In your example, enhancing production efficiency while doing nothing about the displaced workers is detrimentary to society and thus counter-productive. Only ideological zealots would consider improving "efficiency" at all costs as something desirable. As I said, in their "ideal" society there is one person who owns the entire planet, all means of production are automated and everyone else is utterly unemployed.
...and in an ideal world no new children's games will be allowed unless they can be demonstrated to consume at least as much manufactured material as the most complex of existing games. This is how we will ensure full employment.
aaah-aaahripoff!!-choo! So you just read Michael Crichton's new bullship polemic and you think you're an expert, heh? I read it too. Pull your head out of your ass and realize that it's a novel. It's fictionalized. Spurious. Not genuine. The research he cites doesn't come any where close to proving the points he makes in the book. He uses a compelling--i.e. strong--character to make the anti-global warming argument and weak ignoramus characters to feebly try to make counterclaims with no access to the research that has been carried out on the subject. Alarm bells should be ringing in your head, my young embryonic scientist friend. Of course he gets away with this shit because he's just a novelist. This doesn't cut the mustard once people actually take him at his word instead of looking into the matter for themselves. Of course, even if they look into the matter honestly, most of the people who have been swayed by his story lack the training to be able to actually interpret the data in a meaningful way. So they'll do what you've done: they'll take the facile ready-made argument route and assume that that compelling little murder and conspiracy ditty they just read must be true.
In other news, Michael Crichton is a would-be doctor who discovered in med school that he was too scared of blood to pursue his goal and turned to writing instead. That is, he has some scientific training, and should have the ability to at least evaluate the arguments honestly. That he hasn't suggests that he has another agenda in mind, rather than that he is just too ignorant to understand what the arguments are. Talk about double-talk! In the epilogue of his rant he lambasts the media for presenting a biased account of the global warming issue, while in the body of the book and throughout the sober-sounding epilogue he claims that such-and-such a paper proves his point, while in fact it may say precisely the opposite.
Damn him for standing behind his novelist protection while presenting this twisted crap argument. His research doesn't stand up to scrutiny, but it'll convince many well-meaning people who lack the training and time to make an evaluation of the subject themselves.
It's pretty clear that you're referring to telomere biology and telomere metabolism in particular, but you're getting some of the facts wrong. Telomeres, stretches of repetative DNA that degrade with each replication cycle due to the end replication problem, are at the ends of linear chromosomes, they're not connectors b/w strands of DNA. It is also not clear that telomere metabolism is a primary determinant of organismal aging. It might be, but it hasn't been shown to be, though not for lack of trying--lots of correlation, little proof. If you want a good overview, read any review article on telomeres or telomerase by Elizabeth Blackburn (UCSF researcher who probably deserves a Nobel for her work on telomerase) or Titia de Lange (Rockefeller University researcher doing some of the most rapid basic science on telomerase control proteins). Very interesting stuff.
Oh, and we've known about telomeres since Barbara McClintock and the Hayflick and Moorhead experiments in the 50's and 60's. We didn't discover them with Dolly.
Yeah, you're right. [to lab group behind me:] "We better stop everything and take a breather, people. With all the hubbub of discovery here, we haven't had a *single minute* to think about evolution. I know we're all biologists here, but does anybody remember what evolution is? I mean, I know it had something to do with dinosaurs, but...hmm...there was something called natural selection, too; was it "Mutation gives rise to potentially advantagious traits which may give a higher level of fitness in a population," or was it the other way around? Fuck it, let's cure aging and then we can work on the evolutionary implications tomorrow."
Sorry, couldn't resist. I don't think we need to 'stop and think,' as if the Ian Malcolm character in Jurassic Park ("you don't take any responsibility for your work, you stand on the corner of genius and now you've slapped it on a lunchbox and you're going to sell it") was right. That just ain't the way science works, homie, but you probably knew that. But then, this Aubrey de Grey clown isn't a biologist (he's cs), so if he thinks that all there is to curing aging is applying the basic research that's already out there, some biologist is likely to reality-check his ass into oblivion pretty soon. Don't worry--you're not likely to wake up tomorrow to find that you can live forever and it just never occured to any of the researchers working on it that there might be, you know, other issues involved besides just getting to see alternative energy sources and flying cars come of age.
Good work, my man. I thought this was a forum for geeks, but I had to wade through eleventy billion retarded biblical age polemics to find someone even starting to mention cellular aging.
Fortunately, telomere biology is a pretty frickin' huge field, with a lot of major science players. Most people are working the telomere-cancer angle, but understanding cellular aging from a gerontology perspective has its own niche and will benefit massively from the research being done now.
I work in a telomere lab, so keeping up with the new telomere/telomerase research is a pretty big part of what I do. The number of articles coming out each week is astounding--I have an automatic pubmed update that sends me hundreds of new articles/week based on telomere-related keywords.
Not to nitpick, but because of the way that telomeres function (they have a significant protein component that interacts with the DNA and requires >>0 telomeric repeats to function), telomere 'metabolism' (the shortening of telomeres due to the end-replication problem and lengthening due to the enzyme telomerase) affects cell lifespans and chromosomal integrity long long before even normal old age. Telomeric shortening is a likely cause of cellular and organismal aging, and telomeric lengthening is implicated in >90% of cancers. Understanding this problem is of paramount importance in making headway in describing normal aging, let alone supergeriatrics.
Somewhere you missed that ES cells don't come from babies aborted for the purpose of developing stem cells, they come from embryos that are already being destroyed (incinerated usually). If you're against abortion, fine; it's a tenable position, though one that I don't agree with. Neither do most Americans agree with you. So fight (by voting, writing, preaching, whatever non-violent means you choose) against abortion if that's what your religion or ethics tell you to do.
But why insist that there be no medical benefit from what, under our current law, amounts to waste? And why demean the researchers working on stem cells? Most of the researchers and doctors working on ES-based treatments (I would say all, but some/.er would come up with an absurd counter, no doubt) are motivated by finding life-saving treatments for injured people--surely that's not objectionable to anyone but some radical 'christian scientist' types (I mean here the christian sect that rejects medical attention, not scientists who are christians).
As for your IP--researchers just want to murder people and patent their genes--bullshit, I should point out that most researchers working on medical problems never get extra money for their work that gets patented. If they make a significant discovery at an academic institution, their university owns their research. The university may sell the technology to a drug company for development (so called 'technology transfer') who will probably patent it. Most researchers (leaving Craig Venter and his ilk aside for the moment) don't benefit from patenting research or results. Indeed, when a researcher publishes an article in a scientific journal, it becomes essentially public domain for other researchers to build on and borrow from. Researchers are even required, as part of their publication agreement, to provide strains and other materials used in their methodology to other researchers upon request.
So you've pointed your finger wrongly twice in your post. Because many people's lives and quality of life hang in the balance of what is unfortunately becoming an issue dominated by public opinion rather than good medical or ethical considerations, I urge you to reconsider your stance.
Yeah, I love how pipettes mean *SCIENCE* [in a "Welcome to the world of tomorrow" voice]. Accompany any half-assed magazine article with a pic of pipettes or flasks filled with colored liquid (what is that, urine?) and it just screams "valid earth-shaking scientificky stuff!" to Joe Public.
Sure, you're right--science takes time. Self-correction in science takes time. But there are two things meant by self-correcting here. First, that fraud is uncovered. This occurs on the timescale of current research. Verification is fast, and attempts to build on another researcher's falsified work will (generally) quickly identify those falsehoods so that they can be excised from the accepted body of evidence describing a scientific problem. Of course, even here, fast is actually pretty slow to the public eye, which sees very little to none of the science behind some newspaper article giving a precis of it.
Second, self-correction also means changing the accepted interpretation of a scientific problem as new evidence comes to light. This, of course, takes time (c.f. flat earth-->round earth). Discoveries and new ideas take time to surface, but we're getting better at it, largely because science operates largely on a hypothesis-driven research model. Despite his appeal to our Horatio Alger self-made-man ideal in the US, the garage tinkerer who looks to just happen upon some interesting discovery is pretty ineffective.
Also, your comparison of the timescale of science's successes to the timescale of the betterment of the 'general human condition' was a joke, right? Look at the advancements in medicine, in materials science, in communication, in {insert damn-near any cool aspect of modern living here} and tell me that one again. 'Science' (as we're talking about it here) has been a dominant paridigm of discovery for, say, a few hundred years (of course somebody will argue with this, but I'll toss it out there anyway). In that time, look at what it has given us.
Quit with the jackass attitude and listen to the argument being made by the people who fault Bush for his actions with regard to the Kyoto Treaty--especially listen to why Kerry faults him for it. It is NOT being said that the Kyoto Treaty was flawless or should have been supported. What Kerry has said is that Bush was presented with a flawed treaty and, instead of having his people re-work it and lobby for the US's interests to be better supported by the treaty, he walked away from an international effort that would have been especially useful in smoothing over our relations during a period in which we were not exactly in everyone's good graces.
No doubt at this point somebody'll say that we can't be controlled by international entanglements that could hamstring our domestic policies or "way of life" (whatever that is). That is sometimes true, as in the case of our necessary defensive capabilities, but the obvious reality of the world is that we NEED allies, both strategically and tactically, if we're going to defend ourselves and obtain favorable import/export agreements with other countries. The most odious issue with Bush's involvement with the Kyoto Treaty is that it's another instance of his squandering international goodwill with a cavalier cowboy attitude. This is the basic neocon modus operandi and there's no indication that they've learned anything or will change if re-elected/appointed.
Of course you're right regarding blanket statements, and perhaps I was a little sloppy in my terms. Being as this is a politically-charged issue, I wanted to make my previous post as readable as possible to non-biologists. I may have sacrificed some precision (especially in using 'tissue' when I really meant 'differentiated cell types').
However, to clarify: stem cell-based models are advantageous over current animal- or cancer cell-based models for some (not all) disease physiology studies. Advancing the accuracy of disease physiology understanding will, I maintain, significantly advance the potential for new drugs and treatments for those diseases. In so doing, we may "see cures or treatments advanced by years or decades" when the restrictions that have been hamstringing those studies are removed, as I said before. For a specific example, think of a non cancer cell-derived model for chromosomal structure studies. Telomere studies have been slowly advancing for nearly 20 years now. We can't learn enough about normal state telomeres in cancer cell models, because aberrant telomerase activation is a major passage point for cancer cells (90+% of cancer cells have telomerase aberrantly active, and the other 10% use the ALT (alternative lengthening of telomeres) pathway, which is just as problematic). We can't learn much from other animal models, such as mice or Drosophila, because telomere control mechanisms appear to be evolving rapidly (Mus musculus and Mus spretus telomere lenths differ by an order of magnitude or more and probably neither is an adequate model for human telomeres). Were a stem cell-based model for telomere metabolism and telomerase control available for researchers, it could push telomere biology forward rapidly. Since telomere metabolism is crucially linked to cancer and aging, suddenly telomere control mechanisms all become cancer drug targets. This is only one application from one small corner of molecular and cellular biology, but you wouldn't have to dig deep to find similar applications spread into niches all across biology.
Secondly, I ask that you re-read my original post. I suggested that individuals should ask experts, or read expert opinions, before deciding for themselves about the ethical and scientific merits and drawbacks surrounding stem cell research. I explicitly included spiritual/religious figures in that expert category (c.f. "priest, rabbi, whatever" in my original post). I agree that the issue, being multifaceted, needs the input of scientists and ethicists/religious types alike, and that ultimately a person's stance on the issue is their decision. However, I resent it when people will quote or paraphrase the president (or any other politically-motivated person) as the sum total of their opinion. This is a large, important, and wide-reaching issue, and it deserves more consideration than the regurgitation of a sound bite.
I also strongly disagree with your statement that president bush has understood or has been willing to compromise on this or virtually any other scientific issue. Bush has cast the issue in strictly moralist terms and has denied the value and potential benefits of the research. How is that balance? Bush has removed prominent experts from his bioethics advisory panel when their views conflicted with his own. How is that compromise or understanding? I'm a little peeved that you would call bush's statements and stances on the stem cell issue balanced, but would imply that my own suggestion that people learn more before deciding for themselves is one-sided.
Oh, and those links you included didn't have anything to do with mouse or stem cell models; perhaps the UIDs got messed up. Could you just cite the articles directly (i.e. standard journal citation), rather than linking to them?
Um, no. Stem cell research is not a 20-year-out technology. Injecting stem cells into a wounded area, such as an injured spinal column and manipulating them to regrow functional tissues may be a 20-year out technology. But one of the main uses of stem cells is as a much-improved model for human tissues. Current non-stem cell lines used as research models come from cancers that have been harvested (such as HeLa cells) or from non human mammals. These are of limited use as models, since cancer cells and normal tissue cells are fundamentally different, often in ways that can't be anticipated. Stem cell research will provide researchers of human diseases a much more useful and accurate model *immediately*. That is not an exaggeration. Labs are set up and ready to go for this stuff, and we may well see cures or treatments advanced by years or decades when the restrictions are removed. That may mean the public sees results as near to immediately as one could fathom (read: as soon as the treatments pass through FDA trials and testing).
Fundamentally, I think this is a case of gross misrepresentation of the issue at hand by interested parties, which is not an uncommon tactic, and I certainly wouldn't go waving my hands around about a 'conspiracy' or anything. El presidente has cast the issue into a strictly moralist light, confusing the public into believing that there's questionable science and benefits to stem cells (they aren't questionable--ask any biologist involved in disease research), while also making it appear to be a clear-cut ethical choice (it's not--the fetuses are already being thrown out at fertility clinics). In sum, stem cell research is extremely promising 20 years out, but is every bit as promising on the order of a month out (from when their use is condoned), and present no more of an ethical dilemma than using, say, a car accident victim's organs for the benefit of another human being.
If you don't believe me, fine, go read about it for yourself. But learn how to read a scientific journal, talk to a biologist, talk to an ethicist, a priest, or a rabbi, or whatever; don't just take the president's word for it during a time when potentially life-saving technologies are being used as ammunition for politics.
This may have already been pointed out, but neither Physics Today nor MIT's Technology Review are scientific journals. They are layperson review jounals, not journals in which peer-reviewed research articles are presented. This isn't just a pedantic distinction--there's a major difference between a peer-reviewed article on cold fusion (or any other area of research) and an op-ed piece in a review/news journal like the ones mentioned.
So long as we're going there, I might point out that "you havent mastered" in your post should be "you haven't mastered." In English when a word is contracted, we put an apostrophe as a placeholder for the omitted letters.
or maybe we shouldn't insist on absolutely proper speech, especially in the instance of typos, when we're conversing in a manner that more closely resembles verbal chatting. Nobody (who matters) would insist on proper grammer when just chatting.
Actually, there has been a substantial amount of research on physiological differences by geography amongst athletes, but most of the science editors of the popular media outlets have had the good sense to not highlight it and bring it before the general public like they do with, say, cancer research, or other hope-bringing medical advances. See the July 30, 2004 Science for example. It's good that they do this because some layman fucktard would not understand the science behind it, misconstrue it as justification for an absurd and unsupported position on intelligence and achievement between races, and lead us over the brink. This person (the fucktard) would probably be either a politician or a contributor to an online chat forum (I don't mean you, parent or grandparent, I'm presupposing some replies here) in all probability.
The reason that evidence for physiological differences between races in athletic competitions should not be used as evidence of innate intellectual differences is that 1.) There is no reason at all that the two would be connected.
2.) We lack the science to resolve significant differences in cognitive ability and justify them on a biological level, so right now we'd have to rely on psychology for such studies. Psychology is a non-science discipline just north of a divining rod or horoscope in its degree of accuracy.
3.) As you point out, a truly massive number of external factors would have to be controlled for, some of which are completely unknown (e.g. your grandfather taught you to tie knots when you were really little, and thus your interest in plane geometry and mathematics was stimilated a little at just the right time).
So while we have some knowledge about basic differences between races, like tanning, muscle and skeletal development, and disease succeptability, those things are usually due to only one or two differences in a couple of proteins and are, in a relative sense, easy to explore and explain. The brain is many orders of magnitude more complex and we aren't even close to understanding its development or functioning, so lets not go there.
good post. This should have been modded up...
I like the gutter example. It may be silly, but it's not at all farfetched to think that some christian groups would put up a fight along those lines if their pastor/preacher/priest told them to.
whoops. typo--3rd sentence 2nd paragraph should read "While you might have come across some "evolutionist" who described his understanding of evolution in terms suggesting Lamarckian inheritance, it should be noted that an evolutionist is not an evolutionary biologist--viz he is a layman, probably possessing no greater an understanding of evolution than you have, and he was talking to you with only his left buttcheek."
Sorry 'bout that.
It's nice to know that at least a few creationist/anti-evolutionist types can put together a well-considered post (or at least a post which uses complete sentences and correct punctuation). In my experience, most creationists have such a head-in-the-sand attitude that one wonders if they'd still believe the earth was flat and at the center of the solar system if their pastor/preacher/priest hadn't told them otherwise.
That said, your post, while well-considered, contains some errors and misconceptions that lead you to an easily refuted conclusion. First off, the theory of evolution does not rely on Lamarckian inheritance at all. While you might have come across some "evolutionist" who described his understanding of evolution in terms suggesting Lamarckian inheritance, it should be noted that an evolutionist was probably not an evolutionary biologist--viz he is a layman, probably possessing no greater an understanding of evolution than you have, and he was talking to you with only his left buttcheek.
Go talk to an evolutionary biologist instead. If you have him explain evolution to you, you'll find that an no time does he use the crutch of Lamarckian inheritance, which is not accepted by serious biologists. Evolution is complete without Lamarck. Nucleic acid changes, acquired through chance primarily due to genetic damage and repair pathways and through meiosis/crossing over events, are passed on to offspring and natural selection acts upon the change in fitness which those nucleic acid changes create. This is just cursory review, as you seem to understand that much. However, you don't seem to see that somatic (body) cells play no role in this; it's changes in germ (sex) cell lines which are passed on. Those sex cell changes create differences in progeny somatic cells because (obviously) sex cells (egg+sperm) become all the cells in the body, including somatic cells and the progeny's germ cell line. The progeny's somatic cell line is typically what is thought of as the substrate for natural selection, as phenotypic changes in the soma can create obvious morphology differences which are easily illustrated in textbooks and which schoolchildren can easily think of as being more or less fit in a given niche.
In other words, [Organism 1+mutation in organism 1 sex cell line]+[organism 2]=>[Organism 1'+2]. If [organism 1'+2] is more fit than other organisms in the population, then the change that occurred to the sex cell line of organism 1 is more likely to be propogated in the population. At no point do mutations to the somatic cells need to be passed on for natural selection, and by extention evolution, to work.
So, sadly for creationists, there is no Lamarckian flaw in evolution. There is also no reason that evolution couldn't be fit into christian belief structures, but that would require pulling your head out of the sand, now wouldn't it?
I dug the "science against evolution" page, btw. I love it when creationist types come up with stuff like that--it inevitably backfires and makes them look like raving retards. I won't even deign to refute any of it.
Oh, folks, we have a winner here! Mr. Coward has pointed out that in the micro-principality of Andorra, Chess has officially been declared a sport. It must be so. According to international laws governing the definition of sports, all other governments and peoples are required to respect and recognize Andorra's stance.
Yeah, yeah, he probably wasn't trying to say that 'officially' extends to worldwide, but hell, just the notion of chess being officially a sport has me in a tizzy.
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In your example, enhancing production efficiency while doing nothing about the displaced workers is detrimentary to society and thus counter-productive. Only ideological zealots would consider improving "efficiency" at all costs as something desirable. As I said, in their "ideal" society there is one person who owns the entire planet, all means of production are automated and everyone else is utterly unemployed.
...and in an ideal world no new children's games will be allowed unless they can be demonstrated to consume at least as much manufactured material as the most complex of existing games. This is how we will ensure full employment.
Quick, everybody, look! It's a Frenchman standing up to a Nazi!
[sings] And the times, they are a-changin'
aaah-aaahripoff!!-choo! So you just read Michael Crichton's new bullship polemic and you think you're an expert, heh? I read it too. Pull your head out of your ass and realize that it's a novel. It's fictionalized. Spurious. Not genuine. The research he cites doesn't come any where close to proving the points he makes in the book. He uses a compelling--i.e. strong--character to make the anti-global warming argument and weak ignoramus characters to feebly try to make counterclaims with no access to the research that has been carried out on the subject. Alarm bells should be ringing in your head, my young embryonic scientist friend. Of course he gets away with this shit because he's just a novelist. This doesn't cut the mustard once people actually take him at his word instead of looking into the matter for themselves. Of course, even if they look into the matter honestly, most of the people who have been swayed by his story lack the training to be able to actually interpret the data in a meaningful way. So they'll do what you've done: they'll take the facile ready-made argument route and assume that that compelling little murder and conspiracy ditty they just read must be true.
In other news, Michael Crichton is a would-be doctor who discovered in med school that he was too scared of blood to pursue his goal and turned to writing instead. That is, he has some scientific training, and should have the ability to at least evaluate the arguments honestly. That he hasn't suggests that he has another agenda in mind, rather than that he is just too ignorant to understand what the arguments are. Talk about double-talk! In the epilogue of his rant he lambasts the media for presenting a biased account of the global warming issue, while in the body of the book and throughout the sober-sounding epilogue he claims that such-and-such a paper proves his point, while in fact it may say precisely the opposite.
Damn him for standing behind his novelist protection while presenting this twisted crap argument. His research doesn't stand up to scrutiny, but it'll convince many well-meaning people who lack the training and time to make an evaluation of the subject themselves.
Is anybody else thinking about how cool it would be to put one of these in the glovebox and have a compact car computer running OSX for ~700 clams?
It's pretty clear that you're referring to telomere biology and telomere metabolism in particular, but you're getting some of the facts wrong. Telomeres, stretches of repetative DNA that degrade with each replication cycle due to the end replication problem, are at the ends of linear chromosomes, they're not connectors b/w strands of DNA. It is also not clear that telomere metabolism is a primary determinant of organismal aging. It might be, but it hasn't been shown to be, though not for lack of trying--lots of correlation, little proof. If you want a good overview, read any review article on telomeres or telomerase by Elizabeth Blackburn (UCSF researcher who probably deserves a Nobel for her work on telomerase) or Titia de Lange (Rockefeller University researcher doing some of the most rapid basic science on telomerase control proteins). Very interesting stuff.
Oh, and we've known about telomeres since Barbara McClintock and the Hayflick and Moorhead experiments in the 50's and 60's. We didn't discover them with Dolly.
Yeah, you're right. [to lab group behind me:] "We better stop everything and take a breather, people. With all the hubbub of discovery here, we haven't had a *single minute* to think about evolution. I know we're all biologists here, but does anybody remember what evolution is? I mean, I know it had something to do with dinosaurs, but...hmm...there was something called natural selection, too; was it "Mutation gives rise to potentially advantagious traits which may give a higher level of fitness in a population," or was it the other way around? Fuck it, let's cure aging and then we can work on the evolutionary implications tomorrow."
Sorry, couldn't resist. I don't think we need to 'stop and think,' as if the Ian Malcolm character in Jurassic Park ("you don't take any responsibility for your work, you stand on the corner of genius and now you've slapped it on a lunchbox and you're going to sell it") was right. That just ain't the way science works, homie, but you probably knew that. But then, this Aubrey de Grey clown isn't a biologist (he's cs), so if he thinks that all there is to curing aging is applying the basic research that's already out there, some biologist is likely to reality-check his ass into oblivion pretty soon. Don't worry--you're not likely to wake up tomorrow to find that you can live forever and it just never occured to any of the researchers working on it that there might be, you know, other issues involved besides just getting to see alternative energy sources and flying cars come of age.
Good work, my man. I thought this was a forum for geeks, but I had to wade through eleventy billion retarded biblical age polemics to find someone even starting to mention cellular aging.
Fortunately, telomere biology is a pretty frickin' huge field, with a lot of major science players. Most people are working the telomere-cancer angle, but understanding cellular aging from a gerontology perspective has its own niche and will benefit massively from the research being done now.
I work in a telomere lab, so keeping up with the new telomere/telomerase research is a pretty big part of what I do. The number of articles coming out each week is astounding--I have an automatic pubmed update that sends me hundreds of new articles/week based on telomere-related keywords.
Not to nitpick, but because of the way that telomeres function (they have a significant protein component that interacts with the DNA and requires >>0 telomeric repeats to function), telomere 'metabolism' (the shortening of telomeres due to the end-replication problem and lengthening due to the enzyme telomerase) affects cell lifespans and chromosomal integrity long long before even normal old age. Telomeric shortening is a likely cause of cellular and organismal aging, and telomeric lengthening is implicated in >90% of cancers. Understanding this problem is of paramount importance in making headway in describing normal aging, let alone supergeriatrics.
Somewhere you missed that ES cells don't come from babies aborted for the purpose of developing stem cells, they come from embryos that are already being destroyed (incinerated usually). If you're against abortion, fine; it's a tenable position, though one that I don't agree with. Neither do most Americans agree with you. So fight (by voting, writing, preaching, whatever non-violent means you choose) against abortion if that's what your religion or ethics tell you to do.
/.er would come up with an absurd counter, no doubt) are motivated by finding life-saving treatments for injured people--surely that's not objectionable to anyone but some radical 'christian scientist' types (I mean here the christian sect that rejects medical attention, not scientists who are christians).
But why insist that there be no medical benefit from what, under our current law, amounts to waste? And why demean the researchers working on stem cells? Most of the researchers and doctors working on ES-based treatments (I would say all, but some
As for your IP--researchers just want to murder people and patent their genes--bullshit, I should point out that most researchers working on medical problems never get extra money for their work that gets patented. If they make a significant discovery at an academic institution, their university owns their research. The university may sell the technology to a drug company for development (so called 'technology transfer') who will probably patent it. Most researchers (leaving Craig Venter and his ilk aside for the moment) don't benefit from patenting research or results. Indeed, when a researcher publishes an article in a scientific journal, it becomes essentially public domain for other researchers to build on and borrow from. Researchers are even required, as part of their publication agreement, to provide strains and other materials used in their methodology to other researchers upon request.
So you've pointed your finger wrongly twice in your post. Because many people's lives and quality of life hang in the balance of what is unfortunately becoming an issue dominated by public opinion rather than good medical or ethical considerations, I urge you to reconsider your stance.
Yeah, I love how pipettes mean *SCIENCE* [in a "Welcome to the world of tomorrow" voice]. Accompany any half-assed magazine article with a pic of pipettes or flasks filled with colored liquid (what is that, urine?) and it just screams "valid earth-shaking scientificky stuff!" to Joe Public.
Sure, you're right--science takes time. Self-correction in science takes time. But there are two things meant by self-correcting here. First, that fraud is uncovered. This occurs on the timescale of current research. Verification is fast, and attempts to build on another researcher's falsified work will (generally) quickly identify those falsehoods so that they can be excised from the accepted body of evidence describing a scientific problem. Of course, even here, fast is actually pretty slow to the public eye, which sees very little to none of the science behind some newspaper article giving a precis of it.
Second, self-correction also means changing the accepted interpretation of a scientific problem as new evidence comes to light. This, of course, takes time (c.f. flat earth-->round earth). Discoveries and new ideas take time to surface, but we're getting better at it, largely because science operates largely on a hypothesis-driven research model. Despite his appeal to our Horatio Alger self-made-man ideal in the US, the garage tinkerer who looks to just happen upon some interesting discovery is pretty ineffective.
Also, your comparison of the timescale of science's successes to the timescale of the betterment of the 'general human condition' was a joke, right? Look at the advancements in medicine, in materials science, in communication, in {insert damn-near any cool aspect of modern living here} and tell me that one again. 'Science' (as we're talking about it here) has been a dominant paridigm of discovery for, say, a few hundred years (of course somebody will argue with this, but I'll toss it out there anyway). In that time, look at what it has given us.
Quit with the jackass attitude and listen to the argument being made by the people who fault Bush for his actions with regard to the Kyoto Treaty--especially listen to why Kerry faults him for it. It is NOT being said that the Kyoto Treaty was flawless or should have been supported. What Kerry has said is that Bush was presented with a flawed treaty and, instead of having his people re-work it and lobby for the US's interests to be better supported by the treaty, he walked away from an international effort that would have been especially useful in smoothing over our relations during a period in which we were not exactly in everyone's good graces.
No doubt at this point somebody'll say that we can't be controlled by international entanglements that could hamstring our domestic policies or "way of life" (whatever that is). That is sometimes true, as in the case of our necessary defensive capabilities, but the obvious reality of the world is that we NEED allies, both strategically and tactically, if we're going to defend ourselves and obtain favorable import/export agreements with other countries. The most odious issue with Bush's involvement with the Kyoto Treaty is that it's another instance of his squandering international goodwill with a cavalier cowboy attitude. This is the basic neocon modus operandi and there's no indication that they've learned anything or will change if re-elected/appointed.
Of course you're right regarding blanket statements, and perhaps I was a little sloppy in my terms. Being as this is a politically-charged issue, I wanted to make my previous post as readable as possible to non-biologists. I may have sacrificed some precision (especially in using 'tissue' when I really meant 'differentiated cell types').
However, to clarify: stem cell-based models are advantageous over current animal- or cancer cell-based models for some (not all) disease physiology studies. Advancing the accuracy of disease physiology understanding will, I maintain, significantly advance the potential for new drugs and treatments for those diseases. In so doing, we may "see cures or treatments advanced by years or decades" when the restrictions that have been hamstringing those studies are removed, as I said before. For a specific example, think of a non cancer cell-derived model for chromosomal structure studies. Telomere studies have been slowly advancing for nearly 20 years now. We can't learn enough about normal state telomeres in cancer cell models, because aberrant telomerase activation is a major passage point for cancer cells (90+% of cancer cells have telomerase aberrantly active, and the other 10% use the ALT (alternative lengthening of telomeres) pathway, which is just as problematic). We can't learn much from other animal models, such as mice or Drosophila, because telomere control mechanisms appear to be evolving rapidly (Mus musculus and Mus spretus telomere lenths differ by an order of magnitude or more and probably neither is an adequate model for human telomeres). Were a stem cell-based model for telomere metabolism and telomerase control available for researchers, it could push telomere biology forward rapidly. Since telomere metabolism is crucially linked to cancer and aging, suddenly telomere control mechanisms all become cancer drug targets. This is only one application from one small corner of molecular and cellular biology, but you wouldn't have to dig deep to find similar applications spread into niches all across biology.
Secondly, I ask that you re-read my original post. I suggested that individuals should ask experts, or read expert opinions, before deciding for themselves about the ethical and scientific merits and drawbacks surrounding stem cell research. I explicitly included spiritual/religious figures in that expert category (c.f. "priest, rabbi, whatever" in my original post). I agree that the issue, being multifaceted, needs the input of scientists and ethicists/religious types alike, and that ultimately a person's stance on the issue is their decision. However, I resent it when people will quote or paraphrase the president (or any other politically-motivated person) as the sum total of their opinion. This is a large, important, and wide-reaching issue, and it deserves more consideration than the regurgitation of a sound bite.
I also strongly disagree with your statement that president bush has understood or has been willing to compromise on this or virtually any other scientific issue. Bush has cast the issue in strictly moralist terms and has denied the value and potential benefits of the research. How is that balance? Bush has removed prominent experts from his bioethics advisory panel when their views conflicted with his own. How is that compromise or understanding? I'm a little peeved that you would call bush's statements and stances on the stem cell issue balanced, but would imply that my own suggestion that people learn more before deciding for themselves is one-sided.
Oh, and those links you included didn't have anything to do with mouse or stem cell models; perhaps the UIDs got messed up. Could you just cite the articles directly (i.e. standard journal citation), rather than linking to them?
parent absolutely should be moded +5
Um, no. Stem cell research is not a 20-year-out technology. Injecting stem cells into a wounded area, such as an injured spinal column and manipulating them to regrow functional tissues may be a 20-year out technology. But one of the main uses of stem cells is as a much-improved model for human tissues. Current non-stem cell lines used as research models come from cancers that have been harvested (such as HeLa cells) or from non human mammals. These are of limited use as models, since cancer cells and normal tissue cells are fundamentally different, often in ways that can't be anticipated. Stem cell research will provide researchers of human diseases a much more useful and accurate model *immediately*. That is not an exaggeration. Labs are set up and ready to go for this stuff, and we may well see cures or treatments advanced by years or decades when the restrictions are removed. That may mean the public sees results as near to immediately as one could fathom (read: as soon as the treatments pass through FDA trials and testing).
Fundamentally, I think this is a case of gross misrepresentation of the issue at hand by interested parties, which is not an uncommon tactic, and I certainly wouldn't go waving my hands around about a 'conspiracy' or anything. El presidente has cast the issue into a strictly moralist light, confusing the public into believing that there's questionable science and benefits to stem cells (they aren't questionable--ask any biologist involved in disease research), while also making it appear to be a clear-cut ethical choice (it's not--the fetuses are already being thrown out at fertility clinics). In sum, stem cell research is extremely promising 20 years out, but is every bit as promising on the order of a month out (from when their use is condoned), and present no more of an ethical dilemma than using, say, a car accident victim's organs for the benefit of another human being.
If you don't believe me, fine, go read about it for yourself. But learn how to read a scientific journal, talk to a biologist, talk to an ethicist, a priest, or a rabbi, or whatever; don't just take the president's word for it during a time when potentially life-saving technologies are being used as ammunition for politics.
This may have already been pointed out, but neither Physics Today nor MIT's Technology Review are scientific journals. They are layperson review jounals, not journals in which peer-reviewed research articles are presented. This isn't just a pedantic distinction--there's a major difference between a peer-reviewed article on cold fusion (or any other area of research) and an op-ed piece in a review/news journal like the ones mentioned.
So long as we're going there, I might point out that "you havent mastered" in your post should be "you haven't mastered." In English when a word is contracted, we put an apostrophe as a placeholder for the omitted letters. or maybe we shouldn't insist on absolutely proper speech, especially in the instance of typos, when we're conversing in a manner that more closely resembles verbal chatting. Nobody (who matters) would insist on proper grammer when just chatting.
was that "...oh wait..." an indication to wait while you were double-checking?
yeah, but as pointed out above, you'd have to be a fucking retard to believe that.
Actually, there has been a substantial amount of research on physiological differences by geography amongst athletes, but most of the science editors of the popular media outlets have had the good sense to not highlight it and bring it before the general public like they do with, say, cancer research, or other hope-bringing medical advances. See the July 30, 2004 Science for example. It's good that they do this because some layman fucktard would not understand the science behind it, misconstrue it as justification for an absurd and unsupported position on intelligence and achievement between races, and lead us over the brink. This person (the fucktard) would probably be either a politician or a contributor to an online chat forum (I don't mean you, parent or grandparent, I'm presupposing some replies here) in all probability.
The reason that evidence for physiological differences between races in athletic competitions should not be used as evidence of innate intellectual differences is that
1.) There is no reason at all that the two would be connected.
2.) We lack the science to resolve significant differences in cognitive ability and justify them on a biological level, so right now we'd have to rely on psychology for such studies. Psychology is a non-science discipline just north of a divining rod or horoscope in its degree of accuracy.
3.) As you point out, a truly massive number of external factors would have to be controlled for, some of which are completely unknown (e.g. your grandfather taught you to tie knots when you were really little, and thus your interest in plane geometry and mathematics was stimilated a little at just the right time).
So while we have some knowledge about basic differences between races, like tanning, muscle and skeletal development, and disease succeptability, those things are usually due to only one or two differences in a couple of proteins and are, in a relative sense, easy to explore and explain. The brain is many orders of magnitude more complex and we aren't even close to understanding its development or functioning, so lets not go there.
should also be 'banned,' not 'band'
good post. This should have been modded up... I like the gutter example. It may be silly, but it's not at all farfetched to think that some christian groups would put up a fight along those lines if their pastor/preacher/priest told them to.
whoops. typo--3rd sentence 2nd paragraph should read "While you might have come across some "evolutionist" who described his understanding of evolution in terms suggesting Lamarckian inheritance, it should be noted that an evolutionist is not an evolutionary biologist--viz he is a layman, probably possessing no greater an understanding of evolution than you have, and he was talking to you with only his left buttcheek." Sorry 'bout that.
It's nice to know that at least a few creationist/anti-evolutionist types can put together a well-considered post (or at least a post which uses complete sentences and correct punctuation). In my experience, most creationists have such a head-in-the-sand attitude that one wonders if they'd still believe the earth was flat and at the center of the solar system if their pastor/preacher/priest hadn't told them otherwise.
That said, your post, while well-considered, contains some errors and misconceptions that lead you to an easily refuted conclusion. First off, the theory of evolution does not rely on Lamarckian inheritance at all. While you might have come across some "evolutionist" who described his understanding of evolution in terms suggesting Lamarckian inheritance, it should be noted that an evolutionist was probably not an evolutionary biologist--viz he is a layman, probably possessing no greater an understanding of evolution than you have, and he was talking to you with only his left buttcheek.
Go talk to an evolutionary biologist instead. If you have him explain evolution to you, you'll find that an no time does he use the crutch of Lamarckian inheritance, which is not accepted by serious biologists. Evolution is complete without Lamarck. Nucleic acid changes, acquired through chance primarily due to genetic damage and repair pathways and through meiosis/crossing over events, are passed on to offspring and natural selection acts upon the change in fitness which those nucleic acid changes create. This is just cursory review, as you seem to understand that much. However, you don't seem to see that somatic (body) cells play no role in this; it's changes in germ (sex) cell lines which are passed on. Those sex cell changes create differences in progeny somatic cells because (obviously) sex cells (egg+sperm) become all the cells in the body, including somatic cells and the progeny's germ cell line. The progeny's somatic cell line is typically what is thought of as the substrate for natural selection, as phenotypic changes in the soma can create obvious morphology differences which are easily illustrated in textbooks and which schoolchildren can easily think of as being more or less fit in a given niche.
In other words, [Organism 1+mutation in organism 1 sex cell line]+[organism 2]=>[Organism 1'+2]. If [organism 1'+2] is more fit than other organisms in the population, then the change that occurred to the sex cell line of organism 1 is more likely to be propogated in the population. At no point do mutations to the somatic cells need to be passed on for natural selection, and by extention evolution, to work.
So, sadly for creationists, there is no Lamarckian flaw in evolution. There is also no reason that evolution couldn't be fit into christian belief structures, but that would require pulling your head out of the sand, now wouldn't it?
I dug the "science against evolution" page, btw. I love it when creationist types come up with stuff like that--it inevitably backfires and makes them look like raving retards. I won't even deign to refute any of it.
Oh, folks, we have a winner here! Mr. Coward has pointed out that in the micro-principality of Andorra, Chess has officially been declared a sport. It must be so. According to international laws governing the definition of sports, all other governments and peoples are required to respect and recognize Andorra's stance.
Yeah, yeah, he probably wasn't trying to say that 'officially' extends to worldwide, but hell, just the notion of chess being officially a sport has me in a tizzy.
In communist Russia, sports compete you!