Re:human cloning for organ transplants
on
Pigs with Human Genes
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· Score: 5, Interesting
This is not intended as a flame, but thefertilized egg/embryo will need the uterus to grow and develop.
No, it doesn't. A fertilized egg will implant pretty much anywhereit can get a reasonable blood supply. The uterus is mainly there toprotect the mother. Women actually occasionally give birth via cesareansection after ectopic pregnancies, it just is pretty risky.
Even if carrying to term is very risky, if properly planned, it seems plausiblefor a man to be able to carry a cloned embryo ectopically without too muchrisk. Women, of course, can just use the more usual place to carrytheir own clones.
An artificial uterus is difficult to make pretty much because an artificialbody is difficult to make. However, it is quite conceivable that anotherresult of genetic modification in pigs or other animals will be that animalscan carry human babies, with all sorts of interesting implications for humanevolution (no constraints on human head size anymore, for example, and allsorts of complicated constraints on human female evolution removed as well).
I'm not sure it really matters. A lot of annoying behavior would come to an
end if businesses just started behaving more rationally, taking long-term
profits and considerations into account.
human cloning for organ transplants
on
Pigs with Human Genes
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
wouldnt it be "easier" to just have a replacement human with say, no brain (so its not "really" a clone)
Probably, although it wouldn't involve machines. One way this might work is as follows. A doctor would take a sample of your DNA and place it into an egg, creating a clone. That egg can be carried by a surrogate mother, or possibly implanted back into you (eggs can develop pretty much anywhere). When the organ that is needed has started to form, the embryo is removed, the developing organ is removed from the embryo, transplanted into you, and the rest of the embryo destroyed. When the transplanted organ has matured, your original defective organ is removed.
Some organs might need to develop long enough that it becomes a concern whether the developing embryo has some kind of higher brain activity. In that case, the doctor could make sure that the embryo develops without higher brain functions--it would start out ``brain dead'', roughly the same way at which we already harvest organs.
Where does one draw the line ethically? Hard to say. I find it difficult to see why human cloning should raise significant ethical problems as long as the clone does not develop higher brain functions.
If a living being has a human heart, a human liver, and human kidneys... is it closer to pig or human?
Pig. Even if you managed to have a pig brain in an otherwise human body somehow, the result would still not be human. We don't know exactly what makes us human, but we do know that most of whatever it is resides in the brain.
So far, they haven't made anything transplantable. But with enough genetic engineering, it should be possible to make pig organs that are less likely to be rejected than organs from most human donors.
The reason is that with pigs, they can really delete, add, or replace whatever genes they like; obviously; with human donors they obviously can't.
Obviously, they didn't have a good patent attorney. Good patent attorneys know that they should say "a plurality of"--it makes the patent sound more serious.
It's a cluster, not a shared memory machine. Linux scales very well to clusters. In fact, it seems like it is the only choice right now for Opteron-based clustering since there is no released version of XP supporting it. Also, Linux is much more widely used for clustering on PC hardware than anything else and has a lot of tools available for it. So, it seems like the most logical choice; I would just be nice to see that confirmed.
It is hard to understand how these tests can get patented. The method for checking whether specific genetic sequences are present is well-known--no new invention there. And the genetic sequences themselves are observations of nature.
Basically, these kinds of patents are not significantly different from patents on diagnostic criteria. It's similar to patenting "a method for diagnosing sunburn by observing a reddening of the skin and asking the patient about recent sun exposure".
Are we going to have other (non genetic) diagnostic criteria patented as well now?
And Citrix uses an order of magnitide less bandwidth than X11
It probably does, but that's the wrong tradeoff for usage over LANs.
(which of course could be fixed by adding an extention, if anyone gave a shit that is.)
Low bandwidth X extensions have been around for about a decade.
"X11 has the features that its user community need" You sound like an inverse version of Steve Ballmer. Give it a rest.
It may sound like that, but it's different. X11 has the features the user community needs because the user community decides what features it has. Windows has the features its user community "needs" because Ballmer says so.
You seriously think X has been under any form of active development for the last decade? Ha.
powerbooks are similarlysilent unless emergency fans kick in.
It's not an "emergency fan" if it runs pretty regularly during normal operation. And it does. And it is noisy, at least on my 1 year old Titanium Powerbook.
Many musicians like the newer macs with sampler gear because they don't have to worry about systyem sound so much.
I don't know which "newer macs" you are talking about, but some of the newer dual processor machines are very noisy, worse than most PCs.
Apple has made some really quiet machines. Among G3 and G4 machines, the older iMacs were really quiet, and some of the towers were moderately quiet. But overall, Apple's record is pretty mixed. So, don't go out buying just any old Apple expecting it to be quiet.
My point is that like any OS (or linux distribution, for that matter), you need to readup on the documentation. Try reading that Debian Handbook sometime- lots of good stuff!
I know how to install and run Debian, and I know how to figure these things out. But that's no excuse for picking lousy defaults, and booting with a 2.2 kernel and fiddling with video modes unnecessarily are lousy defaults. A Debian install on modern hardware should take a few minutes and not require any reference to a manual. Instead, it usually requires much more time and a bit of head scratching.
USB installs, completely a pain because your reliant on the BIOS to boot from a USB drive
Not necessarily. I might boot off floppy and then install from USB drive. I might boot off a USB CD-ROM (which my BIOS supports) and the continue to install from the USB CD-ROM drive.
You want the BIOS to load a disk into RAM and then proceed to boot off of it? I have yet to see a bios do this
No. I want the BIOS to load the boot loader for the installer and execute it. Then I want the installer to use BIOS calls to load a few dozen megabytes of stuff into a RAM disk (similar to what LILO does), and then I want the installer to proceed with using what was loaded into RAM.
Remeber BIOS was invented to make DOS and CP/M as platform independant as possible. Don't trust it to do anything else.
Well, you and I rely on it for booting, when it loads many megabytes of stuff into memory. Why not use it more during the install? The BIOS obviously knows how to talk to my boot device, otherwise I couldn't have booted from it.
Yeah, I've only been using multisync monitors for 10 years or so. I guess in geological UNIX time, that's pretty recent.
UNIX traditionally hasn't needed resolution switching because the graphics cards people were usually using supported acceleration and bit depths at the highest resolution. It's needed on PC hardware only because the graphics cards are so quirky. And even on PCs, XFree86 has had the necessary support for switching modes on the fly for years; RandR just cleans it up and generalizes it.
Where as the response of the X11 people to competitors was to wait 10 years to implement a feature. Bleh. Think about the point you are arguing here.
Nonsense. X11 has the features that its user community need. Changing resolutions on the fly was not important until recently (and actually still isn't outside the home market). Running applications remotely, however is.
Whatever nifty stuff X11 has, it was pretty much left for dead (commercially) a long time ago, and thus has lots of catching up to do now that Unix might not really be dead on the desktop.
X11 was never "left for dead"--it is very widely used in many enterprises, as well as in scientific and engineering environments.
Of course, if all you have ever seen is PCs, well, then you wouldn't know.
It's core feature of exported displays isn't even all that competitive with Citrix WinFrame,
Oh, but it is: X11 is more efficient over LANs (the usual setting) and supports seamless integration of applications running on different hosts. Citrix doesn't even come close. And, of course, Citrix is a proprietary, single vendor, single-platform solution.
*MOST PEOPLE* don't have a study, or multiple computers in one house
Many people, however, probably have a computer at work and at home, and might want to use applications from an Internet Cafe or a friend's house or their PDA. In the days of $200 desktops and $500 laptops, most homes are soon going to have multiple computers, just like most homes now have multiple television sets.
Do you honestly think MS couldn't add in exported displays somehow if the demand was really there? With more money in the bank than most South American countries combined, they could figure out a way somehow.
I can't think of a single instance where Microsoft has responded to "demand"; usually, they respond to threats from competitors. So, lack of this feature in Windows doesn't mean that there is no demand, it just means that their one major competitor, Apple hasn't figured out how to do this either.
Besides, it is foolish to think that large amounts of money can buy working, high-quality software implementations; Microsoft's track record itself suggests otherwise.
I recently installed Woody, and the text-based nature of the installer wasn't the problem. The problems I had was that the installer was using an outdated kernel by default (2.2), that it couldn't talk to a lot of the hardware I had, and that it was trying to switch the console into some other graphics mode and failing.
Let's not waste time on pretty pictures in the installer; rather, the installer needs to get more robust and support more hardware and installation methods. Installs from USB should be easy (carry Debian on a USB drive key). Installs from RAM disk should be possible (load the entire first stage into RAM using the BIOS, then install from there), and perhaps even the default. Those are the kinds of things that make installs easy, not pretty pictures of penguins.
Being able to export that desktop and/or application to another machine isnt something thats commonly used.
Oh, it's very commonly used even between PCs, as the success of PC Anywhere and VNC show. It's just that those solutions have a lot of problems.
Of course, many PCs in corporate and research environments are actually mostly glorified X11 terminals, and this feature in X11 is also extensively used.
The only people who perhaps aren't using it as much are Linux desktop users. But they don't represent all of the X11 usage.
Changing resolution on the fly (without tweaking a config file) is something thats extremely important to a lot of users
X11 lacked this feature because until recently, there was little hardware support or need for it. Now that the need is there, X11 is providing it. Yes, it took a little longer to do that on X11 than on a proprietary platform, but that's always the case with open standards and platforms.
That mere fact that we had to wait so many years for a feature that has been available to Mac users for, like, 15 years, is the proof that X11 in general and XFree86 in particular, is the most bloated buggy unmaintainnable piece of software ever.
The Mac solved a much simpler problem: given a proprietary GUI toolkit running on a single machine, let people rotate the screen. You can do that with a quick hack.
X11 is a protocol, not an implementation. People can't just go in, hack the XFree86 implementation, and be done with it. If you add something to X11, it needs to be defined, discussed, and then implemented. People need to think about lots of different kinds of possible hardware and scenarios. That takes time.
When will somebody free the world of X11 and write a light-weight fast and efficient graphics layer for Linux,
Have you done a "ps" on your Mac lately? Have you done any kind of graphics benchmarks? X11 runs rings around the Macintosh display system, both in terms of performance and in terms of memory footprint.
but I strongly believe 2/3 of the functionality of the X11 architecure is just a big waste of time and disk space
Oh, and what functionality would that be? Please tell us.
Besides, do you think that putting a PDF or Postscript interpreter into the display server is the epitomy of efficient design?
It's not all that different from Xinerama: even if nothing knows about it, things will mostly work. But you probably at least want to use a window manager that knows about it so that it can do a better job with window placement. Most toolkits probably don't need to know about it, although performance can be better in some cases if they do.
Cut/paste is a toolkit issue, and focus is a window manager issue. If they don't work the way you like them to, it's a problem with the desktop you are using, not the X Window System.
However, the most likely cause of those complaints is that, by convention, cut/paste and focus work differently under X11 than under Windows. Furthermore, X11 has support for pasting the selection, something that doesn't exist under Windows or MacOS at all. Maybe you just need to read the documentation.
Most people have apparently simply given into Windows and Macintosh mediocrity: they think that the limitations of those systems are somehow fundamental. But that doesn't mean that they don't want the ability to say "hey, computer, I'd like to continue with this program on the screen in my study".
maybe the X team has finally changed direction to The Right Way
There is no "X team" that enforces a direction for X11. If you don't like what X11 does, you can add your own extension. If others find it useful, they will use it. X11 is the way it is because its users like it that way. That's more than can be said about most other window systems.
Changing resolution or screen orientation on something like Windows or MacOS is a pretty simple and localized affair--something pokes around with the video hardware and applications get notified that something happened--not very hard, but not very powerful either. Individual X11 implementations have had that for many years as well.
This extension, together with other X11 features, has a much grander vision: letting applications move seamlessly across displays and devices. This requires defining standard protocols by which different implementations can interoperate and communicate. It also means coming up with standards that work across a wide range of devices.
I frankly don't know when, or even whether, X11 will be able to deliver on this vision--it's hard and there is still a lot of work left. But I do know that few other systems are even trying, and that functionally, X11 is already far ahead of the alternatives. For all their visual glitz, Windows and MacOS, for example, are just minor variations on the "applications running on my desktop" theme.
There isn't much danger if you get it on dry skin; it will just harmlessly bead up and roll off. When people wear gloves, it's mostly to protect themselves in case some glass container breaks. However, if it soaks through clothing or if you take it internally, it can be dangerous.
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This is not intended as a flame, but thefertilized egg/embryo will need the uterus to grow and develop.
No, it doesn't. A fertilized egg will implant pretty much anywhereit can get a reasonable blood supply. The uterus is mainly there toprotect the mother. Women actually occasionally give birth via cesareansection after ectopic pregnancies, it just is pretty risky.
Even if carrying to term is very risky, if properly planned, it seems plausiblefor a man to be able to carry a cloned embryo ectopically without too muchrisk. Women, of course, can just use the more usual place to carrytheir own clones.
An artificial uterus is difficult to make pretty much because an artificialbody is difficult to make. However, it is quite conceivable that anotherresult of genetic modification in pigs or other animals will be that animalscan carry human babies, with all sorts of interesting implications for humanevolution (no constraints on human head size anymore, for example, and allsorts of complicated constraints on human female evolution removed as well).
I'm not sure it really matters. A lot of annoying behavior would come to an end if businesses just started behaving more rationally, taking long-term profits and considerations into account.
Probably, although it wouldn't involve machines. One way this might work is as follows. A doctor would take a sample of your DNA and place it into an egg, creating a clone. That egg can be carried by a surrogate mother, or possibly implanted back into you (eggs can develop pretty much anywhere). When the organ that is needed has started to form, the embryo is removed, the developing organ is removed from the embryo, transplanted into you, and the rest of the embryo destroyed. When the transplanted organ has matured, your original defective organ is removed.
Some organs might need to develop long enough that it becomes a concern whether the developing embryo has some kind of higher brain activity. In that case, the doctor could make sure that the embryo develops without higher brain functions--it would start out ``brain dead'', roughly the same way at which we already harvest organs.
Where does one draw the line ethically? Hard to say. I find it difficult to see why human cloning should raise significant ethical problems as long as the clone does not develop higher brain functions.
Pig. Even if you managed to have a pig brain in an otherwise human body somehow, the result would still not be human. We don't know exactly what makes us human, but we do know that most of whatever it is resides in the brain.
The reason is that with pigs, they can really delete, add, or replace whatever genes they like; obviously; with human donors they obviously can't.
Obviously, they didn't have a good patent attorney. Good patent attorneys know that they should say "a plurality of"--it makes the patent sound more serious.
It's a cluster, not a shared memory machine. Linux scales very well to clusters. In fact, it seems like it is the only choice right now for Opteron-based clustering since there is no released version of XP supporting it. Also, Linux is much more widely used for clustering on PC hardware than anything else and has a lot of tools available for it. So, it seems like the most logical choice; I would just be nice to see that confirmed.
It seems like Linux is the most likely choice for an operating system for this, but they don't mention anything. Does anybody know?
Basically, these kinds of patents are not significantly different from patents on diagnostic criteria. It's similar to patenting "a method for diagnosing sunburn by observing a reddening of the skin and asking the patient about recent sun exposure".
Are we going to have other (non genetic) diagnostic criteria patented as well now?
It probably does, but that's the wrong tradeoff for usage over LANs.
(which of course could be fixed by adding an extention, if anyone gave a shit that is.)
Low bandwidth X extensions have been around for about a decade.
"X11 has the features that its user community need" You sound like an inverse version of Steve Ballmer. Give it a rest.
It may sound like that, but it's different. X11 has the features the user community needs because the user community decides what features it has. Windows has the features its user community "needs" because Ballmer says so.
You seriously think X has been under any form of active development for the last decade? Ha.
Yes. But, of course, you wouldn't know.
It's not an "emergency fan" if it runs pretty regularly during normal operation. And it does. And it is noisy, at least on my 1 year old Titanium Powerbook.
Many musicians like the newer macs with sampler gear because they don't have to worry about systyem sound so much.
I don't know which "newer macs" you are talking about, but some of the newer dual processor machines are very noisy, worse than most PCs.
Apple has made some really quiet machines. Among G3 and G4 machines, the older iMacs were really quiet, and some of the towers were moderately quiet. But overall, Apple's record is pretty mixed. So, don't go out buying just any old Apple expecting it to be quiet.
I know how to install and run Debian, and I know how to figure these things out. But that's no excuse for picking lousy defaults, and booting with a 2.2 kernel and fiddling with video modes unnecessarily are lousy defaults. A Debian install on modern hardware should take a few minutes and not require any reference to a manual. Instead, it usually requires much more time and a bit of head scratching.
Not necessarily. I might boot off floppy and then install from USB drive. I might boot off a USB CD-ROM (which my BIOS supports) and the continue to install from the USB CD-ROM drive.
You want the BIOS to load a disk into RAM and then proceed to boot off of it? I have yet to see a bios do this
No. I want the BIOS to load the boot loader for the installer and execute it. Then I want the installer to use BIOS calls to load a few dozen megabytes of stuff into a RAM disk (similar to what LILO does), and then I want the installer to proceed with using what was loaded into RAM.
Remeber BIOS was invented to make DOS and CP/M as platform independant as possible. Don't trust it to do anything else.
Well, you and I rely on it for booting, when it loads many megabytes of stuff into memory. Why not use it more during the install? The BIOS obviously knows how to talk to my boot device, otherwise I couldn't have booted from it.
UNIX traditionally hasn't needed resolution switching because the graphics cards people were usually using supported acceleration and bit depths at the highest resolution. It's needed on PC hardware only because the graphics cards are so quirky. And even on PCs, XFree86 has had the necessary support for switching modes on the fly for years; RandR just cleans it up and generalizes it.
Nonsense. X11 has the features that its user community need. Changing resolutions on the fly was not important until recently (and actually still isn't outside the home market). Running applications remotely, however is.
Whatever nifty stuff X11 has, it was pretty much left for dead (commercially) a long time ago, and thus has lots of catching up to do now that Unix might not really be dead on the desktop.
X11 was never "left for dead"--it is very widely used in many enterprises, as well as in scientific and engineering environments.
Of course, if all you have ever seen is PCs, well, then you wouldn't know.
It's core feature of exported displays isn't even all that competitive with Citrix WinFrame,
Oh, but it is: X11 is more efficient over LANs (the usual setting) and supports seamless integration of applications running on different hosts. Citrix doesn't even come close. And, of course, Citrix is a proprietary, single vendor, single-platform solution.
Many people, however, probably have a computer at work and at home, and might want to use applications from an Internet Cafe or a friend's house or their PDA. In the days of $200 desktops and $500 laptops, most homes are soon going to have multiple computers, just like most homes now have multiple television sets.
Do you honestly think MS couldn't add in exported displays somehow if the demand was really there? With more money in the bank than most South American countries combined, they could figure out a way somehow.
I can't think of a single instance where Microsoft has responded to "demand"; usually, they respond to threats from competitors. So, lack of this feature in Windows doesn't mean that there is no demand, it just means that their one major competitor, Apple hasn't figured out how to do this either.
Besides, it is foolish to think that large amounts of money can buy working, high-quality software implementations; Microsoft's track record itself suggests otherwise.
Yes, for cut-and-paste, as well as for focus. The whole world does not work like Windows, nor should it.
Let's not waste time on pretty pictures in the installer; rather, the installer needs to get more robust and support more hardware and installation methods. Installs from USB should be easy (carry Debian on a USB drive key). Installs from RAM disk should be possible (load the entire first stage into RAM using the BIOS, then install from there), and perhaps even the default. Those are the kinds of things that make installs easy, not pretty pictures of penguins.
Oh, it's very commonly used even between PCs, as the success of PC Anywhere and VNC show. It's just that those solutions have a lot of problems.
Of course, many PCs in corporate and research environments are actually mostly glorified X11 terminals, and this feature in X11 is also extensively used.
The only people who perhaps aren't using it as much are Linux desktop users. But they don't represent all of the X11 usage.
Changing resolution on the fly (without tweaking a config file) is something thats extremely important to a lot of users
X11 lacked this feature because until recently, there was little hardware support or need for it. Now that the need is there, X11 is providing it. Yes, it took a little longer to do that on X11 than on a proprietary platform, but that's always the case with open standards and platforms.
The Mac solved a much simpler problem: given a proprietary GUI toolkit running on a single machine, let people rotate the screen. You can do that with a quick hack.
X11 is a protocol, not an implementation. People can't just go in, hack the XFree86 implementation, and be done with it. If you add something to X11, it needs to be defined, discussed, and then implemented. People need to think about lots of different kinds of possible hardware and scenarios. That takes time.
When will somebody free the world of X11 and write a light-weight fast and efficient graphics layer for Linux,
Have you done a "ps" on your Mac lately? Have you done any kind of graphics benchmarks? X11 runs rings around the Macintosh display system, both in terms of performance and in terms of memory footprint.
but I strongly believe 2/3 of the functionality of the X11 architecure is just a big waste of time and disk space
Oh, and what functionality would that be? Please tell us.
Besides, do you think that putting a PDF or Postscript interpreter into the display server is the epitomy of efficient design?
It's not all that different from Xinerama: even if nothing knows about it, things will mostly work. But you probably at least want to use a window manager that knows about it so that it can do a better job with window placement. Most toolkits probably don't need to know about it, although performance can be better in some cases if they do.
However, the most likely cause of those complaints is that, by convention, cut/paste and focus work differently under X11 than under Windows. Furthermore, X11 has support for pasting the selection, something that doesn't exist under Windows or MacOS at all. Maybe you just need to read the documentation.
Most people have apparently simply given into Windows and Macintosh mediocrity: they think that the limitations of those systems are somehow fundamental. But that doesn't mean that they don't want the ability to say "hey, computer, I'd like to continue with this program on the screen in my study".
maybe the X team has finally changed direction to The Right Way
There is no "X team" that enforces a direction for X11. If you don't like what X11 does, you can add your own extension. If others find it useful, they will use it. X11 is the way it is because its users like it that way. That's more than can be said about most other window systems.
This extension, together with other X11 features, has a much grander vision: letting applications move seamlessly across displays and devices. This requires defining standard protocols by which different implementations can interoperate and communicate. It also means coming up with standards that work across a wide range of devices.
I frankly don't know when, or even whether, X11 will be able to deliver on this vision--it's hard and there is still a lot of work left. But I do know that few other systems are even trying, and that functionally, X11 is already far ahead of the alternatives. For all their visual glitz, Windows and MacOS, for example, are just minor variations on the "applications running on my desktop" theme.
There isn't much danger if you get it on dry skin; it will just harmlessly bead up and roll off. When people wear gloves, it's mostly to protect themselves in case some glass container breaks. However, if it soaks through clothing or if you take it internally, it can be dangerous.