[Phaedrus]

From "Prescient" Peggy Noonan's OpinionJournal.com article My Brothers and Sisters on 3/8/2002:

The friend who had e'd me followed up with news that the Chinese are creating dozens of cloned embryos in their labs. The British medical journal New Scientist has reported a Chinese team "based at Shanghai No. 2 Medical University" says it has "derived stem cells from hybrid embryos composed of human cells and rabbit eggs." The journal said scientists throughout the world fear similar research in the US and UK has been "bogged down" by "ethical concerns."

Ah, those pesky ethical concerns. They slow you up just when you could be creating in a Petri dish the recipe for Rabbit Man. And then of course you could grow him, bring him into being, for all but dunces know that what man can do he will do. And then perhaps once you've grown him you can have Rabbit Man for dinner.

Boldings are, again, mine.

[Phaedrus]

Ping

[muawiyah]

Even this article has that flaw in it - that life "began" on Earth.

It is clear that there has not yet been enough time for Earth to have come up with such a thing. Life and it's various processes, particularly it's various quantum computers, has clearly been around for tens if not hundreds of billions of years - maybe even through infinity!

[JmyBryan]

Molecular biologists are aware of these limitations. They discovered them. Scientists always simplify - especially to get govt money.

[MarkWar]

>Barry Commoner

"Beginning with his opposition to nuclear weapons in the 1950s, Commoner has been an outspoken, sometimes radical motivator of change on such environmental issues as energy conservation, pesticide use, waste management and control of toxic chemicals. He also founded the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems (CBNS), which has disseminated information on topics ranging from dioxin to waste recycling and the economics of renewable resources."

[Scientific American bio of Commoner]

This current article describes Commoner as the "...senior scientist at the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems..." but that's the group he started himself. I can be "senior scientist" of the MarkWar Institute if I want to be...

I think that having left wing nuts like Commoner speak out against cloning and such is a way the Establishment hopes to preempt serious opposition. Nobody in their right mind would want to stand alongside these former radicals and environmentalists etc. Setting up these scum as "opponents" of cloning and genetic engineering is a good way of making sure that your only opponents will be similar losers... (Regardless of the merits of their case...)

Mark W.

[PatrioticAmerican]

too long an article to read. DNA is a great thing to understand and we are knowing more about it every day. God gave us a brain, so what's the problem with using it to discover the world around and in us? We know little of dna, but that is changing rapidly.

[EternalHope]

Great article!

[WhiteKnight]

careful observation of the hierarchy of living processes strongly suggests that it is the other way around: DNA did not create life; life created DNA.41

Which always begs the question: What created life and therefore DNA??

WhiteKnight

[stripes1776]

This Reaganesque version of the central dogma is the scientific foundation upon which...

A very interesting article. However, I have to take exception to the authors understanding of "Reaganesque". What he describes is most definitely not Reaganesque. It is more akin to socialist, Clintonesque, Democratic central control.

That the author could so clearly fail to understand and infact distort the meaning of Reaganesque shows that his powers of reason are far from infallible. Therefore, it calls into question the substance of the entire article. His conclusions must be critiqued at all levels before forming any opinion of their truth.

[Renegade]

Gene count might be approaching the 70,000 mark as stated in upcoming article in Science magazine . AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE ANNUAL MEETING: Human Gene Count on the Rise Ben Shouse BOSTON--The annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (publisher of Science ), held from 15 to 19 February, included symposia across the scientific disciplines. According to one presentation, the number of human genes may actually be much closer to the early prediction of 70,000 genes rather than the much smaller number predicted when the draft sequence was published last year. This story and the following one are a sampling from the early sessions; more coverage will be published next week.

[jwalsh07]

OK, so life preceded DNA and cells are irreducible.

I hate to ask but where did the living cells fly in from?

[nopardons]

BUMP

[AndrewC]

The experimental data, shorn of dogmatic theories, points to the irreducibility of the living cell,

Despite my misgivings about his political views, this particular conclusion is consonant with those expressed by Dr. James Shapiro. All in all this article says something about the Emperor's new clothes.

[realpatriot71]

The article was a bit "foil-hat" for my tastes, but Commoner does make some good points - specifically that care needs to be taken when playing with DNA. However, I've personally worked with transgenic species to develop purified proteins for pharmaceutical use, and I've never seen the type of horror stories Commoner seems to imply in this piece. I was on the inside and I can tell you we weren't covering anything up. If a protein came out of Picia spp. or E. coli and it was not folded properly or did not work we didn't use it or push it. I think there's a lot of hope and promise for this kind of technology.

[<1/1,000,000th%]

Nuke DNA.

[Doctor Stochastic]

There are far too few human genes to account for the complexity of our inherited traits or for the vast inherited differences between plants, say, and people.

This is stated with no reference nor justification. Having lots of genes, chromosomes, or other genetic material doesn't say much about the complexity of an organism. Aside from that, other people estimate a different number of genes from what Commoner does.

[aruanan]

Instead of the 100,000 or more genes predicted by the estimated number of human proteins, the gene count was only about 30,000.

And there are something like 6 variants of each gene, making 180,000 or more genes. Poor Barry Commoner.

[RightWhale]

most molecular biologists operate under the assumption that DNA is the secret of life, whereas the careful observation of the hierarchy of living processes strongly suggests that it is the other way around: DNA did not create life; life created DNA

This article is an excellent find. Things are happening in physics, too, even though biology has moved beyond experiments with pea plants.