Stem Cell Cloning...

MO!

MO!

MOnkey`ead!
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British scientists have been given permission to perform therapeutic cloning using human embryos for the first time.
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Thoughts?
 
And apparantly now a major "issue" in the American elections!
 
Shows how stupid/superstitious the Americans are
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I'd have thought that religion plays a big part in the americans concern about it too. Or is religion covered under the stupid/superstitious subset?

Personally, I'm in favour of conducting research, provided it is done ethically and to appropriate guidelines.
 
i'm very pro this.
why is it that cloning immediately engenders images of fankensteins monster or little german dictators originating from south america. literature has a lot to answer for.
cheers


julian
 
I'm all in favour of it. I do think its potential for curing all sorts of diseases in the relatively near future has been rather hyped up though and is possibly giving some people false expectations. I hear 10 years being bandied about but no one yet has the first clue how to do the re-programming of the cells to make them grow into what they want.

Michael.
 
michaelab said:
I'm all in favour of it. I do think its potential for curing all sorts of diseases in the relatively near future has been rather hyped up though and is possibly giving some people false expectations. I hear 10 years being bandied about but no one yet has the first clue how to do the re-programming of the cells to make them grow into what they want.

Michael.
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I think I heard as little as 5 years!!!
 
Twins are good, triplets are better but cloning is best!

I am sure it will be a race between Nanobots and Cloning to see which technology has the biggest impact in the medical field over the next twenty or so years.

Auric
 
I agree here the potential for a lot of untreatable (at the moment) ills is great, so is the abuse of it, very carefull policing of labs is called for here, how long before a synthetic is replicated? 15-20 years or sooner?
Correctly handled this could bring stunning results, if not serious consiquenices could be fatal, if the wrong ethical idiots got hold of it. Playing at being God is no mean feat, we will be judged on our handling of it.
 
Ethics and profit are they a zero sum game?

Those who wish to play God will be a problem, at the moment in time anti-retroviral drugs for adis and hiv suffers are in short supply and someone has to decide who gets them and who does not. The same may well happen with cloning and nano technology.
 
and on a similar theme........

From the NY Times.... (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/25/opinion/25kristof.html)

OP-ED COLUMNIST
Building Better Bodies
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: August 25, 2004

or a glimpse of what post-human athletes may look like beginning in the 2012 or 2016 Olympics, take a look at an obscure breed of cattle called the Belgian Blue.

Belgian Blues are unlike any cows you've ever seen. They have a genetic mutation that means they do not have effective myostatin, a substance that curbs muscle growth. A result is that Belgian Blues are all bulging muscles without a spot of fat, like bovine caricatures of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

These mutants may also point to the future of humans, particularly athletes. Gene therapies are being developed that would block myostatin in humans, and they offer immense promise in treating muscular dystrophy and the frailty that comes with aging. But once this gene therapy becomes available for people who really need it, it'll take about 10 minutes before athletes are surreptitiously using it, particularly because, in contrast to today's doping, gene therapy leaves no trace in the blood or urine.

The standard human shape would become different, and anyone with money could look like a body builder. As H. Lee Sweeney, chairman of physiology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, writes in a fascinating article in July's Scientific American, "The world may be about to watch one of its last Olympic Games without genetically enhanced athletes."

Even more important, gene therapy goes to the heart of an issue that will turn our species upside down in the coming decades. We are beginning to understand our own operating system - genes - and we're gaining the ability to try to "improve" our genetic endowment. If we do so, the ramifications could be as enormous as when our ancestors first crawled out of the slime to live on land.

Genetic tinkering gives me the willies. My concern is not so much the details of blocking myostatin, although Belgian Blue calves are so muscled that their mothers are at high risk of dying while giving birth, as with the possibility that we will irreversibly change what it is to be human. Geneticists have tried to improve apples over the last 50 years, producing larger, prettier species that just aren't as tasty or as interesting as they used to be; it would be a tragedy if we did to humans what we've done to apples.

Yet gene therapy also offers immense promise. Injecting genes to block myostatin could help not only those with muscular dystrophy but also anyone suffering the routine loss of musculature that comes with aging. Instead of breaking their hips and limping about on walkers, nonagenarians could run road races.

So far, the experiments have been very impressive. Dr. Sweeney and his team injected mice with genes that resulted in muscles 15 to 30 percent larger than in other mice. And when middle-aged mice were injected with the gene, their muscles did not weaken in old age.

Other gene therapies are being developed that would prod the human body to produce more red blood cells, a huge benefit to athletes. In monkeys and baboons, these therapies led the red blood cell count to just about double in 10 weeks.

A small number of humans have natural genetic mutations that are similar, and these people appear to live normally and to be exceptional athletes. For example, Eero Mantyranta of Finland was a three-time gold medalist in cross-country skiing Olympics in the 1960's, and his family later turned out to have a genetic mutation that produced extremely high levels of red blood cells.

Likewise, The New England Journal of Medicine in June documented a human version of the Belgian Blues, a boy with a genetic mutation that interferes with myostatin. From the moment he was born, he had extraordinary muscling, and at age 4 he can hold a 3-kilogram dumbbell in each hand with his arms extended. A European weight-lifting champion is said to have a similar mutation.

Perhaps the most important and complex decision in the history of our species is approaching: in what ways should we improve our genetic endowment? Yet we are neither focused on this question nor adequately schooled to resolve it.

So we desperately need greater scientific literacy, and it's past time for a post-Sputnik style revitalization of science education, especially genetics, to help us figure out if we want our descendants to belong to the same species as we do.
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and the Belgian Blue....
23belg.184.jpg
 
ohhh is that a knee i see jerking? i refer you to my earlier post in this thread. this kind of 'speculation' as fact reporting makes me want to vomit. perhaps if they took their heads out of their arses in the search for a sensationalist story they'd actually see the benefits of this technology. but of course that wouldn't sell their raggy scream sheet, now, would it? this is one of the major reasons all media whores should be shot, just after all the lawyers.
cheers


julian
 
It is not about muscle. After watching the Games I think I follow the theory that it is the brain that athletes need to look to technology to improve. They need to have brains with faster processing speed. A brain that could out think all the opponents. A brain that they could at a turn of a switch to set the correct pychological mind set and strength to believe in yourself.
 
wolfgang,
if it was ALL about brains stephen hawking would be doing the 100m sprint in 5 seconds. muscles are important too, in the end it's about both, the will to use the available muscle. a certain amount of one can make up for a lack of the other but in the end there has to be a minimum level of both in order to perform.
cheers


julian
 
Nope. It is all about brain power. 80% brain 20% muscle. If Hawkings have normal and not diseased muscles he could well be a good natural sportman. Err..... Another example is Jonathan Edwards who has been documented to score a high IQ test. Since he is good in long jump it suggest that even in a simple event that involve run as fast as you can and jump must requires lots of processing brain power to do it well. Err....errr..... it is midnight and I can't come up with any better idea how to prolong this debate. I give up. You win.
 
julian2002 said:
wolfgang,
if it was ALL about brains stephen hawking would be doing the 100m sprint in 5 seconds. muscles are important too..............
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:lol:

LMAO!!!
 
wolfgang,
don;t worry about it i only took such an extreme contrary position so i could use the analogy mo found so funny. of course it's about both, two physically matched people racing, the one with the better attitude (not just intelligence imho) will be the winner more often. i reckon that's one of the reasons paula radcliffe just stopped during the marathon - mental burnout - unless a physiological reason has been found - not watching tv as much as possible does have it's disadvantages i guess.
cheers


julian
 

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