China hands down prison terms to scientists who genetically altered babies

[sac39507]

This is just a lie as an attempt to show the world that China has some ethical standards and is not entirely barbaric. They send out this fake news but in reality they are secretly funding these scientists and pushing them to make more and faster progress in science in order to achieve their ultimate goal of world domination. Don't believe this for a minute. Trump is the only world leader to have the balls to stand up to this new evil.

 

[Danny101]

I was at my doctor's office, while she was recounting to me me how she had to have one of her two dogs put to sleep. She said , "it got cancer of the blood vessels, can you believe that"?

She continued by saying, "that's why I bought a mix, ("labradoodle"), to begin with, to avoid the genetic diseases of many purebreds".

The single creature on the planet we've done the most "genetic engineering" on is, the common gray wolf, or "timber wolf", if you prefer. In fact, the "dog" is still taxonomically classified as a wolf subspecies, Canis lupis faniliaris.

Is there a moral to that story? I don't know, you tell me.

Only if we plan to eat them. LOL. But a lot of what we eat are bred. There may be risks to it. Who the hell knows? But at least it was mostly done through breeding. Sperm meets egg, eggs says well Ok, I'll try and work with what you got. There's an internal cell intelligence. "I'll turn this on, whoop, no, turn that off! Ok, this will work!" It's the external human laboratory of chemicals, gene splicing/switching, and cell modifications that give me pause. Do you really know what you're doing? Have you assessed the feedback accurately? You don't have a local office within the cell to see everything like the other adjacent cells do. When it's nature vs humans that decide which genes to incorporate or turn on, I lend toward the intelligence of nature. Sure, nature has it's errors, but I suspect humans would err a whole lot more. Bottomline, these scientists 1) are not as smart as they like to think they are, 2) understand what the long-term results will be. My trust in them is at a bare minimum. Some like to cite increased longevity as a sign that they're doing things right. That's just short-term in my view due to the hygiene we developed in the 20th century and medical breakthroughs, prior to the modern experimental and trash filled era. We use to keep and repair things. Now, we produce tons of irreparable garbage. Human life spans are now actually starting to shrink. Gee, I wonder what's causing that?

 

[captaincranky]

Only if we plan to eat them. LOL. But a lot of what we eat are bred. There may be risks to it. Who the hell knows? But at least it was mostly done through breeding. Sperm meets egg, eggs says well Ok, I'll try and work with what you got. There's an internal cell intelligence. "I'll turn this on, whoop, no, turn that off! Ok, this will work!" It's the external human laboratory of chemicals, gene splicing/switching, and cell modifications that give me pause. Do you really know what you're doing? Have you assessed the feedback accurately? You don't have a local office within the cell to see everything like the other adjacent cells do. When it's nature vs humans that decide which genes to incorporate or turn on, I lend toward the intelligence of nature. Sure, nature has it's errors, but I suspect humans would err a whole lot more. Bottomline, these scientists 1) are not as smart as they like to think they are, 2) understand what the long-term results will be. My trust in them is at a bare minimum. Some like to cite increased longevity as a sign that they're doing things right. That's just short-term in my view due to the environmental cleanliness we developed in the 20th century prior to the modern frankenstein food era. Human life spans are now actually starting to shrink. Gee, I wonder what's causing that?

As to our shrinking lifespans, decadence, over consumption, and poor lifestyle choices account for that. I don't think genetic engineering has anything to do with it. After you make those poor choices, big pharma and the medical profession capitalize on it, big time.

Man's biggest conceits, are believing he's "has dominion over the animals", "he was created 'in god's image'", and that the laws of nature don't apply to him.

The US has become decadent beyond belief. As attested to by this picture of Billy Porter at a Met gala.

He thinks he's "fabulous". I think he looks like some deviant creature from "the Hunger Game's, District One". If people want to revere someone like "him", it's a sad testimonial on our current belief and value system.

If you get a dozen of our current womenfolk together and let a wolf loose nearby, you'd have the hominid equivalent of a cattle stampede. (Oh wait, I ca't say that, it's "body shaming". I hope no real far left liberals are around).

I have a bit of sociopathic tendency in my personality, in having great difficulty in forming bonds with others. You'll have to take that into account when I say, "it's time for granny to be put to sleep, so the hospital doesn't grab up any inheritance we might be entitled to".

Back to "longer lives". We already have double the amount of humans on the planet we can comfortably support, WTF are we going to do when they start living to 200?

This is way off topic, but I"d still like to know where the infinitely dense and energetic point of "matter" came from to start the "big bang" in the first place.

Hey, you know you're right, we aren't anywhere near as smart as we think we are.

 

[Yynxs]

You seem to cherish the notion that, "dimension", is a philosophical term, rather than its "definition #1", which is entirely in the physical realm.

Again, I did not mean to insult nor did I mean to denigrate your post. It was a comment about thinking about the negative results from SETI maybe not being due to changing RF use and not about dimensions. The term "2D thinking" is a reference to pop culture from the Star Trek movie, "The Wrath of Khan". In the movie, Mr. Spock is speaking to Capt Kirk about how the attacks Khan is making on the Enterprise seem to originate and are expressed.

"1D thinking" is linear. A to B. I prefer it. The ship is there, shoot it. The point is this. Self-evident being the key. All the readers understand and agree to the terms being used. In the article, experimenting on humans is bad. Period.

"2D thinking" is predator thinking (trying to relate to this). The prey is there. If I attack the prey it will see me, therefore I go behind the prey and attack. (See the movie clip).

"3D thinking" is spatial, vector forces, statistical, influences, cultural (I'm running out of common core of language references), . When the commenters talk about 'other factors' such as 'greater good', 'other useful results', they're talking about results outside the dimensions of the experiment. I used to think that 'metadata' was 4D thinking but have revised that conclusion to retain it in 3D cognition, just that the observer has changed and is writing down to the reader's comprehension limitations.

"4D thinking" is path thinking but 'grokking a fullness'. Does age and size of the trees affect the size of the prey? Are there non-linear non-direct vector influences on the results. Dark matter, dark energy is an example. The rules say this. This is not happening. Another factor is influencing. Describe it. 4D thinking is fraught with logical fallacy and thinker error traps. Using 4D thinking and the resultant non-linear vectors I can show that HIV was caused by Presidents Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and Hitler and Mussolini each following the paths they took and likely would not have happened without all of them.

I only wound up mentioning SETI as a side issue when discussing CRISPR when it was a 'new technology' because of the dangers of CRISPR. Sadly, these Chinese scientists were caught human experimenting. I do not doubt that there are others around the world and the US who have not been caught. I responded your post, half in jest, because I've recently assembled a Linux Mint Cinnamon MSI 3600 system and spent some time getting SETI to run on it. Not yet as simple as Windows 7. Reading the continuing posts about needing money and equipment (and today storage) reminded me of the early days, then and now, still begging for resources. The irony is that the SETI shared computing methodology is the basis for basic research on numerous sciences around the world from protein folding to cryptocurrency. In a larger metaphor, I see the penniless inventor while better salesmen get rich.

Everything you've said about science is true. From your past posts, I'm quite sure you understand them clearly. What I tried to point out, and apparently did a poor job of it, is that, in spite of the science and the math, people do win the lottery. SETI is a very very long shot lottery. As our RF to digital RF history shows, it won't be a simple 1924 Olympic Games broadcast discovery. The last I heard, there are people at SETI evolving that thinking. I'm a long shot bettor. We'll see how that turns out.

 

[Lew Zealand]

Only if we plan to eat them. LOL. But a lot of what we eat are bred. There may be risks to it. Who the hell knows? But at least it was mostly done through breeding. Sperm meets egg, eggs says well Ok, I'll try and work with what you got. There's an internal cell intelligence. "I'll turn this on, whoop, no, turn that off! Ok, this will work!" It's the external human laboratory of chemicals, gene splicing/switching, and cell modifications that give me pause. Do you really know what you're doing? Have you assessed the feedback accurately? You don't have a local office within the cell to see everything like the other adjacent cells do. When it's nature vs humans that decide which genes to incorporate or turn on, I lend toward the intelligence of nature. Sure, nature has it's errors, but I suspect humans would err a whole lot more.

Nature introduces vast rafts of errors/new gene variations into all animal genomes every day, far more than humans will be able to do using gene editing methods for decades if not centuries. It is up to natural selection to determine the overall fitness of an individual and how it contributes to it's species as a whole. The cells are doing this every day and make that 'judgement' on every altered cell, whether the change is done by chance or by directed gene editing methods.

The problem here is that it was done on people (cue Charlton Heston).

1. This was not tested adequately on other animals to ensure close to 100% accuracy in humans (basic medical procedure of Phase I, II and III medical trials)
2. This is a permanent change to the germ line so any effects can be passed on to future generations (code of ethics disallows this at this time)
3. This was not the best way to prevent HIV transmission (drugs and other methods have higher efficacy)
4. They ****ed it up. (introduced errors were NOT the ones they were targeting, see Point 1 above)

 

[Danny101]

Is this our eventual fate?

The Doomed Mouse Utopia That Inspired the 'Rats of NIMH'

Dr. John Bumpass Calhoun spent the '60s and '70s playing god to thousands of rodents.

getpocket.com

 

[captaincranky]

Is this our eventual current fate?

FIXED..!

That link was utterly fascinating. Good catch.

Given out current rise in mass shootings and mass drug dependencies, I'd say we're almost there. The sad thing is, our birth rates haven't dropped yet.

I've seen other reports of studies done where animals were given a choice between cocaine and food, and very often came to prefer the former, starving themselves in the process. Perhaps the good doctor should have introduced some Peruvian marching powder into the mix, to ascertain if it accelerated the rodent's descent into madness...

 

[Lew Zealand]

World fertility rates have been falling drastically since the 1960s and are approaching the net zero of 2 per female, though that won't happen until 2050 or so.

World Bank Open Data

Free and open access to global development data

data.worldbank.org

 

[captaincranky]

World fertility rates have been falling drastically since the 1960s and are approaching the net zero of 2 per female, though that won't happen until 2050 or so...[ ]...

You still have to draw a conclusion if that is being induced by, nature, or by planned parenthood. China outlawed more than one child per couple for a time. More sensible parents only have as many children as they can afford. (Which ain't many, these days).

If in fact, it's by biological infertility, I have to say it's nature getting even with us for shitt!ng all over her planet. Or maybe it's something in the water.

 

[Danny101]

World fertility rates have been falling drastically since the 1960s and are approaching the net zero of 2 per female, though that won't happen until 2050 or so.

World Bank Open Data

Free and open access to global development data

data.worldbank.org

The birth rate can't fall fast enough. I have none, so I'm doing my part, . With AI and robots removing the need for human labor more and more, there's going to be less and less jobs going around. What will truly happen of course will be difficult to predict, but this is no small matter or variable.

 

[captaincranky]

World fertility rates have been falling drastically since the 1960s and are approaching the net zero of 2 per female, though that won't happen until 2050 or so....[ ]....

OK, that's as may be. But, birth rates are not falling symmetrically across all cultures, and socio-economic statuses.

As a long dead friend so rudely (but quite truthfully) put it, "we federally subsidize the breeding of an entire segment of the population we'd be better off without".

 

[Lew Zealand]

OK, that's as may be. But, birth rates are not falling symmetrically across all cultures, and socio-economic statuses.

Yup, the population boom in Africa is nutso. However this was expected as all countries follow the same pattern:

1. Increase in hygiene
2. Increase in affluency
3. Decrease in death rate
4. Decrease in birth rate

The delay between 3 and 4 happening is what creates a population boom. Japan was among the (if not the very) first nation to do this and their native population has been decreasing for a while. Other westernized regions came next (Europe, then N America, then S America) and now SE Asia is catching up with Africa left to last. It will stabilize there just as it has everywhere else, but that won't happen until mid-century.