I can tell you as a grad student with 3 years experience working in an engineering lab, packages are the way to go. Not just in software, but generally in most situations. As others have mentioned, you have the ease of use, tech support, and the time savings. While you may eke out a little bit of performance, your time is of significant cost to the lab, with which you can be doing many other more valuable services. Also, as a student, you will likely only be there for a couple of years. When you leave, and something goes wrong, someone else has to sort through what you did to try and fix it.
Popular science ran an interesting article a while ago linked here, where a doctor at the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research found stem cells in her childs baby teeth. While this would limit the possibilities for "rejection free transplants", it doesn't have any real moral repercussions and would provide a way of obtaining stem cells for research purposes.
As for the cloning aspect to obtain stem cells, I believe that when one views human life to be so cheap that it can be grown in a tube and thrown away at will for the sake of harvesting a few cells, it has far greater ramifications into many other views and attitudes that society adopts. Just some food for thought.
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I can tell you as a grad student with 3 years experience working in an engineering lab, packages are the way to go. Not just in software, but generally in most situations. As others have mentioned, you have the ease of use, tech support, and the time savings. While you may eke out a little bit of performance, your time is of significant cost to the lab, with which you can be doing many other more valuable services. Also, as a student, you will likely only be there for a couple of years. When you leave, and something goes wrong, someone else has to sort through what you did to try and fix it.
Popular science ran an interesting article a while ago linked here, where a doctor at the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research found stem cells in her childs baby teeth. While this would limit the possibilities for "rejection free transplants", it doesn't have any real moral repercussions and would provide a way of obtaining stem cells for research purposes. As for the cloning aspect to obtain stem cells, I believe that when one views human life to be so cheap that it can be grown in a tube and thrown away at will for the sake of harvesting a few cells, it has far greater ramifications into many other views and attitudes that society adopts. Just some food for thought.