Okay, folks. I wanted to discuss the idea of gene splicing. I've been repeatedly bugged by the topic, its validity, how it'd be executed... all of that stuff.
My view on it is that if we do figure out how to basically inject animal genes in to us, we'd use it for curing diseases or different ailments right off the bat. Then, there'd be others who would want to take it a step further and become hybrids of animal and human (dont turn this into a furry discussion, now.)
However, we'd have to study the negative effects of doing these procedures closely as to not have a sort of apocalypse break out.
So, forums, what do you feel about Gene Splicing, or directly using animal DNA for medical or recreational purposes?
EDIT: Edited title for a better term. Dont know what I was thinking
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Genetics could be the most useful thing in the history of medicine. It could also be the most destructive thing in the history of weapons.
I feel that too many people are anti GE, and that it is important to learn about it, both for medicine, and to prevent deliberate/accidental catastrophes.
I highly recommend you watch the "Animal Farm" documentary: (part 1)
My one hate in it is the guy who thinks that a shark could grow extra big by eating a fish genetically modified to grow big.
Evolutionary-wise, I think we should let nature run it's own course, atleast on this matter.
Why? Nature sucks at it and definitely doesn't have human interests in mind.
As far as applications to humanity, it'll come in the form of gene therapies. We already have successful gene therapies which have begun to cure certain forms of blindness, cures for color blindness aren't far off. Genetics also gives us insight into other diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's which are pretty close to being well understood (and possibly cured).
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Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
Feeding the world - good. Saving the environment - good. Curing serious diseases - good.
For the lols - bad. Creating a state of total disease immunity - bad. Cloning for purposes other than specie preservation - bad. Transgenics for military purposes - bad.
^
Well, side effects ignored would I be biologically immortal?
In the sense that your body can regenerate by reverting to an earlier developmental form. You would be immortal in the sense that you could avoid aging by simply undoing it, but most of your body would be effectively destroyed in the process.
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Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
(as in, id loose knowledge when de-aging from what id understand?)
Who knows? Jellyfish don't have a central nervous system. There's a number of specialized organs and systems that humans possess that jellyfish do not. I can't extrapolate the way these jellyfish regenerate to how a human would do it. The body structure is too different.
you're severely underestimating nature
How? Nature is a shitty designer because it doesn't intelligently attempt to solve problems. Evolution is a haphazard and unguided process that takes millions of years to produce anything that looks like it was optimized. Nature produces a lot of stuff that looks amazing until you look closely and see how stupid it actually is. Consider the testicles. Dumb. The respiratory and digestive systems in many organisms cross one another in the throat guaranteeing that, at some point, something is going to choke to death. The mammalian eyes are a particularly egregious example with the nerves and blood vessels for the photoreceptor cells placed in front of the cells so that they actually block light. And then they have to go back through the retina leaving a blind spot.
Nature has had billions of years to solve problems and we can look to it for inspiration (and avoid reinventing the wheel). But we don't have the luxury of sitting around forever and hoping that our problems will be solved by a process that doesn't give a rat's ass about what happens to us. We've already been using nature through selective breeding programs for thousands of years and we've done some pretty great things with it, but it's still limited in what it can accomplish. Just as we used to be able to make shelters out of existing natural features such as caves but moved on to building our own structures out of smaller parts, so too will we advance from letting nature and chance completely dictate our genetics to actively controlling it.
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Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
So i wouldn't be immortal?
(as in, id loose knowledge when de-aging from what id understand?)
If yes,
Regeneration of a human being would be complex enough, gene-coding to ignore brain-cells even harder. Although It is probably possible. The problem is your brain tissue would wear out.
Aging genes are the way to go. Cells do not wear out because they can no longer repair, rather, proteins control this too. It should be possible the hack the aging genes into aging around 4x slower (as has been done with fruit flys (the reason all this genetic stuff is done to fruit flys is because they only have 4 chromosomes)).
The problem is, either of these methods cannot be applied to humans past the single cell stage (egg cell), so sorry, but no immortality for us. Unless the conciseness/memory can be transferred that is, thoughts anyone? If its not too off topic can I have your thoughts on if a being with your exact memories would still be you?
I know that, that's why it sucks at what it does. Because there's absolutely no guiding hand. When I characterized it as a process that "doesn't give a rat's ass" I was speaking metaphorically. I use metaphors and personify inanimate things because it happens that the human brain is particularly well suited to understanding these things.
Now, are you going to actually try to back up your point or make me waste more of my time explaining metaphors?
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Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
I figure gene splicing would be a very strictly controlled practice and that it would only be used in medical cases when no alternative was present. There would probably be crazy side-effects of merging human genes with animals' (There's a reason we're different!), so it would never become a common factor in society, but it would also never lose value in the scientific or medical fields. Once a breakthrough came and made a stable iteration of gene splicing, it would become available for personal use by high-class/wealthy civilians. From the beginning, this would be largely protested by those that see the alteration of DNA as a desecration of the human body, and a potentially dangerous one at that. Eventually, there would be an unforgivable scandal caused by someone who legally attained the gene-splicing technology with unscrupulous intentions. Afterward, gene splicing would be confined to the lab/hospital once more.
I'm calling it.
EDIT: And I completely forgot to explain the problems that would come up when eugenics became possible. I'd think someone would envision a second Holocaust, followed by a superior race of lab-altered humans. Whether they could reasonably try to execute it... I don't know. It's crazy stuff, but so are some people.
That reason being that two very related ancestral populations were separated and responded to different sets of selective pressures associated with their local environments.
I figure gene splicing would be a very strictly controlled practice and that it would only be used in medical cases when no alternative was present.
I don't like the term gene splicing since it implies something specific. Genetic engineering is a better term. Anyway, actually splicing in animal genes into our own genome would be pretty stupid. We'd be better off designing custom genes (or using other human genes). For some diseases gene therapy is the only answer. You can't vaccinate against genetic blindness, after all.
This is the kind of things that gene "splicing" is for.
Once a breakthrough came and made a stable iteration of gene splicing, it would become available for personal use by high-class/wealthy civilians
What? Gene therapy is a medical treatment, not a toy.
and a potentially dangerous one at that
Most medical procedures are. The thing is they end up being less dangerous than the alternative of doing nothing.
And I completely forgot to explain the problems that would come up when eugenics became possible.
Eugenics is cheaper and easier through selective breeding (also, by definition, it is selective breeding). Genetic engineering could only potentially make it faster. It's also strongly associated with some of the most egregious human rights violations of the last century. Inherently I don't see anything particularly wrong with the improvement of the human genome (especially with regards to congenital disorders). How much you can actually influence a person's cognitive abilities and personality through their genes remains to be seen (since the brain is so incredibly plastic during development, environmental factors play at least a big a role if not bigger than genetic ones). At best eugenics was mostly pseudoscience and any comparison with modern genetic engineering is tenuous. I also consider it a kind of fear mongering.
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Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
That reason being that two very related ancestral populations were separated and responded to different sets of selective pressures associated with their local environments.
Then maybe I should have said, "There are lots of reasons gene splicing would not work - Being different creatures involves having different genes, and the effects of intermixing them would be unsafe and unpredictable at best." Is that any better for you?
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I don't like the term gene splicing since it implies something specific. Genetic engineering is a better term. Anyway, actually splicing in animal genes into our own genome would be pretty stupid. We'd be better off designing custom genes (or using other human genes). For some diseases gene therapy is the only answer. You can't vaccinate against genetic blindness, after all.
I actually agree with this bit; I was wondering if Cliff_Racer meant something broader than just gene splicing when he said it, which would make sense. Why confine a topic about genetics to just gene splicing?
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What? Gene therapy is a medical treatment, not a toy.
(Trying not to create any more confusion regarding gene therapy/splicing/re-engineering/whatever) And it wouldn't be a toy for the limited groups that were eventually allowed to use it, either. The people that could access the technology would be allowed to do so under the pretense that it could be beneficial to independent study or for more easily accessible medical treatment. When it becomes available to the public, we aren't changing the mediums in which it is used, just the people that are using it. Of course, someone would see it as a toy, which leads us into the portion of my prediction following the public getting access to it.
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Most medical procedures are. The thing is they end up being less dangerous than the alternative of doing nothing.
That's not necessarily true. If you're dealing with a largely unexplored and unstable science, the effects could very well be more dangerous than doing nothing.
Quote from Yourself »
Eugenics is cheaper and easier through selective breeding (also, by definition, it is selective breeding). Genetic engineering could only potentially make it faster. It's also strongly associated with some of the most egregious human rights violations of the last century. Inherently I don't see anything particularly wrong with the improvement of the human genome (especially with regards to congenital disorders). How much you can actually influence a person's cognitive abilities and personality through their genes remains to be seen (since the brain is so incredibly plastic during development, environmental factors play at least a big a role if not bigger than genetic ones). At best eugenics was mostly pseudoscience and any comparison with modern genetic engineering is tenuous. I also consider it a kind of fear mongering.
I might be able to refute this if I better understood the concept of eugenics. As far as I know, it's just picking and mixing the best genes to end up with an overall superior breed. Fear mongering - Ehhh... maybe if people thing actions would be taken to stop the inferior races from living on. I think it would be a good thing in the long run, even though it would painfully divide humans (there would be pre-genetic-engineering races, and the new, supposedly superior group. There would be a clear difference between them, and either group would have a valid reason to feel threatened by the other.).
My view on it is that if we do figure out how to basically inject animal genes in to us, we'd use it for curing diseases or different ailments right off the bat. Then, there'd be others who would want to take it a step further and become hybrids of animal and human (dont turn this into a furry discussion, now.)
However, we'd have to study the negative effects of doing these procedures closely as to not have a sort of apocalypse break out.
So, forums, what do you feel about Gene Splicing, or directly using animal DNA for medical or recreational purposes?
EDIT: Edited title for a better term. Dont know what I was thinking
I feel that too many people are anti GE, and that it is important to learn about it, both for medicine, and to prevent deliberate/accidental catastrophes.
I highly recommend you watch the "Animal Farm" documentary: (part 1)
My one hate in it is the guy who thinks that a shark could grow extra big by eating a fish genetically modified to grow big.
We've already made a cross between a monkey and a jellyfish.
Why? Nature sucks at it and definitely doesn't have human interests in mind.
As far as applications to humanity, it'll come in the form of gene therapies. We already have successful gene therapies which have begun to cure certain forms of blindness, cures for color blindness aren't far off. Genetics also gives us insight into other diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's which are pretty close to being well understood (and possibly cured).
On a more serious note:
Feeding the world - good. Saving the environment - good. Curing serious diseases - good.
For the lols - bad. Creating a state of total disease immunity - bad. Cloning for purposes other than specie preservation - bad. Transgenics for military purposes - bad.
facepalm of the month- dra6o0n
The immortal jellyfish gives birth without sex. Have fun with that.
facepalm of the month- dra6o0n
They reproduce sexually, but like many sea creatures do so without actual physical interaction between members of the opposite sex.
You'd also have to continually revert to a prepubescent child and have to wait to go through puberty all over again before you can revert again.
Of course this doesn't apply to humans. We simply can't operate that way.
Well, side effects ignored would I be biologically immortal?
facepalm of the month- dra6o0n
In the sense that your body can regenerate by reverting to an earlier developmental form. You would be immortal in the sense that you could avoid aging by simply undoing it, but most of your body would be effectively destroyed in the process.
(as in, id loose knowledge when de-aging from what id understand?)
If yes,
facepalm of the month- dra6o0n
Who knows? Jellyfish don't have a central nervous system. There's a number of specialized organs and systems that humans possess that jellyfish do not. I can't extrapolate the way these jellyfish regenerate to how a human would do it. The body structure is too different.
How? Nature is a shitty designer because it doesn't intelligently attempt to solve problems. Evolution is a haphazard and unguided process that takes millions of years to produce anything that looks like it was optimized. Nature produces a lot of stuff that looks amazing until you look closely and see how stupid it actually is. Consider the testicles. Dumb. The respiratory and digestive systems in many organisms cross one another in the throat guaranteeing that, at some point, something is going to choke to death. The mammalian eyes are a particularly egregious example with the nerves and blood vessels for the photoreceptor cells placed in front of the cells so that they actually block light. And then they have to go back through the retina leaving a blind spot.
Nature has had billions of years to solve problems and we can look to it for inspiration (and avoid reinventing the wheel). But we don't have the luxury of sitting around forever and hoping that our problems will be solved by a process that doesn't give a rat's ass about what happens to us. We've already been using nature through selective breeding programs for thousands of years and we've done some pretty great things with it, but it's still limited in what it can accomplish. Just as we used to be able to make shelters out of existing natural features such as caves but moved on to building our own structures out of smaller parts, so too will we advance from letting nature and chance completely dictate our genetics to actively controlling it.
Regeneration of a human being would be complex enough, gene-coding to ignore brain-cells even harder. Although It is probably possible. The problem is your brain tissue would wear out.
Aging genes are the way to go. Cells do not wear out because they can no longer repair, rather, proteins control this too. It should be possible the hack the aging genes into aging around 4x slower (as has been done with fruit flys (the reason all this genetic stuff is done to fruit flys is because they only have 4 chromosomes)).
The problem is, either of these methods cannot be applied to humans past the single cell stage (egg cell), so sorry, but no immortality for us. Unless the conciseness/memory can be transferred that is, thoughts anyone? If its not too off topic can I have your thoughts on if a being with your exact memories would still be you?
facepalm of the month- dra6o0n
I know that, that's why it sucks at what it does. Because there's absolutely no guiding hand. When I characterized it as a process that "doesn't give a rat's ass" I was speaking metaphorically. I use metaphors and personify inanimate things because it happens that the human brain is particularly well suited to understanding these things.
Now, are you going to actually try to back up your point or make me waste more of my time explaining metaphors?
I'm calling it.
EDIT: And I completely forgot to explain the problems that would come up when eugenics became possible. I'd think someone would envision a second Holocaust, followed by a superior race of lab-altered humans. Whether they could reasonably try to execute it... I don't know. It's crazy stuff, but so are some people.
That reason being that two very related ancestral populations were separated and responded to different sets of selective pressures associated with their local environments.
I don't like the term gene splicing since it implies something specific. Genetic engineering is a better term. Anyway, actually splicing in animal genes into our own genome would be pretty stupid. We'd be better off designing custom genes (or using other human genes). For some diseases gene therapy is the only answer. You can't vaccinate against genetic blindness, after all.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/health/03eye.html
This is the kind of things that gene "splicing" is for.
What? Gene therapy is a medical treatment, not a toy.
Most medical procedures are. The thing is they end up being less dangerous than the alternative of doing nothing.
Eugenics is cheaper and easier through selective breeding (also, by definition, it is selective breeding). Genetic engineering could only potentially make it faster. It's also strongly associated with some of the most egregious human rights violations of the last century. Inherently I don't see anything particularly wrong with the improvement of the human genome (especially with regards to congenital disorders). How much you can actually influence a person's cognitive abilities and personality through their genes remains to be seen (since the brain is so incredibly plastic during development, environmental factors play at least a big a role if not bigger than genetic ones). At best eugenics was mostly pseudoscience and any comparison with modern genetic engineering is tenuous. I also consider it a kind of fear mongering.
Then maybe I should have said, "There are lots of reasons gene splicing would not work - Being different creatures involves having different genes, and the effects of intermixing them would be unsafe and unpredictable at best." Is that any better for you?
I actually agree with this bit; I was wondering if Cliff_Racer meant something broader than just gene splicing when he said it, which would make sense. Why confine a topic about genetics to just gene splicing?
(Trying not to create any more confusion regarding gene therapy/splicing/re-engineering/whatever) And it wouldn't be a toy for the limited groups that were eventually allowed to use it, either. The people that could access the technology would be allowed to do so under the pretense that it could be beneficial to independent study or for more easily accessible medical treatment. When it becomes available to the public, we aren't changing the mediums in which it is used, just the people that are using it. Of course, someone would see it as a toy, which leads us into the portion of my prediction following the public getting access to it.
That's not necessarily true. If you're dealing with a largely unexplored and unstable science, the effects could very well be more dangerous than doing nothing.
I might be able to refute this if I better understood the concept of eugenics. As far as I know, it's just picking and mixing the best genes to end up with an overall superior breed. Fear mongering - Ehhh... maybe if people thing actions would be taken to stop the inferior races from living on. I think it would be a good thing in the long run, even though it would painfully divide humans (there would be pre-genetic-engineering races, and the new, supposedly superior group. There would be a clear difference between them, and either group would have a valid reason to feel threatened by the other.).