I think the reason life as we know it is based on carbon is because it can form four equal bonds. While phosphorus, sulfur, and silicon can all form more bonds than carbon, the energy required to form each bond differs. Also, carbon is not particularly electronegative or electropositive, and it doesn't take a lot of energy to create or break its bonds, which is essential for metabolic processes to occur in a timely fashion. While silicon shares similar properties with carbon, it doesn't bind with as many different elements, and bonds to silicon are harder to break. (Though admittedly, this is in a terrestrial environment. Who knows what we'll find in space.)
All three of the above replies to this message or complete garbage. Open Source software will never, ever be stable enough to produce a cardiac arrest monitor or CAT Scan machine that any normal person would want used on them.
I'm pretty sure these things are mostly hardware. (I haven't opened one up to check.) I can't imagine doing a CAT scan in an emergency situation, anyway. I doubt anyone needs Win NT or *NIX to run medical equipment. Most of the software apps are with regards to sending/retrieving information. I wonder, has anyone died because they weren't able to retrieve a medical record fast enough? You don't really need to know a patient's previous history to be able to diagnose MI.
Would you want a doctor who got an A or a doctor who got all C's. You can't gaurantee the A's with OSS.
Med-school grades don't have that great of an impact on how good a doctor you get to be. (Your board score matters a lot more) A lot of good schools have abolished grading all together (like Yale.)
It won't be the features or the cost that will sell game systems--it will be what games can run on it. The reason why the Playstation is so dominant is definitely not because of hardware superiority (the N64 is much more advanced, and so was, I believe, the doomed Sega Saturn) or even their slick marketing in of itself (who buys a Playstation just for the fact of having a Playstation?) It is the fact that you can play Final Fantasy 7, and now Final Fantasy 8, as well as the Resident Evil saga, and a bunch of other blockbuster games on the Playstation and only on the Playstation.
The reason why getting into the hardware side of the console world is difficult is because there are only so many big name developers with games that are guaranteed to have a loyal following, and they tend to develop exclusively to one platform. I can't name one extremely popular console game that is cross-platform. You might say that MS can tap into developers of PC games, but what's the point of buying an X-Box if you can just run it on your PC?
Microsoft essentially has to buy a big game company if they hope to succeed. Having a good game come out is the key, and the only real guarantee of this is if the game comes out from a renown developer. This was the secret to Nintendo's success. They develop their own games, and it's probably the only reason they haven't died completely. Who would've bought an N64 is you could get Zelda 64 on the PSX? This is the reason why Sega has always had a hard time despite their technical superiority--no games. The only reason Sony is succeeding is because they have such big names developing on their platform. I really don't think the PSX really blew up until Squaresoft showed up on their doorstep after having a spat with Nintendo. I've heard that quite a few gamers who would've bought an N64 changed their mind when they found out Final Fantasy 7 was coming out for the PSX instead. Should Squaresoft and Capcom ever decide to defect, it will probably mean the end of the Playstation.
MS itself doesn't really make good games, definitely not games that would do well on a console environment. (I shudder to think about how you would play Age of Empires with a gamepad! Or even a flight simulator.) So I wonder which game company will be assimilated by MS.
Why will the first batch of games make or break the X-box? IIRC, the first batch of games didn't make or break the Playstation.
True, I think the Playstation is probably the exception to the rule, perhaps owing to the fact that it came out in between generations, so to speak--between the 16-bit consoles and the 64-bit ones. There really wasn't anything like it at the time, and it had capabilities no one else could match. The Playstation probably seemed to be doing well simply because no one was buying any of the older consoles, which had pretty much reached saturation levels (what gamer didn't own a SNES by then?) But when the N64 finally came, the rule came into effect--probably part of the reason why the N64 didn't kill the PSX was because Nintendo screwed up and drove Squaresoft away. Then Capcom defected (no Resident Evil for N64!) In terms of hardware, the PSX is vastly inferior to the N64 and definitely to the Dreamcast, but it's got the titles! If MS doesn't have anything to rival the next Resident Evil or Final Fantasy, their chances are slim.
But the console and PC gaming market barely overlap. The types of games you develop for consoles port very badly to PCs (witness FF7) while the games you develop for PCs would seem ludicrous on a console (imagine trying to play Starcraft with nothing but a gamepad!) This is borne out by who the top developers are in the console world, who are nowhere near the top in the PC world. Square and Capcom are pretty much ubiquitous when talking about Sony, Sega, and Nintendo, but when was the last time you booted up your PC to play one of their games? I'm not much of a PC gamer myself, but I imagine the situation is the same going in reverse.
This is definitely not to say that we shouldn't be working on a "cure," but isn't "curing" cancer a little like trying to "cure" old age? We can probably stave it off for years and decades with technological advances, and make treatments less and less painful, and increase the quality of life of people who have it, but we probably won't be able to ever eliminate it like we have with, say, polio, or smallpox.
Isn't cancer just one of the three ultimate fates of a cell--either to die by apoptosis, die by necrosis, or to go on dividing indefinitely? Isn't it built into our biological make-up?
This is definitely not to say that we shouldn't be working on a "cure," but isn't "curing" cancer a little like trying to "cure" old age? We can probably stave it off for years and decades with technological advances, and make treatments less and less painful, and increase the quality of life of people who have it, but we probably won't be able to ever eliminate it like we have with, say, polio, or smallpox.
Isn't cancer just one of the three ultimate fates of a cell--either to die by apoptosis, die by necrosis, or to go on dividing indefinitely? It's built into our biological make-up.
Your intestines and kidneys regulate how much calcium gets to stay in your body anyway, so calcium supplements only have an effect if you have a deficiency. Otherwise, you excrete it. So increasing your intake of calcium won't make your brain collapse, but you might get kidney or bladder stones.
And you're right, the only way to get calcium into your cells is through slow diffusion over time.
I think proliferation of dendrites would make the synaptic response more efficient. Any particular axon will only synapse with one neuron, and since proliferation only occurs where there are already dendrites, I don't think the neurotransmitter would be diluted in the way you say. Each new dendrite is still part of the same neuron. The increase of efficiency only occurs, of course, only if these new dendrites have all the proper receptors at the same density as the old ones have. This would increase the number of available receptors, and therefore increase the chance that neurotransmitters will bind at the same time, making it more likely that an action potential will occur.
Of course, this still doesn't prove that it has anything to do with memory, and I don't know if I like the other effects of caffeine, like causing muscle tremor and the fact that it has been proven to damage DNA.
Yeah, it is pretty simplified, but the Central Dogma isn't all the complicated, really--it was figuring it out that was a real bastard. What more do you need to know about the Central Dogma than DNA-->RNA-->protein? (OK, there's DNA replication and reverse transcriptase, but that's not much more)
I don't know if it would really be that great if computers were just like life. When you consider it took about a billion years to get a basic cell, and another three billion to get the first multicellular organism--that's one hell of a wait for the next upgrade. Though I admit that we haven't made anything near the complexity of a single bacterium (but then again we haven't had a billion years!) Plus the cruft factor is incredible. The human genome is roughly 3 Gbp--but only about 120 Mbp actually codes for anything! The rest is evolutionary debris or just outright junk (except possibly for structural purposes, I guess) That would be kind of annoying, filling up a 3 GB hard drive, when all you really need is that 120 MB. Guess it's kind of like running Windows.
The statement "80% of IQ is determined by genetics" is actually true, though not in the way the original poster is trying to imply. The reason why there is something of a correlation is that most gross genetic problems (i.e., trisomies and unbalanced translocations) that are compatible with life result, among other things, mental retardation. Down's, cri du chat, Angelman's, Prader-Willi, Turner's, Kleinfelter's, etc., even relatively benign polysomies like XXX or XYY which can't be determined without a karyotype--as distrinct populations, their IQs are lower than average. But some of this can be attributed to bias of ascertainment--if they never find out you're XXX (which they won't unless you have a karyotype taken--you are probably phenotypically "normal"), you probably won't be counted in those samples. Even though as a population, XXXs have a lower mean IQ, most individual XXXs still fall within the normal distribution of the population at large. This is what happens when you don't define what you mean by "genetic factors."
In any case, while genotype can predict IQ in these special cases, in most cases it can't, and IQ can't be used to predict genotype. I would wager that there is no significant genetic difference between someone with an IQ of 165 and someone with an IQ of 140. Probably not even between someone with an IQ of 120 and an IQ of 195.
I thought I'd reply 'cause I like these silly metaphors.
I guess you could look at it this way:
DNA is like source code RNA are like the object files proteins are the compiled binaries.
You could think of these signals as--I guess--equivalent to magic numbers in UNIX?
The hardware/software question is kind of hard to tackle with this analogy, though--it kind of breaks down. I guess in an everyday sense, they are hardware--they are physical entities that move around and sometimes have structural functions and they function by physically interacting with other substances. But I think it's more fruitful to make them analogous to objects, in an OOP sense.
Apparently the idea of signal sequences has been around for about 20 years.
I like your last question. It has a lot of practical ramifications. Until we understand the mechanism of crossing over much better, I would hazard to say that anything we manipulate is not likely to make it to the next generation--but that's a technicality we might overcome in 25 years or so.
Statistically speaking, unless the environment changes dramatically so that new selective forces are created, our manipulations will become diluted over the generations, as the natural alleles will still dominate, and I'm sure that crossing over between the manipulated allele and a natural allele will produce something that is more like a natural allele, or it will produce something that won't work at all. The only way those modifications will prevail is if all the "normal" people die from some new selective pressure.
By the way, natural selection never selects FOR a trait, it only selects against traits. It only looks like it selects for traits because everything else dies out.
I'll admit there is a lot I don't know...but what you say is kind of absurd. I haven't even been alive anywhere close to 30 years, and yet I still see scientific objections to the idea the IQ is genetically determined. Do you have gene loci for me to look up? Nucleotide sequences? Glu at 302 makes you stupider than Asp? Maybe I'm wrong.
I'm pretty sure Steven Jay Gould wrote "The Mismeasure of Man" within the past 30 years.
I'm sure I could throw contradicting numbers at you ad nauseam, and we'd never agree. (I am curious to know the difference between someone with an IQ of 140 and one of 165.) I know that IQ is a valid measure of performance in school for an extremely narrow range of parameters (and how do you measure performance? More standardized tests, of course), but the leap from that to the idea that IQ (and therefore intelligence) can somehow be modified by genetic manipulation is pretty large. Besides, how can you say IQ measures intelligence if the concept of intelligence itself is still being debated?
-----
Obligatory hackneyed quotes:
"There are three kinds of lies--lies, damned lies, and statistics." -- Disraeli
"A valid statistical hypothesis is not necessarily a valid scientific hypothesis" -- various statistics professors whose lectures I've attended
Natural selection doesn't work that way--there'd have to be a selective factor AGAINST pinky toes for it to disappear. Unless someone's figured out that pinky toes decrease your chance to reproduce? Well, that's why a lot of diseases won't disappear--because they don't necessarily reduce your chances of reproducing. Stuff like Alzheimers, Parkinsons, Huntingtons--things that happen to you in your old age, when you've already propagated your "bad" genes.
All this commentary is moot until we overcome significant technical barriers. The human genome project will be a small first step in this long process. I don't think we will be able to effectively remove single defective genes from the genetic pool in less than fifty years, much less erasing polygenic diseases like cancer and heart disease, not withstanding the fact that these will probably never go away because they have significant environmental components. And even this is a large step from trying to control vague factors like intelligence--things that don't have clear cut genetic components and may very well be only artificial constructs that have no bearing on biology.
Among the challenges for genetic engineers:
First of all, we have to figure out what makes a chromosome stable, and how to ensure anything we make changes in will survive in a germ cell and reliably propagate it to progeny. A lot of the diseases we want to treat will involve large scale changes to the human genome, and interactions between genes and non-coding regions will be important. More importantly, we'll have to understand crossing over in meiosis a lot better. Just the map given by human genome project will not be enough to figure these things out. If our changes are not stable, we will likely introduce random, lethal mutations into the gene pool, which may work for a couple of generations, but die out immediately afterwards. What's worse is that we can't possibly foresee how mutations of our modifications will turn out (because unless we all decide to live in lead houses and cease using light and electricity, there's no way we can avoid mutation--and even then, DNA spontaneously degrades chemically)
The other thing we need to work on is DNA delivery systems. It's not like you can just inject this stuff into a zygote and expect it to accept it. And even if it does accept it, it's likely to be degraded within a few months at most--and even if it does survive, it will probably result in mosaicism.
We also don't have the tools to molecularly manipulate DNA in vivo. It's not like we can extract a chromosome, chop it up, insert what we want, then stick it back into the nucleus.
The thing is, the more useful role of genetic engineering is probably in treating pre-existing conditions and just modifying somatic cells, so these changes don't get propagated. You don't need to address a lot of the challenges that I mentioned to do this. We already have the technology to do this, except for the delivery systems, but that's being worked on. Treatment of CF looks promising using these methods.
How much better would it be to control all cases of cystic fibrosis and diabetes, not just the ones you catch prenatally? There's absolutely no reason why genetic engineering has to be monopolized by the elite.
Although I thought the movie had significant flaws, the point about discrimination according to medical condition is valid. It already happens.
Health insurance companies will look for any reason for disqualifying you for coverage. Have diabetes? Sure, we'll cover you, except for anything that has to do with diabetes. It is, after all, "a pre-existing condition." You've got neuropathy now? Well, that's related to your diabetes, so we can't cover that either.
The sick thing is, diabetes can be controlled--we have the technology and the resources to keep people from dying from this--but we can't cure it. So do we exert effort to help them, even though in a way, it's futile? Some will see it's a waste. Let them die. Let the gene die out. Ain't "scientific civilization" wonderful? But does diabetes have any affect on your performance at, let's say a job? Maybe you aren't going to be a world-class athelete, but what's to stop you from being a genius at physics, so long as you've got insulin injections?
Eugenics is a stupid idea just on scientific principles because we simply don't have enough information about the ramifications of screwing with our genes. For all we know, pruning out "bad" genes will doom life in the future, because we've just cut off an evolutionary escape route. I still say Chuckie Darwin had it right. "Variety is the keystone to man's success." Or our "fix" may introduce all sorts of anomalies that were unforeseen--and there are no take-backs if you stick these things into germ cells.
...AND GENETICS IS NOT THE ONLY PREDETERMINING FACTOR FOR INTELLIGENCE!!! We don't even have any idea what intelligence is, biologically speaking, and the idea of reifying such a vague concept into a number has got to be just a little silly. Sure, those ridiculous tests have some correlation to mental performance (BUT CORRELATIONS DO NOT IMPLY CAUSAL RELATIONSHIPS!) but only on a very broad level. The difference between someone with an IQ of 40 and 140 is obvious. The difference between someone with an IQ of 140 and 160 is not--there might not even be one!! In fact, what intelligence has done for the human race is free us from the tyranny of our genes and natural selection.
By the way, there doesn't seem to be much genetics in that article. I was kind of disappointed.
Anyway, sorry, I know this may sound a bit contrived, but given a lot of you are programmers out there, I thought I'd throw out this silly little analogy:
Think of the human genome as the binary code of a program. The human genome project is only going to give us a memory map, not the actual source code. Can you imagine trying to modify code without having the source? Maybe if you were a hard core machine language programmer--but what's worse is that we don't even know entirely how the CPU works (which in this analogy would be the laws of physics.) Add to this the fact that the extreme fragmentation of the code base--everyone of us is running an almost entirely unique version--and the idea that we can just go off and start modifying things easily seems really ludicrous.
Take, for example, the case of cystic fibrosis. On first glance, it may seem that we've figured out where the problem is: a gene in 7q31 that codes for what appears to be a chloride channel. Everyone who has CF has a problem with this gene. But guess what, we don't know what this gene does. We have ideas, after years and years of research, but we're not even sure if the gene product itself is what causes the disease, or if it's something else entirely. Notwithstanding the fact that we have the entire nucleotide sequence of this gene and most of its common polymorphisms. Replacing the gene in some people does work, but not for everyone. And we have no idea what it does to the stability of the genome if it were inserted into germ cells.
Or take Down's syndrome. The problem is very obvious--you have three copies of chromosome 21 instead of two. We don't need to know any sequence information to figure this out. But the thing is, even if you were to detect this in a fetus or even in a zygote, how are you going to get that extra copy out without destroying the zygote? It's not like we can tell which chromosome is which in vivo. I guess you'd have the option to abort--but that's nothing new.
Then there's the problem of passing these modified traits on. Even in really simple cells like yeast, although we can insert all sorts of DNA into it and get the cell to use it, we still can't get it to reliably pass it on to the next generation. While this is OK when you're just interested in making a protein, and a success rate of 1 for every million is actually pretty good, this would be insane in human beings. Sure, you've got a pretty smart and physically fit kid, but hey, you know what, he can't have any kids himself. Except you probably won't even get that far most of the time, since the zygote will probably fail to divide into viable progeny. I guess we'll have to try the next test tube. Genetic engineering in the fetus has the possibility of sterilizing us all. Even cloning is inexact--look at Dolly the Sheep.
While bacteria, plants, and fungi can stand all sorts of mangling of their DNA, that isn't the case for human beings. Even one slight change to the genome is likely to cause a miscarriage, often for reasons we don't understand--in a lot of them, there are no gross problems with the genome. Add to this the fact that most of the major conditions we'd be interested in are polygenic and multifactorial (meaning the environment has a big part in what happens)--like cancer and heart disease--and it's easy to see that the utility of genetic engineering is likely to be limited. I'm not saying it's useless-far from it, but it is hardly the paradigm shift that the article makes it out to be.
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I think the reason life as we know it is based on carbon is because it can form four equal bonds. While phosphorus, sulfur, and silicon can all form more bonds than carbon, the energy required to form each bond differs. Also, carbon is not particularly electronegative or electropositive, and it doesn't take a lot of energy to create or break its bonds, which is essential for metabolic processes to occur in a timely fashion. While silicon shares similar properties with carbon, it doesn't bind with as many different elements, and bonds to silicon are harder to break. (Though admittedly, this is in a terrestrial environment. Who knows what we'll find in space.)
I'm pretty sure these things are mostly hardware. (I haven't opened one up to check.) I can't imagine doing a CAT scan in an emergency situation, anyway. I doubt anyone needs Win NT or *NIX to run medical equipment. Most of the software apps are with regards to sending/retrieving information. I wonder, has anyone died because they weren't able to retrieve a medical record fast enough? You don't really need to know a patient's previous history to be able to diagnose MI.
Would you want a doctor who got an A or a doctor who got all C's. You can't gaurantee the A's with OSS.
Med-school grades don't have that great of an impact on how good a doctor you get to be. (Your board score matters a lot more) A lot of good schools have abolished grading all together (like Yale.)
The reason why getting into the hardware side of the console world is difficult is because there are only so many big name developers with games that are guaranteed to have a loyal following, and they tend to develop exclusively to one platform. I can't name one extremely popular console game that is cross-platform. You might say that MS can tap into developers of PC games, but what's the point of buying an X-Box if you can just run it on your PC?
Microsoft essentially has to buy a big game company if they hope to succeed. Having a good game come out is the key, and the only real guarantee of this is if the game comes out from a renown developer. This was the secret to Nintendo's success. They develop their own games, and it's probably the only reason they haven't died completely. Who would've bought an N64 is you could get Zelda 64 on the PSX? This is the reason why Sega has always had a hard time despite their technical superiority--no games. The only reason Sony is succeeding is because they have such big names developing on their platform. I really don't think the PSX really blew up until Squaresoft showed up on their doorstep after having a spat with Nintendo. I've heard that quite a few gamers who would've bought an N64 changed their mind when they found out Final Fantasy 7 was coming out for the PSX instead. Should Squaresoft and Capcom ever decide to defect, it will probably mean the end of the Playstation.
MS itself doesn't really make good games, definitely not games that would do well on a console environment. (I shudder to think about how you would play Age of Empires with a gamepad! Or even a flight simulator.) So I wonder which game company will be assimilated by MS.
True, I think the Playstation is probably the exception to the rule, perhaps owing to the fact that it came out in between generations, so to speak--between the 16-bit consoles and the 64-bit ones. There really wasn't anything like it at the time, and it had capabilities no one else could match. The Playstation probably seemed to be doing well simply because no one was buying any of the older consoles, which had pretty much reached saturation levels (what gamer didn't own a SNES by then?) But when the N64 finally came, the rule came into effect--probably part of the reason why the N64 didn't kill the PSX was because Nintendo screwed up and drove Squaresoft away. Then Capcom defected (no Resident Evil for N64!) In terms of hardware, the PSX is vastly inferior to the N64 and definitely to the Dreamcast, but it's got the titles! If MS doesn't have anything to rival the next Resident Evil or Final Fantasy, their chances are slim.
But the console and PC gaming market barely overlap. The types of games you develop for consoles port very badly to PCs (witness FF7) while the games you develop for PCs would seem ludicrous on a console (imagine trying to play Starcraft with nothing but a gamepad!) This is borne out by who the top developers are in the console world, who are nowhere near the top in the PC world. Square and Capcom are pretty much ubiquitous when talking about Sony, Sega, and Nintendo, but when was the last time you booted up your PC to play one of their games? I'm not much of a PC gamer myself, but I imagine the situation is the same going in reverse.
Isn't cancer just one of the three ultimate fates of a cell--either to die by apoptosis, die by necrosis, or to go on dividing indefinitely? Isn't it built into our biological make-up?
Isn't cancer just one of the three ultimate fates of a cell--either to die by apoptosis, die by necrosis, or to go on dividing indefinitely? It's built into our biological make-up.
And you're right, the only way to get calcium into your cells is through slow diffusion over time.
Of course, this still doesn't prove that it has anything to do with memory, and I don't know if I like the other effects of caffeine, like causing muscle tremor and the fact that it has been proven to damage DNA.
I don't know if it would really be that great if computers were just like life. When you consider it took about a billion years to get a basic cell, and another three billion to get the first multicellular organism--that's one hell of a wait for the next upgrade. Though I admit that we haven't made anything near the complexity of a single bacterium (but then again we haven't had a billion years!) Plus the cruft factor is incredible. The human genome is roughly 3 Gbp--but only about 120 Mbp actually codes for anything! The rest is evolutionary debris or just outright junk (except possibly for structural purposes, I guess) That would be kind of annoying, filling up a 3 GB hard drive, when all you really need is that 120 MB. Guess it's kind of like running Windows.
In any case, while genotype can predict IQ in these special cases, in most cases it can't, and IQ can't be used to predict genotype. I would wager that there is no significant genetic difference between someone with an IQ of 165 and someone with an IQ of 140. Probably not even between someone with an IQ of 120 and an IQ of 195.
I guess you could look at it this way:
DNA is like source code RNA are like the object files proteins are the compiled binaries.
You could think of these signals as--I guess--equivalent to magic numbers in UNIX?
The hardware/software question is kind of hard to tackle with this analogy, though--it kind of breaks down. I guess in an everyday sense, they are hardware--they are physical entities that move around and sometimes have structural functions and they function by physically interacting with other substances. But I think it's more fruitful to make them analogous to objects, in an OOP sense.
Apparently the idea of signal sequences has been around for about 20 years.
Statistically speaking, unless the environment changes dramatically so that new selective forces are created, our manipulations will become diluted over the generations, as the natural alleles will still dominate, and I'm sure that crossing over between the manipulated allele and a natural allele will produce something that is more like a natural allele, or it will produce something that won't work at all. The only way those modifications will prevail is if all the "normal" people die from some new selective pressure.
By the way, natural selection never selects FOR a trait, it only selects against traits. It only looks like it selects for traits because everything else dies out.
I'm pretty sure Steven Jay Gould wrote "The Mismeasure of Man" within the past 30 years.
I'm sure I could throw contradicting numbers at you ad nauseam, and we'd never agree. (I am curious to know the difference between someone with an IQ of 140 and one of 165.) I know that IQ is a valid measure of performance in school for an extremely narrow range of parameters (and how do you measure performance? More standardized tests, of course), but the leap from that to the idea that IQ (and therefore intelligence) can somehow be modified by genetic manipulation is pretty large. Besides, how can you say IQ measures intelligence if the concept of intelligence itself is still being debated?
-----
Obligatory hackneyed quotes:
"There are three kinds of lies--lies, damned lies, and statistics." -- Disraeli
"A valid statistical hypothesis is not necessarily a valid scientific hypothesis" -- various statistics professors whose lectures I've attended
Natural selection doesn't work that way--there'd have to be a selective factor AGAINST pinky toes for it to disappear. Unless someone's figured out that pinky toes decrease your chance to reproduce? Well, that's why a lot of diseases won't disappear--because they don't necessarily reduce your chances of reproducing. Stuff like Alzheimers, Parkinsons, Huntingtons--things that happen to you in your old age, when you've already propagated your "bad" genes.
All this commentary is moot until we overcome significant technical barriers. The human genome project will be a small first step in this long process. I don't think we will be able to effectively remove single defective genes from the genetic pool in less than fifty years, much less erasing polygenic diseases like cancer and heart disease, not withstanding the fact that these will probably never go away because they have significant environmental components. And even this is a large step from trying to control vague factors like intelligence--things that don't have clear cut genetic components and may very well be only artificial constructs that have no bearing on biology.
Among the challenges for genetic engineers:
First of all, we have to figure out what makes a chromosome stable, and how to ensure anything we make changes in will survive in a germ cell and reliably propagate it to progeny. A lot of the diseases we want to treat will involve large scale changes to the human genome, and interactions between genes and non-coding regions will be important. More importantly, we'll have to understand crossing over in meiosis a lot better. Just the map given by human genome project will not be enough to figure these things out. If our changes are not stable, we will likely introduce random, lethal mutations into the gene pool, which may work for a couple of generations, but die out immediately afterwards. What's worse is that we can't possibly foresee how mutations of our modifications will turn out (because unless we all decide to live in lead houses and cease using light and electricity, there's no way we can avoid mutation--and even then, DNA spontaneously degrades chemically)
The other thing we need to work on is DNA delivery systems. It's not like you can just inject this stuff into a zygote and expect it to accept it. And even if it does accept it, it's likely to be degraded within a few months at most--and even if it does survive, it will probably result in mosaicism.
We also don't have the tools to molecularly manipulate DNA in vivo. It's not like we can extract a chromosome, chop it up, insert what we want, then stick it back into the nucleus.
The thing is, the more useful role of genetic engineering is probably in treating pre-existing conditions and just modifying somatic cells, so these changes don't get propagated. You don't need to address a lot of the challenges that I mentioned to do this. We already have the technology to do this, except for the delivery systems, but that's being worked on. Treatment of CF looks promising using these methods.
How much better would it be to control all cases of cystic fibrosis and diabetes, not just the ones you catch prenatally? There's absolutely no reason why genetic engineering has to be monopolized by the elite.
Although I thought the movie had significant flaws, the point about discrimination according to medical condition is valid. It already happens.
Health insurance companies will look for any reason for disqualifying you for coverage. Have diabetes? Sure, we'll cover you, except for anything that has to do with diabetes. It is, after all, "a pre-existing condition." You've got neuropathy now? Well, that's related to your diabetes, so we can't cover that either.
The sick thing is, diabetes can be controlled--we have the technology and the resources to keep people from dying from this--but we can't cure it. So do we exert effort to help them, even though in a way, it's futile? Some will see it's a waste. Let them die. Let the gene die out. Ain't "scientific civilization" wonderful? But does diabetes have any affect on your performance at, let's say a job? Maybe you aren't going to be a world-class athelete, but what's to stop you from being a genius at physics, so long as you've got insulin injections?
Eugenics is a stupid idea just on scientific principles because we simply don't have enough information about the ramifications of screwing with our genes. For all we know, pruning out "bad" genes will doom life in the future, because we've just cut off an evolutionary escape route. I still say Chuckie Darwin had it right. "Variety is the keystone to man's success." Or our "fix" may introduce all sorts of anomalies that were unforeseen--and there are no take-backs if you stick these things into germ cells.
...AND GENETICS IS NOT THE ONLY PREDETERMINING FACTOR FOR INTELLIGENCE!!! We don't even have any idea what intelligence is, biologically speaking, and the idea of reifying such a vague concept into a number has got to be just a little silly. Sure, those ridiculous tests have some correlation to mental performance (BUT CORRELATIONS DO NOT IMPLY CAUSAL RELATIONSHIPS!) but only on a very broad level. The difference between someone with an IQ of 40 and 140 is obvious. The difference between someone with an IQ of 140 and 160 is not--there might not even be one!! In fact, what intelligence has done for the human race is free us from the tyranny of our genes and natural selection.
By the way, there doesn't seem to be much genetics in that article. I was kind of disappointed.
Anyway, sorry, I know this may sound a bit contrived, but given a lot of you are programmers out there, I thought I'd throw out this silly little analogy:
Think of the human genome as the binary code of a program. The human genome project is only going to give us a memory map, not the actual source code. Can you imagine trying to modify code without having the source? Maybe if you were a hard core machine language programmer--but what's worse is that we don't even know entirely how the CPU works (which in this analogy would be the laws of physics.) Add to this the fact that the extreme fragmentation of the code base--everyone of us is running an almost entirely unique version--and the idea that we can just go off and start modifying things easily seems really ludicrous.
Take, for example, the case of cystic fibrosis. On first glance, it may seem that we've figured out where the problem is: a gene in 7q31 that codes for what appears to be a chloride channel. Everyone who has CF has a problem with this gene. But guess what, we don't know what this gene does. We have ideas, after years and years of research, but we're not even sure if the gene product itself is what causes the disease, or if it's something else entirely. Notwithstanding the fact that we have the entire nucleotide sequence of this gene and most of its common polymorphisms. Replacing the gene in some people does work, but not for everyone. And we have no idea what it does to the stability of the genome if it were inserted into germ cells.
Or take Down's syndrome. The problem is very obvious--you have three copies of chromosome 21 instead of two. We don't need to know any sequence information to figure this out. But the thing is, even if you were to detect this in a fetus or even in a zygote, how are you going to get that extra copy out without destroying the zygote? It's not like we can tell which chromosome is which in vivo. I guess you'd have the option to abort--but that's nothing new.
Then there's the problem of passing these modified traits on. Even in really simple cells like yeast, although we can insert all sorts of DNA into it and get the cell to use it, we still can't get it to reliably pass it on to the next generation. While this is OK when you're just interested in making a protein, and a success rate of 1 for every million is actually pretty good, this would be insane in human beings. Sure, you've got a pretty smart and physically fit kid, but hey, you know what, he can't have any kids himself. Except you probably won't even get that far most of the time, since the zygote will probably fail to divide into viable progeny. I guess we'll have to try the next test tube. Genetic engineering in the fetus has the possibility of sterilizing us all. Even cloning is inexact--look at Dolly the Sheep.
While bacteria, plants, and fungi can stand all sorts of mangling of their DNA, that isn't the case for human beings. Even one slight change to the genome is likely to cause a miscarriage, often for reasons we don't understand--in a lot of them, there are no gross problems with the genome. Add to this the fact that most of the major conditions we'd be interested in are polygenic and multifactorial (meaning the environment has a big part in what happens)--like cancer and heart disease--and it's easy to see that the utility of genetic engineering is likely to be limited. I'm not saying it's useless-far from it, but it is hardly the paradigm shift that the article makes it out to be.