Yes, I would hope there are better sources. If I want to know about a biological problem, then the last person I am going to ask is a psychologist/psychiatrist. If you want me to take that seriously, you'd better come up with a much more credible source (and I doubt that my hankles could be defined as "easily raised" if that is your source). Please understand that the reason I say this is because your assertion is in the extreme minority, I personally have never heard anyone posit the theory that Alzheimer's is a psychological disease, so the onus really is on you to back that up.
If you really want to know what we know about Alzheimner's, for instance, I suggest you read this. Similar resources exist for each of those conditions I mentioned and are quite easily found.
Exactly. "Forces" being selective pressure. Evolution occurs by mutation>selection>replication, anything that is beneficial means you get to replication faster and you populate the world with your genes. I definitely did NOT mean to imply the intelligent design theory.
Well, organ replacement is just one idea. Some scenarios for organ replacement you did not mention would be kidney failure in diabetics for example, that is not the fault of self-exposure.
The most exciting development would be the ability to treat non-organ centric diseases, such as Parkinsons, spinal cord injuries, Alzheimer's, ALS, and the list goes on and on. The idea is that by applying pre-differentiated cells (as opposed to "adult" cells which have already made the choice to become liver, heart, lung, etc.) those cells can then supplant themselves and replace the surrounding damaged tissue, thus relieving and even reversing the symptoms.
Also, something not mentioned in this discussion yet, study of predifferentiated cells can lead to an understanding of how cells turn on and off. This would be the key to understanding cancers. Cloning would be important to maintain a cell line with a specific genetic makeup (say, a defect or specific gene sequence) which could be transferred and studied. Current tech to do this is very limited.
When Homo sapiens first came to be (speciated), our life span was not very long. Modern humans, as opposed to that ancient human, have found methods of prolonging their lifespan, none of which are the products of evolution.
And please don't tell me we are going to have an argument about evolution, too;)
It depends on what your definiton of "fertilized" is. It is not, in fact, fertilized by conventional means (ie sperm). The eggs were stripped of their nuclear material and a new nucleus (w/ DNA) was inserted into them. The egg allows the new DNA to direct the development of a genetically-identical copy of whatever you took the nucleus out of. That is how cloning works.
But you are quite correct that if implanted into a uterus it would probably grow. In that sense, the egg is "fertile."
So the nucleus is the material that carries all of the info. necessary to make a person. But it can't do that without the egg. The egg contains the means to support the development of an organism, but it can't do that without the uterus (host) OR the DNA. So you are arguing semantics. None of these pieces by themselves constitute a viable organism. The newly made embryo is not, IMO, a person, because it cannot become one unless some very specific conditions are met.
That is an interesting argument: "dilution of the gene pool." Let me bring up one point that you may not have considered. We were never designed by evolution to live as long as we do. Things like Alzheimer's or Parkinson's are generally diseases of advanced age. Therefore, this does not necessarily mean that, genetically speaking, the individual was inferior. They would have survived (and obviously did) long ago because selective pressure was not against them (ie they lived to reproductive age and died before said disease showed up). Today they are just living long enough to display the disease.
Also your point about genetic recoding viruses is interesting. But you should know that we carry the detritus of hundreds of thousands of years of virus infections, that have left junk in our DNA that is now permanent. In fact, everyone of us carries in our genome the genetic code for cytomegalovirus (CMV). In very few individuals does this become a problem but it happens. We will continue to accumulate such in our genome and there is no way to go back to "safe genetic stock."
"Unborn human being"? What I would call it is a tissue sample created in the lab. Is "unborn human being" what you would call those millions of embryoes created each year for infertile couples? Oh, let's not forget that 80% of those will never see the light of day. If you ask me, by your definition that sounds not just like Nazi's but a freakin' holocaust! But that's all perfectly legal, of course.
Just because you have your particular defintion of human life doesn't mean the rest of us should suffer because of it. When I am old and suffering from Parkinson's so bad my whole body shakes, I will be glad when a doctor suggests some type of stem cell treatment. If this medical advancement is distasteful to you, then I suggest you stop going to the doctor and start practising holistic medicine, because just about all of modern medicine has grown from research that has been conducted (to the detriment on some group) through experimentation.
Your not going to get far in bioinformatics coming from the CS side. You need a good background in biology and/or biophysics. There is a top notch program at Johns Hopkins which is designed for CS people who want to work in computational biology. (They have a tough time attracting CS types because the pay is lousy, so they are always on the lookout for good people). Check it out at:
http://www.jhu.edu/~ibr/bwf/index.html
Good luck!
Re:why this doesn't mean people are next.
on
More Clones!
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· Score: 1
That's not true. The real difficulty in cloning higher mammals is really just a technical difficulty. A key protein needed for chromosome migration during cell division is removed from the cell at the time the DNA is removed. Without that protein, the new cell cannot divide and it is dead before it gets a chance. Once this problem is overcome, human cloning could be much easier. Read about it here:
http://www.nature.com/nsu/030407/030407-12.html
Quote:
"Their wild-type substrate interacts with 12-18 residues, so multiply that by your 20 standard amino acids across these interacting residues and you have a crapload of sequences to deal with (10^15 to 10^23; I'll take their word for it)"
That's a good point. The paper notes that this problem is not soluble by the combinatorial method as you described it. It is a combinatoric process to start blindly investigating every possible combination, in this case that's 10^76 possible combinations. To make these proteins would require more material than exists in the universe! In rational design, you attempt to "fit" the ligands by designing complementary van der Waals surfaces and other non-covalent interactions. The actual strategy employed in the paper was somewhere inbetween, by building a search tree and eliminating dead ends.
I think this is why the paper received so much attention. There has not been much success in rational design, a field which has failed horribly since it's inception. A fact that is especially galling considering the money that was thrown into it by many organizations. Still, it's a very sophisticated discussion of the paper by this group!
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If you really want to know what we know about Alzheimner's, for instance, I suggest you read this. Similar resources exist for each of those conditions I mentioned and are quite easily found.
Exactly. "Forces" being selective pressure. Evolution occurs by mutation>selection>replication, anything that is beneficial means you get to replication faster and you populate the world with your genes. I definitely did NOT mean to imply the intelligent design theory.
The most exciting development would be the ability to treat non-organ centric diseases, such as Parkinsons, spinal cord injuries, Alzheimer's, ALS, and the list goes on and on. The idea is that by applying pre-differentiated cells (as opposed to "adult" cells which have already made the choice to become liver, heart, lung, etc.) those cells can then supplant themselves and replace the surrounding damaged tissue, thus relieving and even reversing the symptoms.
Also, something not mentioned in this discussion yet, study of predifferentiated cells can lead to an understanding of how cells turn on and off. This would be the key to understanding cancers. Cloning would be important to maintain a cell line with a specific genetic makeup (say, a defect or specific gene sequence) which could be transferred and studied. Current tech to do this is very limited.
And please don't tell me we are going to have an argument about evolution, too ;)
But you are quite correct that if implanted into a uterus it would probably grow. In that sense, the egg is "fertile."
So the nucleus is the material that carries all of the info. necessary to make a person. But it can't do that without the egg. The egg contains the means to support the development of an organism, but it can't do that without the uterus (host) OR the DNA. So you are arguing semantics. None of these pieces by themselves constitute a viable organism. The newly made embryo is not, IMO, a person, because it cannot become one unless some very specific conditions are met.
Also your point about genetic recoding viruses is interesting. But you should know that we carry the detritus of hundreds of thousands of years of virus infections, that have left junk in our DNA that is now permanent. In fact, everyone of us carries in our genome the genetic code for cytomegalovirus (CMV). In very few individuals does this become a problem but it happens. We will continue to accumulate such in our genome and there is no way to go back to "safe genetic stock."
"Unborn human being"? What I would call it is a tissue sample created in the lab. Is "unborn human being" what you would call those millions of embryoes created each year for infertile couples? Oh, let's not forget that 80% of those will never see the light of day. If you ask me, by your definition that sounds not just like Nazi's but a freakin' holocaust! But that's all perfectly legal, of course. Just because you have your particular defintion of human life doesn't mean the rest of us should suffer because of it. When I am old and suffering from Parkinson's so bad my whole body shakes, I will be glad when a doctor suggests some type of stem cell treatment. If this medical advancement is distasteful to you, then I suggest you stop going to the doctor and start practising holistic medicine, because just about all of modern medicine has grown from research that has been conducted (to the detriment on some group) through experimentation.
Your not going to get far in bioinformatics coming from the CS side. You need a good background in biology and/or biophysics. There is a top notch program at Johns Hopkins which is designed for CS people who want to work in computational biology. (They have a tough time attracting CS types because the pay is lousy, so they are always on the lookout for good people). Check it out at: http://www.jhu.edu/~ibr/bwf/index.html Good luck!
That's not true. The real difficulty in cloning higher mammals is really just a technical difficulty. A key protein needed for chromosome migration during cell division is removed from the cell at the time the DNA is removed. Without that protein, the new cell cannot divide and it is dead before it gets a chance. Once this problem is overcome, human cloning could be much easier. Read about it here: http://www.nature.com/nsu/030407/030407-12.html
Quote: "Their wild-type substrate interacts with 12-18 residues, so multiply that by your 20 standard amino acids across these interacting residues and you have a crapload of sequences to deal with (10^15 to 10^23; I'll take their word for it)" That's a good point. The paper notes that this problem is not soluble by the combinatorial method as you described it. It is a combinatoric process to start blindly investigating every possible combination, in this case that's 10^76 possible combinations. To make these proteins would require more material than exists in the universe! In rational design, you attempt to "fit" the ligands by designing complementary van der Waals surfaces and other non-covalent interactions. The actual strategy employed in the paper was somewhere inbetween, by building a search tree and eliminating dead ends. I think this is why the paper received so much attention. There has not been much success in rational design, a field which has failed horribly since it's inception. A fact that is especially galling considering the money that was thrown into it by many organizations. Still, it's a very sophisticated discussion of the paper by this group!