Dr. Mancie at Stanford, trained by the folks who made the machine. Interesting, my dad's a laser engineer, consulted with opitical surgeons for years, talked me out of earlier procedures (radial kar) 'cause the surgeons were still wearing their coke bottles.
Anyway, the folks he was working with started getting the lasik procedure done, so I went for it in june 3 years back, and it's been great, 20/20, since then. Dr. Mancie did it in one operation, went from really bad vision to 20/20 in one day, pretty cool. I spend about 6-7 hours a day doing multimedia programming, and if anything my eyes are much better for looking at a screen than they were with glasses or contacts, no blurryness, dryness headaches, no problem.
My GF had it done from a traveling Dr. 1 year ago, apparently the machines can get de-calibrated when moved, she had to go back for a second procedure, and still not quite there. So I'd recommend paying more for an established Dr. with a real (non-mobile) lab set up and plenty of experience (& references), myself.
I'd go for it, but there are even less invasive procedures coming, so if you are young and not too bothered by corrective lenses, you might want to look at some of these.
Very few animals are going to die of high blood pressure before they read breeding age.
Even the many stress related diseases that kill humans don't generally turn deadly until the late 30s-40s.
By which time (in the natural course of things) we would already be done reproducing anyway.
In any event, in context, environmental stress (I mean like asteroid strikes, not like your boss maybe catching you reading/.) leads to lower general health, which leads to worse DNA repair, which leads to more mutations, which leads to greater variation, which leads to a greater chance of a new pattern emerging that can survive in the aftermath of the environmental change.
& Yeah, of course gross environmental 'stress' does tend to kill off most animals prematurely, that is one reason why we have mass extinctions when the environment changes dramatically.
Evolution happens to the ones that survive the stress...
> I think I understand GAs at least as well as you do, thanks.
Uhh, the point was that GAs do not explain Evolution, they merely use some of the features of evolution, and show that those features work as expected.
Now how much time have you spent working with real genetics? How many years investigating how actual organisms act in the field and/or lab?
They Don't (Abiogenesis is not part of Evolution)
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"This brings up a fundamental question (which is the one I am asking you): Where do evolutionary theorists say life started?"
It's not a "fundamental question" for evolutionary biology, the theory of evolution begins with the first species & explains how other species evolve from that species. How that first species got there is a question for a different area of research & theory (abiogenesis).
It is interesting how often folks confuse evolution with cosmology or abiogenesis, obviously schools are not doing a good enough job of explaining the differences.
"The theist says, "It was given to me by someone of superior understanding". The non-theist or atheist however, can only say, "morality is determined by man"."
No, the non-theist says that his/her morality stems from the exact same place as the theist, but the theist has deluded him/herself into thinking that there is an invisible bein of superior understanding handing out morality checks.
"As a result, if your view of morality is in conflict with the view of society as a whole, then you are always wrong and there's no way to argue that you are correct."
Sure there is: Logic and Reason. Voltaire never resorted to saying he was right because God says so & countless other humanist, most of whom were/are unpopular in their time, have made arguments for morality without resorting to claiming they had an invisible friend to back them up.
> How is it that now an adverse environment is somehow able to make genes suddenly express themselves?
By stressing the system.
If a species is facing extinction due to gross environmental changes, there are all kinds of stresses (greater disease, starvation, difficulty finding mates, etc.)
Since there is no way to know what kind of environmental change is going to happen, there is no way to tell _what_ mutations will be "beneficial" of course.
So it makes sense for a species to have a means of changing drastically, in a variety of ways. And it also makes sense to suppress such a change so long as the environment doesn't much change.
> That said, as an ardent evolutionist with an MS in population genetics, I sometimes have to wonder about things like the bombardier beetle.
A) your problem is that your consider yourself an "ardent evolutionist", implying that you believe in evolution for an emotional reason, rather than logic & evidence.
B) The Bombadier Beetle's system is based on standard "grammar", cells that produce hydroquinones and hydrogen peroxide, peroxidases & catalases are quite common, the BB just puts these together in a different way. &
"Much creationist literature gives an inaccurate account of the process." (the mixture doesn't explode spontaneously when mixed, nor does it explode outside the beetle)
& Intermediate steps not only exist in related creatures, but the steps leading to the BB system are entirely consistent with evolutionary theory (see http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/bombardier.html for a complete exposition).
Isn't "Providing a Vehicle" what a Free Press
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is all about?
I mean if a newspaper reports what a terrorist says, are they not "providing a vehicle"?
Seems to me that this is exactly about the First A, which was specifically designed to protect views that the Govt. wants to suppress!
However, the student web site may not be able to fight on legal grounds as they are using the U's webserver, thus dragging the U into a potential fight it doesn't want.
While it would be nice to see the UCSD set a better example of supporting unpopular speech, perhaps it would be better for students to get an offsite web page to put their links on.
If I was to hire an engineer by the hour
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Engineer in a Box?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I would be pretty p**d if s/he spent time working things out on paper.
They teach computer programming here to write code without teaching then to use de-buggers, color coded editors, etc.
And the grads. need at least 6mos of 'on the job' training to learn how to use modern programming environments efficiently.
Someday perhaps educators will learn that there is nothing wrong with teaching students to learn the best tools for the job at hand. Of course theory is important, but teaching theory should not require making students spend hours scratching away with the primitive tools that the theory was originally figured out on!
Ahh well, folks said writing was dead with the advent of the fountain pen (you have to cut your own quill and mix your own ink to understand how to write a _real_ letter, sonny!). Then it was the typewriter...
And so it goes, I expect in fifty years, profs will be saying "Stay off the neural net! You can't really get the answer in holo space! Use your your calculator like a real engineer!"
> 2) Tack and Mike live to 100. Bill lives to 150.
Switch it too: Gates buys Abrams tanks and defends his mansion against the invading commie armies.
Tack and Mike get killed by commies because we have no tanks.
We have the best military in the world because folks have decided to stop alot (though by no means all!) of the religious infighting over whether privatly or publicly is a better way to spend resources on this one issue and just get it right.
There is no logical reason that the life of our citizens can't be defended from internal diseases with the same vigor that we currently use vs. external enemies.
Unfortunatly, there are plenty of illogical reasons why we don't do this.
"The big potential losers if Apple should switch chips would be software developers. They would be forced -- perhaps for the second time in two years -- to rewrite their programs, this time to make them work with a Pentium-based Mac."
But how much re-writing would actually be required? X already runs a bunch of *nix software, right? What kinds of apps. would need to be "re-written" if the processor was switched to x86?
> The inalienable right is to purchase one's own medical care with wealth one has acquired through productive work.
That sounds like pursuit of happieness. But I was talking about the first inalieanble right, what it meant before the religious right hi-jacked it, & in context what it would mean if "life" was denied to poor Americans (capitalist, communist, or otherwise).
So to return to the context, is denial of medical care a violation of an American's right to life?
> "Yo, Gates. Too much money. Too many toys. Too high a standard of living. You're giving that money to charity or we're taking it from you."
Uh huh. In any event, it doesn't take guns (unless Gates decides to fight), it takes a majority in Congress. And the question was: "how big will the disparity between the lifespan of the poor (here defined as folks who can't afford a $600,000 test to save their life) have to get before the poor will demand an equal right to life?"
> But if you compare standards of living around the world, you'll find that "the poor" have done a damn sight better under countries with (flawed as they inevitably are) implementations of Capitalism versus any other social system.
So you think that if the rich live for say 30 years longer than the poor, the poor will still feel ok with it because they live longer than the kings of the 1600s? Or because they still live longer than the warlords in Sudan? How about if the rich live 50 years longer?
There is a whole solar system out there & alot more beyond.
The speed of light ain't much of a limit for folks who don't age.
Plenty of room.
No reason to let death erase that software you've been writing for the past (insert current age here) years. It is a wothwhile program your're working on, isn't it?
So you see no problem with a rich person living for 3 or more decades longer than a poor person? No conflict there with the "inalienable rights" guaranteed to all?
BTW, why are you assuming I'm attacking capitalism? Does "capitalism" require a huge difference between the rich and the poor? Does capitalism require that the rich live much longer and healthier lives than the poor?
I think that capitalism merely requires that capital be free to flow to the area most worth investing in, something which seems at odds with having most of the capital locked up in the hands of a few, no?
Finally, what is the point of your dystopic vision of a post-nuclear world? Are you saying that the only choice available is accepting gross divisions between rich and poor or nuking the place?
Surely democracy comes into the equation at some point (as a way of more or less peacefully resolving the differences between groups)?
> Lets not get into the absurd here. Did she know she would miscarry if she drank the coffee? Did she do it deliberately to miscarry? Was there malice involved?
These are the differences between a neglect/manslaughter charge and a charge of murder (did she know the baby would drown if she left it alone in the tub?) & you illustrate my point (that miscarriage would require the same sort of investigation as other infant deaths). The issue still remains that if the fertilized egg is a human being, then the US Govt. is required by the 14thAmendment to extend the full protection of the law to the fertilized egg, the same protection other human beings are afforded.
The fact that this may be difficult or impossible to do is a sign that granting human being status to a fertilized egg is illogical.
(I'm sorry if you feel pointing these conclusions are "inflamatory". I don't, I feel that too often anti-ESCR folks present themselves as the only one's with a moral position in the debate, ignoring that for folks who don't see fertilized eggs or stem cells as human beings, the anti-research position is a brutal stand to take: saying that folks should not be allowed to research cures to some very terrible diseases in order to prevent "harm" to some microscopic goo!)
> You don't even know if the research is going to solve the problem, yet you've come to the conclusion that my (our collective) opposition is eliminating all hopes of a cure. That's quite a stretch.
The leading scientific institutions of the United States (AAAS, NAS, etc.) have come to a similar conclusion (that refusal of public funding is seriously hindering the research), so I'm not just relying on my own training as a molecular biologist here.
> The issue, to me, is the precedent and overhead that goes along with this, and on this I have not drawn a conclusion. It's the dilemma of benefiting from a past evil,
I think your feeling that IVF is "evil" is at the root of our disagreement. In nature, as many as half of conceptions result in an expelled embryo. The woman usually doesn't even notice. IOW, in the natural system, embryos are made and discarded regularly. What logical course could possibly lead to the conclusion that mimicing this process in the lab to allow couples who cannot have children 'normally' is EVIL?
And (since it is the natural course to discard unused embryos) why would it be EVIL to use the discarded ones to try and find cures for disease?
> The embryo is genetically distinct from the mother. It is then "its own owner", if you will. The rest of that paragraph talks of cells that truly are hers. She can do what she wants with them.
So you have no opposition to deriving stem cells from therapeutic cloning?
> It certainly is a requirement for a human being, but I don't conclude that individuality is a necessary requirement to label an embryo as human life.
Nor is anyone else, the embryo is human life, as is a living organ or cell culture. ESCR doesn't "kill" human life, either.
That is why the issue of individuality is the key to the discussion.
> I still hold that the embryo is no less human than an adult.
And so if a woman drinks too much coffee and has a misscarriage she should be tried the same as if she drowned her infant?
And so our numbers on births and deaths should be adjusted to count the millions of zygotes that die every day?
> That being said, educate me on the concept and I will attempt to draw a conclusion. In this situation, is there viable life, or is it an unviable mutation (though common)?
Viable life. From two or more fertilized eggs.
> What's the point in bringing this up?
Reagon killed millions of people by blocking research into AIDs. You may well feel morally justified in fighting ESCR, but your (collective) actions are also condemning millions to death. You may well feel that 1 millions zygotes saved = 1 million sick people prevented from being cured by your morality, but at least do the math.
> From my point of view, those cells in the petri dish are the result of murder too.
See above. From my point of view they are cells & it is cells vs. people. From your point of view, it is people vs. people. I would still say this does not automatically mean blocking the research is the best choice, but you'll have to wrestle with that yourself.
Do you think we should apply the same criteria to protecting infants to protecting fertilized eggs? If so, then it requires the filing of a conception certificate and explanations if that conception fails, just as we do for birth, right?
Or do you want these microscopic human beings protected at some lesser level than real human beings? If so, what is your logic?
> If you even try to argue that life begins at birth then you will have a difficult time ever having your voice heard in the scientific community over all of the laughing.
Are you repeating a personal experience for some kind of therapy? If not, what in the world led you to imagine that I would make such a silly statement?
Fact is, "life" doesn't "begin" at all. The sperm is alive, the egg is alive, the blastula is alive, the embryo is alive, and the fetus is alive. At some point, a mass of generic cells becomes an individual of the human species, that is the topic (not Nazis nor dog eating babies, much as you might prefer to discuss those for some reason).
> People are already attempting to clone children that died prematurely so don't tell me that this type of research won't open doors to cloning
Another strawman. If you want to prevent human reproductive cloning, then pass Spectre's bill against it (it would have passed last year if not for the Religious Right's opposition, isn't that wierd?) Meanwhile, we don't reduce speeding by outlawing bicycles, nor does it make any more sense to try and prevent reproductive cloning by outlawing ESCR.
> Again, the qualification of "individual" seems to be arbitrary. The fact remains that it is at least a human being, and for me that's enough cause to take the conservative approach.
Individual is part of the definition of human being (an individual of the human species). Without it, the term is meaningless.
> I belive we are discussing actual human beings. Just because this being is at a stage where it may be come more than one doesn't invalidate that it still is at the very least a human being. Why do you belive that individuality is a necessary requirement?
Three reasons: 1) it is not "at the very least" a human being. In fact, it may well become part of a human being. Human Chimerae with unique DNA from two or more fertilized eggs have been found to be far more common than previously thougth.
2) See above (individuality is part of the definition of "human being").
3) Human clones will happen one day. These folks will not have unique DNA, but they will still be human beings (right?).
> Their DISEASE causes them to suffer and die.
Interestingly, that was the argument Reagan used to justify not spending money on AIDs research.
However, anti-ESCR folks are actively fighting a promising path to cures for a variety of diseases for millions of unique individuals of the human species. Preventing those folks from having access to those cures seems much closer to murder than harvesting some cells from a petri dish to me.
> BTW, IIRC the fetus' heart starts beating at week 3, so "first couple of weeks" might be more accurate than "first several weeks".
Well, Spectre's bill research to 14 days, while other nations have decided on 3 weeks or longer.
> I am not quite convinced we're reached level of understanding and common agreeement where we can say X number of days always equals 'no human being here', which is what a bill like this requires.
Well, every such law involves some risk. Making the research illegal or de-funding it certainly risks killing many people for whom there is no question of their human being status, while taking the risk that God or Science may one day reveal a lower limit.
But we do this all the time in a society, millions of folks are killed on the hiways alone, who might have been saved by a lower speed limit or an all out ban on cars.
In this case it seems to me that the apparent risks of causing death by banning or de-funding the research far outwiegh the potential risks involved in allowing it to go forward.
> The question isn't individual human life, it's human life period.
The question is the difference between 'human life' in general and an individual human being, I think.
> However, when a human being is soley comprised of a very small amount of undifferentiated cells
Again, this redefines "human being": an individual of the human species becomes "anything that might become one or more or several individuals of the human species."
If you are arguing that _potential_ human beings should be treated as _actual_ human beings, then just say so.
But then explain why these potential human beings should not be protected from neglect and abuse as actual human beings are?
> I belive we should take an extremely conservative approach to this unless/untill we can factually say otherwise (something that I don't belive can ever happen).
If it was academic, that would be one thing. However, restricting this research risks causing human beings _for which there is no question whether they are human beings_ to suffer and die. People with Parkinsons, people with heart disease, people with broken spines, people with MS, etc. There is no question whether these folks are human beings, right?
I think the risk of causing suffering & death of human beings is much higher on the part of the folks who want to stop this research.
Slashdot Mirror
Dr. Mancie at Stanford, trained by the folks who made the machine. Interesting, my dad's a laser engineer, consulted with opitical surgeons for years, talked me out of earlier procedures (radial kar) 'cause the surgeons were still wearing their coke bottles.
Anyway, the folks he was working with started getting the lasik procedure done, so I went for it in june 3 years back, and it's been great, 20/20, since then. Dr. Mancie did it in one operation, went from really bad vision to 20/20 in one day, pretty cool. I spend about 6-7 hours a day doing multimedia programming, and if anything my eyes are much better for looking at a screen than they were with glasses or contacts, no blurryness, dryness headaches, no problem.
My GF had it done from a traveling Dr. 1 year ago, apparently the machines can get de-calibrated when moved, she had to go back for a second procedure, and still not quite there. So I'd recommend paying more for an established Dr. with a real (non-mobile) lab set up and plenty of experience (& references), myself.
I'd go for it, but there are even less invasive procedures coming, so if you are young and not too bothered by corrective lenses, you might want to look at some of these.
But YMMV. Good luck!
Very few animals are going to die of high blood pressure before they read breeding age.
/.) leads to lower general health, which leads to worse DNA repair, which leads to more mutations, which leads to greater variation, which leads to a greater chance of a new pattern emerging that can survive in the aftermath of the environmental change.
Even the many stress related diseases that kill humans don't generally turn deadly until the late 30s-40s.
By which time (in the natural course of things) we would already be done reproducing anyway.
In any event, in context, environmental stress (I mean like asteroid strikes, not like your boss maybe catching you reading
& Yeah, of course gross environmental 'stress' does tend to kill off most animals prematurely, that is one reason why we have mass extinctions when the environment changes dramatically.
Evolution happens to the ones that survive the stress...
> I think I understand GAs at least as well as you do, thanks.
Uhh, the point was that GAs do not explain Evolution, they merely use some of the features of evolution, and show that those features work as expected.
Now how much time have you spent working with real genetics? How many years investigating how actual organisms act in the field and/or lab?
"This brings up a fundamental question (which is the one I am asking you): Where do evolutionary theorists say life started?"
It's not a "fundamental question" for evolutionary biology, the theory of evolution begins with the first species & explains how other species evolve from that species. How that first species got there is a question for a different area of research & theory (abiogenesis).
It is interesting how often folks confuse evolution with cosmology or abiogenesis, obviously schools are not doing a good enough job of explaining the differences.
"The theist says, "It was given to me by someone of superior understanding". The non-theist or atheist however, can only say, "morality is determined by man"."
No, the non-theist says that his/her morality stems from the exact same place as the theist, but the theist has deluded him/herself into thinking that there is an invisible bein of superior understanding handing out morality checks.
"As a result, if your view of morality is in conflict with the view of society as a whole, then you are always wrong and there's no way to argue that you are correct."
Sure there is: Logic and Reason. Voltaire never resorted to saying he was right because God says so & countless other humanist, most of whom were/are unpopular in their time, have made arguments for morality without resorting to claiming they had an invisible friend to back them up.
The poster mentioned:
"Most people (Christians included) have little problem with suggesting evolution is the path by which the world, as we know it, was created."
The theory of evolution doesn't cover how the world was created, it simply covers how species evolve from other species.
There has to be at least one species already there before the theory of evolution has anything at all to say.
> How is it that now an adverse environment is somehow able to make genes suddenly express themselves?
By stressing the system.
If a species is facing extinction due to gross environmental changes, there are all kinds of stresses (greater disease, starvation, difficulty finding mates, etc.)
Since there is no way to know what kind of environmental change is going to happen, there is no way to tell _what_ mutations will be "beneficial" of course.
So it makes sense for a species to have a means of changing drastically, in a variety of ways. And it also makes sense to suppress such a change so long as the environment doesn't much change.
> That said, as an ardent evolutionist with an MS in population genetics, I sometimes have to wonder about things like the bombardier beetle.
A) your problem is that your consider yourself an "ardent evolutionist", implying that you believe in evolution for an emotional reason, rather than logic & evidence.
B) The Bombadier Beetle's system is based on standard "grammar", cells that produce hydroquinones and hydrogen peroxide, peroxidases & catalases are quite common, the BB just puts these together in a different way. &
"Much creationist literature gives an inaccurate account of the process." (the mixture doesn't explode spontaneously when mixed, nor does it explode outside the beetle)
& Intermediate steps not only exist in related creatures, but the steps leading to the BB system are entirely consistent with evolutionary theory (see http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/bombardier.html for a complete exposition).
is all about?
I mean if a newspaper reports what a terrorist says, are they not "providing a vehicle"?
Seems to me that this is exactly about the First A, which was specifically designed to protect views that the Govt. wants to suppress!
However, the student web site may not be able to fight on legal grounds as they are using the U's webserver, thus dragging the U into a potential fight it doesn't want.
While it would be nice to see the UCSD set a better example of supporting unpopular speech, perhaps it would be better for students to get an offsite web page to put their links on.
I would be pretty p**d if s/he spent time working things out on paper.
They teach computer programming here to write code without teaching then to use de-buggers, color coded editors, etc.
And the grads. need at least 6mos of 'on the job' training to learn how to use modern programming environments efficiently.
Someday perhaps educators will learn that there is nothing wrong with teaching students to learn the best tools for the job at hand. Of course theory is important, but teaching theory should not require making students spend hours scratching away with the primitive tools that the theory was originally figured out on!
Ahh well, folks said writing was dead with the advent of the fountain pen (you have to cut your own quill and mix your own ink to understand how to write a _real_ letter, sonny!). Then it was the typewriter...
And so it goes, I expect in fifty years, profs will be saying "Stay off the neural net! You can't really get the answer in holo space! Use your your calculator like a real engineer!"
> 2) Tack and Mike live to 100. Bill lives to 150.
Switch it too:
Gates buys Abrams tanks and defends his mansion against the invading commie armies.
Tack and Mike get killed by commies because we have no tanks.
We have the best military in the world because folks have decided to stop alot (though by no means all!) of the religious infighting over whether privatly or publicly is a better way to spend resources on this one issue and just get it right.
There is no logical reason that the life of our citizens can't be defended from internal diseases with the same vigor that we currently use vs. external enemies.
Unfortunatly, there are plenty of illogical reasons why we don't do this.
The article makes the claim:
"The big potential losers if Apple should switch chips would be software developers. They would be forced -- perhaps for the second time in two years -- to rewrite their programs, this time to make them work with a Pentium-based Mac."
But how much re-writing would actually be required? X already runs a bunch of *nix software, right? What kinds of apps. would need to be "re-written" if the processor was switched to x86?
> The inalienable right is to purchase one's own medical care with wealth one has acquired through productive work.
That sounds like pursuit of happieness. But I was talking about the first inalieanble right, what it meant before the religious right hi-jacked it, & in context what it would mean if "life" was denied to poor Americans (capitalist, communist, or otherwise).
So to return to the context, is denial of medical care a violation of an American's right to life?
> "Yo, Gates. Too much money. Too many toys. Too high a standard of living. You're giving that money to charity or we're taking it from you."
Uh huh. In any event, it doesn't take guns (unless Gates decides to fight), it takes a majority in Congress. And the question was: "how big will the disparity between the lifespan of the poor (here defined as folks who can't afford a
$600,000 test to save their life) have to get before the poor will demand an equal right to life?"
> But if you compare standards of living around the world, you'll find that "the poor" have done a damn sight better under countries with (flawed as they inevitably are) implementations of Capitalism versus any other social system.
So you think that if the rich live for say 30 years longer than the poor, the poor will still feel ok with it because they live longer than the kings of the 1600s? Or because they still live longer than the warlords in Sudan? How about if the rich live 50 years longer?
There is a whole solar system out there & alot more beyond.
The speed of light ain't much of a limit for folks who don't age.
Plenty of room.
No reason to let death erase that software you've been writing for the past (insert current age here) years. It is a wothwhile program your're working on, isn't it?
So you see no problem with a rich person living for 3 or more decades longer than a poor person? No conflict there with the "inalienable rights" guaranteed to all?
BTW, why are you assuming I'm attacking capitalism? Does "capitalism" require a huge difference between the rich and the poor? Does capitalism require that the rich live much longer and healthier lives than the poor?
I think that capitalism merely requires that capital be free to flow to the area most worth investing in, something which seems at odds with having most of the capital locked up in the hands of a few, no?
Finally, what is the point of your dystopic vision of a post-nuclear world? Are you saying that the only choice available is accepting gross divisions between rich and poor or nuking the place?
Surely democracy comes into the equation at some point (as a way of more or less peacefully resolving the differences between groups)?
Uhh, methanol is made from corn. The corn takes the CO2 from the air and converts it to sugar, which a distiller converts to methanol.
The fuel cell puts the CO2 back into the air. Thus there is no net increase in the amount of CO2.
If you still feel bad, for the amount these little cells will produce, pick up a few more houseplants. Or grow yourself some corn.
> Lets not get into the absurd here. Did she know she would miscarry if she drank the coffee? Did she do it deliberately to miscarry? Was there malice involved?
These are the differences between a neglect/manslaughter charge and a charge of murder (did she know the baby would drown if she left it alone in the tub?) & you illustrate my point (that miscarriage would require the same sort of investigation as other infant deaths). The issue still remains that if the fertilized egg is a human being, then the US Govt. is required by the 14thAmendment to extend the full protection of the law to the fertilized egg, the same protection other human beings are afforded.
The fact that this may be difficult or impossible to do is a sign that granting human being status to a fertilized egg is illogical.
(I'm sorry if you feel pointing these conclusions are "inflamatory". I don't, I feel that too often anti-ESCR folks present themselves as the only one's with a moral position in the debate, ignoring that for folks who don't see fertilized eggs or stem cells as human beings, the anti-research position is a brutal stand to take: saying that folks should not be allowed to research cures to some very terrible diseases in order to prevent "harm" to some microscopic goo!)
> You don't even know if the research is going to solve the problem, yet you've come to the conclusion that my (our collective) opposition is eliminating all hopes of a cure. That's quite a stretch.
The leading scientific institutions of the United States (AAAS, NAS, etc.) have come to a similar conclusion (that refusal of public funding is seriously hindering the research), so I'm not just relying on my own training as a molecular biologist here.
> The issue, to me, is the precedent and overhead that goes along with this, and on this I have not drawn a conclusion. It's the dilemma of benefiting from a past evil,
I think your feeling that IVF is "evil" is at the root of our disagreement. In nature, as many as half of conceptions result in an expelled embryo. The woman usually doesn't even notice. IOW, in the natural system, embryos are made and discarded regularly. What logical course could possibly lead to the conclusion that mimicing this process in the lab to allow couples who cannot have children 'normally' is EVIL?
And (since it is the natural course to discard unused embryos) why would it be EVIL to use the discarded ones to try and find cures for disease?
> The embryo is genetically distinct from the mother. It is then "its own owner", if you will. The rest of that paragraph talks of cells that truly are hers. She can do what she wants with them.
So you have no opposition to deriving stem cells from therapeutic cloning?
How much longer will the rich have to live before ordinary folks get really p**d off, do you think?
A decade? (you're right, probably already there when accidents are corrected out)
2 decades?
3?
in the the 21st century.
We'll experience a revolution in biotechnology and it's ability to give folks longer, healthier lives.
But many or the treatments will be very expensive.
At what point does being denied a cure for a disease due to poverty equal being denied the right to life?
Or do we just accept that the rich will live years, maybe decades, longer than the rest of US?
> It certainly is a requirement for a human being, but I don't conclude that individuality is a necessary requirement to label an embryo as human life.
Nor is anyone else, the embryo is human life, as is a living organ or cell culture. ESCR doesn't "kill" human life, either.
That is why the issue of individuality is the key to the discussion.
> I still hold that the embryo is no less human than an adult.
And so if a woman drinks too much coffee and has a misscarriage she should be tried the same as if she drowned her infant?
And so our numbers on births and deaths should be adjusted to count the millions of zygotes that die every day?
> That being said, educate me on the concept and I will attempt to draw a conclusion. In this situation, is there viable life, or is it an unviable mutation (though common)?
Viable life. From two or more fertilized eggs.
> What's the point in bringing this up?
Reagon killed millions of people by blocking research into AIDs. You may well feel morally justified in fighting ESCR, but your (collective) actions are also condemning millions to death. You may well feel that 1 millions zygotes saved = 1 million sick people prevented from being cured by your morality, but at least do the math.
> From my point of view, those cells in the petri dish are the result of murder too.
See above. From my point of view they are cells & it is cells vs. people. From your point of view, it is people vs. people. I would still say this does not automatically mean blocking the research is the best choice, but you'll have to wrestle with that yourself.
> I see your logic here
Then why can't you re-state it properly?
> so an infant isn't really a human being either
Do you think we should apply the same criteria to protecting infants to protecting fertilized eggs? If so, then it requires the filing of a conception certificate and explanations if that conception fails, just as we do for birth, right?
Or do you want these microscopic human beings protected at some lesser level than real human beings? If so, what is your logic?
> If you even try to argue that life begins at birth then you will have a difficult time ever having your voice heard in the scientific community over all of the laughing.
Are you repeating a personal experience for some kind of therapy? If not, what in the world led you to imagine that I would make such a silly statement?
Fact is, "life" doesn't "begin" at all. The sperm is alive, the egg is alive, the blastula is alive, the embryo is alive, and the fetus is alive. At some point, a mass of generic cells becomes an individual of the human species, that is the topic (not Nazis nor dog eating babies, much as you might prefer to discuss those for some reason).
> People are already attempting to clone children that died prematurely so don't tell me that this type of research won't open doors to cloning
Another strawman. If you want to prevent human reproductive cloning, then pass Spectre's bill against it (it would have passed last year if not for the Religious Right's opposition, isn't that wierd?) Meanwhile, we don't reduce speeding by outlawing bicycles, nor does it make any more sense to try and prevent reproductive cloning by outlawing ESCR.
> Again, the qualification of "individual" seems to be arbitrary. The fact remains that it is at least a human being, and for me that's enough cause to take the conservative approach.
Individual is part of the definition of human being (an individual of the human species). Without it, the term is meaningless.
> I belive we are discussing actual human beings. Just because this being is at a stage where it may be come more than one doesn't invalidate that it still is at the very least a human being. Why do you belive that individuality is a necessary requirement?
Three reasons:
1) it is not "at the very least" a human being. In fact, it may well become part of a human being. Human Chimerae with unique DNA from two or more fertilized eggs have been found to be far more common than previously thougth.
2) See above (individuality is part of the definition of "human being").
3) Human clones will happen one day. These folks will not have unique DNA, but they will still be human beings (right?).
> Their DISEASE causes them to suffer and die.
Interestingly, that was the argument Reagan used to justify not spending money on AIDs research.
However, anti-ESCR folks are actively fighting a promising path to cures for a variety of diseases for millions of unique individuals of the human species. Preventing those folks from having access to those cures seems much closer to murder than harvesting some cells from a petri dish to me.
> BTW, IIRC the fetus' heart starts beating at week 3, so "first couple of weeks" might be more accurate than "first several weeks".
Well, Spectre's bill research to 14 days, while other nations have decided on 3 weeks or longer.
> I am not quite convinced we're reached level of understanding and common agreeement where we can say X number of days always equals 'no human being here', which is what a bill like this requires.
Well, every such law involves some risk. Making the research illegal or de-funding it certainly risks killing many people for whom there is no question of their human being status, while taking the risk that God or Science may one day reveal a lower limit.
But we do this all the time in a society, millions of folks are killed on the hiways alone, who might have been saved by a lower speed limit or an all out ban on cars.
In this case it seems to me that the apparent risks of causing death by banning or de-funding the research far outwiegh the potential risks involved in allowing it to go forward.
> The question isn't individual human life, it's human life period.
The question is the difference between 'human life' in general and an individual human being, I think.
> However, when a human being is soley comprised of a very small amount of undifferentiated cells
Again, this redefines "human being": an individual of the human species becomes "anything that might become one or more or several individuals of the human species."
If you are arguing that _potential_ human beings should be treated as _actual_ human beings, then just say so.
But then explain why these potential human beings should not be protected from neglect and abuse as actual human beings are?
> I belive we should take an extremely conservative approach to this unless/untill we can factually say otherwise (something that I don't belive can ever happen).
If it was academic, that would be one thing. However, restricting this research risks causing human beings _for which there is no question whether they are human beings_ to suffer and die. People with Parkinsons, people with heart disease, people with broken spines, people with MS, etc. There is no question whether these folks are human beings, right?
I think the risk of causing suffering & death of human beings is much higher on the part of the folks who want to stop this research.