From: john grigg (starman125@hotmail.com)
Date: Wed Apr 05 2000 - 15:45:26 MDT
Hello everyone,
This is the continuation of the discussion I have been having with a certain
Jon Fulton of the AdAstra list which is at onelist.com and has about seventy
members. He is a rather different but he does know his biotech. I am
grateful to Anders and Robert for having helped me in the discussions. The
final post by Fulton really revealed his views. I look forward to reading
what you all think of the points brought up in these posts.
best regards,
John Grigg
At onelist.com the mission of AdAstra is given:
AdAstra: "A New Humanity For A New Millennium" When Cro-Magnon Man
out-competed Neanderthal in the struggle for survival, the human species
quickly became the dominant life form on this planet. That was arguably the
last major evolutionary advance for our species...and it happened 95
thousand years ago! Today, as we enter a new millennium, humankind has the
power to take charge of its own evolution using the tools of medical
science, technology, education and social engineering. Ad Astra is a
restricted list dedicated to the proposition that guided evolution
(eugenics) can and should be attempted, and to discussing the logistical and
moral issues attendant upon implementing such an ambitious goal. Ad Astra
is not affiliated with any political or religious organization, and will
summarily unsubscribe any individual promulgating theories of social
engineering based solely on age, gender, nationality, race, belief system,
sexual preference, or any other arbitrary criterion
(end)
At 01:02 PM 4/2/00 -0700, you wrote:
john grigg" starman125@h... writes:
>Anders requested I sent off his story to a list who could be >considered
>transhumanist 'racialists.' lol These were their >reactions. By the way,
>what is a 'jävla tönt'?
Jon Fulton wrote:
Hey Spike!
Our friend "John Grigg" must be having a slow day at EugenicsWatch.org or
whatever other group he's an e-agent of. Boot the Commie, I'd consider it a
personal favor. I'm sure however there are other e-agents out there, in
"lurker" status, maybe so we should kick them too? Just to make them earn
their paychecks? BTW, the onelist archives, are they open to casual perusal?
Maybe a members only clause, I'm sure the "forces of enlightened
egalitarianism" are
keeping tabs, let's make 'em sweat! ;>
Ad Nihilo!
From: spike <original_spikegrrl@y...>
Date: Mon Apr 3, 2000 10:08am
Subject: Re: What Anders thought about the responses
--- jfulton@w... wrote:
> Hey Spike!
> Our friend "John Grigg" must be having a
>slow day at EugenicsWatch.org or
> whatever other group he's an e-agent of. Boot
>the Commie, I'd consider it
> a personal favor. I'm sure however there are
>other e-agents out there, in
> "lurker" status, maybeso we should kick them
>too? Just to make them earn their
> paychecks? BTW, the onelist archives, are
>they open to casual perusal? Maybe a members only clause, I'm sure the
>"forces
>of enlightened egalitarianism" are
> keeping tabs, let's make 'em sweat! ;>>>>
Give me a synopsis, dude, I've been unplugged for
almost a month -- without even really "deciding"
I walked off the job that's been eating my brain
for 9 months (ill-considered methodologically but
a profoundly necessary mental-health decision)
and have been living is blissful if temporary
slackerdom far from all things Cyberian.
If his transgressions are egregious, surely I shall boot
the offender. If, however, he is simply being
misguided, idiotic, or just plain wrongheaded he
stays. I've had experience with lists that
systematically eradicate dissent, and they all in
time degenerate into a mutual head-nodding
society. Four legs good, two legs bad,
donchaknow.
Back from the earth -- spike
...and btw I think our archives ARE members only;
I'll check on it when I zip over to onelist to
approve yet more subscription requests :)
*****************************************
"What do I do now?!"
"Depends on what you've already done."
-- Return of the Killer Tomatoes
****************************************
From: alaska16 (John Grigg) <alaska16@e...>
Date: Mon Apr 3, 2000 3:18pm
Subject: The key point here... (post with no subject heading is the same as
this)
Hello everyone,
Jon Fulton wrote:
>BTW, the onelist archives, are they open to casual perusal? Maybe a members
>only clause
First of all, I am a member of this group. Though after joining I
was surprised by some of the content. I have found the content
interesting though I disagree with much of it.
Jon wrote:
>Our friend "John Grigg" must be having a slow day at EugenicsWatch.org or
>whatever other group he's an e-agent of.
"Jon Fulton" sure is suspicious. lol! A coercive utopia is certainly
not my desire or the halting of scientific research to upgrade the
human race through genetic engineering. I don't think you understand
what transhumanism stands for.
>Boot the Commie, I'd consider it a personal favor.
Jon, you make me think of the character Dale Gribble, from the show
'King of the Hill' who always sees conspiracy everywhere! :)
Spike wrote:
>I've had experience with lists that systematically eradicate dissent, and
>they all in time degenerate into a mutual head-nodding society. Four legs
>good, two legs bad, donchaknow.
This is a very perceptive statement. I hope Jon heeds it.
my friend Anders Sandberg wrote:
As for the devolution, it is on such a tremendously longer timescale
than cultural and technological evolution that it is irrelevant for
all practical transhumanist aims. We have the technology ~now to start
fixing bad genes or at least do prenatal screening, and in the short
run we will likely see genetic enhancements. Things like devolution
and race will not survive that long outside small groups. The nicest
thing is that by leaving the choice up to the parents one can get a
distributed, non-coercive system that still achieves the eugenic
aims.
My impression is that the readers didn't quite get what I was aiming
at. Transhumanism + racism will end up becoming transhumanism anyway
if you believe we can change the human condition drastically, then
puny things like race is becoming *IRRELEVANT*. Who cares if your
neighbour had black parents when his skin now is silver and his genes
come from 43 different species? Who cares if his home culture was
American when he has modified his personality and adapted to several
globalized net cultures. This is likely even more frightening for the
PC crowd than the racists...- --
(end)
Don't you all see?? Ultimately, race is not going to matter! That
is the point here. If anything, our 'mind children(AI)' will be the
great challenge for us.
Spike wrote:
>I walked off the job that's been eating my brain
>for 9 months (ill-considered methodologically but
>a profoundly necessary mental-health decision)
>and have been living is blissful if temporary
>slackerdom far from all things Cyberian.
I hope you find a new job soon in a work environment that is
conducive to your peace of mind. Good luck.
sincerely,
John Grigg
John,
With regard to your question, re: antisense and cocktail viruses...Antisense
RNA or DNA is a well defined technique in molecular biology for turning off
genes. The principle of antisense is very sound in that it involves the
production (or delivery) of a piece of RNA or DNAin (to) the cell that is
complementary (in DNA base-paring rules)to an expressed messenger RNA. It
binds to that RNA, preventing it from being turned into protein.
There a couple of biotech companies (ISIS, I think is one) whose
livelihood is based on in depth knowledge of how to make antisense
treatments work, for example in therapies against viruses, such as
Hepatitis C. I believe there are a number of these currently in
clinical trials. My March 2, 2000 issue of Biotechnology News
(an expensive industry rag), discusses using "antisense" therapy
against the Beta1-adrenergic receptors to reduce blood pressure
(work done by Ian Phillips' group at Univ. of Floriday, Gainesville.
Studies published in the peer reviewed Hypertension 35:219-24 and
Circulation 101:682-8). If you went to Medline at www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov,
and did a query for "antisense", I suspect you would get thousands
of articles back. So, "antisense" is very legit.
Now, virus cocktails (or combination gene therapies) are a bit Sci-Fi
at this point, because we are still in a primitive state of developing
the vectors and a host of other little pieces of the toolkit required
to make gene therapies work reliably. As I've discussed before, Greg
Stock and John Campbell (from UCLA) doubt that these techniques will
ever work (but their sources are really old-school, so you have to take that
position with a grain of salt). I had a group here in Moscow, that was
using gene therapy to put luciferase genes into the mammary glands of adult
sheep in *1994*. If we had continued that work we would certainly be
reliably transforming animals to produce specific proteins in their milk by
now.
Moving from single treatments to "cocktails" isn't a big deal if they work
reliably. And since viruses seem to manage to get the whole process to work
fairly reliably, we can presume we will eventually solve the problems. Its
worth noting that working with an embryo
in a dish is much easier than working with live humans because there
is no immune system to deal with and you can verify the treatment
worked as you wanted.
The process would involve taking embryos
with cells at the totipotent stage, separating the cells into single
cells, administering the therapy, then allowing those cells to redevelop
into new embryos. Taking a single cell from each new embryo allows you to
test (via PCR) whether the therapy was successful. You then implant those
embryo(s) that were successfully treated. With adults, the verification of
the type & number of cells that took up the therapy is much more difficult.
Gene therapy has suffered from premature press that it was going to
cure a number of things. Progress has been much slower than people
expected, so the crowd of doubters has grounds for their opinions.
That doesn't however mean it will never work. Several treatments
for hemophilia are in the works currently that look quite promising.
As I'm fond of saying, if you lean on something *long* enough
(for example Sequoia trees), it *will* fall over.
As far a Fulton's opinion goes, he may not know Anders and so has
no way of knowing whether the information is regurgitated popular
press, or serious scientific thought.
Different people have different approaches for meme policing. To my mind,
the mark of a wise man, isn't whether they stick their foot in their mouth,
but whether they acknowledge it when you point out the shoe polish around
their lips. Anders, like myself, has a mind that can take significant
engineering challenges and make them "small", relative to the amount of
actual work that might be required.
That is a big difference however, from making claims about stuff that
currently seems pretty impossible, e.g. anti-gravity. Most people are not
aware of the rates of change in various disciplines (genomics, robotics,
computers, AI, software assistants, etc.) that are likely to make problems
that seem "big" today, quite "small" in the future, so they tend to get put
off when we assume extraordinary "leaps" of progress in our discussions.
Feel free to forward this to other individuals/lists if you feel it is
useful.
Robert
From: jfulton <jfulton@w...>
Date: Tue Apr 4, 2000 6:21am
Subject: Re: regarding Anders claims about genetic engineering
>
There a couple of biotech companies (ISIS, I think is one) whose
livelihood is based on in depth knowledge of how to make antisense
treatments work, for example in therapies against viruses, such as Hepatitis
C.
>
This is true, most 3'-5' oligos are given exogenously tosuppress
mRNA transcripts, be they of self or viral origin. The DNA-RNA
heteroduplex is degraded, making a dominant negative for the
duration of treatment. While one MIGHT be able to put an antisense
copy of a targeted gene into a retrovirus or episomal DNA virus
under some inducable transactivated promoter, it's speculation
similar to a "Dyson sphere" at this point in time, IOW, still
out of reach, if technically even possible. No one has seriously tried
introducing or suppressing genes in the embryo during development by this
method, and it probably won't WORK because it's hard to target, difficult to
control, and still doesnt even work well in tissue culture, not to mention
the fact that the cells themselves seem to have the ability to supress
foreign nucleic acid synthesis, be it by interferon-alpha/beta inducible
inhibitors of translation elongation-factors as well as inducible
exonucleases. (translation factors come into play because of course a virus
must make sufficient copies of itself to provide template, and that requires
so called viral immediate-early and early gene products (proteins, of a
sort, not usually carried within the capsid itself).
-Transgenes as a whole are nothing new, most of our lab rodents are
trangenic for something, especially canonical T-cell receptor beta chains,
but a number carry human genes. This involves adding altered blastomeres at
the morula stage to an embryo, an invitro
process but NOT an antisense dominant negative phenocopy. It still
requires several mating backcrosses, as the first generation is a
mosaic. On the other hand, it's also untargeted, and random insertion
of transcriptionally active sequences into the genome are not a
good thing, witness most formes of leukemia.
>
embryo allows you to test (via PCR) whether the therapy was successful.
You then implant those embryo(s) that were successfully treated.
>
PCR is a licensed trade name, call it "template directed elongation" when
talking to your "biotech freinds" unless they are FROM Promega corp.
>
Gene therapy has suffered from premature press that it was going to cure a
number of things.
>
as well as a few untimely deaths.....
>
That doesn't however mean it will never work. Several treatments for
hemophilia are in the works currently that look quite promising.
>
and involve fetal cord blood transplantation, still no germline
alterations
>
Anders, like myself, has a mind that can take significant engineering
challenges and make them "small", relative to the amount of actual work that
might be required.
>
At least we agree on something. Is warp drive your 'next' falling sequoia?
>you continue:
>>Don't worry, you'll 'win' in the end, I only wish you could be around to
>>see it.
>
>
>We will see how things pan out...
>
or not, oh maker of small falling things. ;>
Jon
From: spike <original_spikegrrl@y...>
Date: Mon Apr 3, 2000 5:18pm
Subject: Re: regarding Anders claims about genetic engineering
Welcome to Robert, who seems thus far
a scholar and a gentleman, though we
shall surely test his temper ;)
Jon and John, play nice.
Jeepers it's good 2 b back --
spike
your listadmin
=====
*********************************************
I'm so happy,
'cause today I found my friends
They're in my head
-- Cobain
______________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:27:52 MST