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I cant wait. In fact I think I’ll start my review a day ahead of time…..The producers screwed up by making fewer episodes; there wasnt enough character development in this last episode. It was all action. Though the final scene with the Pterodactyl and the time machine was interesting.
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vDragons are cool.
I have to say the GOT dragons are the best depictions of living dragons since St. George slew the last one towards the end of the Middle Ages. It was just a cub though.
The problem with all this is that there are no genes that are population specific. The frequencies in which they appear can vary between populations, but none are exclusive to a certain population. Genetic variation is greater within a population than between them. So even if they developed a biological weapon targeted against a certain population, there would be potential for a lot of collateral damage among other groups that weren’t targeted. So to me, the risk of developing bio-weapons against genes in certain ethnic populations would be too risky, unless they weren’t worried about it moving through other populations with varying degrees of virulence.
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And do you think ANY of that ‘collateral damage’ stuff would cause the CIA
to stop researching it, Nittany?What do you think?
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vCould they be researching it? Sure. It wouldn’t surprise me if they were researching it. The issue with such a weapon would be containment and isolation. The target population would have to be isolated through strict travel bans. Basically quarantene the region. But even then the risk of it spreading to other populations would be high. So there are galactically huge problems that would have to be overcome for such a weapon to be used in the intended manner, which I assume would not be creating a global pandemic.
Keep in mind the article provided no proof that this research was actually being done at any of these labs. It’s a pretty big leap from ‘Requesting sonovial fluid samples from Russians of European extraction’ to developing genetic bio-weapons.
And the article does read like a scare piece. It mentioned the GM H5N1 bird flu virus developed in the Netherlands that could potentially spread from person to person through the air. But the article didn’t mention that it was developed amid a lot of controversy. There was no cover up. Nothing was hidden. The researchers were aware of the risk, but did so because the only way to develop controls against an airborne bird flu would be to create one. And given the ease in which it was created, it lends credence to the researcher’s contention that the wild virus would eventually make that transition itself anyway. The potential danger of it escaping the lab or of terrorists using their published work to create a bio-weapon is real although the likelihood of it happening is debatable. But it wasn’t part of some covert research project consistent with the theme of the article. So in that regard, I think the article is alarmist. It doesn’t back up its contentions with hard evidence – just speculation, albeit reasonable in some ways.
Designer babies highly unlikely….
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/04/science/gene-editing-embryos-designer-babies.html
Gene Editing for ‘Designer Babies’?
Highly Unlikely, Scientists Say
Fears that embryo modification could allow parents to custom
order a baby with Lin-Manuel Miranda’s imagination or
Usain Bolt’s speed are closer to science fiction than science.By PAM BELLUCKAUG. 4, 2017
Now that science is a big step closer to being able to fiddle with the genes of a human embryo, is it time to panic? Could embryo editing spiral out of control, allowing parents to custom-order a baby with Lin-Manuel Miranda’s imagination or Usain Bolt’s speed?
News that an international team of scientists in Oregon had successfully modified the DNA of human embryos has renewed apprehensions that babies will one day be “designed.” But there are good reasons to think that these fears are closer to science fiction than they are to science.
Here is what the researchers did: repair a single gene mutation on a single gene, a defect known to cause — by its lonesome — a serious, sometimes fatal, heart disease.
Here is what science is highly unlikely to be able to do: genetically predestine a child’s Ivy League acceptance letter, front-load a kid with Stephen Colbert’s one-liners, or bake Beyonce’s vocal range into a baby.
That’s because none of those talents arise from a single gene mutation, or even from an easily identifiable number of genes. Most human traits are nowhere near that simple.
“Right now, we know nothing about genetic enhancement,” said Hank Greely, director of the Center for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford. “We’re never going to be able to say, honestly, ‘This embryo looks like a 1550 on the two-part SAT.’”
Even with an apparently straightforward physical characteristic like height, genetic manipulation would be a tall order. Some scientists estimate height is influenced by as many as 93,000 genetic variations. A recent study identified 697 of them.
Can Gene Editing Actually Do That?
A new technique known as Crispr has revolutionized humans’ ability to edit DNA. See if you can identify whether a given development has already happened, could eventually happen or is pure fiction.“You might be able to do it with something like eye color,” said Robin Lovell-Badge, a professor of genetics and embryology at the Francis Crick Institute in London.
But “if people are worried about designer babies, they’re normally thinking of doing special — different things than the normal genetic stuff.”
The gene-modification process used in the new study also turns out to be somewhat restrictive. After researchers snipped the harmful mutation from the male gene, it copied the healthy sequence from that spot on the female gene.
That was a surprise to the scientists, who had inserted a DNA template into the embryo, expecting the gene to copy that sequence into the snipped spot, as occurs with gene editing in other body cells. But the embryonic genome ignored that template, suggesting that to repair a mutation on one parent’s gene in an embryo, a healthy DNA sequence from the other parent is required.
“If you can’t introduce a template, then you can’t do anything wild,” Dr. Lovell-Badge said. “This doesn’t really help you make designer babies.”
Talents and traits aren’t the only thing that are genetically complex. So are most physical diseases and psychiatric disorders. The genetic message is not carried in a 140-character tweet — it resembles a shelf full of books with chapters, subsections and footnotes.
So embryonic editing is unlikely to prevent most medical problems.
But about 10,000 medical conditions are linked to specific mutations, including Huntington’s disease, cancers caused by BRCA genes, Tay-Sachs disease, cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anemia, and some cases of early-onset Alzheimer’s. Repairing the responsible mutations in theory could eradicate these diseases from the so-called germline, the genetic material passed from one generation to the next. No future family members would inherit them.
A composite image showing the development of embryos after injection of a gene-correcting enzyme and sperm from a donor with a genetic mutation known to cause hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. Credit Oregon Health & Science University
But testing editing approaches on each mutation will require scientists to find the right genetic signpost, often an RNA molecule, to guide the gene-snipping tool.In the study reported this week, it took 10 tries to find the right RNA, said Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, a co-author and geneticist at the Salk Institute.
Dr. Greely noted that while scientists work to get human embryonic editing ready for clinical trials (currently illegal in the United States and many countries), alternate medical treatments for these diseases might be developed. They may be simpler and cheaper.
“How good one technique is depends on how good the alternatives are, and there may be alternatives,” he said.
