Posted on 09/01/2005 4:12:01 AM PDT by snarks_when_bored
amazing, read later bump
If the regeneration is occurring with telomere length matching that of the rest of the animal, the benefits will be huge for quality of life, but have little effect on length of life.
Frankly, it scares me a little that we may be getting close to massive extension of average lifespan. Not that I don't want to see it happen, but society is totally unprepared for it, and it's likely to lead to a Lord of the Flies type culture for quite a while, as population explodes, and people compete for resources that are becoming scarce (in the per person sense) at a frightening speed. Also, the technology is not likely to be cheap for the first generation or two that it's available, and we will have to face the hard question very fast of who gets it and who doesn't. It may be wonderful in the long run, but in the short run things will get very ugly.
Fetuses on whom surgery is performed in utero heal without scars.
The kind of evolution you're talking about is called "intelligent design". But the designer isn't who the primary proponents of that catch-phrase think it is.
ALL OF US SHOULD REMEMBER THAT IF PETA HAD ITS WAY, THIS TYPE OF LIFE SAVING RESEARCH WOULDN'T BE HAPPENING.
We were still talking about this being 20 or 30 years away.From a healthcare point of view maybe that's still true.
Right. There's usually a long lag between theory and practice in healthcare.
bump for later, thank you
Nothing is too high for the daring or mortals; they storm heaven in their folly. - Quintus Horatius Flaccus
Genesis Chapter 11:
6: And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
7: Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.
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this is actually the great terrifying thing that all men & women of God must reflect upon. Because DNA is just another language and the fearful thing is that it will be confounded in precisely the same way as was told in the Tower of Babel.
God will not be mocked.
In the short term it could provide a brand new diet for house cats ala smorgasbord.
"nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do."
IOW, anything that man sets his mind to do WILL be accomplished! Manipulating DNA is not exactly playing God, but more like a child with building blocks. Man cannot MAKE DNA, yet. When he attempts to do that feat , then he is playing God. With all our technology, man cannot yet CREATE a single celled living entity. The "BREATH OF LIFE" is God's exclusive domain..........and ALWAYS will be........
F.D.A. Approves Drug Meant to Help Short Children Grow
FReepmail me if you want on or off my health and science ping list. Anyone can post any unrelated link as they see fit.
ping
I recall the FedGov's funding of a program at Duke Medical in the early eighties for growing mice tails back. I thought "What!?!?", but I see I was two decades blind.
Revelation 9:6 And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.
I always took that to mean the Angel of Death was on hiatus and taking it easy somewhere. Suicide would be impossible as would be murder. There would be no escape from the wrath of God............
Sure it can. You're obviously ignorant of the techniques known by animal and plant breeders for thousands of years, which are all about "helping evolution".
It's possible that the exact combination of genetic changes necessary to make this possible were unlikely enough to occur together that the prior appearance of such an adaptation was unlikely to have occurred in the past. Some evolutionary "breakthroughs" have occurred once in the history of life on Earth precisely because they weren't of the kind that would occur several times in a few thousand generations.
But yeah, I'm skeptical too, for a number of reasons.
That's what they said about the invention of lightning rods, and anesthetics, too.
Yes, really.
Seriously, that was pretty much the premise of this movie. A couple of researchers decide to test their new "regeneration" serum on a fresh corpse at the hospital. Just their bad luck it happened to be a psycho killer who had recently been shot by the police... Every time the Sheriff (played by Chuck Norris) tries to kill or incapacitate the psycho, he just regenerates the damage and keeps coming.
Don't forget pasteurization, immunization and (still a bone of contention among some Christian and Jewish sects) blood transfusions.
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