Yahoo Tuning Groups Ultimate Backup metatuning Re: [metatuning] Digest Number 76

My responses to Jeff:

>Biotech fanaticism: "Genetic purity at any cost! We
>are our own gods and all must worship us! Our decrees
>shall not be questioned!"

This sounds like statement from a radical New Age environmentalist, not
from a traditional
plant breeder or a genetic engineer. Genetic purity is not very
meaningful as our
domestic plants and animals, as well as we humans, have mixed ancestries.

None of us think we're gods or want to be worshipped, just well-paid <g>.

Scientists don't issue decrees; we amass evidence and test theories.

>Fanatical evolutionists are simply unable to withstand
>any criticism because their widely believed and
>fiercely protected theory is itself just a fantastic
>speculation, unsupported by evidence.

This statement can only be based on ignorance and religious or
philosophical prejudice.
There is an immense amount of evidence for evolution: This past week
both Nature and Science
have articles on more new fossils from Pakistan of transitional forms
between whales
and artiodactyls (cows, sheep, pigs, giraffes, hippos, goats, camels,
etc.), just to give a recent example.

There is also an ongoing series on PBS that seems to be tailored to the objections
of creationists like yourself, though I doubt you'll be convinced by it.

> Please reference the exact email or post to which you
>are referring so I may address your concerns more
>specifically.

It was a remark made in passing near the end of your post (in Digest 73 ?)
discussing some kind of inquisition against scientists, possibly
led by me, but I didn't save the original. If I misunderstood you, I
apologize.

>Don't be such a silly boy, John.
>It's what you were fishing for, was it not?

I never fish for compliments or insults and I consider myself
a highly moral, civil, honest, and ethical individual.

We've discussed biotech ("frankenfood") before on this
list and I've never been reticent about defending science or my
expressing my beliefs, though I do try to be polite about it.

"Making a clone of oneself and killing it for spare parts is
>what's really offensive, John. Murdering human
>beings for medical research is really offensive, John.

Do you really understand what a clone is? I suspect your emotional
rejection to the
possibilities created by cloning, etc. is based on religion or
metaphysics, not biology.
Read Lee Silver's book, "Remaking Eden." He is an expert in reproductive
physiology and carefully
distinguishes fact from speculation, though some of the speculation is
pretty unsettling, even
to me. However, I think he ignores the fact that these technologies will
be so expensive
that only a minuscule number of people would ever use them. I really
don't think
that cloning humans, even if if possible, will affect the gene pool or
lead to speciation.

I learned quite a number of things from the book myself and I bought it
at a time when
I was considering writing a book on cloning (right after Dolly was
born). One thing
I didn't know was that there are 100 known cases of human chimeras,
humans who
have two genetically distinct cell lines in their bodies because they
arose by the natural fusion of
two fertilized eggs. In other words, what would have been fraternal
twins becomes only one person.
When the two are the same sex, the person is entirely normal. If one if
male and the other female,
then there may be reproductive problems and abnormal genitalia,
depending upon how much each embryo
contributed to the total organism and how much of each cell type is in
each organ.

Silver suggests that couples might clone themselves and combine the
cells from both
embryos before gestation. The process has been done in mice for years
and Vonda McIntyre wrote
a compelling SF story about such a tetraparental man (parentage
unspecified, however).

I mention chimeras primarily to indicate that diagnostic medical
research, even in the absence of
human experimentation, forces us to re-evaluate our conceptions of
personhood. I think these differing
concepts are at the bottom of our disagreement over the morality of cloning.

I don't see in what sense a reprogrammed nucleus from one of the cells
of my adult body
is a human being. And why is generating stem cells this way instead of
culturing them
directly from my tissues (assuming this would work as well) "Evil and Sadistic"?
One can only be sadistic to something that can feel, and a stem cell or
an early
embryo cannot as it has no nervous system to feel with. I'm not talking
about raising a
clone to full term or adulthood, then killing it for spare parts. I
agree that that would be murder.

There has been speculation that a decerebrate clone could be ethically
sacrificed as it wouldn't have
a nervous system, consciousness, or sense of pain (no brain, no pain),
but it would also have to
be kept alive with very expensive, specialized culture equipment. This
particular idea does worry me;
fortunately it's not feasible at the moment, even if cloning were.

>So either you are 'just kidding' or you are a clearly a
>profoundly evil presence *if* you really support these
>abominations.

I'm not kidding and I don't support the torture and dismemberment
of real, live human beings. Of course, I don't consider these ideas
"abominations," but rather a potentially wonderful means to increase
human happiness by
permitting otherwise childless people to reproduce and to cure life threatening
diseases.

> What about middle-aged parents who have lost their only child
> and are now infertile?

>What about them?

Why should they not be allowed to clone their dead child, if viable
cells can be found, especially if it is young?

>Thanks for the chilling honesty, Dr. Chalmers.
>You aren't of German descent by any chance are you?

I'm a quarter German, one my mother's side. Aren't you being racially
prejudiced here? Ironically, just about everybody from Western Europe
is "German" because Germanic-speaking tribes overran most of it at the
expense of the Celts, Iberians, and Latins and intermarried with them.
The rest of my known ancestry is English, Welsh and Scottish, though no one
seems to know where my middle name, Harvey, came from. It's been in the family
for at least four generations and may be from a Hebrew word meaning
fourth son.

>Or do statements like you just made come naturally to
>you as a result of your involvement witnh BIO?

Of course, where else would I learn of these possibilities? Certainly not
in a church, synagogue, or mosque, or other religious institution.

> It's a very exciting field at the moment.

>I understand the Nazis were quite excited about
>what they did too.

So I've read, but not being one, I wouldn't really know. Were they?
In any case, it isn't relevant. I believe inserting a reference
to Nazism or Hitler in an argument is called "Graham's Law,"
and is usually a signal that the speaker has exhausted his/her
supply of logical arguments.

> Would you support the cloning of Hitler or Dahlmer as
>an interesting experiment into the effect of nature
>vs nurture? If not, which personalities would you prefer?

I must say that this never occurred to me. Why not clone a saint?
In any case, it would be an extraordinarily expensive experiment
as one would have to generate many clones, raise them to adulthood
in different environments, test them, etc. I wouldn't fund it as there
are other more ethical means of getting the same type of information and
I wouldn't
consider this type of experiment ethical even with children born the
normal way.

Studying monozygotic twins raised apart from birth is an ethically acceptable
way of getting the same information.

>Perhaps it would be interesting to take a sample of the blood on the
>shroud of Turin and make a clone of whoever that person was?

This has been suggested as a means of bringing about the Second Coming.
Unfortunately, the so-called blood on the Shroud is a paint containing
mercuric sulfide
(the image is iron oxide in an organic binder).

Since so many people have handled the Shroud since it was painted and
first exhibited in the 13th century,
any DNA extracted would very likely not be from the artist or his model.
Anyway, it is virtually
impossible that any DNA on the Shroud would be capable of directing the
development of a normal human
being . One might get a few sequences out by PCR, but I don't think they
would tell us very much.

>Should there be legal limits placed on any of these kinds of experiments,
>or should scientists do as they please without restriction?

There are and should be legal limits on what kinds of experiments scientists
can do with human subjects. That's not what we are talking about, we're talking
about stem cells from early embryonic clones, organ anlagen from
somewhat later embryos,
or cloning a person and raising him/her in a normal home environment.

>Should I be deprived of the privledge to vote because of what you see
as my vast
>scientific ignorance?

No, I never said you should be. If vast, detailed and relevant knowledge
were a prerequisite for voting,
none of us would be given the franchise (well, almost none) <g>.

>Or perhaps you support the system H.G. Wells proposed,
>where the genetically superior intellectual elites such
>as yourself will make all decisions for society and
ignoramouses like myself will just do as we are told
>since we're not bright enough to understand the lofty
>dictates of wisdom emitted by the mouths of the glass
>bead game players in their ivory towers.

Plato made the same suggestion before Wells. My answer is "absolutely
not," but I think people
should be able to make their own decisions about reproduction with
minimal interference from
the State, except to ensure quality control, avoid price-gouging,
prevent malpractice, etc..

> So you believe that a woman should not be able to get
>an abortion unless she has the fathers permission?

When abortion first became legal, I did think this, but after discussing
it with a close woman friend, I changed my mind and decided that the
right is
absolute, even for minors (and without parental permission or notification).

Conceivably, the father could request that the embryo or fetus be
transplanted for gestation or have it cloned,
but that's another issue. Silver suggests that with proper hormonal
treatment, careful placement, and a
good surgical team, even a man might be able to gestate a fetus to full
term. The idea is based on the knowledge
that post-menopausal women can bear children if treated with hormones
and and furnished with an embryo from
someone else. (There has been at least one case of a mother bearing her
grandchild for her daughter who had good
ova, but a malformed uterus. )

Occasionally zygotes implant not in the uterus but in the abdominal
cavity of normal women as ectopic pregnancies.
Usually they implant on a vital organ and are life-threatening, but in
some cases they attach in a safe place and can be
brought to full term, though rather complicated surgical delivery is
needed. So Silver speculates that it would thus be
possible for a man to have himself cloned then gestate the fetus himself.

I must admit this idea makes me uneasy, though not on logical grounds. I
wouldn't do it myself, but I'm not
sure I'd legally prevent someone else from doing it, because I dislike
the coercive and intrusive force of the Law
more.

>Did you mean persecute instead of prosecute?
>Please clarify; I am having difficulty understanding
>what you are saying in this paragraph.

Given the exorbitant cost of legal services in the US, I see little
difference between prosecution
and persecution in this case. My point was that if one considers every
embryo a human being with full
legal rights regardless of it origin and age, then a couple who
deliberately produced a child that
had severe medical problems should be criminally and civilly liable for
child abuse.

I believe there has been at least one law suit for "wrongful life" by a
congenitally disabled person (or its
lawyers) who wanted compensation for the pain and suffering inflicted by
the parents. My suggestion would be to
sue their Church as well under the "Deep Pockets" doctrine.

To other matters:

>George W. Bush. The war was originaly called something like imaculate
>crusade.

I believe it was called "Infinite Justice," but the name was changed
at the request of
American muslims who think only Allah is capable of infinite justice. I
know the unfortunate
term crusade was mentioned, but I thought it was not part of the
operation code name.

Random number generators:

Some hardware random generators are based on radioactive decay, which is
thought to
be truly random and insensitive to external influences. This is not
quite true for certain
isotopes of light elements that decay via electron capture, but in
general it is. However, the
counting devices might be subject to EMF fields, powerline fluctuations etc.

I think the best explanation is that the data are artifacts. A lot of 3
sigma signals in particle physics turn out
to disappear when more data is collected.

Re Pakistan:

The American Atheists have been campaigning for some time for the
release of Dr. Shaikh, but it is feared that the
Pakistani government will go ahead and execute him anyway. There have
been similar cases in Egypt where academics
have been arrested, murdered, divorced, or exiled for even suggesting
that the Koran can be studied as literature.
See the article on the history of the Koran in the January 1999 issue of
Atlantic Monthly.

--John

Re: [metatuning] Digest Number 76

🔗John Chalmers <JHCHALMERS@...>

🔗Paul Erlich <paul@...>