Pray for the British Isles.
Posted on 05/18/2007 9:11:09 AM PDT by mware
Hybrid embryos get go-ahead
David Batty Thursday May 17, 2007
Guardian Unlimited
The government has overturned its proposed ban on the creation of human-animal embryos and now wants to allow them to be used to develop new treatments for incurable diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. The proposal, in a new draft fertility bill published today, would allow scientists to create three different types of hybrid embryos.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
Let’s hear it for our Brave New World.
Pray for the British Isles.
There was a thread yesterday. No one should be surprised who has followed research into transgenic chickens.
I forwarded the article to a priest FRiend of mine who has a radio show on Sirus 159. I think he will be talking about it.
There should be more discussion. These genetic threads peter out quickly, while discussions of Paris Hilton go on and on. We ought to be very careful about toying with our DNA since what results won’t be ‘us’ anymore.
The other day there was a thread about possibly allowing athletes with hi-tech artificial limbs to participate in the olympics. And we see talk of genetic modification all the time. Do we want to enter a trans-human era? What will we gain? What will we lose?
We ought to be aware of these things and more. What are the rights of partially human chimera? Can they vote? Would they vote R or D?
I don't have the book here so I can't look it up, sorry.
More like The Island of Doctor Moreau.
(Here in Alberta I would have thought "transgenic chickens" to be an epithet for Ottawa.)
Well, if parents have genetically-modified kids with higher abilities and intelligence, and the kids compete in the same world with the rest of us, and are at an obvious predisposition to succeed more than the rest, what can stop them, or others from following that path? Genetic domination, after all, is the name of life’s game.
One of the genetic corporations was developing chickens that would lay eggs with human hormones in the albumin. This was probably about ten years ago. Without a doubt this kind of research will change things on the medical front in the coming century, but it is happening too slowly to actually invest and I sold my stock.
IIRC, human insulin is manufactured in a similar manner.
It’s pretty easy to insert a gene coding for one human protein (out of thousands) into a bacteria, which will procede to generate that protein in large quantities. It’s much more efficient than extracting the protein from animals or other humans, it’s safer (no infectious agents), and it’s an exact match, not just a reasonably close animal match.
This has been a boon to medicine, and it doesn’t seem wrong to make a bacteria that makes one human protein - bacteria pick up new genes all the time in nature.
Mrs VS
Saw a picture of a room full of engineered chicken eggs. The quantity of albumin compared to what an animal could generate in an internal organ was a selling point. Don’t know if they made a lot of sales anyway.
Yes. I’m not against it. I believe mankind is in for a major “genetic upgrade” pretty soon, if not already. Filtering human gametes for “perfection”, genetic modification, will all happen, licit, or illicit, and when it reaches critical mass, the rest will be forced to follow, or be sidelined.
Messing around with a bacteria seems more respectful than messing around with a chicken - not that we haven’t produced all sorts of variations just by breeding - imagine the moral outrage of a wolf over a pug dog.
Mrs VS
That’s funny. My neighbor walks her pug past my house every day and my dog thinks it is a rabbit and may be barked at. The concept of a rabbit on a leash is more advanced than my dog’s comprehension.
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