You guys are completely missing the point.... it's neither disgusting, nor disturbing. It is a viable and exciting research path that could someday lead to cures for many chronic diseases. To quote the article:
"Most important, researchers said, the paper stops short of proving beyond a doubt that the stem cells retrieved from the hybrid embryos are truly capable of growing for long periods of time in lab dishes, and that they can turn into every known kind of cell."
To give an example or where this kind of research could be very useful, some of the big issues with the Edmonton Protocol to treat Type I diabetes (http://www.joslin.harvard.edu/news/islet_transpla nt_july.shtml) are the requirement to use immuno-suppresive drugs to prevent rejection of the transplanted cells. Stem-cell research, and now this kind of research could go a long way towards dealing with this.
So I have a hard time listening to the people who have a knee-jerk reaction that this kind of research is "disgusting" or "disturbing". The potential difference it could make in the lives of many millions of people is astounding.
Ever read Stanislaw Lem's "The Cyberiad"? One of my favorite stories in that collection concerns the creation of an electronic bard. My favorite excerpt:
Klapaucius thought, and thought some more. Finally he nodded and said:
"Very well. Let's have a love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the cybernetic spirit."
"Love and tensor algebra? Have you taken leave of your senses?" Trurl began, but stopped, for his electronic bard was already declaiming:
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane, Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn, Their indices bedecked from one to n, Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
Come, every frustum longs to be a cone, And every vector dreams of matrices. Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze: It whispers of a more ergodic zone.
In Riemann, Hilbert, or in Banach space Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways. Our asymptotes no longer out of phase, We shall encounter, counting, face to face.
I'll grant thee random access to my heart, Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love; And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove, And in our bound partition never part.
For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel, Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler, Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers, Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?
Cancel me not -- for what then shall remain? Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes, A root or two, a torus and a node: The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine! The product of our scalars is defined! Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind Cuts capers like a happy haversine.
I see the eigenvalue in thine eye, I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh. Bernoulli would have been content to die, Had he but known such a^2 cos 2 phi
Open Market pioneered a micro-payements system in their ecommerce suite Transact around 1997. Transact was targeted at Commerce Service Providers (CSPs).... the model was essentially that a large company (remember AT&T Securebuy and Time-Warner's Pathfinder?) would run the transaction processing engine for smaller distributed merchants or a large publishing house. The end-user would set up a micro-payments account with the CSP and authorize a set amount from a credit card.
Once the authorization was done, the user could go and purchase items for as little as a penny and have it automatically and transparently deducted from the micropayment account. When they ran out of money, they'd just need to add more funds to the account.
The problem was that the CSP model never took off, Open Market did not remain a viable company focusing on content management instead of their real strength - ecommerce, and the whole thing died out.
One of Sun's core value propositions has always been binary compatibility from the low end servers, all the way up to the Sun Fire 15K. One way that they've been able to maintain that is because they own the Sparc technology that powers all of the Sun manufactured hardware.... until the recent Linux servers, that is.
Sun has often been criticized for devoting too much $$$ to processor R&D when off-the-shelf CPUs from Intel and Motorola were available.... but they have always seemed to feel the the complete control over the hardware environment was critical to their compatibility story, and worth the extra R&D.
Also interesting to note that Sun was founded on high-end workstations, not servers.... which makes it even more tragic that their default desktop is so bad. Personally, I try to avoid anything but the command line on Suns, but that's just the SysAdmin in me talking.
Slashdot Mirror
Just wait 'til next year!
You guys are completely missing the point.... it's neither disgusting, nor disturbing. It is a viable and exciting research path that could someday lead to cures for many chronic diseases. To quote the article:
a nt_july.shtml) are the requirement to use immuno-suppresive drugs to prevent rejection of the transplanted cells. Stem-cell research, and now this kind of research could go a long way towards dealing with this.
"Most important, researchers said, the paper stops short of proving beyond a doubt that the stem cells retrieved from the hybrid embryos are truly capable of growing for long periods of time in lab dishes, and that they can turn into every known kind of cell."
To give an example or where this kind of research could be very useful, some of the big issues with the Edmonton Protocol to treat Type I diabetes (http://www.joslin.harvard.edu/news/islet_transpl
So I have a hard time listening to the people who have a knee-jerk reaction that this kind of research is "disgusting" or "disturbing". The potential difference it could make in the lives of many millions of people is astounding.
Ever read Stanislaw Lem's "The Cyberiad"? One of my favorite stories in that collection concerns the creation of an electronic bard. My favorite excerpt:
Klapaucius thought, and thought some more. Finally he nodded and said:
"Very well. Let's have a love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the cybernetic spirit."
"Love and tensor algebra? Have you taken leave of your senses?" Trurl began, but stopped, for his electronic bard was already declaiming:
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n,
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
Come, every frustum longs to be a cone,
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.
In Riemann, Hilbert, or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.
I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.
For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?
Cancel me not -- for what then shall remain?
Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
The product of our scalars is defined!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
Cuts capers like a happy haversine.
I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a^2 cos 2 phi
Open Market pioneered a micro-payements system in their ecommerce suite Transact around 1997. Transact was targeted at Commerce Service Providers (CSPs).... the model was essentially that a large company (remember AT&T Securebuy and Time-Warner's Pathfinder?) would run the transaction processing engine for smaller distributed merchants or a large publishing house. The end-user would set up a micro-payments account with the CSP and authorize a set amount from a credit card.
Once the authorization was done, the user could go and purchase items for as little as a penny and have it automatically and transparently deducted from the micropayment account. When they ran out of money, they'd just need to add more funds to the account.
The problem was that the CSP model never took off, Open Market did not remain a viable company focusing on content management instead of their real strength - ecommerce, and the whole thing died out.
Sad when good technology fails to succeed.
One of Sun's core value propositions has always been binary compatibility from the low end servers, all the way up to the Sun Fire 15K. One way that they've been able to maintain that is because they own the Sparc technology that powers all of the Sun manufactured hardware.... until the recent Linux servers, that is.
Sun has often been criticized for devoting too much $$$ to processor R&D when off-the-shelf CPUs from Intel and Motorola were available.... but they have always seemed to feel the the complete control over the hardware environment was critical to their compatibility story, and worth the extra R&D.
Also interesting to note that Sun was founded on high-end workstations, not servers.... which makes it even more tragic that their default desktop is so bad. Personally, I try to avoid anything but the command line on Suns, but that's just the SysAdmin in me talking.
It's also available at ThinkGeek.