Human-animal embryos - What are the implications of this?

[flowperson]

Hi Snoopy...At the time it was all just a job to me, and I was good at it. Of course one doesn't always realize, that even in middle age, what one is doing is really contributing to a larger problem instead of doing what we're all here for...finding the answers to problems.

Back then the "population bomb" was a very large perceived problem looming in the future and genetically modified food sources were successfully "sold" to us all as an answer. We went for the available answer instead of finding the roots of the "real" problems that humans must face collectively.

When you're staring across the table into the cold eyes of corporate attorneys and you've done a good job at attaining what your employer, a leading university in agricultural research, has stated as it's goals...and then the Dean of the Graduate College nudges you under the table and stares at you...you do the deal.

flow....

[juantoo3]

Dikika baby

[juantoo3]

Originally Posted by juantoo3

Dikika baby

Point being: if you create it, will you love it as your own?

[flowperson]

Hi Juan...lest we scare away any potential new CR members that may reside in Poland, perhaps reading an article which puts your posted image into context might be advisable.

Of course this all fits with my basic theory of Creation. G-d has the most accurate time/space manipulation devices, and is the universally supreme genetic engineer. And G-d cares .

flow....

Human evolution child hominin discovery - National Geographic Magazine

[juantoo3]

Kindest Regards, Flow!

Originally Posted by flowperson

Hi Juan...lest we scare away any potential new CR members that may reside in Poland, perhaps reading an article which puts your posted image into context might be advisable.

Of course this all fits with my basic theory of Creation. G-d has the most accurate time/space manipulation devices, and is the universally supreme genetic engineer. And G-d cares .

flow....

Human evolution child hominin discovery - National Geographic Magazine

Awww, Flow! You wouldn't be trying to evade the truth by using the facts now, would ya?

I used the photo of the Dikika baby, which is an Australopithicus Afarensis about 500,000 years or so older than Lucy (the type for the species) and by far more complete. My point however, was to visually show something that was not quite human...and yet was "fully" human. That is the paradox we have when we create by tampering.

If your significant other presented a living, breathing, obviously intelligent child that looked like this representation of Dikika to you, are you going to treat it as a living breathing gift worthy of everything that would be bestowed upon a "human" child? Or would you treat this creature as a pet, loving but a bit distant? Or would you treat it as a lab rat, pin cushion, organ donor?

I think these questions asked of anybody would go far to reveal a great deal of how we interact with the natural world, and in turn other humans. But then, what would I know? I only know enough to know I wouldn't proceed to begin with. Not that I cannot, but that I should not. Has Mary Shelley taught us nothing?

[flowperson]

Hi Juan...Well I've tried the "significant other" thingy twice.

The first time created two wonderful children that I still dote upon when I have the chance. The second provided me with an opportunity to mentor a step son who turned into quite a good blues musician. But both marriages ended badly thru some very strange circumstances which I won't go into.

Now, if your highly hypothetical proposition had produced offspring for me that appeared to be an Afarensis child, I would have been very surprised and, at the least would have requested a paternity test for confirmation. If that proved conclusive and was confirmed through repetition, then yes...since it came from me my vested interest would have made it impossible for me not to be fully involved in raising him/her in the very best way that I could.

The point that I was trying to make in my previous posts was that when money drives the process of reproduction of life and not human love and compassion, it is then that we end up with "lab rats" and "pin cushions". But of course you realize that this is only a result of committed researchers when money and power control the processes of life reproduction. And right now, the reins of control, not to mention free and open discussion of the issues, has been taken out of the public forum and hidden away by those who have the most to financially gain in the process as it continues to exist.

The point I was also making was that this has been going on for better than twenty years now, and no one seems to really care about it yet very much. In fact this, obvious to me, lack of care by the public in general is what has largely motivated my writing and research activities for about twenty five years now. And conservative religious institutions have usually been the leaders, up until now, in the organized instruction of people in the fine art form of hiding their collective heads in the sand.

flow....

[Snoopy]

Originally Posted by flowperson

Hi Snoopy...At the time it was all just a job to me, and I was good at it. Of course one doesn't always realize, that even in middle age, what one is doing is really contributing to a larger problem instead of doing what we're all here for...finding the answers to problems.

Back then the "population bomb" was a very large perceived problem looming in the future and genetically modified food sources were successfully "sold" to us all as an answer. We went for the available answer instead of finding the roots of the "real" problems that humans must face collectively.

When you're staring across the table into the cold eyes of corporate attorneys and you've done a good job at attaining what your employer, a leading university in agricultural research, has stated as it's goals...and then the Dean of the Graduate College nudges you under the table and stares at you...you do the deal.

flow....

Hey flow, you know I was only ribbing you......We've all done some crap (there's that word again) in our time. Could still be doing it now, whether we realise it or not...

s.

[flowperson]

Snoopy...I know that subtle humour is part of your ineffable charm and I am always appreciative of your ability to wield it with restraint and good taste. I was only making sure that others who might happen upon our exchange come to understand just what motivated me to act in the ways that I did in my misinformed former selfhood.

If you caught InLove's very prescient comment elsewhere about CR posts being read as history by those who, in the future, might wish to explore our reasons for doing what we did in the past, they will need to understand such things. I try to be ever mindful of that aspect in our exchanges. I view this as the older generation's primary obligation to future generations since books will likely eventually disappear, and knowledge will only be available on screens. And just to assure you of the timeless overabundance of crap in our lives (as if you need reminding)...it's about time again for me to clean my Indonesian Moustache Parakeet's cage...ugh !

flow....

[InLove]

"Prescient". I like that. And here I thought I was just being "hokey".

[juantoo3]

Kindest Regards, Flow!

Originally Posted by flowperson

Now, if your highly hypothetical proposition had produced offspring for me that appeared to be an Afarensis child, I would have been very surprised and, at the least would have requested a paternity test for confirmation. If that proved conclusive and was confirmed through repetition, then yes...since it came from me my vested interest would have made it impossible for me not to be fully involved in raising him/her in the very best way that I could.

I didn't mean specifically an Afarensis child; but that with genetic manipulation if the child came out to look something like an Afarensis child. It is good to hear on all counts that you have done what you could for those you have raised ("yours" and adopted), and that you would extend that grace to a modified child should the manipulation perhaps not go quite as planned. Dolly the sheep, as I recall, died way too young after suffering severely crippling arthritis and other chronic ailments. There is nothing yet to indicate we will not have to first surmount similar odds when dealing with human genomic manipulation. I fear the first generations of genetically modified humans will suffer overwhelming chronic ailments which previously will be unforeseen.

The book "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley was recently brought up in another conversation...seems fitting how such things tie in together. In that book, not only was the government the sole and only parent of all children, but that specific "races" were "engineered" to serve specific roles. Apartheid on steroids with government sanction to boot. Not only can I envision an Huxleyesque servant race, I can also envision a "super"-human race bred specifically for the military (looking not unlike the more recent version of "Planet of the Apes" or the Orcs in "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy).

Originally Posted by flowperson

The point that I was trying to make in my previous posts was that when money drives the process of reproduction of life and not human love and compassion, it is then that we end up with "lab rats" and "pin cushions". But of course you realize that this is only a result of committed researchers when money and power control the processes of life reproduction. And right now, the reins of control, not to mention free and open discussion of the issues, has been taken out of the public forum and hidden away by those who have the most to financially gain in the process as it continues to exist.

I agree that business is a huge driver behind a lot of ethical issues, but it is not alone. A lot of people are under the misguided impression that President Bush has discouraged human genetic experiments...that's not quite true. Bush's "veto" on this was about government funding for research...absolutely nothing is stopping private corporate business from conducting human genomic research in the US. What got everybody's goat was that the government wasn't going to foot the bill for the university system. Perhaps you know a little about this?

I seem to recall a little incident going back some years now, where Monsanto spliced some genes of a flounder fish into a commercial strain of tomato to increase cold survival. Word got out, and the project was fairly quickly halted, at great loss of R & D capital. This is probably one reason why such projects have become rather hush-hush. The outcry in Europe far exceeded that in the states, with protests calling for the banishment of "Frankenfoods." Now, less than a generation later, we witness similar as starving countries in Africa are turning away genetically modified grains with similar cries of "Frankenfood."

We are far too near the beginning of all of this to fully realize the impact of what we are allowing to be done in the name of agribusiness. Human population explosion bedamned...what good is a hyperproductive crop that is ultimately deleterious to the human anatomy? And average joe US citizen is serving unwittingly as the guinea pig in all of this!

Originally Posted by flowperson

The point I was also making was that this has been going on for better than twenty years now, and no one seems to really care about it yet very much. In fact this, obvious to me, lack of care by the public in general is what has largely motivated my writing and research activities for about twenty five years now. And conservative religious institutions have usually been the leaders, up until now, in the organized instruction of people in the fine art form of hiding their collective heads in the sand.

I'm afraid I have not witnessed conservative religious leaders organizing instruction of head burying. No, that head burying instruction I have seen has come directly from the Business and Intellectual (read that: University) world that stands so much to profit from the ethical redirection of attention. Raise a big stink over embryonic stem cells so nobody thinks to look at their frosted flakes.

Luv ya, Flow! Thanks for the insight, keep it coming! We all need to hear it!

[flowperson]

Hi Juan...Love is a many splendored thing, and right back at'cha.

I guess my biggest beef with how all this is progressing is that secrecy has so much to do with it all. The truth of it all is that things may be more effectively hidden away in private companies and their privately funded institutes. Government laboratories are something else altogether as we've seen with the current administration's focus on the political controls imposed upon the reportage of national lab work. National lab scientists like to believe that they're more closely allied with university environments, but the truth is something environmentally quite different.

But in universities it is different. There is an obligation to publicly disclose the results of research and development for the benefit of the public. That is the entire point behind the world-wide collaboration among researchers and the publication of their results. Global organizations of scientists further this impetus. There is a degree of difference in the concealment of results between private and public universities, but in the main in these environments, the scientific community remains in control of the processes of moving science out of the labs and into the lives of ordinary people.

So in the first two scenarios above, scientists and engineers are naturally restrained in their disclosure and publications almost entirely for commercial or political reasons. In the university model, at least those who know the most about what is going on with the science have the most control over the final disposition of the results.

But even that began to change significantly in the 80's with the onset of innovative chip design/building techniques and biotechnology discoveries. Automatically, the time scale from development of basic science in university labs to the point of public utilization began to contract due to the "first to market" syndrome. The newest and most impactful discoveries make the most money, and universities were put into the market oriented rush in two ways. Access to public funds for basic research began to "magically" shrink, and legislation was passed at all levels of government to enable their closer relations with industrial partners...and the rest is what we now have, for better or worse.

So Juan, I suggest that we keep on eating our frosted flakes as they are and hope for the best. Of course they might cost three times as much in a few years because of the coming ethanol debacle. Everyone's piling on this bandwagon without realizing that it takes as much energy to make ethanol out of corn as it does to just pump more oil for gasoline. Ethanol is at best only a stopgap measure, but hundreds of millions are being spent on processing plants. Supply and demand pressures on corn crops is consistently pushing the price of corn sky high because of the demands imposed on the markets by ethanol manufacturers. Oh, what a wicked web we weave....

flow....

[Francis king]

humans evolve, the planet evolves, and maybe this is just another step in the evolution of man/the world? okay, scientists don't quite yet know what they are doing, yet, but well... let's give it a go. If we can tinker with say, the genes of a pig which will allow us to use that pigs heart in a transplant which will save a small child's life, then why not try, if the child will die anyway?

If I can produce a crop which is locust resistant, or modify a plant so that I can grow say, oranges in scotland, then why not try? But yes! experiments like this are already up and running, and that's without even mentioning more contentious aspects of genetics such as stem cell research...

yes, maybe it seems a little scary, and yes, what if it all goes wrong? But you see, people have been attempting to cross breed differing animal species for thousands of years, and generally the creatures are not viable, they are miscarried by the animal, or born premature/underweight, malformed, and they die early.

now... doing this crossbreeding via the genetics lab is a different ballgame. It's not like mating a cow and a man, and it birthing a mancow. Instead, its more a case of...

each person/creature has a barcode. they all have that same length of barcode, but they have different numbers written underneath the lines, and the lines are differently spaced. Now, if in a cow, we realise that what makes them big and strong is line 2, number 1, then in theory we should be able to access this line 2 number 1 in man and somehow, activate it or turn it on, so that the man becomes big and strong like a cow. However, we are not up to that level of things yet, but we will be soon.

Of course, when we get to that stage then other problems will arise. If we meddle with the mans line 2 number one then maybe this will cause something on his line three number 4 to change, and the mancow becomes man-who-smells-of-cabbage.

Altering the dna sequence of human beings to eradicate disease will happen, eventually, when we are more sure of the specifics. If we could do the same for animals too, then maybe we would live in a kind of utopia... I am sick of every new change being viewed as dystopic by Luddites and the conspiracists, protesting from their cosy corners in their organic t-shirts with bellies full of lentil burgers.

Maybe instead of creating pigmen, or dogwomen, or scaly lizard children, we might use this new technology to save lives, and improve things? I mean, things to change to the good as well as the bad, don't they?

sometimes?

[flowperson]

Francis...Yes very well said. What is going on will bring change to both the good and the bad things in life. However, the nature of the technological alteration of genomes is now being undertaken more on a mechanistic basis as opposed to an artistic basis.

Also, the automation of such alteration procedures speeds up cycles of change and the resultant needs for humans to adapt to resultant changes. So adaptation cycles that took us perhaps hundreds of years to assimilate may be required within a few decades. IMHO this is already going on before our eyes right now due to past oversights.

The problem with approaching all of this stuff about genomic alteration as a process similar to replacing a broken part in an automobile with a new one, is that there are really no interchangeable parts, even though it may appear to be that way. Even human genomes are only 99% compatable.

Instead, alteration of genomic structures must be approached similarly to rewriting an old song into a new song. In the old song every note, rhythm, melody, and harmony fits into a workable, wholistic entity that functions based upon exquisite timing mechanisms which brings functional life to inanimate chemical and atomic structures. These sort of approaches to genomic research should be adopted in time instead of the mechanistic genomic alteration processes mostly now in use, or we may risk episodes of chaotic repercussions within life processes.

But I believe your thinking to be sound in much of your statement Francis.

cheers....flow....

[wil]

Ok maybe it is possible that it is evolution....and maybe we'll accidentally create intelligent, peaceful man with powers of compassion, caring and persuasion that will be able to stop wars.. and figure out global warming, poverty, population explosion, and turning waste into clean energy.

While they are at it, I'd like to fly, and have the eyes of an eagle by day and an owl by night, sonar like a bat, be able to breathe underwater, and the sense of hearing and smell of a dog. That last one just so I can sniff the air and find out who is in heat in the club or neighborhood.

[juantoo3]

Kindest Regards, Francis!

In general, I understand what you are saying, even if I might unfairly be perceived as a Luddite...

However, I did find a little bit of inaccuracy:

Originally Posted by Francis king

each person/creature has a barcode. they all have that same length of barcode, but they have different numbers written underneath the lines, and the lines are differently spaced.

In simple terms, this part I highlighted is not true. Using the barcode reference, the barcode is not the same length in every creature. Of some 3 billion base pairs in the DNA of a typical human, less than 100 thousand compose the genomic map, and far fewer still make up the genes. There is a difference between human genes and bonobo (and other simian) genes of one gene. Another example, the domestic horse has 64 genes, and the Przewalski's horse (wild horse of the Steppes) has 66 genes, yet the two can successfully interbreed with fertile offspring.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Przewalski's_Horse

Aside from the minor inaccuracy, I do understand what you are saying. I think we should begin our genetic experiments on the children of those people who most strongly advocate in favor of genetic experiments. Their children, afterall, are merely things to be experimented on, not really human people, not human children, not worthy of a mother's love and affection and concern. IOW, experiment all day long on your own children. Leave my children alone. Thanks.