Re:I am sure I am not the only one bothered by thi
on
Human-Mouse Hybrids?
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· Score: 1
I think I see what you're worried about. When people talk about hybrids, they imagine a 50/50 mix. And yes, a half mouse, half human creatue probably wouldn't survive, would be of questionable scientific value, and it's creation would be ethically questionable, to say the least!
However, that's not what they're talking about here. Or rather, that's not what the scientists are doing. The reporter doesn't have a clue what he's talking about, and garbled most of his facts. The technique described in the article will introduce a small amount of genetic material into the mouse. Some of the mouse's cells would then be able to produce the proteins coded for by those genes. You could, for example, have the mouse produce specific antibodies and see if that allowed it to fight off a disease. You would NOT be able to produce mice with human brains, or able to produce human sperm, or able to walk on their back legs, or any nonsense like that.
Actually, that was the reporter paraphrasing what the Doctor said. Given the mistakes that were made in the rest of the article I would have to assume that the reporter garbled this as well. There is simply no way a mouse can produce human sperm or egg cells. The mouse's immune system would recognize the human cells as foreign and attack them.
I do understand and, to a certain degree, share your concerns. This is a whole new realm of investigation, and scientific enthusiasm must be tempered by ethical considerations. But for those considerations to be relevant, they must be based on facts. The reporter had most of his facts wrong, and the Bishop's grasp of what the scientists were doing was even worse. The techniques the scientists are using are on fairly firm ethical ground, it's just the very poor reporting job in the article that makes them sound scary.
Don't be so afraid, the reporter got almost all his facts wrong. There will be 0 (zero) human cells in the chimera. That's not the way this procedure works. The genetic material is put in the blastocyst, and is then absorbed by some of the cells there. Those cells can then (in theory) produce the proteins that the absorbed genes code for. So the mouse's brain might have some human protiens in it, but it would still be a mouses's brain.
Also, the Bishop's comment about a few human cells per organ being acceptable: not the way it works. As I said, there will be NO human cells, and the modified cells will come in patches. As a modified cell in the blastocyte divides, all it's progeny will have the modifications, so you'll end up with an area in the adult organism that has the modifications. Is it really too much to ask that the people who are trying to make these ethical decisions put in the effort to actually learn what they're talking about before passing judgment?
Unfortunately, no one is talking about making hybrids. In cloning, all the DNA comes from one, in this case dead, "parent". The modern elephant simply provides the womb, and has nothing genetically to do with the offspring.
Ontogeny depends on interactions between mother and child in the womb. There's a complex interaction of hormones, genetic signals, etc that takes place during fetal development, and since mammoths are extinct we can only guess at what they might be for that species. They may be similar enough to a modern elephants that it could work, but I'd hardly assume it.
I can't tell if you're a fool or an idiot. The Catholic church didn't persecute Galileo because he didn't follow good scientific practices! Where did you possibly get that idea? Church doctrine is based on faith, and a belief in the infallibility of the Pope. The concepts of proof and truth are completely irrelevant as far as they're concerned. It was Galileo's contention that you could determine truth through observation that got him persecuted. Galileo's methods might not have been as rigorous as we would expect today, but that's because the scientfic method, as we now know it, was still in development.
Calling Moore's law a law is a misnomer. There's no science or math behind it. Moore just made some simple observations, drew a line on a graph, and said "Hey, look at that, doubles every 18 months." There's no fundamental reason for chip development to go at that rate, it's just a trend that we've happened to follow. It could in fact be a self fullfilling prophecy. People expect chips to develop at that rate, so that's what marketing and development shoot for.
From Article I of the International space treaty, ratified in 1967.
Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, shall be free for exploration and use by all States without discrimination of any kind, on a basis of equality and in accordance with international law, and there shall be free access to all areas of celestial bodies.
If bars of pure gold were neatly stacked anywhere you like on the moon, we couldn't go there and bring them back and show a profit. I've never seen a study done on the economics of asteroid mining, but there's a couple of things to remember. They're further out, which means lots more fuel, and they have negligable gravity, which makes working them harder. Plus, one final consideration: if by capture you mean strap a booster to it and move it into earth orbit, remember that the brain trust at NASA recently crashed a probe into Mars because they didn't convert their units correctly. Do you really want someone, anyone, trying to manouver an asteroid into Earth orbit? So basically, until we get huge advances in lift technology, there's no way that any sort of space mining will be economical.
But then again, it's wild ass speculation and might be entirely false
Not entirely. I do know for a fact that nails were almost never used back then due to expense. Further, you'ld want to assemble and disassemble your catapult on the field, which is much easier to do if you've used peg construction. The reason I said I was guessing is that I don't have an actual midevil catapult in my pocket to check for nails. So before you go accusing people of ex-recto speculation perhaps you should make sure you know something about the topic.
Re:Modern Tech
on
Fling-A-Keg
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· Score: 2, Informative
I'm guessing they didn't use any nails way back when. Far too labor intensive and expensive to make by hand. Instead they'd use peg and hole construction, which is actually stronger than using nails. And if you split the wood yourself, it will split along the grain, which means the resulting piece of wood will be stronger than if you cut it at a mill. If anything I would imagine that the modern versions are weaker than their historical counterparts.
You can't take away someones right to drive without some sort of legal proceeding. At the very least, you need a cop to have 'justifiable cause', or something like that. After all, there may be a perfectly legitimate reason why the car reaks of booze, like you're rushing your overly drunk friend to the hospital to get his stomach pumped. You need a human in the equation somewhere to make the actual judgment call about whether the driver should actually be driving.
Feeling cynical this morning? Insurance companies would love this gizmo. After all, they make money when you don't get in an accident. If your car never started they'd be in seventh heaven. And as for the cops, do they actually make any money when they pull people over? Whenver I've gotten a ticket, I've had to make the check out to the town, not the police department.
The primary objective of war is to impose your will on another state. If you can do that with minimal casualties and minimal damage, that's virtualy always to your advantage.
What I was trying to say is that while we can look at something on a microscopic scale and actually count the atoms, you would then need to actually count 6.02e26 atoms. The only practical way of figuring out how many atoms something sizeable has is to use some macroscopic method.
Technically true, but the difference over a distance of, say, a meter or so is so small as to be negligable. As long as the balance fits in one room it's reasonable to say that the force of gravity is the same anywhere on the scale.
If they were trying to accurately measure weight, then the variations in Earth's gravity would be a problem. However, a mass balance will always work, regardless of local gravity. Think of a see-saw. If it starts balanced, and then you pull down twice as hard on either end, it stays balanced.
As for why we don't use 6.0221e26 (I think that's right) carbon atoms as the standard kilogram, the only way we have on the macroscopic scale of determining how many atoms are in something is to weigh it. You'ld have to use the kilogram to define the kilogram.
The second is the duration 0f 9 192 631 770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the Caesium atom.
While a lunar colony would be cool, there's no way it will be financially feasible any time in the remotely near future. Even if there is water and oxygen trapped in the rocks somewhere, it would take tons of equipment to extract and process it. And while this is going on the colonists would need full life support. That includes food, air, water, and shelter. It currently costs about $10,000 a pound just to get something into orbit. I'm not sure how much it would cost to get something to the moon, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was 10 times that much. We're easily talking in the trillions of dollars here. And for what benefits? Surely none that would convince the tax payers who are fitting the bill.
No need to call out MarsFirst. Any trails these things might leave would last as long in a Martian dust storm as your footprints would on an Earth desert.
If you want to know if your computer model is using a fine enough grid (enough particles) there's a simple way to be sure. Run the simulation with 5000 particles, then 10000, then 20000, etc. Keep doing it until the answer doesn't change much, and you can be pretty sure you have enough particles. Of course, I don't know that they did something like this, but some sort of grid resolution study is pretty standard in any advanced computer simulation. I'd be extremely surprised if they couldn't justify using 20000 particles.
I'd like to address your points:
1. While I will grant you that a fetus does not have the rights of a human (at least in America), that doesn't lessen the immorality of a procedure that is as risky as cloning. For every healthy baby born, you'll get dozens of babies with birth defects, and scores of miscarriages. Perfect the techniques with animals first, than try it on humans.
2. You may not want to define a fetus as a person, but once it's born it certainly will be. Regardless of whether the DNA came from one person or two (parents, sex, that whole thing) a baby, once born, is a person, with the same rights as any other person. After all, just because it has the same DNA as you doesn't mean it is you. It will have it's own memories, personality, etc.
3. On this point I agree with you in principle. However, we shouldn't follow the quest for knowledge blindly. Many scientific findings have moral reprocutions, which must be examined. If we find that, as a people, we aren't mature enough to handle the responsibility that comes with progress, then we need to slow down a bit. Cloning is a perfect example. That Italian doctor is so caught up in the "gee whiz!" aspect of cloning he seems to have forgoten that his 200 volunteers will result in a dozen kids going through life with horrible birth defects. That is too high a price to pay for the mere quest of knowledge.
If the system worked as you describe then I couldn't agree with you more. However, it doesn't. The cameras don't record anything, or store anything in a db. They just scan the crowds comparing faces to a db of wanted criminals. If you don't match, then the system forgets you.
Slashdot Mirror
I think I see what you're worried about. When people talk about hybrids, they imagine a 50/50 mix. And yes, a half mouse, half human creatue probably wouldn't survive, would be of questionable scientific value, and it's creation would be ethically questionable, to say the least!
However, that's not what they're talking about here. Or rather, that's not what the scientists are doing. The reporter doesn't have a clue what he's talking about, and garbled most of his facts. The technique described in the article will introduce a small amount of genetic material into the mouse. Some of the mouse's cells would then be able to produce the proteins coded for by those genes. You could, for example, have the mouse produce specific antibodies and see if that allowed it to fight off a disease. You would NOT be able to produce mice with human brains, or able to produce human sperm, or able to walk on their back legs, or any nonsense like that.
Actually, that was the reporter paraphrasing what the Doctor said. Given the mistakes that were made in the rest of the article I would have to assume that the reporter garbled this as well. There is simply no way a mouse can produce human sperm or egg cells. The mouse's immune system would recognize the human cells as foreign and attack them.
I do understand and, to a certain degree, share your concerns. This is a whole new realm of investigation, and scientific enthusiasm must be tempered by ethical considerations. But for those considerations to be relevant, they must be based on facts. The reporter had most of his facts wrong, and the Bishop's grasp of what the scientists were doing was even worse. The techniques the scientists are using are on fairly firm ethical ground, it's just the very poor reporting job in the article that makes them sound scary.
Don't be so afraid, the reporter got almost all his facts wrong. There will be 0 (zero) human cells in the chimera. That's not the way this procedure works. The genetic material is put in the blastocyst, and is then absorbed by some of the cells there. Those cells can then (in theory) produce the proteins that the absorbed genes code for. So the mouse's brain might have some human protiens in it, but it would still be a mouses's brain.
Also, the Bishop's comment about a few human cells per organ being acceptable: not the way it works. As I said, there will be NO human cells, and the modified cells will come in patches. As a modified cell in the blastocyte divides, all it's progeny will have the modifications, so you'll end up with an area in the adult organism that has the modifications. Is it really too much to ask that the people who are trying to make these ethical decisions put in the effort to actually learn what they're talking about before passing judgment?
Unfortunately, no one is talking about making hybrids. In cloning, all the DNA comes from one, in this case dead, "parent". The modern elephant simply provides the womb, and has nothing genetically to do with the offspring.
Ontogeny depends on interactions between mother and child in the womb. There's a complex interaction of hormones, genetic signals, etc that takes place during fetal development, and since mammoths are extinct we can only guess at what they might be for that species. They may be similar enough to a modern elephants that it could work, but I'd hardly assume it.
I can't tell if you're a fool or an idiot. The Catholic church didn't persecute Galileo because he didn't follow good scientific practices! Where did you possibly get that idea? Church doctrine is based on faith, and a belief in the infallibility of the Pope. The concepts of proof and truth are completely irrelevant as far as they're concerned. It was Galileo's contention that you could determine truth through observation that got him persecuted. Galileo's methods might not have been as rigorous as we would expect today, but that's because the scientfic method, as we now know it, was still in development.
Calling Moore's law a law is a misnomer. There's no science or math behind it. Moore just made some simple observations, drew a line on a graph, and said "Hey, look at that, doubles every 18 months." There's no fundamental reason for chip development to go at that rate, it's just a trend that we've happened to follow. It could in fact be a self fullfilling prophecy. People expect chips to develop at that rate, so that's what marketing and development shoot for.
From Article I of the International space treaty, ratified in 1967.
Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, shall be free for exploration and use by all States without discrimination of any kind, on a basis of equality and in accordance with international law, and there shall be free access to all areas of celestial bodies.
If bars of pure gold were neatly stacked anywhere you like on the moon, we couldn't go there and bring them back and show a profit. I've never seen a study done on the economics of asteroid mining, but there's a couple of things to remember. They're further out, which means lots more fuel, and they have negligable gravity, which makes working them harder. Plus, one final consideration: if by capture you mean strap a booster to it and move it into earth orbit, remember that the brain trust at NASA recently crashed a probe into Mars because they didn't convert their units correctly. Do you really want someone, anyone, trying to manouver an asteroid into Earth orbit? So basically, until we get huge advances in lift technology, there's no way that any sort of space mining will be economical.
But then again, it's wild ass speculation and might be entirely false
Not entirely. I do know for a fact that nails were almost never used back then due to expense. Further, you'ld want to assemble and disassemble your catapult on the field, which is much easier to do if you've used peg construction. The reason I said I was guessing is that I don't have an actual midevil catapult in my pocket to check for nails. So before you go accusing people of ex-recto speculation perhaps you should make sure you know something about the topic.
I'm guessing they didn't use any nails way back when. Far too labor intensive and expensive to make by hand. Instead they'd use peg and hole construction, which is actually stronger than using nails. And if you split the wood yourself, it will split along the grain, which means the resulting piece of wood will be stronger than if you cut it at a mill. If anything I would imagine that the modern versions are weaker than their historical counterparts.
You can't take away someones right to drive without some sort of legal proceeding. At the very least, you need a cop to have 'justifiable cause', or something like that. After all, there may be a perfectly legitimate reason why the car reaks of booze, like you're rushing your overly drunk friend to the hospital to get his stomach pumped. You need a human in the equation somewhere to make the actual judgment call about whether the driver should actually be driving.
Feeling cynical this morning? Insurance companies would love this gizmo. After all, they make money when you don't get in an accident. If your car never started they'd be in seventh heaven. And as for the cops, do they actually make any money when they pull people over? Whenver I've gotten a ticket, I've had to make the check out to the town, not the police department.
The primary objective of war is to impose your will on another state. If you can do that with minimal casualties and minimal damage, that's virtualy always to your advantage.
Wouldn't that formula give you the mass of a photon? How are you going to count the number of photons needed to get up to a kg?
What I was trying to say is that while we can look at something on a microscopic scale and actually count the atoms, you would then need to actually count 6.02e26 atoms. The only practical way of figuring out how many atoms something sizeable has is to use some macroscopic method.
Technically true, but the difference over a distance of, say, a meter or so is so small as to be negligable. As long as the balance fits in one room it's reasonable to say that the force of gravity is the same anywhere on the scale.
If they were trying to accurately measure weight, then the variations in Earth's gravity would be a problem. However, a mass balance will always work, regardless of local gravity. Think of a see-saw. If it starts balanced, and then you pull down twice as hard on either end, it stays balanced.
As for why we don't use 6.0221e26 (I think that's right) carbon atoms as the standard kilogram, the only way we have on the macroscopic scale of determining how many atoms are in something is to weigh it. You'ld have to use the kilogram to define the kilogram.
The standard for the second is:
The second is the duration 0f 9 192 631 770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the Caesium atom.
And now I know as much as I did before.
Check your units. The speed of light is about 176000 miles per second, not hour. 5909 mph / 176000 mps is about .0001%
While a lunar colony would be cool, there's no way it will be financially feasible any time in the remotely near future. Even if there is water and oxygen trapped in the rocks somewhere, it would take tons of equipment to extract and process it. And while this is going on the colonists would need full life support. That includes food, air, water, and shelter. It currently costs about $10,000 a pound just to get something into orbit. I'm not sure how much it would cost to get something to the moon, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was 10 times that much. We're easily talking in the trillions of dollars here. And for what benefits? Surely none that would convince the tax payers who are fitting the bill.
No need to call out MarsFirst. Any trails these things might leave would last as long in a Martian dust storm as your footprints would on an Earth desert.
If you want to know if your computer model is using a fine enough grid (enough particles) there's a simple way to be sure. Run the simulation with 5000 particles, then 10000, then 20000, etc. Keep doing it until the answer doesn't change much, and you can be pretty sure you have enough particles. Of course, I don't know that they did something like this, but some sort of grid resolution study is pretty standard in any advanced computer simulation. I'd be extremely surprised if they couldn't justify using 20000 particles.
I'd like to address your points: 1. While I will grant you that a fetus does not have the rights of a human (at least in America), that doesn't lessen the immorality of a procedure that is as risky as cloning. For every healthy baby born, you'll get dozens of babies with birth defects, and scores of miscarriages. Perfect the techniques with animals first, than try it on humans. 2. You may not want to define a fetus as a person, but once it's born it certainly will be. Regardless of whether the DNA came from one person or two (parents, sex, that whole thing) a baby, once born, is a person, with the same rights as any other person. After all, just because it has the same DNA as you doesn't mean it is you. It will have it's own memories, personality, etc. 3. On this point I agree with you in principle. However, we shouldn't follow the quest for knowledge blindly. Many scientific findings have moral reprocutions, which must be examined. If we find that, as a people, we aren't mature enough to handle the responsibility that comes with progress, then we need to slow down a bit. Cloning is a perfect example. That Italian doctor is so caught up in the "gee whiz!" aspect of cloning he seems to have forgoten that his 200 volunteers will result in a dozen kids going through life with horrible birth defects. That is too high a price to pay for the mere quest of knowledge.
If the system worked as you describe then I couldn't agree with you more. However, it doesn't. The cameras don't record anything, or store anything in a db. They just scan the crowds comparing faces to a db of wanted criminals. If you don't match, then the system forgets you.