What do you do when you're bored?

...twice.

 

My fault, I just realised I could have edited my previous post.

Can you all forgive me?

0

 

The good thing is... You can do it now!

 

Nope, I don't think so. Except for money, the international reputation and the culture infleunce are also important. But as I know, China continiously 'enjoys' a bad (or not so good) reputation among the developed countries, especially the USA. You see, when Japanese was developing quickly, western countries saied little about it. But when China seems to raise, we received nothing but complaints.

 

Hm, I know this will sound stupid, but how do I delete my post?
I can only edit it, there is no delete button.

What? I'm just a janitor!

 

That's because Japan has put its human rights abuses behind it (mostly). China still commits such acts and there is the whole Tibet thing too. If China wasn't so powerful the UN would tell it off more for breaking international laws (but the same is true of America and it's exploits).

Refer to what in the thread?

I was indulging in the lowest form of wit. Taken together with the preceeding sentence it's pretty obvious that what I'm saying is "if people stringing facts together in a logical order annoys you then that's your problem".
However I'm very sorry if all this apologising offends you.
(Smiley as insurance policy against people saying "You just apologised for apologising!!! You suck!")

Your whole bunker scheme never annoyed me. It's a joke thread. Besides, what do I care if you have a cupboard with 3 tins of beans or a military complex with 20 floors of high tech survival gear? It doesn't affect me in any way.
I objected to you saying that cloning is inhumane and immoral when you have shown you know very little about the scientific process. None of my questions were rhetorical and I genuinely wanted to know what you found so "immoral" about a technique that has the potential to change medicine forever.

 

Oh my god! You just apologised for apologising!!! You suck!

 

stringy: you can only delete a post until someone posts after you, then the option disappears.

tongs: what do i find immoral about cloning? that someone would have the absolute audacity to try and create life, when that is reserved for God alone. and i say try, because even if they think they get it perfect, there will be flaws. a clone is supposed to be a perfect copy, right? and yet, when they cloned a calico cat, they got a kitten with different markings!! it's been explained that there were "enviromental factors" that were present, and that will give any clone the possibility of different coloring, or even a different personality from the original. that doesn't sound like a perfect copy to me. that sounds like they just found a new method of artificial insemination, and don't want to admit it. check out the article here: http://www.nature.ca/genome/04/041/0415_10_e.cfm if you click on the link to Texas A&M, you will get pictures of the kitten and her mother...

there's still more that upsets me about cloning. we'll start off by just cloning cells and organs, sure, and i actually don't find anything wrong with that. but we all know how the military works. they'll see the cloning of hearts, and think "how can we use this technology to kill something?" then they'll attempt to create some sort of cloned army, a la Star Wars. or maybe people will decide that they don't want to wait for an accident before their organs are cloned, and start to keep large "organ banks" filled with their body parts. and you can bet that only the rich will be able to afford this new procedure, so everybody else will still be dying of supposedly "curable diseases." and since we obviously don't have the cloning process perfected (as per the cat), how are we to know what the end result will require? maybe everything will turn out hunky-dory. but i'm not inclined to believe it. it's a much bigger possibility that we will create some weird by-product that will put our lives in danger, or reduce our quality of life. what if people want to clone dead family members? if we have the technology, why say no? but since that clone probably won't have the same personality, and may not even look the same, will they want to keep it when it's delievered? or will these clones just end up in the foster system. and how will these cloned people be classified? are they just a continuation of an old person? or do they get a new set of identification?

and if the process were perfected, you know some asshole would try to clone hitler. so all around, it just sounds like a very bad idea, no matter what the benefits are.

 

There are plenty of parthenogenic animals which clone themselves. The adult simply pops out an egg which hatches into a clone of the adult. It's been going on for hundreds of millions of years (longer if you count bacteria) so it is nothing new. Humans didn't invent cloning, they are simply trying to make use of it.

You find it immoral because it goes against your religious moral standards. I don't recognise the bible as fact but I can't argue with your morals because it's your opinion. I can only argue against facts, not opinions. My opinion, of course, is very different.

If 2 animals (let's stick with goats) mate, their DNA recombines when the gametes fuse. The combinations of a finite DNA strand are finite therefore it is possible for 2 animals to mate and produce offspring which is genetically identical to one of the parents. It would be a clone. Not because of human intervention, simply because that's the way the dice came up. It's a chance in a billionbillionetc but it is real.

Not really. Even if it was a perfect DNA copy there are too many factors involved to ever make a perfect copy. The cells make use of the atoms they have available. The atoms will never be a perfect copy and from there changes will ripple out, becoming greater at each stage. Different temperatures, the mother eating an extra blade of grass during pregnancy, a single ray of cosmic radiation passing through the foetus (which happens every moment), etc. The article you linked to is a simplified version of what I said so I'm not sure how it helps your case. If you are trying to show that a clone isn't a perfect copy then you are correct. But no real scientist every claimed a clone was a perfect copy beyond the original DNA. The tabloids simply misunderstand, as always, because the subtleties of the scientific terms are lost on them.

Even the DNA itself changes and will not be a perfect copy. Although the DNA might start off as a perfect copy it won't stay that way. DNA has imperfect error checking routines so errors creep in. This is a natural process. It is the reason why we get cancer. When enough errors occur then the cell will usually self-terminate. Suicide for the good of the organism. If the self-termination mechanism is screwed up then it can lead to cancer. So even if a clone starts off with identical DNA it will always diverge from the donor cell sooner or later.

The point of cloning is not to get a perfect copy, it's to get a copy which is perfect in terms of the starting DNA.

By definition insemination requires a male to produce male gametes. A male and female gamete then fuse. No male gametes were involved in creating the cat therefore no insemination.
You imply that the scientists are somehow keeping a secret and half-lying to the public? Science isn't a club where everyone is on the same side. There will be hundreds of scientists in the same field who would love to tear their rival's work apart so there really isn't any room for "not admitting it".

The same is true of anything. If science stopped because some idiot politician / general might misuse it somewhere down the line then we would be living in mud huts. Any form of science can be misused and the only solution is to have no science at all.

Star Wars...er...I won't touch this one.

So if you can't have it then no one can have it? That's a shortsighted and selfish attitude. I'm sure you or your relatives rely on medication unavailable in the third world. My parents and remaining grandparent would be dead if it weren't for blood pressure medications as the problem runs in our family. Should my family all stop taking the pills and die because poor people in Africa can't afford them?

That's your feeling. A feeling is not a fact. If you can explain to my why it is "a much bigger possibility" please do. I will consider all the facts that you can provide.

We should say no because it's idiotic on so many levels. I never suggested cloning a person. I think cloning people is completely stupid. It serves no purpose. It endangers human life (the mother and however many failed embryos it takes to get the clone to work). The clone will never be a replacement for the person who died. At best it will be a look-a-like. There should be laws passed to ban whole human cloning and do you know what's holding the process up? American right wing christians who are trying so hard to ban all cloning that they have stalled the process. (Another reason I dislike the Bush regime). A deal was almost completed but then Bush's government said "no it isn't strict enough we want to ban the lot" and the deal fell apart. So now if some nutter is endangering human life by trying to clone humans he can largely escape punishment. However it will be banned sooner or later and I am completely in favour of that.

It's doubtful there are any viable cells to clone Hitler from. His body was burned and scattered. Where are hey going to get his tissue from? Don't believe Jurassic Park, cloning from long dead DNA isn't realistic (unless the flesh is permanently deep frozen but even then it is unlikely). Even if they somehow did clone Hitler, the human they create would no more be Hitler than Hitler's great great grandnephew "is" Hitler. The clone would share Hitler's genes but that is it. Hitler was a psycho because he was traumatised in WW1 and the political climate allowed him to rise to power. No one has ever found an evil dictator gene and I doubt they ever will.

As for the benefits you so casually dismiss, do you even know what they are? It's very easy for you to sit in your comfortable Western ivory tower and say "we don't need cloning" but what about the sick, dying and starving who do need it? Who are you to condemn them to death because you have a feeling that something might have a "weird by-product "?

Let me go over some basics about transgenics to try and show you the benefits which you are completely unaware of.
I'll use the example of insulin but there are millions of possible applications. In the past when they wanted insulin for diabetics they had to mush up a pig pancreas, strain it, purify it, etc. The process was long and expensive, resulting in expensive insulin which was in short supply. Even those who could afford it often died because animal insulin isn't very compatible with humans.
Move on a few years and thanks to the genome project (which many religious folk squawked about at the time "it is not for us to copy the works of god!") we can now use genetically engineered yeast cells to produce human insulin. It's cheaper, more plentiful and fully compatible with the human body. But to do it we had to alter the DNA of one of god's creatures. It's a blasphemy that saves countless lives every single day. Lives in the West that is. The third world are still screwed because although insulin is cheaper, it still isn't that cheap.
The next step is to create a transgenic goat. By inserting the human insulin gene into the goat's mammary gland lactating cells you get milk full of insulin. A quick and cheap bit of straining and you can separate out cheap human insulin. Hoorah! But where does the cloning come into it you ask?
Making a transgenic goat is a tricky business. You PCR some of the required DNA sequence. Fertilise a goat egg in a "test tube". You then fire some DNA at the zygote (and yes they often literally fire it with a micro gun but that's more common with plants).
99% of the time the zygote will not absorb the DNA.
Out of the few that do, 99% won't incorporate the DNA into the correct region so they are of no use.
Out of the few that do incorporate the DNA in the correct region, 99% of them will die.
So only 1% of 1% of 1% are actually any use. (Anyone who thinks they are being smart by looking up figures and telling me it's actually 7% or 0.5%, it differs for every study and I am well aware).
So it takes a lot of time and resources to make one insulin goat. There is no guarantee the goat will pass the correct genes onto its children so after the goat dies of old age you are back to square one. If it takes 2 years and £10 million to make 1 goat then it is a big waste of time. However if you can clone that goat, then you have an endless supply of cheap insulin (or whatever other organic compound you'd like).
The third world rejoice. Billions are saved from suffering. The West gets cheap medicine.

 

You just aren't getting it are you? Let me give you a couple pointers:

1. When someone is being sarcastic, don't try to argue with them as if they were being serious. It makes you look like a jackass.

2. Don't try to make people think you are some kind of super genious because again, you just look like a jackass.

 

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God does not exist.
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Yes, perfect copies don't exist, because of the environmental issue. This is exactly why we can't even hope to transport ourselves to another place with the Star Trek-like method, or transplant our souls into other men.
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Ban all knives. Terrorists can use them.
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I think it's much cheaper to buy lots of nuclear bombs than set up an army of (still human) clones. (Hehh... I don't think any country would buy such an army, nowadays manpower is less important than technological superiority)
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And for the medicine thing, how about subsidy (or what the heck)?
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Cloning itself doesn't endangers life, instead, it can be used to create life (even if we take into account the failed embryos). Genetic modification is another issue, but it can be also helpful (as explained in the post before the previous post).
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JJ, when did you decide to become such an asshole?

 

I hardly see how pointing me to a thread I haven't read counts as sarcasm. I'm not going to read 8 pages for your benefit.

Where do I live? Ah ha...How witty! I can see why they call you Japes...Oh wait a minute they don't, you called yourself that.

As I said before, if you get annoyed by people combining facts in a coherent manner then that is entirely your problem. Also, avoid the library or you might have a fit.
Or better yet, read some of the books and perhaps you won't feel so threatened by people stating facts which have nothing to do with you. I'm not looking for your approval. And I couldn't give a damn how smart you think I am. What my family, girlfriend and diploma think/say means something, you don't.

By the way, well done spelling genius, you geniousze.

 

When I bloody well felt like it wench.

 

:lol:

(omg spam)

 

Damn.

Oh, no! What's this?

I'm melting. :stoner:

 

Hey when i was created there was only two people involved and i am damned certain that god was not one of them! If he was i should be making water into wine now and that is still not happening.

Think if you get lungcancer. The theory is that they then can take a healthy cell from your lungs and grow a new set of lungs. Even though this is probably far into the future i don't mind the chance to get some new organs.

 

I'm tempted to start handing out weapons.

 

don't bother. it's not worth the energy it takes to come up with a suitable response. nothing tongs can say will change my beliefs, and nothing i say will change his. so i'm now going to ignore him, and continue accepting applications for my zombie/apocalypse foress of death and destruction. but he's not invited. i don't need hate-mongers in my utopia.

 

I just have a question, you're free to debate the morality of it as much as you like.

Don't we already have enough people? Sex has been doing pretty well. 6 billion people, all growing, advancing, and evolving. When cloning is introduce it will stagnate human evolution.

Cloning is directly linked with genetic engineering, they're contingent fields. Not only will cloning continuously ensure that we're making more humans, who are only as genetically advanced as their parents, but that we also are going to end up with certain attributes that are deemed favorable, and cosmetic genetic engineering is going to end up making us all look the same, and then it'd be boring.

Imagine parents 'designing' their children to be taller, with a certain color of hair, a certain color of eyes, because they view that color as favorable. If such parents belong to the social norm, as most people due, those colors are going to be relatively similar. And the diversity of mankind will decrease.

That said, let me point out a group that will surely not survive such an ordeal. Redheads. Most people don't view red as the most favorable hair color. They might like it, but not as much as another color. This means there will be a decrease in redheads. I swear to all the gods on high, if you take away my firebushes I'll fucking kill you. I like those usually attractive, and relatively independent-minded women.