm@chemistry.ucsc.edu