HEAP BIG BREAKTHROUGH: According to George Dvorsky at io9, scientists have made human stem cells by Dolly-type cloning. Check out his article, "Scientists Use Cloning to Create Embryonic Stem Cells".
The Godsquad's gonna freak . . . but the 'Genie' is out of the bottle, er, test-tube. Essentially your unique DNA can be used to grow more you to fix things that need fixing with you. Now, we got medicine. It's early days, now, but the path to control of our genetic expression just got a lot more defined. Also, long-term, this is probably not good if you make or sell pills and such for a living.
That's great, although . . . didn't Dolly like age prematurely and stuff? Might want to go carefully on actually putting those cells in our bodies until the bugs are worked out. Still, very nice to hear.
ReplyDeleteThe trick'll be figuring out how to find and reprogram the faulty DNA that gave rise to illness and the multitude of inherited genetic disorders. If we can find and disable the mutation factors that have a negative outcome that will have even more of an impact.
ReplyDeleteOf course, with any "Eureka!" there can also be an attendant Pandora's Box - GATTACA, anyone?
Also, it probably goes without saying that those who'll most benefit from such developments WON'T be the great mass of humanity but the 1% instead, likely by BioMed and GenMed firms keeping the prices artificially stratospheric to generate obscene profits and keep out the "riff raff" (aka, us)...
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