What you have said is not correct. What the other person said is correct. It doesn't follow that something active for O3 will also be active for O2. It's illegal for esentially the same reason the old freon that used to be used in A/C and refridgerators is illegal - it damages the ozone layer. Additionally, Halon is effective because it removes Hydrogen, so combustion cannot occur.
I guess he's going to have guest, not ghost, bloggers. I sure do hope he feels OK with fleshing out thoughts, but trackbacks, if not commentary, is necessary for that.
Personally I don't go in for the Christian religion, but you should realize that your question can always be asked. Each time science comes up with a pretty good explanation, and that's all the big bang is, a pretty good explanation, you'll always be able to ask, what was before that. When you ask such a question, you're starting to think like a scientist. But every time you answer the question, you can ask, "Well, where did that come from?", and you can try to come up with good theories up to the point where you start saying "God made it". That's giving up. And where did God come from anyways?
So are you suggesting that the state just come in and seize Ponchatoula and make it a suburb of New Orleans? Where would we get our strawberries?
More to the point, how about we propose to your city council that we bring all our poor people to your city and leave them there? Despite how it looks on Google Maps, that area is actually inhabited, and the land is actually owned, by private landowners. It even has economic value, if everything has to come down to money.
About the west bank - it's already residential. It's true, I've been there.
A rapid transit system for New Orleans has been discussed, but have you seen the roads there? I wouldn't want to ride on the thing.
The whole thing about "wasting people's tax money giving emergency relief to hurricane victims" is just so juvenile. That's not an attack, it's just an observation that young people sometimes have a poor sense of the weight of things. It's a whole town, with history and culture that can't be found anywhere else!
Using abbreviations for "people" and "your" makes you sound teen-aged, too. Is it really that important to save a couple keystrokes? LOL!;-)
I wouldn't waste too much breath on people saying ignorant things like the original poster. They don't get it. Just let them know that when they want to come spend their money and act retarded, we won't hold it against them.
I've just about lost my patience with people saying stuff like this. No one who has ever spent any time in New Orleans, or even looked at the area on a map at sufficient detail, would suggest that we "just build it somewhere else".
Here are some satellite photos of New Orleans taken after 8/28. The building I worked in was in the central business district, near the top of the big U of the river. The first floor of that building, and most others in the CBD, was flooded. As you may be able to guess from the name, the central business district is not heavily residential.
The city is squeezed between the lake and the river, and is flush up against them both. There ain't a lot of room below the river, and that would be moving you closer to the ever-eroding wetlands, anyways. All pragmatics aside, there is something special about the city as it has developed. There is a unique culture there, which someone from the cornfields of Iowa can be excused for not being able to comprehend, that this country would be poorer without.
Without dirt and darkness and struggle, all art would be appropriate for a hallmark card. Do you want to live in a world like that?
As far as Habitat for Humanity goes, we don't need you. Go spend your money on Bourbon Street.
By the way, it's either New Orleans or NOLA. The N'awlins spelling is only found on tourist brochures. Did you know you can actually tell what part of the city someone is from by the way the pronounce New Orleans? It's true. Also, because our house was near Tchoupitoulas, we were safe, from the flood, anyways.
The day I meet someone who understands the science and the ethics as well as I do, and is still opposed to it going forward, then I'll shut up and listen to them. As it happens, I meet people who understand the many sides of the issue as well as or better than I all the time, and they're universally for continuing just a little bit more, just until we understand things a little bit better and the real issues become clearer.
So that's my answer. We just don't know enough to be able to say, "Here is OK, but here is not, and this is why."
Here: What your tax dollars are paying for.
I'd rather keep everything on here, so it's in one place, but as you say, I think we've gone about as far as we can.
In the first point, about human life and some arbitrary number of cells being classified as human life, I can only urge you to read up on things, so you'll stop sounding as silly as you currently do. Honestly, mate, it's a poor showing.
Quality of life: Sounds like we both agree that people should be allowed to end their life, if they really want to, but we should encourage them to seek help for depression first. If by hype, you mean the teachings of the oldest philosophy in the world, then yes, I am falling for it, and quite hard.
Ignorance: Yes, I'd really like to "talk about my faith" with a mormon. I know where this is going already. You carry around a laptop in your backpack?
All kidding aside, you're absolutely right that all we have are theories. If you ever talk to any other scientist, they'll tell you the same thing. Absolute certainty isn't something you ever get. You can get 99.9999% certainty, as with the theory that more complex organisms have evolved from simpler ones, but every scientist worth his grant knows that any statement of fact is really an assertion of the most likely theory, according to the information they have, subject to change as new information comes in from ongoing experiments, which is why we need to keep going on ES cell research, so that we can get to a point where we have some good theories. We're so far away, and Singapore and Korea and Japan are going to kick our butts at the rate things are going. I've been to the conferences, man, you don't even know how bad we're getting our butts kicked, even at this moment. Hey, I know there are some dogmatic scientists, but that's where the whole scientific community comes into play. Be as dogmatic as you want, give poor reviews to papers and grants that come under your purview that don't fit the dogma, but in the end, the evidence will come out. Kuhn would say that happens after you kick off, but nonetheless the system as a whole converges upon the truth, unstoppably.
This is in sharp contrast to religious dogma, where the "truth" was cast in stone in ages past, and can never be changed, ever.
You see why I get irritated when someone tells me they have a problem with stem cell research? I think about this shit a lot, all day, every day(It's my job!), and I know we don't know enough to have any answers. We don't even know what the right questions are. So for someone to come along, not knowing how little they know, and to suggest that we draw some arbitrary line in the sand...they're basically saying, "I don't trust you to do the right thing, if and when you figure out what the right thing is." I think I'm pretty damn trustworthy, and we're made to seem like we're all a bunch of Dr. Frankensteins running around.
Let's see...I don't want us to degenerate into semantics here, so let me extract a couple things.
What is life, and what do we consider a human being? I don't think that clarifies anything, because your new question is just as vulnerable to reductio ad absurdum as my old one.
Should you be allowed to do things with my cells that you aren't allowed to do with my whole body? In the lab, I might kill millions of cells a day, and no one cares. What about my finger? At what point does it become OK? Whenever I have all kinds of non-sensical questions like this, it's a sign that I don't properly understand everything about the issue.
So we just don't know enough to be able to make a rational decision, yet, and we have to have a rational basis for where the line is drawn. I don't think we can just draw some arbitrary line in the sand, and go on forever not knowing if that was the right place to draw it or not. I'm in favor of trusting in people to know to "do the right thing", proceed with the science, and see if the issue becomes more clear with more time and more understanding of the issue. It's not like we're all of the sudden going to start trying to create frankenstein unless we're kept in check by the government. I just think that with slow, careful, considerate progress we may eventually come to a point where the emotions are taken out of it and everyone can see what is right. But we're not there yet, and you can tell because of the controversy. If we knew what was what, there wouldn't be any controversy, right?
Alleviating suffering: I think you know what I meant, but I'll clarify. I think it's terrible for people to be clinging onto life the way they do. A good christian who knew they had lived a good life, and had complete faith that they were in good standing with god, should be able to accept that the end of their life is upon them. A good Hindu knows that the body is only temporary, you only get use of it for 80 or so years, and then you gotta return it to where you got it. So the point I was making was that it's more important to try to live a good life while you're here than to drag things out unmercifully. I'd like to improve the quality of people's lives rather than the quantity. Even more so for someone's family to keep them artificially alive. How do you know they're not screaming in agony in there? Why the attachment to the physical form?
I do think there is a meta-ideology, and I think it is that internal sense that we (almost) all have. There's so much in common with all of the world's religions, which have grown and evolved over the centuries, back from when the world was much smaller, we didn't understand things as well, and small-mindedness was universal. Some of the things that were a part of religion in the old times aren't needed today. Don't forget that it was the church that came after Galileo. I get the feeling that the current debate is the exact same thing, just modernized. So there are parts of all the world religions which are the same, all independently derived. No one had to introduce the idea of loving one another to the Catholic church, though the Hindus had figured it out well before. Likewise, you don't have to believe in a bearded guy in the sky to be a highly ethical and deeply spiritual person. It's quite an amazing idea, when you think about it: You have everything you need to be a good person, already inside you. You don't need a pastor or clergyman to tell you that stealing is wrong, that lying is wrong, or that hurting people is wrong. Why do people do it then? I think it's because ego gets in the way. You tell yourself that it would make you feel better, or you convince yourself that the other person is a threat to you. So you have to be aware that there are animal urges, some of which are good and some of which are bad, and there are desires of the ego, which are the causes of people just not listening to that voice which is always there, telling you what's wrong and what's right. All t
I agree that a knowledge of the science is insufficient, and there are other considerations to be made, but I stand by my statement that a thorough understanding of just exactly what the issue really is is a prerequisite. Maybe there's a reason that every scientist rolls his eyes at this issue, and just possibly that's because many of the considerations you think are important actually fall away once you understand what's really going on.
Try this zen riddle out for size: There is no point at which life begins. It's a continuous thread of existence from greatgrandmother to grandmother to mother to child to grandchild to great grandchild, forever. You can no more answer the question "Where does life begin?" now than you could for the first being to ever exist. At which point did life itself enter the universe? There is no point at which you can say, this isn't alive, but once this gene gets expressed, on once this cell moves from to here, or once this cell divides 3 times, it's all of the sudden a human, whereas before it wasn't.
What is life? It's that which we're fanatically attached to, but that which matters least, really. I'm not in the business of extending life, I'm in the business of alleviating suffering (and, in the process, finding out some cool stuff).
So this whole debate falls to reduction ad absurdum. Pick your favorite place to say life begins, or don't pick a place at all, it doesn't matter because there is no right answer. Science can never say, this is alive, but this isn't. That's a question of epistemology, where evidence can never be brought to bear.
Once you've dispensed with the distractions, and refocused on what I feel is the important question, "How can I alleviate suffering?", then you get into another quagmire. At which point does the potential benefit of my work overshadow the suffering it might cause as I am carrying it out. Since these questions affect all of humanity, from the Christians in America to the Hindus in India to the Gaia-worshipping tribesmen of South America, you can't answer the question according to one particular ideology. You have to hold yourself to a higher standard, because you're answering to all of humanity. Here is the point at which there are no right or wrong answers, no easy choices, no litmus tests. You just have to discuss things with a group of people who are educated on the issue and honestly concerned about doing "that which is right" for everyone. How can anyone bear the responsibility of choosing that? How can anyone presume that they know what's right without any word given from upon high? It's inexpressible. It can't be written down, but deep with everyone is a internal sense of what's right and wrong. Once you've gotten past your knee-jerk reactions, and once you've gotten past your fear of the unknown, and once you've gotten past all these things, and you have to, because you're taking on the responsibility of making choices that affect everyone, so you'd better be as educated as you possibly can, then you can get in touch with that internal sense.
That's how this scientist approaches the issue. Of course, in reality, the particular dogma that a person has grown up with can affect their judgement, and their ego can get in the way, and all sorts of things can cloud judgement, but these things are minor influences to someone who is basically a good person. Most of us are, because society weeds out the creeps pretty well, but you have to accept that nothing is perfect in this world, and there are some genuinely evil people. That's why science is set up the way it is. You do some work, and before you can publish it, which is the thing you have to do before you can get more funding to continue working, you have to expose your work to your peers, who scrutinize it to see if there's any possible way in which you could be fooling yourself about what the data say. Usually there is, so you slowly make corrections and a clearer picture emerges. Any serious scietific endeavor is too much for on
you know, I carefully avoided the religion/science dichotomy, because it's a false one. It was created when people who don't understand the issues started poking around and, instead of asking for an receiving answers, criticizing that which they didn't understand.
I'm totally not saying that science is the only consideration in any argument, but when you're talking about the physical properties of cells, it's a pretty good starting point, no?
I completely understand that some people have allowed themselves to get stirred up about these things, but I stand by my statement, and if it's the only thing you take away from our little chat, this should be the thing: You have to understand the issues before you can expect to reasonably debate them. That's all I'm saying. Of course there are many different kinds of considerations that go into either prayer in schools, or into whether the government should fund research. Ideally, you'd understand all the spheres, but if you can't do that, start with the ones most germane to the discussion. In this case, you'll find that many of the perceived ethical considerations fall away when you realize that the question of when does life begin has not a thing to do with this discussion. It can't be determined scientifically when life begins. It just can't. So what do you do?
p.s.
Since you're such a logician, What type of logical fallacy is criticizing someone, but not their ideas? What's it called when you overgeneralize to impute unfavorable characteristics to someone, so that you can then attack those characteristics? No partial credit, buster.;-)
I really wish people like you and I could see eye-to-eye, but I just don't think we can. See, there's one type of people who based their opinions on how something strikes them, and how it makes them feel, and then there's the other type of person who has no opinion except that which is hard-won through slogging through the nitty-gritty details of an issue. I spend 90% of my time working in the lab, and I understand a very little about biological issues. So I get surprised when I hear from people who I KNOW know less about the issue than I do, opining as if their opinion is worth listening to. My span on this earth is finite, so I've had to come to grips with the fact that I can only know and do so much. With that in mind, I don't presume to have a worthwhile opinion about how people should run their businesses, churches, or about what artistic expressions have merit. However, I do have an opinion about stem cells, and it's one that should be listened to, because I am in the trenches every damn day. Can we just be friends? All I want is for y'all to go back to doing what you're good at, and let us get back to what we're good at, which, incidentally, is attempting, with ethics and integrity, to improve the quality of life for everyone on this planet.
About my rhetorical style:
Everyone who speaks publicly used a blend of logic, incitement, and ridicule. It gets you noticed, lets everyone know how you really feel, and makes your point to both the people assessing your words on the basis of their merit and to those more attuned to the emotional impact of your words. To do otherwise would be pretending to live on Spock's planet.
Regarding my "pulling rank": You wouldn't pull out your philosophy degree and force scientist out of an ethical debate, because we're not in them. We avoid them like the plague, and on the few occasions we get baited into one, generally feel ashamed afterwards.
Man, how can you be so right and yet so wrong, all at the same time? Guess you must be human. I mean, you can't even spell embryonic correctly, yet you understand that the two fields should keep out of each others way. Then, without missing a beat, you suggest scientists are trying to define what it means to be human.
How do you keep two totally inconsistent ideas in your head simultaneously like that?
Actually, this isn't even new research. They fused a somatic cell and an ES cell, and found that some of the genes that were silenced in the somatic nucleus became expressed again. That's pretty much it, and it was entirely expected, given that scientists such as Jaenisch have been fusing adult and stem cells for a while now. Furthermore, the fusion product is tetraploid, and you've got no way to make it spit out the nucleus you want it to, and even if you did, can you be sure that those genes that were de-repressed aren't going to cause teratomas? Know what happens when you inject ES cells into an organism?
Every time a article about stem cells makes it into the lay press, it gets these ridiculous headlines...I mean, really, it's ridiculous. The headline should be "Scientist activates silenced somatic genes by fusing somatic cell with ES cell", but if you just read the comments, you'd think it was "Pointy-eared godless mad scientist takes time off from world domination plot to create life in a test-tube, just to piss people off."
I would be tempted to mod you insightful, if only for the comment about people missing the point. I agree, the focus should be on improving the world for everyone.
However, since anytime a person who doesn't really understand the science enters a discussion like this they start to make comments like "embryonic waste products", we'd all be better off if you guys either educated yourselves on what's really going on, or, since not everyone can be both scientists and do their regular job too, just leaving the scientists to do the job as they know best, and accept that we really are trying to advance humanity. Having to tiptoe around stuff like this for no good reason is just making our job harder.
Accepting that our span on this earth is finite and we should focus on making our time good, rather than just long, is a strangely hard thing to accept. Accepting that your time is finite, that you can't know everything, and that you have to leave some things to the good judgement of other people, is hard, too.
What does being sick have to do with understanding the science? Not a damn thing.
Therefore, how much weight should we give your family member's opinion? Not a damn picogram.
Where the heck did people get the idea that their demonstrably uninformed opinion should have anything to do with science policy?
Do you see scientists lobbying congress to outlaw the practice of praying to god because there's no proof for it? No, because we know we're not clergymen. Why then does every man, woman, and child with a high school understanding of biology think they're all of the sudden science policy experts?
Your final acronym indicates to me that this is an emotional issue for you, which kinda makes my point, doesn't it? What do you think would happen if all the scientists did as you suggest and fucked our selves right off to another country with less restrictive laws? The current pre-eminence of this country in science has lots to do with people fleeing presecution elsewhere(Look at the people involved in the manhattan project, for example), but there's no reason that process couldn't happen in reverse. Look at South-east Asia. They're kicking our asses. What would happen to your cure for cancer then? It would still be discovered, and would still be released publicly for the whole world to benefit from, because that's what motivates scientists. Why you people stand in the way of people who are geniunely trying to help, I'll never understand.
So, basically, what you're saying is that your opinion about what policy should be comes from a demonstrably uninformed gut feeling?
I bet you have and voice opinions about genetic engineering, alternative medicine(how many books on herbal healing do you have on your shelf?), and evolution, based on how you feel about the topics or what your equally uninformed coworkers or neighbors told you, too. That doesn't make you a horrible human being, it just makes you one of the people who isn't cut out to be a scientist. People used to admit that they didn't understand the science, and therefore weren't really qualified to have an opinion. I wish you people would either follow the prerequisite of understanding the issue before opining upon it, or kindly piss off and let us get back to doing our work.
If the antibodies recognize surface proteins on the cell which is shedding virus, and the cells are tagged for destruction by the antibodies, that would be pretty much what you'd want.
I just wanted to say I think it's +5, Funny that your above post is rated 1, while Angostura's wrong-end-of-the-stick rant is +4, Insightful. Keep up the good work, my friend.
p.s. I feel your pain with the whole "being misquoted by a journalist thing". A wise person once told me his secret for dealing with the media (paraphrased):
"They're just looking for a story, and you can't expect them, or their readers, to follow your explanation and faithfully reproduce it. However, they have to print what you say, so no matter what they ask, say what you want them to print and they can't mess it up."
No government is going to seize any invention. What they might do is subsidize the invention, so that poor people and countries can afford it. Us westerners live in a wealthy and prosperous country, so unless you're on medicaid, you're going to be paying full price for it. Deal with it. Think of it as your own little subsidy. Over here, we pay more money to get better things. If you go to the Whole foods, you pay more for groceries, but you get better stuff than if you take your food stamps to wal-mart. That's kinda a subsidy, too, in a way. How come a po' sucka like myself can understand this, while those who can afford to buy and drive SUVs cannot?
If you develop a recombinant antibody which could be used to clear the body of HIV particles, you better damn well be trying to profit from it, because you're going to need those funds to rapidly scale up production. There's going to be a demand for it like you ain't never seen, and the only humanitarian crisis would be you not being able to make it fast enough. The alternative would be to artificially keep prices low, but then depend on the government to help you ramp up production, and that's....just dumb.
Slashdot Mirror
...least I got chicken...
What you have said is not correct. What the other person said is correct. It doesn't follow that something active for O3 will also be active for O2. It's illegal for esentially the same reason the old freon that used to be used in A/C and refridgerators is illegal - it damages the ozone layer. Additionally, Halon is effective because it removes Hydrogen, so combustion cannot occur.
Wait...there are some places where students actually BUY software?
I guess he's going to have guest, not ghost, bloggers. I sure do hope he feels OK with fleshing out thoughts, but trackbacks, if not commentary, is necessary for that.
Personally I don't go in for the Christian religion, but you should realize that your question can always be asked. Each time science comes up with a pretty good explanation, and that's all the big bang is, a pretty good explanation, you'll always be able to ask, what was before that. When you ask such a question, you're starting to think like a scientist. But every time you answer the question, you can ask, "Well, where did that come from?", and you can try to come up with good theories up to the point where you start saying "God made it". That's giving up. And where did God come from anyways?
More to the point, how about we propose to your city council that we bring all our poor people to your city and leave them there? Despite how it looks on Google Maps, that area is actually inhabited, and the land is actually owned, by private landowners. It even has economic value, if everything has to come down to money.
About the west bank - it's already residential. It's true, I've been there.
A rapid transit system for New Orleans has been discussed, but have you seen the roads there? I wouldn't want to ride on the thing.
The whole thing about "wasting people's tax money giving emergency relief to hurricane victims" is just so juvenile. That's not an attack, it's just an observation that young people sometimes have a poor sense of the weight of things. It's a whole town, with history and culture that can't be found anywhere else!
Using abbreviations for "people" and "your" makes you sound teen-aged, too. Is it really that important to save a couple keystrokes? LOL! ;-)
Preserved food is, by definition, not fresh.
I wouldn't waste too much breath on people saying ignorant things like the original poster. They don't get it. Just let them know that when they want to come spend their money and act retarded, we won't hold it against them.
Here are some satellite photos of New Orleans taken after 8/28. The building I worked in was in the central business district, near the top of the big U of the river. The first floor of that building, and most others in the CBD, was flooded. As you may be able to guess from the name, the central business district is not heavily residential.
The city is squeezed between the lake and the river, and is flush up against them both. There ain't a lot of room below the river, and that would be moving you closer to the ever-eroding wetlands, anyways. All pragmatics aside, there is something special about the city as it has developed. There is a unique culture there, which someone from the cornfields of Iowa can be excused for not being able to comprehend, that this country would be poorer without.
Without dirt and darkness and struggle, all art would be appropriate for a hallmark card. Do you want to live in a world like that?
As far as Habitat for Humanity goes, we don't need you. Go spend your money on Bourbon Street.
By the way, it's either New Orleans or NOLA. The N'awlins spelling is only found on tourist brochures. Did you know you can actually tell what part of the city someone is from by the way the pronounce New Orleans? It's true. Also, because our house was near Tchoupitoulas, we were safe, from the flood, anyways.
This is new orleans. It's "Ward", not "precinct".
The day I meet someone who understands the science and the ethics as well as I do, and is still opposed to it going forward, then I'll shut up and listen to them. As it happens, I meet people who understand the many sides of the issue as well as or better than I all the time, and they're universally for continuing just a little bit more, just until we understand things a little bit better and the real issues become clearer. So that's my answer. We just don't know enough to be able to say, "Here is OK, but here is not, and this is why." Here: What your tax dollars are paying for.
In the first point, about human life and some arbitrary number of cells being classified as human life, I can only urge you to read up on things, so you'll stop sounding as silly as you currently do. Honestly, mate, it's a poor showing.
Quality of life: Sounds like we both agree that people should be allowed to end their life, if they really want to, but we should encourage them to seek help for depression first. If by hype, you mean the teachings of the oldest philosophy in the world, then yes, I am falling for it, and quite hard.
Meta-ideology: see the oldest philosophy in the world.
Ignorance: Yes, I'd really like to "talk about my faith" with a mormon. I know where this is going already. You carry around a laptop in your backpack?
All kidding aside, you're absolutely right that all we have are theories. If you ever talk to any other scientist, they'll tell you the same thing. Absolute certainty isn't something you ever get. You can get 99.9999% certainty, as with the theory that more complex organisms have evolved from simpler ones, but every scientist worth his grant knows that any statement of fact is really an assertion of the most likely theory, according to the information they have, subject to change as new information comes in from ongoing experiments, which is why we need to keep going on ES cell research, so that we can get to a point where we have some good theories. We're so far away, and Singapore and Korea and Japan are going to kick our butts at the rate things are going. I've been to the conferences, man, you don't even know how bad we're getting our butts kicked, even at this moment. Hey, I know there are some dogmatic scientists, but that's where the whole scientific community comes into play. Be as dogmatic as you want, give poor reviews to papers and grants that come under your purview that don't fit the dogma, but in the end, the evidence will come out. Kuhn would say that happens after you kick off, but nonetheless the system as a whole converges upon the truth, unstoppably.
This is in sharp contrast to religious dogma, where the "truth" was cast in stone in ages past, and can never be changed, ever.
You see why I get irritated when someone tells me they have a problem with stem cell research? I think about this shit a lot, all day, every day(It's my job!), and I know we don't know enough to have any answers. We don't even know what the right questions are. So for someone to come along, not knowing how little they know, and to suggest that we draw some arbitrary line in the sand...they're basically saying, "I don't trust you to do the right thing, if and when you figure out what the right thing is." I think I'm pretty damn trustworthy, and we're made to seem like we're all a bunch of Dr. Frankensteins running around.
What is life, and what do we consider a human being? I don't think that clarifies anything, because your new question is just as vulnerable to reductio ad absurdum as my old one.
Should you be allowed to do things with my cells that you aren't allowed to do with my whole body? In the lab, I might kill millions of cells a day, and no one cares. What about my finger? At what point does it become OK? Whenever I have all kinds of non-sensical questions like this, it's a sign that I don't properly understand everything about the issue.
So we just don't know enough to be able to make a rational decision, yet, and we have to have a rational basis for where the line is drawn. I don't think we can just draw some arbitrary line in the sand, and go on forever not knowing if that was the right place to draw it or not. I'm in favor of trusting in people to know to "do the right thing", proceed with the science, and see if the issue becomes more clear with more time and more understanding of the issue. It's not like we're all of the sudden going to start trying to create frankenstein unless we're kept in check by the government. I just think that with slow, careful, considerate progress we may eventually come to a point where the emotions are taken out of it and everyone can see what is right. But we're not there yet, and you can tell because of the controversy. If we knew what was what, there wouldn't be any controversy, right?
Alleviating suffering: I think you know what I meant, but I'll clarify. I think it's terrible for people to be clinging onto life the way they do. A good christian who knew they had lived a good life, and had complete faith that they were in good standing with god, should be able to accept that the end of their life is upon them. A good Hindu knows that the body is only temporary, you only get use of it for 80 or so years, and then you gotta return it to where you got it. So the point I was making was that it's more important to try to live a good life while you're here than to drag things out unmercifully. I'd like to improve the quality of people's lives rather than the quantity. Even more so for someone's family to keep them artificially alive. How do you know they're not screaming in agony in there? Why the attachment to the physical form?
I do think there is a meta-ideology, and I think it is that internal sense that we (almost) all have. There's so much in common with all of the world's religions, which have grown and evolved over the centuries, back from when the world was much smaller, we didn't understand things as well, and small-mindedness was universal. Some of the things that were a part of religion in the old times aren't needed today. Don't forget that it was the church that came after Galileo. I get the feeling that the current debate is the exact same thing, just modernized. So there are parts of all the world religions which are the same, all independently derived. No one had to introduce the idea of loving one another to the Catholic church, though the Hindus had figured it out well before. Likewise, you don't have to believe in a bearded guy in the sky to be a highly ethical and deeply spiritual person. It's quite an amazing idea, when you think about it: You have everything you need to be a good person, already inside you. You don't need a pastor or clergyman to tell you that stealing is wrong, that lying is wrong, or that hurting people is wrong. Why do people do it then? I think it's because ego gets in the way. You tell yourself that it would make you feel better, or you convince yourself that the other person is a threat to you. So you have to be aware that there are animal urges, some of which are good and some of which are bad, and there are desires of the ego, which are the causes of people just not listening to that voice which is always there, telling you what's wrong and what's right. All t
Check the other message thread we've had going to see my response, because these two more or less converged. p.s. you left out "straw man". ;-)
Try this zen riddle out for size: There is no point at which life begins. It's a continuous thread of existence from greatgrandmother to grandmother to mother to child to grandchild to great grandchild, forever. You can no more answer the question "Where does life begin?" now than you could for the first being to ever exist. At which point did life itself enter the universe? There is no point at which you can say, this isn't alive, but once this gene gets expressed, on once this cell moves from to here, or once this cell divides 3 times, it's all of the sudden a human, whereas before it wasn't.
What is life? It's that which we're fanatically attached to, but that which matters least, really. I'm not in the business of extending life, I'm in the business of alleviating suffering (and, in the process, finding out some cool stuff).
So this whole debate falls to reduction ad absurdum. Pick your favorite place to say life begins, or don't pick a place at all, it doesn't matter because there is no right answer. Science can never say, this is alive, but this isn't. That's a question of epistemology, where evidence can never be brought to bear.
Once you've dispensed with the distractions, and refocused on what I feel is the important question, "How can I alleviate suffering?", then you get into another quagmire. At which point does the potential benefit of my work overshadow the suffering it might cause as I am carrying it out. Since these questions affect all of humanity, from the Christians in America to the Hindus in India to the Gaia-worshipping tribesmen of South America, you can't answer the question according to one particular ideology. You have to hold yourself to a higher standard, because you're answering to all of humanity. Here is the point at which there are no right or wrong answers, no easy choices, no litmus tests. You just have to discuss things with a group of people who are educated on the issue and honestly concerned about doing "that which is right" for everyone. How can anyone bear the responsibility of choosing that? How can anyone presume that they know what's right without any word given from upon high? It's inexpressible. It can't be written down, but deep with everyone is a internal sense of what's right and wrong. Once you've gotten past your knee-jerk reactions, and once you've gotten past your fear of the unknown, and once you've gotten past all these things, and you have to, because you're taking on the responsibility of making choices that affect everyone, so you'd better be as educated as you possibly can, then you can get in touch with that internal sense.
That's how this scientist approaches the issue. Of course, in reality, the particular dogma that a person has grown up with can affect their judgement, and their ego can get in the way, and all sorts of things can cloud judgement, but these things are minor influences to someone who is basically a good person. Most of us are, because society weeds out the creeps pretty well, but you have to accept that nothing is perfect in this world, and there are some genuinely evil people. That's why science is set up the way it is. You do some work, and before you can publish it, which is the thing you have to do before you can get more funding to continue working, you have to expose your work to your peers, who scrutinize it to see if there's any possible way in which you could be fooling yourself about what the data say. Usually there is, so you slowly make corrections and a clearer picture emerges. Any serious scietific endeavor is too much for on
p.s. Since you're such a logician, What type of logical fallacy is criticizing someone, but not their ideas? What's it called when you overgeneralize to impute unfavorable characteristics to someone, so that you can then attack those characteristics? No partial credit, buster. ;-)
I really wish people like you and I could see eye-to-eye, but I just don't think we can. See, there's one type of people who based their opinions on how something strikes them, and how it makes them feel, and then there's the other type of person who has no opinion except that which is hard-won through slogging through the nitty-gritty details of an issue. I spend 90% of my time working in the lab, and I understand a very little about biological issues. So I get surprised when I hear from people who I KNOW know less about the issue than I do, opining as if their opinion is worth listening to. My span on this earth is finite, so I've had to come to grips with the fact that I can only know and do so much. With that in mind, I don't presume to have a worthwhile opinion about how people should run their businesses, churches, or about what artistic expressions have merit. However, I do have an opinion about stem cells, and it's one that should be listened to, because I am in the trenches every damn day. Can we just be friends? All I want is for y'all to go back to doing what you're good at, and let us get back to what we're good at, which, incidentally, is attempting, with ethics and integrity, to improve the quality of life for everyone on this planet. About my rhetorical style: Everyone who speaks publicly used a blend of logic, incitement, and ridicule. It gets you noticed, lets everyone know how you really feel, and makes your point to both the people assessing your words on the basis of their merit and to those more attuned to the emotional impact of your words. To do otherwise would be pretending to live on Spock's planet. Regarding my "pulling rank": You wouldn't pull out your philosophy degree and force scientist out of an ethical debate, because we're not in them. We avoid them like the plague, and on the few occasions we get baited into one, generally feel ashamed afterwards.
How do you keep two totally inconsistent ideas in your head simultaneously like that?
Every time a article about stem cells makes it into the lay press, it gets these ridiculous headlines...I mean, really, it's ridiculous. The headline should be "Scientist activates silenced somatic genes by fusing somatic cell with ES cell", but if you just read the comments, you'd think it was "Pointy-eared godless mad scientist takes time off from world domination plot to create life in a test-tube, just to piss people off."
However, since anytime a person who doesn't really understand the science enters a discussion like this they start to make comments like "embryonic waste products", we'd all be better off if you guys either educated yourselves on what's really going on, or, since not everyone can be both scientists and do their regular job too, just leaving the scientists to do the job as they know best, and accept that we really are trying to advance humanity. Having to tiptoe around stuff like this for no good reason is just making our job harder.
Accepting that our span on this earth is finite and we should focus on making our time good, rather than just long, is a strangely hard thing to accept. Accepting that your time is finite, that you can't know everything, and that you have to leave some things to the good judgement of other people, is hard, too.
Where the heck did people get the idea that their demonstrably uninformed opinion should have anything to do with science policy?
Do you see scientists lobbying congress to outlaw the practice of praying to god because there's no proof for it? No, because we know we're not clergymen. Why then does every man, woman, and child with a high school understanding of biology think they're all of the sudden science policy experts?
Your final acronym indicates to me that this is an emotional issue for you, which kinda makes my point, doesn't it? What do you think would happen if all the scientists did as you suggest and fucked our selves right off to another country with less restrictive laws? The current pre-eminence of this country in science has lots to do with people fleeing presecution elsewhere(Look at the people involved in the manhattan project, for example), but there's no reason that process couldn't happen in reverse. Look at South-east Asia. They're kicking our asses. What would happen to your cure for cancer then? It would still be discovered, and would still be released publicly for the whole world to benefit from, because that's what motivates scientists. Why you people stand in the way of people who are geniunely trying to help, I'll never understand.
I bet you have and voice opinions about genetic engineering, alternative medicine(how many books on herbal healing do you have on your shelf?), and evolution, based on how you feel about the topics or what your equally uninformed coworkers or neighbors told you, too. That doesn't make you a horrible human being, it just makes you one of the people who isn't cut out to be a scientist. People used to admit that they didn't understand the science, and therefore weren't really qualified to have an opinion. I wish you people would either follow the prerequisite of understanding the issue before opining upon it, or kindly piss off and let us get back to doing our work.
If the antibodies recognize surface proteins on the cell which is shedding virus, and the cells are tagged for destruction by the antibodies, that would be pretty much what you'd want.
p.s. I feel your pain with the whole "being misquoted by a journalist thing". A wise person once told me his secret for dealing with the media (paraphrased):
If you develop a recombinant antibody which could be used to clear the body of HIV particles, you better damn well be trying to profit from it, because you're going to need those funds to rapidly scale up production. There's going to be a demand for it like you ain't never seen, and the only humanitarian crisis would be you not being able to make it fast enough. The alternative would be to artificially keep prices low, but then depend on the government to help you ramp up production, and that's....just dumb.