PUNCTUATED EVOLUTION is the philosophy of TRANSHUMANISM------starting in 1960s---70s----soaring in 1990s---2010s.
MAN-MADE EVOLUTIONARY INNOVATIONS REPLACE GOD'S NATURAL GRADUALISM CREATES A SPIKE IN 'NEW' GMO SPECIES.
Below we see the earliest PUNCTUATED EVOLUTION-----for plants----GMO MONSANTO.
'Six companies are about to merge into the biggest farm-business oligopoly in history
Chase Purdy
QuartzSeptember 20, 2016
Top executives from Bayer, Monsanto, DuPont, Dow Chemical, and Syngenta today (Sept. 20) testified before the US Senate Judiciary Committee in Washington, making a case for why federal regulators should approve the mega-mergers, which stand to fundamentally reorganize global agriculture. (Executives from the sixth company involved in the consolidation, China National Chemical Corp., declined an invitation to appear at the hearing'.)
BREEDING HUMANS to create sub-species is MOVING FORWARD thanks to CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA---global banking 1% OLD WORLD KINGS---KNIGHTS OF MALTA TRIBE OF JUDAH.
NOSY NEIGHBORS AND THE GANG yesterday made fun saying I WAS TRANSHUMAN-----I am a 'dog bred human'. My use of the term DOG BREEDING connected to TRANSHUMANISM is not simply DISMISSIVE JARGON. To understand the goals of TRANSHUMANISM we must move away from all these ties to MEDICINE and the idea of making a SUPER HUMAN. There is no plan to make a SUPER HUMAN---there is no plan to try to extend life and quality of life for 99.9% WE THE PEOPLE.
THAT IS NOT TRANSHUMANISM.
The medical research surrounding ARTIFICIAL LIMBS----and connectivity of nerves from missing LEG OR ARM to MUSCLE MOVEMENT is MEDICINE. If that human with 'BIONIC LEG' removes that leg-----that human is the same HOMO SAPIEN he/she was before having that MEDICAL PROCEDURE. TRANSHUMANISM is about GENETIC CHANGES which cannot be reversed.
A TOY POODLE CAN NEVER RETURN TO BEING A WOLF. THE WOLF IS THE NATURAL SOURCE OF DOG SPECIES.
MY LAWSUIT against HOSTING SERVER NOSY NEIGHBORS AND THE GANG of BARBER SURGEONS and criminal installation of BODY/BRAIN IMPLANTS ------does not make for TRANSHUMANISM. I could have them removed if our US doctors were not BARBER SURGEONS. As it is BATTERIES DIE------IMPLANTS ARE TURNED OFF---and I am still a HOMO SAPIEN----not a SUB-SPECIES of humans---that will be GMO ---GENETICALLY MODIFIED HUMANS.
What has happened in HUMAN MEDICAL RESEARCH so far has been BRAIN/BODY IMPLANT with goals of CONTROLLING HUMAN MIND AND BODY. We have seen a beginning of TRANSHUMANISM with EMBRYONIC STEM CELL MANIPULATION. What has manifested physically from these genetic manipulations are GENDER-BLENDED HUMANS-----we call that GMO HUMANS.
The future of robotics: in a transhuman world, the disabled will be the ones without prosthetic limbs…
Bertolt Meyer's amazing bionic hand controlled by an iPhone app is a glimpse of the advances being made in prosthetics. But in years to come, will everyone want one?
Bertolt Meyer is used to being viewed as not fully human. Born with a stump where his left hand should have been, he spent his childhood wearing a hook connected to an elaborate pulley and harness. "To open the hook and grasp things I had to flex my shoulders like this," he says, striking a he-man pose. "The harness was very uncomfortable. To stop it chafing my skin, I had to wear a shirt underneath it at all times. I was always sweating."
Even when, at the age of 19, Meyer exchanged his body-powered hook for a myoelectric prosthesis with a more realistic plastic hand, he kept his disfigured left arm hidden from view. "It wasn't simply a question of aesthetics," he explains, proffering the plastic hand, now grubby and discoloured with use. "You have to understand, this is a stigma. People think it's weird and that is how you come to perceive it. You walk around with a sense of shame."
Today, that shame is gone. In 2009 Meyer, a social psychologist at the University of Zurich, was fitted with an i-limb, a state-of-the-art bionic prosthesis developed by a Scottish company, Touch Bionics, that comes with an aluminium chassis and 24 different grip patterns. To select a new suite of gestures, Meyer simply taps an app on his iPhone.
"This is the first prosthesis where the aesthetics match the engineering," he says, balancing a Biro between his purring electronic fingers. "It's part of me and I'm proud of it."
Since appearing in the Channel 4 documentary How to Build a Bionic Man, in which he allowed engineers to build a robotic replica of the rest of his body complete with artificial heart, lungs and an alarming prosthetic likeness of his face, Meyer has become something of a poster boy for "transhumanism". Encompassing everything from robotic limbs to memory-enhancing neural implants to gene therapies that slow ageing, transhumanism (or posthumanism) concerns the technologies and drugs that are rapidly altering the limits of human performance, as well as notions about what we might look like in future.
As Nick Bostrom, the head of the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford and a leading transhumanist thinker puts it, transhumanism "challenges the premise that the human condition is and will remain essentially unalterable". "It seems to me fairly obvious why one might have reason to desire to become a posthuman in the sense of having a greatly enhanced capacity to stay alive and healthy," he writes. "I suspect that the majority of humankind already has such a desire implicitly."
But while some medical interventions such as organ transplants to replace malfunctioning livers and kidneys, or vaccines to boost the immune system, command wide social acceptance, others invite moral approbation. This is particularly the case where the enhancement is regarded as a vanity or may be detrimental to health, as was the case with substandard silicon breast implants.
Then there is the question of access – an i-limb costs £30,000, while an artificial heart will set you back £70,000 – and whether it is OK to turn a blind eye to the "off-label" use of drugs such as Ritalin, which was developed as a treatment for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, but is increasingly being used to enhance cognitive performance.
Even more ethically fraught is the line between restorative therapy and elective surgery. Last year, for instance, an Austrian man who damaged his hand in a motorcycle accident opted for an amputation and had a bionic replacement fitted.
At the moment, bionic hands are poor substitutes for the real thing – they can grasp and manipulate objects, but cannot feel. But what if in the future we could make bionic hands with a sense of touch that were also capable of enhanced performance? Would we be happy if a struggling concert pianist elected to amputate his hand so that he could perform Rachmaninoff's infamously difficult third concerto?
For the moment, the answer is almost certainly no, but that may change as people become more comfortable with posthuman technologies and the opportunities they afford for improved health and function. "What's crucial about these technologies is they don't just repair us, they make us better than well," says Andy Miah, director of the Creative Futures Institute and professor of ethics and emerging technologies at the University of the West of Scotland. "The human enhancement market will reveal the truth about our biological conditions – we are all disabled. This is why human enhancements are here to stay and likely to become more popular."
A good example of the way that these technologies are already changing our perception of human identity and notions of disability comes from the world of sport. When Oscar Pistorius donned a pair of carbon-fibre blades to compete alongside able-bodied athletes at the 2012 Olympics, he had ceased to be a disabled athlete; instead, he offered us a glimpse of a "superhuman" future where Paralympians aided by bionics or performance-enhancing drugs might set hitherto unimaginable sporting records. At the moment, such enhancements are considered unfair and athletes who seek to evade anti-doping regulations are pilloried as cheats. But in a posthuman future where everyone has access to these technologies, such objections may become moot. As Bostrom puts it: "If every athlete takes a lot of dangerous performance-enhancing drugs, there will still only be one gold medallist."
Future prosthetic limbs will be immersed within our flesh, rather than being outside it or replacing it. Athletes will also be able to use 3D printing to create new limbs perfectly tailored to their bodies, or grow replacement body parts when their old ones wear out.
Nor is bionics the only technology transforming norms of health and human performance. For example, in search of enhanced cognitive performance, many people are experimenting with modafinil, a treatment for narcolepsy, while others routinely take selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) such as Paxil and Zoloft to regulate their moods and sense of wellbeing.
HMMM, THIS IS WHAT TRANSHUMANISTS CALL 'BETTER'---'ENHANCED QUALITY OF LIFE'
These drugs are but the forerunners of a new generation of neuroenhancers and brain stimulation devices that promise shortcuts to even greater intellectual heights – and all without the social awkwardness we usually associate with superior cognitive functioning (think Bradley Cooper in Limitless, rather than Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man).
In Switzerland, which leads the way in many of these technologies and therapies, concerns about the health and ethical impacts are leading to calls for greater regulation. Currently, there are three proposals before the Swiss legislature, many of them focusing on Ritalin, which is manufactured by the Swiss pharmaceuticals firm Novartis. In June the Swiss public health service reported that adolescent use of methylphenidate, the generic name for Ritalin, had increased by 40% between 2005 and 2008, mirroring trends in the US where off-label use is rife among high-school and college students. There is similar concern about the wide uptake of anti-anxiety drugs as pharmaceutical companies seek to redefine social pathologies as treatable psychiatric conditions and aggressively market the therapies to consumers. Meanwhile, Martial Saugy, the head of Switzerland's anti-doping laboratory, remains under fire over US allegations that he helped Lance Armstrong evade doping tests before the 2002 Tour de France – a row that has highlighted the scope for sporting figures to abuse anabolic steroids and other performance-enhancing supplements.
The problem is that as technology blurs the distinction between illness and optimal health, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish normal from abnormal. "It's not only question of human enhancement," says Anne Eckhardt, the author of a recent report on the opportunities and risks of the human enhancement market for the Swiss Centre for Technology Assessment. "It's also about medicalisation and changing definitions of disease and disability."
Like Siegfried tasting the blood of the dragon, people have long dreamt of acquiring superhuman powers. The difference today is that it is no longer enough to manipulate our external environment by, for instance, donning a pair of Nikes or boarding a plane. Instead, enhancement increasingly focuses on the re-engineering of bodies and minds themselves.
For the moment, this posthuman future still lies some way off. We don't need a brain implant to use Google – Google's glasses, iPads and mobile phones are, at the moment, more than sufficient for most people's needs. "In the long run, technology will surpass our biological nature, but we should not underestimate the technical challenges in getting to that stage," says Bostrom.
It is an assessment with which Meyer concurs. Since being fitted with his i-limb, Meyer says that actions that used to be unimaginable – such as wheeling a suitcase through duty free while talking on his mobile phone – he now performs with confidence and ease. However, although the i-limb has enabled him to transcend his feelings of inadequacy and shame, he is a long way from considering himself transhuman, let alone superhuman.
"It's a question of standards," he says. "Compared to the normal human standard, I wouldn't describe myself as transhuman, but compared to my own standard, then yes."
That could soon change however. Meyer is already on his fourth generation i-limb and during the filming of the Channel 4 documentary he saw how US military-funded research is resulting in ever more sophisticated developments, including robotic legs with articulated joints that can negotiate stairs and give the appearance of a natural walking gait. "The question is, as the technology gets better, will it become the norm to have one of these, and what will people go through to get one?" asks Meyer, indicating his i-limb with his "good" hand.
The only point in the Channel 4 documentary at which Meyer appeared to balk at the brave new transhuman future was when he came face to face with "Bionic Bertolt" – the robot bearing his hand and a prosthetic version of his face. He was clearly appalled by the transformation. "It was a face version of this," he says tapping his old plastic prosthesis. "It really freaked me out."
Indeed, Meyer's visceral reaction drove home the extent to which these posthuman technologies provoke visions of dystopian futures or what Miah pithily calls "the yuck factor".
Ultimately, however, these are technical issues and Meyer recognises that it is only a matter of time before engineering companies are in a position to offer us products that not only look human but offer functionality way beyond the human. "That is the point where we may need to find a larger set of ethical criteria, because, from what I have seen, we cannot rely on engineers and business people to come up with them," he warns.
________________________________________________
Fruit tree hybridization has been happening for thousands of years. A branch of one fruit tree species is grafted onto a different fruit tree species creating a different kind of fruit. This is NATURAL HYBRIDIZATION.
Placing a robotic prosthetic limb on a human does not make a human a DIFFERENT SPECIES------this person is still HOMO SAPIEN.
This is the UK GUARDIAN FAKE NEWS MEDIA OUTLET PRETENDING THAT A PROSTHETIC LIMB IS GMO HUMAN--TRANSHUMAN.
Our US and global 99.9% of WE THE PEOPLE are deliberately being CONFUSED/FOOLED into thinking these medical enhancement which are social benefit-----are TRANSHUMANISM.
TRANSHUMANISM IS CHANGING THE GENETICS OF HUMANS JUST AS GMO PLANTS.
'The future of robotics: in a transhuman world, the disabled will be the ones without prosthetic limbs…'
Can a human who has been GENDER-BLENDED as a fetal/egg genetic manipulation change back to being a NATURAL HUMAN? NO, that gender-blended human will always been GENETICALLY MANIPULATED. The human with a PROSTHETIC LEG -------is still genetically a NATURAL HUMAN.
So, NOSY NEIGHBORS AND THE GANG as black market illegal 24/7 VIDEO PORN saying I was a dog breed---I am transhuman because I was criminally IMPLANTED------
DON'T UNDERSTAND TRANSHUMANISM.
Biotechnology /
CRISPREngineering the Perfect BabyScientists are developing ways to edit the DNA of tomorrow’s children. Should they stop before it’s too late?
by Antonio Regalado
Mar 5, 2015
If anyone had devised a way to create a genetically engineered baby, I figured George Church would know about it.
At his labyrinthine laboratory on the Harvard Medical School campus, you can find researchers giving E. Coli a novel genetic code never seen in nature. Around another bend, others are carrying out a plan to use DNA engineering to resurrect the woolly mammoth. His lab, Church likes to say, is the center of a new technological genesis—one in which man rebuilds creation to suit himself.
When I visited the lab last June, Church proposed that I speak to a young postdoctoral scientist named Luhan Yang. A Harvard recruit from Beijing, she’d been a key player in developing a powerful new technology for editing DNA, called CRISPR-Cas9. With Church, Yang had founded a small biotechnology company to engineer the genomes of pigs and cattle, sliding in beneficial genes and editing away bad ones.
As I listened to Yang, I waited for a chance to ask my real questions: Can any of this be done to human beings? Can we improve the human gene pool? The position of much of mainstream science has been that such meddling would be unsafe, irresponsible, and even impossible. But Yang didn’t hesitate. Yes, of course, she said. In fact, the Harvard laboratory had a project under way to determine how it could be achieved. She flipped open her laptop to a PowerPoint slide titled “Germline Editing Meeting.”
Here it was: a technical proposal to alter human heredity. “Germ line” is biologists’ jargon for the egg and sperm, which combine to form an embryo. By editing the DNA of these cells or the embryo itself, it could be possible to correct disease genes and pass those genetic fixes on to future generations. Such a technology could be used to rid families of scourges like cystic fibrosis. It might also be possible to install genes that offer lifelong protection against infection, Alzheimer’s, and, Yang told me, maybe the effects of aging. Such history-making medical advances could be as important to this century as vaccines were to the last.
That’s the promise. The fear is that germ-line engineering is a path toward a dystopia of superpeople and designer babies for those who can afford it. Want a child with blue eyes and blond hair? Why not design a highly intelligent group of people who could be tomorrow’s leaders and scientists?
Just three years after its initial development, CRISPR technology is already widely used by biologists as a kind of search-and-replace tool to alter DNA, even down to the level of a single letter. It’s so precise that it’s expected to turn into a promising new approach for gene therapy in people with devastating illnesses. The idea is that physicians could directly correct a faulty gene, say, in the blood cells of a patient with sickle-cell anemia (see “Genome Surgery”). But that kind of gene therapy wouldn’t affect germ cells, and the changes in the DNA wouldn’t get passed to future generations.
In contrast, the genetic changes created by germ-line engineering would be passed on, and that’s what has made the idea seem so objectionable. So far, caution and ethical concerns have had the upper hand. A dozen countries, not including the United States, have banned germ-line engineering, and scientific societies have unanimously concluded that it would be too risky to do. The European Union’s convention on human rights and biomedicine says tampering with the gene pool would be a crime against “human dignity” and human rights.
But all these declarations were made before it was actually feasible to precisely engineer the germ line. Now, with CRISPR, it is possible.
The experiment Yang described, though not simple, would go like this: The researchers hoped to obtain, from a hospital in New York, the ovaries of a woman undergoing surgery for ovarian cancer caused by a mutation in a gene called BRCA1. Working with another Harvard laboratory, that of antiaging specialist David Sinclair, they would extract immature egg cells that could be coaxed to grow and divide in the laboratory. Yang would use CRISPR in these cells to correct the DNA of the BRCA1 gene. They would try to create a viable egg without the genetic error that caused the woman’s cancer.
Yang would later tell me that she dropped out of the project not long after we spoke. Yet it remained difficult to know if the experiment she described was occurring, canceled, or awaiting publication. Sinclair said that a collaboration between the two labs was ongoing, but then, like several other scientists whom I’d asked about germ-line engineering, he stopped replying to my e-mails.
Regardless of the fate of that particular experiment, human germ-line engineering has become a burgeoning research concept. At least three other centers in the United States are working on it, as are scientists in China, in the U.K., and at a biotechnology company called OvaScience, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that boasts some of the world’s leading fertility doctors on its advisory board.
All this means that germ-line engineering is much further along than anyone imagined.
The objective of these groups is to demonstrate that it’s possible to produce children free of specific genes involved in inherited disease. If it’s possible to correct the DNA in a woman’s egg, or a man’s sperm, those cells could be used in an in vitro fertilization (IVF) clinic to produce an embryo and then a child. It might also be possible to directly edit the DNA of an early-stage IVF embryo using CRISPR. Several people interviewed by MIT Technology Review said that such experiments had already been carried out in China and that results describing edited embryos were pending publication. These people, including two high-ranking specialists, didn’t wish to comment publicly because the papers are under review.
All this means that germ-line engineering is much further along than anyone imagined. “What you are talking about is a major issue for all humanity,” says Merle Berger, one of the founders of Boston IVF, a network of fertility clinics that is among the largest in the world and helps more than a thousand women get pregnant each year. “It would be the biggest thing that ever happened in our field.” Berger predicts that repairing genes involved in serious inherited diseases will win wide public acceptance but says the idea of using the technology beyond that would cause a public uproar because “everyone would want the perfect child”: people might pick and choose eye color and eventually intelligence. “These are things we talk about all the time,” he says. “But we have never had the opportunity to do it.”
Editing embryos
How easy would it be to edit a human embryo using CRISPR? Very easy, experts say. “Any scientist with molecular biology skills and knowledge of how to work with [embryos] is going to be able to do this,” says Jennifer Doudna, a biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who in 2012 co-discovered how to use CRISPR to edit genes.
To find out how it could be done, I visited the lab of Guoping Feng, a biologist at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, where a colony of marmoset monkeys is being established with the aim of using CRISPR to create accurate models of human brain diseases. To create the models, Feng will edit the DNA of embryos and then transfer them into female marmosets to produce live monkeys. One gene Feng hopes to alter in the animals is SHANK3. The gene is involved in how neurons communicate; when it’s damaged in children, it is known to cause autism.
Feng said that before CRISPR, it was not possible to introduce precise changes into a primate’s DNA. With CRISPR, the technique should be relatively straightforward. The CRISPR system includes a gene-snipping enzyme and a guide molecule that can be programmed to target unique combinations of the DNA letters, A, G, C, and T; get these ingredients into a cell and they will cut and modify the genome at the targeted sites.
But CRISPR is not perfect—and it would be a very haphazard way to edit human embryos, as Feng’s efforts to create gene-edited marmosets show. To employ the CRISPR system in the monkeys, his students simply inject the chemicals into a fertilized egg, which is known as a zygote—the stage just before it starts dividing.
Feng said the efficiency with which CRISPR can delete or disable a gene in a zygote is about 40 percent, whereas making specific edits, or swapping DNA letters, works less frequently—more like 20 percent of the time. Like a person, a monkey has two copies of most genes, one from each parent. Sometimes both copies get edited, but sometimes just one does, or neither. Only about half the embryos will lead to live births, and of those that do, many could contain a mixture of cells with edited DNA and without. If you add up the odds, you find you’d need to edit 20 embryos to get a live monkey with the version you want.
That’s not an insurmountable problem for Feng, since the MIT breeding colony will give him access to many monkey eggs and he’ll be able to generate many embryos. However, it would present obvious problems in humans. Putting the ingredients of CRISPR into a human embryo would be scientifically trivial. But it wouldn’t be practical for much just yet. This is one reason that many scientists view such an experiment (whether or not it has really occurred in China) with scorn, seeing it more as a provocative bid to grab attention than as real science. Rudolf Jaenisch, an MIT biologist who works across the street from Feng and who in the 1970s created the first gene-modified mice, calls attempts to edit human embryos “totally premature.” He says he hopes these papers will be rejected and not published. “It’s just a sensational thing that will stir things up,” says Jaenisch. “We know it’s possible, but is it of practical use? I kind of doubt it.”
For his part, Feng told me he approves of the idea of germ-line engineering. Isn’t the goal of medicine to reduce suffering? Considering the state of the technology, however, he thinks actual gene-edited humans are “10 to 20 years away.” Among other problems, CRISPR can introduce off-target effects or change bits of the genome far from where scientists had intended. Any human embryo altered with CRISPR today would carry the risk that its genome had been changed in unexpected ways. But, Feng said, such problems may eventually be ironed out, and edited people will be born. “To me, it’s possible in the long run to dramatically improve health, lower costs. It’s a kind of prevention,” he said. “It’s hard to predict the future, but correcting disease risks is definitely a possibility and should be supported. I think it will be a reality.”
Editing eggs
Elsewhere in the Boston area, scientists are exploring a different approach to engineering the germ line, one that is technically more demanding but probably more powerful. This strategy combines CRISPR with unfolding discoveries related to stem cells. Scientists at several centers, including Church’s, think they will soon be able to use stem cells to produce eggs and sperm in the laboratory. Unlike embryos, stem cells can be grown and multiplied. Thus they could offer a vastly improved way to create edited offspring with CRISPR. The recipe goes like this: First, edit the genes of the stem cells. Second, turn them into an egg or sperm. Third, produce an offspring.
Some investors got an early view of the technique on December 17, at the Benjamin Hotel in Manhattan, during commercial presentations by OvaScience. The company, which was founded four years ago, aims to commercialize the scientific work of David Sinclair, who is based at Harvard, and Jonathan Tilly, an expert on egg stem cells and the chairman of the biology department at Northeastern University (see “10 Emerging Technologies: Egg Stem Cells,” May/June 2012). It made the presentations as part of a successful effort to raise $132 million in new capital during January.
During the meeting, Sinclair, a velvet-voiced Australian whom Time last year named one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World,” took the podium and provided Wall Street with a peek at what he called “truly world-changing” developments. People would look back at this moment in time and recognize it as a new chapter in “how humans control their bodies,” he said, because it would let parents determine “when and how they have children and how healthy those children are actually going to be.”
The company has not perfected its stem-cell technology—it has not reported that the eggs it grows in the lab are viable—but Sinclair predicted that functional eggs were “a when, and not an if.” Once the technology works, he said, infertile women will be able to produce hundreds of eggs, and maybe hundreds of embryos. Using DNA sequencing to analyze their genes, they could pick among them for the healthiest ones.
Genetically improved children may also be possible. Sinclair told the investors that he was trying to alter the DNA of these egg stem cells using gene editing, work he later told me he was doing with Church’s lab. “We think the new technologies with genome editing will allow it to be used on individuals who aren’t just interested in using IVF to have children but have healthier children as well, if there is a genetic disease in their family,” Sinclair told the investors. He gave the example of Huntington’s disease, caused by a gene that will trigger a fatal brain condition even in someone who inherits only one copy. Sinclair said gene editing could be used to remove the lethal gene defect from an egg cell. His goal, and that of OvaScience, is to “correct those mutations before we generate your child,” he said. “It’s still experimental, but there is no reason to expect it won’t be possible in coming years.”
Sinclair spoke to me briefly on the phone while he was navigating in a cab across a snowed-in Boston, but later he referred my questions to OvaScience. When I contacted OvaScience, Cara Mayfield, a spokeswoman, said its executives could not comment because of their travel schedules but confirmed that the company was working on treating inherited disorders with gene editing. What was surprising to me was that OvaScience’s research in “crossing the germ line,” as critics of human engineering sometimes put it, has generated scarcely any notice. In December of 2013, OvaScience even announced it was putting $1.5 million into a joint venture with a synthetic biology company called Intrexon, whose R&D objectives include gene-editing eggs to “prevent the propagation” of human disease “in future generations.”
When I reached Tilly at Northeastern, he laughed when I told him what I was calling about. “It’s going to be a hot-button issue,” he said. Tilly also said his lab was trying to edit egg stem cells with CRISPR “right now” to rid them of an inherited genetic disease that he didn’t want to name. Tilly emphasized that there are “two pieces of the puzzle”—one being stem cells and the other gene editing. The ability to create large numbers of egg stem cells is critical, because only with sizable quantities can genetic changes be stably introduced using CRISPR, characterized using DNA sequencing, and carefully studied to check for mistakes before producing an egg.
Tilly predicted that the whole end-to-end technology—cells to stem cells, stem cells to sperm or egg and then to offspring—would end up being worked out first in animals, such as cattle, either by his lab or by companies such as eGenesis, the spinoff from the Church lab working on livestock. But he isn’t sure what the next step should be with edited human eggs. You wouldn’t want to fertilize one “willy nilly,” he said. You’d be making a potential human being. And doing that would raise questions he’s not sure he can answer. He told me, “‘Can you do it?’ is one thing. If you can, then the most important questions come up. ‘Would you do it? Why would you want to do it? What is the purpose?’ As scientists we want to know if it’s feasible, but then we get into the bigger questions, and it’s not a science question—it’s a society question.”
Improving humans
If germ-line engineering becomes part of medical practice, it could lead to transformative changes in human well-being, with consequences to people’s life span, identity, and economic output. But it would create ethical dilemmas and social challenges. What if these improvements were available only to the richest societies, or the richest people? An in vitro fertility procedure costs about $20,000 in the United States. Add genetic testing and egg donation or a surrogate mother, and the price soars toward $100,000.
Others believe the idea is dubious because it’s not medically necessary. Hank Greely, a lawyer and ethicist at Stanford University, says proponents “can’t really say what it is good for.” The problem, says Greely, is that it’s already possible to test the DNA of IVF embryos and pick healthy ones, a process that adds about $4,000 to the cost of a fertility procedure. A man with Huntington’s, for instance, could have his sperm used to fertilize a dozen of his partner’s eggs. Half those embryos would not have the Huntington’s gene, and those could be used to begin a pregnancy.
Indeed, some people are adamant that germ-line engineering is being pushed ahead with “false arguments.” That is the view of Edward Lanphier, CEO of Sangamo Biosciences, a California biotechnology company that is using another gene-editing technique, called zinc fingers nucleases, to try to treat HIV in adults by altering their blood cells. “We’ve looked at [germ-line engineering] for a disease rationale, and there is none,” he says. “You can do it. But there really isn’t a medical reason. People say, well, we don’t want children born with this, or born with that—but it’s a completely false argument and a slippery slope toward much more unacceptable uses.”
Critics cite a host of fears.
Children would be the subject of experiments. Parents would be influenced by genetic advertising from IVF clinics. Germ-line engineering would encourage the spread of allegedly superior traits. And it would affect people not yet born, without their being able to agree to it. The American Medical Association, for instance, holds that germ-line engineering shouldn’t be done “at this time” because it “affects the welfare of future generations” and could cause “unpredictable and irreversible results.” But like a lot of official statements that forbid changing the genome, the AMA’s, which was last updated in 1996, predates today’s technology. “A lot of people just agreed to these statements,” says Greely. “It wasn’t hard to renounce something that you couldn’t do.”
The fear?
A dystopia of superpeople and designer babies for those who can afford it.
Others predict that hard-to-oppose medical uses will be identified. A couple with several genetic diseases at once might not be able to find a suitable embryo. Treating infertility is another possibility. Some men don’t produce any sperm, a condition called azoospermia. One cause is a genetic defect in which a region of about one million to six million DNA letters is missing from the Y chromosome. It might be possible to take a skin cell from such a man, turn it into a stem cell, repair the DNA, and then make sperm, says Werner Neuhausser, a young Austrian doctor who splits his time between the Boston IVF fertility-clinic network and Harvard’s Stem Cell Institute. “That will change medicine forever, right? You could cure infertility, that is for sure,” he says.
I spoke with Church several times by telephone over the last few months, and he told me what’s driving everything is the “incredible specificity” of CRISPR. Although not all the details have been worked out, he thinks the technology could replace DNA letters essentially without side effects. He says this is what makes it “tempting to use.” Church says his laboratory is focused mostly on experiments in engineering animals. He added that his lab would not make or edit human embryos, calling such a step “not our style.”
What is Church’s style is human enhancement. And he’s been making a broad case that CRISPR can do more than eliminate disease genes. It can lead to augmentation. At meetings, some involving groups of “transhumanists” interested in next steps for human evolution, Church likes to show a slide on which he lists naturally occurring variants of around 10 genes that, when people are born with them, confer extraordinary qualities or resistance to disease. One makes your bones so hard they’ll break a surgical drill. Another drastically cuts the risk of heart attacks. And a variant of the gene for the amyloid precursor protein, or APP, was found by Icelandic researchers to protect against Alzheimer’s. People with it never get dementia and remain sharp into old age.
Church thinks CRISPR could be used to provide people with favorable versions of genes, making DNA edits that would act as vaccines against some of the most common diseases we face today. Although he told me anything “edgy” should be done only to adults who can consent, it’s obvious to him that the earlier such interventions occur, the better.
Church tends to dodge questions about genetically modified babies. The idea of improving the human species has always had “enormously bad press,” he wrote in the introduction to Regenesis, his 2012 book on synthetic biology, whose cover was a painting by Eustache Le Sueur of a bearded God creating the world. But that’s ultimately what he’s suggesting: enhancements in the form of protective genes. “An argument will be made that the ultimate prevention is that the earlier you go, the better the prevention,” he told an audience at MIT’s Media Lab last spring. “I do think it’s the ultimate preventive, if we get to the point where it’s very inexpensive, extremely safe, and very predictable.” Church, who has a less cautious side, proceeded to tell the audience that he thought changing genes “is going to get to the point where it’s like you are doing the equivalent of cosmetic surgery.”
Some thinkers have concluded that we should not pass up the chance to make improvements to our species. “The human genome is not perfect,” says John Harris, a bioethicist at Manchester University, in the U.K. “It’s ethically imperative to positively support this technology.” By some measures, U.S. public opinion is not particularly negative toward the idea. A Pew Research survey carried out last August found that 46 percent of adults approved of genetic modification of babies to reduce the risk of serious diseases.
The same survey found that 83 percent said genetic modification to make a baby smarter would be “taking medical advances too far.” But other observers say higher IQ is exactly what we should be considering. Nick Bostrom, an Oxford philosopher best known for his 2014 book Superintelligence, which raised alarms about the risks of artificial intelligence in computers, has also looked at whether humans could use reproductive technology to improve human intellect. Although the ways in which genes affect intelligence aren’t well understood and there are far too many relevant genes to permit easy engineering, such realities don’t dim speculation on the possibility of high-tech eugenics.
“The human genome is not perfect. It’s ethically imperative to positively support this technology.”
What if everyone could be a little bit smarter? Or a few people could be a lot smarter?
HMMMMM, ISN'T THAT WHAT GLOBAL BANKING 1% EXPECT SUPER-DUPER BIG DEAD HEAD TO BE---THE REPLACEMENT FOR NATURAL HUMAN GENIUS?
Even a small number of “super-enhanced” individuals, Bostrom wrote in a 2013 paper, could change the world through their creativity and discoveries, and through innovations that everyone else would use. In his view, genetic enhancement is an important long-range issue like climate change or financial planning by nations, “since human problem-solving ability is a factor in every challenge we face.”
To some scientists, the explosive advance of genetics and biotech means germ-line engineering is inevitable. Of course, safety questions would be paramount. Before there’s a genetically edited baby saying “Mama,” there would have to be tests in rats, rabbits, and probably monkeys, to make sure they are normal. But ultimately, if the benefits seem to outweigh the risks, medicine would take the chance. “It was the same with IVF when it first happened,” says Neuhausser. “We never really knew if that baby was going to be healthy at 40 or 50 years. But someone had to take the plunge.”
Wine country
In January, on Saturday the 24th, around 20 scientists, ethicists, and legal experts traveled to Napa Valley, California, for a retreat among the vineyards at the Carneros Inn. They had been convened by Doudna, the Berkeley scientist who co-discovered the CRISPR system a little over two years ago. She had become aware that scientists might be thinking of crossing the germ line, and she was concerned. Now she wanted to know: could they be stopped?
“We as scientists have come to appreciate that CRISPR is incredibly powerful. But that swings both ways. We need to make sure that it’s applied carefully,” Doudna told me. “The issue is especially human germ-line editing and the appreciation that this is now a capability in everyone’s hands.”
At the meeting, along with ethicists like Greely, was Paul Berg, a Stanford biochemist and Nobel Prize winner known for having organized the Asilomar Conference, a historic 1975 forum at which biologists reached an agreement on how to safely proceed with recombinant DNA, the newly discovered method of splicing DNA into bacteria.
Should there be an Asilomar for germ-line engineering?
Doudna thinks so, but the prospects for consensus seem dim. Biotechnology research is now global, involving hundreds of thousands of people. There’s no single authority that speaks for science, and no easy way to put the genie back in the bottle. Doudna told me she hoped that if American scientists agreed to a moratorium on human germ-line engineering, it might influence researchers elsewhere in the world to cease their work.
Doudna said she felt that a self-imposed pause should apply not only to making gene-edited babies but also to using CRISPR to alter human embryos, eggs, or sperm—as researchers at Harvard, Northeastern, and OvaScience are doing. “I don’t feel that those experiments are appropriate to do right now in human cells that could turn into a person,” she told me. “I feel that the research that needs to be done right now is to understand safety, efficacy, and delivery. And I think those experiments can be done in nonhuman systems. I would like to see a lot more work done before it’s done for germ-line editing. I would favor a very cautious approach.”
Not everyone agrees that germ-line engineering is such a big worry, or that experiments should be padlocked. Greely notes that in the United States, there are piles of regulations to keep lab science from morphing into a genetically modified baby anytime soon. “I would not want to use safety as an excuse for a non-safety-based ban,” says Greely, who says he pushed back against talk of a moratorium. But he also says he agreed to sign Doudna’s letter, which now reflects the consensus of the group. “Although I don’t view this as a crisis moment, I think it’s probably about time for us to have this discussion,” he says.
GREELY IS THE TRANSHUMANIST FAKE MEDICAL ETHICIST
(After this article was published online in March, Doudna’s editorial appeared in Science (see “Scientists Call for a Summit on Gene-Edited Babies”.) Along with Greely, Berg, and 15 others, she called for a global moratorium on any effort to use CRISPR to generate gene-edited children until researchers could determine “what clinical applications, if any, might in the future be deemed permissible.” The group, however, endorsed basic research, including applying CRISPR to embryos. The final list of signatories included Church, although he did not attend the Napa meeting.)
As news has spread of germ-line experiments, some biotechnology companies now working on CRISPR have realized that they will have to take a stand. Nessan Bermingham is CEO of Intellia Therapeutics, a Boston startup that raised $15 million last year to develop CRISPR into gene therapy treatments for adults or children. He says germ-line engineering “is not on our commercial radar,” and he suggests that his company could use its patents to prevent anyone from commercializing it.
“The technology is in its infancy,” he says. “It is not appropriate for people to even be contemplating germ-line applications.”
Bermingham told me he never imagined he’d have to be taking a position on genetically modified babies so soon. Modifying human heredity has always been a theoretical possibility. Suddenly it’s a real one. But wasn’t the point always to understand and control our own biology—to become masters over the processes that created us?
Doudna says she is also thinking about these issues. “It cuts to the core of who we are as people, and it makes you ask if humans should be exercising that kind of power,” she told me. “There are moral and ethical issues, but one of the profound questions is just the appreciation that if germ-line editing is conducted in humans, that is changing human evolution.” One reason she feels the research should slow down is to give scientists a chance to spend more time explaining what their next steps could be.
“Most of the public,” she says, “does not appreciate what is coming.”
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To understand the goals of TRANSHUMANISM we are not suggesting that HUMANS ARE DOGS. We are using the thousand years of DOG BREEDING to show 99.9% of WE THE PEOPLE the goals of GMO HUMAN genetic breeding. NATURAL evolution took WOLF breeding with smaller wolf---breeding with smaller wolf----breeding with wolf having not grey fur but BROWN FUR and VOILA we have FOXES-----COYOTES------we have DOMESTICATED DOGS.
DOMESTICATED DOGS WERE BRED FOR WORK---OR AS LAP DOGS.
The chihuahua is a LAP DOG-----CHAMPION DOG.
'History of the Chihuahua Breed
www.chihuahuawardrobe.com/history-of-the...
I think the fennec fox connection is only in appearance, as the Chihuahua is genetically descended from the prehistoric predecessor of the grey wolf just like all other domestic dogs. The large ears are an adaptation to control body temperature in warm climates…'
How does global banking 1% make SUB-SPECIES of HUMANS -----taking HOMO SAPIEN as TOP/BEST OF SPECIES and create functional GMO HUMANS.
Below we what it takes to create a GMO HUMAN as DOG BREED------global banking 1% wants to blend ANIMAL TRAITS with HUMAN TRAITS. That is NATURALLY impossible yet they are manipulating to do just that because global banking says----
IT'S ALL ABOUT GLOBAL CORPORATE SUSTAINABILITY---YOU KNOW, THAT WORLD BANK/UNITED NATIONS/WORLD HEALTH GOALS OF MAXIMIZING GLOBAL CORPORATE PROFITS.
We see here just that----A CHICKEN would never be able to have a viable embryo with genes for ALLIGATOR TEETH. The chicken embryonic process would see that ALLIGATOR TEETH GENE as MUTATION and silence it.
TRANSHUMANISTS are working with CIS ---DNA as MUTATION to translate when our bodies would not translate a MUTATION. Chicken embryonic DNA inserted with ALLIGATOR GENE FOR TEETH and VOILA ------CHICKEN bred with ALLIGATOR makes a NEW CHICKEN SUB-SPECIES.
Naturally, we have been crossing through HYBRIDIZATION different kinds of chickens to create different species of CHICKEN. This GMO CHICKEN creates a completely different SUB-SPECIES ----
'Thirty-nine varieties of chicken (and one Guinea Fowl)'.
Cross a LEGHORN chicken with teeth genes from ALLIGATOR ----and you get a SUB-SPECIES of LEGHORN CHICKENS.
'The Leghorn (US: /ˈlɛɡhɔːrn/, UK: /lɛˈɡɔːrn/; Italian: Livorno or Livornese) is a breed of chicken originating in Tuscany, in central Italy'.
are different from CHICKEN ALLIGATOR SPECIES.
Global banking 1% say------COCK FIGHTING CHICKENS with ALLIGATOR TEETH----great for BUSINESS---MONEY-MAKING.
PUNCTUATED EVOLUTION would see this GMO CHICKEN as reverting back to dinosaurs------you know, JURASSIC PARK.
Sustainability
Mutant Chicken Grows Alligatorlike Teeth
Working late in the developmental biology lab one night, Matthew Harris of the University of Wisconsin noticed that the beak of a mutant chicken embryo he was examining had fallen off. Upon closer examination of the snubbed beak, he found tiny bumps and protuberances along its edge that looked like teeth--alligator teeth to be specific. The accidental discovery revealed that chickens retain the ability to grow teeth, even though birds lost this feature long ago. The finding also resurrected the controversial theory of one of the founders of comparative anatomy, Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hillaire.
In the early 19th century, Saint-Hillaire observed that developing parrots have tiny bumps on their beaks that resemble teeth, something he ascribed to modern animals deriving from more basic primitive forms. But due to his developing battles with Georges Cuvier over evolution, the finding was forgotten until Harris, a graduate student, rediscovered it nearly 200 years later.
The mutant chickens Harris studied bear a recessive trait dubbed talpid2. This trait is lethal, meaning that such mutants are never born, but some incubate in eggs as long as 18 days. During that time, the same two tissues from which teeth develop in mammals come together in the jaw of the mutant embryo--and this leads to nascent teeth, a structure birds have lacked for at least 70 million years. "They don't make a molar," explains development biologist John Fallon, who oversaw Harris's work. "What they make is this conical, saber-shaped structure that is clearly a tooth. The other animal that has a tooth like that is an alligator."
Previous efforts to produce teeth in chickens had relied on introducing genetic information from mice, resulting in chickens growing mammalian molars. But a chicken's underlying ability to grow teeth derives from a common ancestor with alligators--archosaurs--that is more recent than the one linking birds and mammals. Nevertheless, the underlying genetic mechanism that produces teeth in mice, alligators and mutant chickens remains the same.
Exactly how the mutation causes the chickens to sprout teeth is unknown, Fallon notes, but a similar effect can be produced in normal chickens. Harris proved this by engineering a virus to mimic the molecular signals of the mutation and caused normal chickens to briefly develop teeth that were then reabsorbed into the beak. The finding of such an atavism--presented in yesterday's issue of Current Biology--opens a new avenue of exploration in the quest to understand how particular structures like teeth are lost in different evolutionary lineages. It also vindicates the long ago observations of one of the early fathers of comparative anatomy.
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If CHICKENS can have ALLIGATOR TEETH----then why not HUMANS?
Alligator teeth on humans would make for a FIERCE RAPTOR WARRIOR. Think about the fact that GMO HUMAN technology is driven by GLOBAL PRIVATE MILITARY CORPORATIONS------that would be the goal.
To bring this cross-hybridization of HUMAN and ALLIGATOR embryonic BLENDING----let's sell this as social benefit where humans would have their missing teeth grow back naturally.
This GMO HUMANS as bred with ANIMAL TRAITS is a REVERSAL of NATURAL SELECTION. Human evolution naturally evolved away from alligator teeth----no doubt because humans have all kinds of NEAT---PEACHY KEEN TRAITS needing room on our HUMAN DNA. If we are to put REPTILIAN TRAITS on HUMAN DNA then we are going back REVERTING-----IS NOT PROGRESSIVE.
So, global banking 1% says----LET'S JUST REMOVE some HUMAN BODY CORE genes----and replace them with genes for ALLIGATOR TEETH----
AND THAT WILL BE A SUB-SPECIES OF HOMO-SAPIENS.
This is what BREEDING HUMANS like DOGS looks like and this is TRANSHUMANISM.
While FAKE NEWS FAKE DATA global banking MEDIA AND ACADEMICS sell this idea of GMO HUMANS with sensationalism around BIONIC LEGS OR ARMS-----GMO HUMANS are CHICKENS WITH ALLIGATOR TEETH.
Hmmmm, says HOSTING SERVER NOSY NEIGHBOR with those RAPTORS as GANG members creating illegal black market 24/7 VIDEO PORN-------maybe I will invest in HUMANS with ALLIGATOR TEETH---that will keep the PORN coming.
Alligators Can Grow New Teeth, So Why Not Humans?
Scientists are trying to understand organ regeneration in hopes of stimulating new growth in humans.
By Jason Koebler, Contributor May 13, 2013, at 5:10 p.m.
Will Humans One Day Regrow Lost Teeth?
The key to keeping a sparkling set of pearly whites might lie with patients that dentists won't have any interest in seeing—alligators.
An alligator can regenerate a lost tooth up to 50 times. In what must come as good news for hockey players, researchers at the University of Southern California are studying alligators' teeth to see if doctors could one day stimulate adult humans to automatically replace a tooth if they lose one.
According to lead author Cheng Ming Chuong, alligator's teeth are very similar to humans, and his team may have discovered why they have regenerative properties.
Chuong says that alligators' teeth grow in sets of three: They have an adult tooth in their mouth, a replacement or "baby" tooth in waiting in case of a lost tooth, and then a stem cell that can become a replacement tooth if necessary.
"When the mature tooth falls out, the second one becomes a mature one, and the stem cell becomes a baby one. Interestingly, they are able to do this process repeatedly," he says. "In humans, we have a similar structure when we're born, but we don't have any stem cell there under normal conditions."
Though the understanding necessary to make regenerative medicine a possibility in humans is still far off, Chuong says that one day scientists will be able to inject hormones or molecules that will cause humans to grow new teeth.
"We have to understand the molecular pathway involved," he says. "We will need the ability to position and control the process in a strategic way."
The ability to regenerate cells isn't completely without precedent in humans, Chuong says.
"In a way, our hair can keep regenerating multiple times in our life. But human teeth only have one chance—when we change from [baby] teeth to permanent teeth," he says. "The motivation for studying this is so that we'll one day be able to do this."
Chuong says that the DNA of humans contains the genetic material necessary to grown teeth and even regenerate other parts of the body, but that code isn't "turned on."
Regeneration is relatively common in the animal kingdom—certain types of salamanders can regenerate limbs, lobsters and stone crabs can grow new claws, starfish can grown new appendages and many types of predators, including sharks and alligators, can regenerate teeth.
"Primitive animals have more robust regenerative power. Humans have more specialized cells, and the price we pay for that specialization is that we have fewer stem cells around," he says. "The percentage of stem cells in lower animals is much higher than it is in humans."
For now, the process is in its infancy as scientists are just beginning to understand the processes of regeneration in more primitive animals.
"I like to think we are learning the grammar of a new language. Once we learn more rules, we will be able to write an essay or a poem or a book," he says.
__________________________________________
PUCTUATED EVOLUTION as a goal of DE-POPULATION of EARTH-----subjectation by .00014% of all the world's 99.9% of people-----would indeed result in RETRO----EVOLUTION-----not PROGRESSIVE EVOLUTION and that would be PUNCTUATED because these MAN-MADE GMO processes are killing NATURAL HUMANS in record-breaking time-------
Below we see SCIENCE DAILY----this is a global banking 1% FAKE DATA FAKE NEWS media outlet selling this global banking GEO-POLITICAL ECONOMIC MODEL as real biological evolution.
'Human evolution was uneven and punctuated - ScienceDailywww.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/11/... Nov 16, 2017 ·
According to the new research, this process was not a straightforward, smooth one -- instead, it seems to have been punctuated, with different evolutionary patterns in different geographical regions'.
Whether people are ATHEIST or RELIGIOUS ----GOD'S NATURAL LAWS include how our human body replicates----all that DNA gradually created a most successful and intelligent species in HOMO SAPIENS. Today, we have global banking 1% who are GENETICALLY---CHALLENGED----being sociopaths----being without morals or ethics---having no attachment to HUMANITY trying to SUBVERT our GOD'S NATURAL LAWS surrounding HUMAN EVOLUTION.
'Darwinian evolution is the process in which in order for organisms to evolve, heritable variation and genetic mutations need to occur to better adapt to its environmental pressures(13). If we as a human race take on genetic engineering technology then we take control of natures process of evolution and heritable genetic variation and could potentially halt the very process that drives darwinian evolution. As well as this, depending on the method of genetic engineering, we could not only control that variation within our genes from our parents but we could suppress the mutations that occur that are necessary for our evolutionary future'.
As said above=======the result of MOVING FORWARD GMO HUMAN will indeed be COLLAPSE OF HUMANITY just as GMO FOODS is leading to the COLLAPSE OF FOOD production globally.
Chickens with ALLIGATOR TEETH will breed our domestic chickens away-----hmmm, will we be eathing these GMO CHICKENS or will they be EATING US---the HUMANS.
How Could Genetically Modifying Babies Effect the Course of Human Evolution
Author: Benjamin McColm-Pickford, n8847762
Introduction
Over the past couple of decades many debates have spawned over the topic of whether or not genetically modifying humans or even genetic engineering as a whole is acceptable or is it too much like playing god. The notion of genetically modifying humans so we have preferable phenotypes arose in the 1980's when genetic engineering and gene transfers first became advanced enough to be considered by the community. Since then, us as humans have adopted genetically modified crops and there has even been genetically modified babies without any fatal side effects. Although this is true, there is still a lot of unexplored possible consequences regarding genetic modification. For example, you might be able to genetically modify your baby with no side effects, but what if everyone was ensuring their babies were perfect through genetic engineering? Would the human race become a monoculture that had little or no diversity?
Would it completely stop the course of human evolution?
Methods of the Genetic Modification
Current Method of Genetic Modification
Today, Genetic Modification in babies is done through a process known as In Vitro Fertilisation(IVF), gene sequencing and cytoplasmic transfer(1). IVF is the process in which a female gamete is fertilised with a sperm outside of the fallopian tubes. With standard IVF treatment, multiple eggs are fertilised with thousands of sperm from the desired male and then inserted back into the uterus through embryo transfer (2). But with genetic modification of a baby, before the implementation of an egg, an ooplasm from an oocyte is transferred to another oocyte or zygote to modify the babies genetic make up. This transfer involves the transfer of the cytoplasmic material of an oocyte cell which includes mitochondria mRNA, proteins and organelles contained within the oocyte (3). When this mitochondria and mRNA are transferred into the oocyte, this creates a mixed mitochondria condition and can potentially be considered as a germline alteration. This mixed condition means that the genetic modified child could have two maternal mtDNA and generate mitochondrial heteroplasmy in the offspring (4). The Gene sequencing is used to locate the particular genotypes that control the desired phenotypes to ensure there is a higher chance of that phenotype being displayed in the baby.
(5)
Future Methods of Genetic Modification
Furthermore, there are several methods that are not currently used in humans but in the future could show potential in the field of human genetic modification. Some of these modification methods involve the process known as transgenesis. This process involves locating, then transferring the preferred or beneficial exogenous gene into a bacterial plasmid and implementing the plasmid so the organism will display a new hereditable phenotype (6). The most common way to implement this method is through pronuclear microinjection (shown in diagram 1) although the testing of this method in animals has proved ineffective with only 2% of zygotes resulting in transgenic genes.
(7)There are also many complications with this method including unintended deletions and duplications of certain gene sequences as well as other unwanted disruptions (8). Other methods of transgenesis include the use of retro viruses to transfer the genetic material in the form of RNA (9) and Embryonic cell transfer which involves the process of using stem cells to incorporate DNA into an embryo(10). To read more about these methods go to:
Retroviruses and Embryonic Transfer
Why it could affect course of Human Evolution
Although the future of human evolution is debatable and unpredictable, there will most likely be an undeniable effect on human evolution because of genetic modification, if the human race adopt genetic modification. Through several research prospects it has been observed that if a species turns into a genetic homogeneous species, the ability to adapt and respond to a environment is strongly impaired due to lack of diversity (11). This lack of diversity also increases the risk of large-scale hist-specific epidemics because of close the relatedness within the species. An example of this is the Irish Potato Famine in 1845 that caused pathogenic infestations of multiple infections and diseases throughout Ireland causing nearly 1/4 of the population to die(12).The general cause of this was the host phytopthora but the reason it spread so fast and far, causing what is known as potato blight, throughout is the development of a potato monoculture (shown below).
This monoculture developed from the Irish mass cloning their potatoes, causing little or no genetic variation within the species and therefore little room to adapt to the environmental pressure caused by this infectious eukaryotic fungi. Another example very similar happened in the 1900's, wiping out almost all wineries throughout Europe. Although both of these example involve plants and not animals, the concept is very much the same. If we all try to become phylogenetically perfect, we could potentially become close to a monoculture with little to no diversity and be wiped out by a single strain of a simple bacteria or fungi outbreak.
Darwinian evolution is the process in which in order for organisms to evolve, heritable variation and genetic mutations need to occur to better adapt to its environmental pressures(13). If we as a human race take on genetic engineering technology then we take control of natures process of evolution and heritable genetic variation and could potentially halt the very process that drives darwinian evolution. As well as this, depending on the method of genetic engineering, we could not only control that variation within our genes from our parents but we could suppress the mutations that occur that are necessary for our evolutionary future.
Conclusions
Although many of these claims are based on a time when genetic engineering is a common practice among humans and that humans are still evolving as a species, there are many scientific analysis and undeniable evidence that genetically modifying humans on a large scale could be potentially dangerous for the human race. We could potentially drive our species to the brink of extinction if we create a monocultured human species due to the vulnerabilities of a species with a genetic make up that is nearly identical. Overall, there are definitely potential evolutionary dangers that come with genetic modification in humans, but in saying that, the potential dangers described would take place over a long period of time, and as stated before, would need to be a common practice among all of man kind.
DON'T WORRY SAYS GLOBAL BANKING 1%----WE HAVE A GOAL OF PRODUCING LOTS OF DOG BREED GMO HUMANS------NOT MONOCULTURE.
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Here is that DINOSAUR CHICKEN with ALLIGATOR TEETH------and we can bet our domestic chickens as a prime source of FOOD FOR HUMANS-------we revert to chasing HUMANS down as FOOD for those REPTILIAN CHICKENS.
Well, this may be good for the global banking 1% wanting to kill HUMANITY----not so progressive for HUMANITY.
By the way-----my case of HOSTING SERVER NOSY NEIGHBORS AND THE GANG---------as RAPTORS for global banking-------do look a lot like this PHOTO-------WATCH OUT FOR THOSE MONSTERS IN THE CLOSET----illegal surveillance 24/7 video PORN for black market SEX TRADE.
A chicken embryo with a dinosaur-like snout instead of a beak has been developed by scientists
Sixty-five million years ago, an asteroid is believed to have crashed into Earth. The impact wiped out huge numbers of species, including almost all of the dinosaurs.
One group of dinosaurs managed to survive the disaster. Today, we know them as birds.
The idea that birds evolved from dinosaurs has been around since the 19th century, when scientists discovered the fossil of an early bird called Archaeopteryx. It had wings and feathers, but it also looked a lot like a dinosaur. More recent fossils look similar.
But these early birds didn't look the same as modern ones. In particular, they didn't have beaks: they had snouts, like those of their dinosaur ancestors.
Velociraptors were small feathered theropod dinosaurs (Credit: Sabena Blackbird/Alamy)
To understand how one changed into another, a team has been tampering with the molecular processes that make up a beak in chickens.
By doing so, they have managed to create a chicken embryo with a dinosaur-like snout and palate, similar to that of small feathered dinosaurs like Velociraptor. The results are published in the journal Evolution.
The team's aim was to understand how the bird beak evolved, because the beak is such a vital part of bird anatomy. It has been crucial for their success. The 10,000 or more bird species occupy a wide range of habitats, and many have specialised beaks to help them survive.
But they did not set out to create a "dino-chicken", say lead authors Bhart-Anjan Bhullar of Yale University in New Haven and Arkhat Abzhanov of Harvard University in Cambridge, US.
"Whenever you examine an important evolutionary transformation, you want to learn the underlying mechanism," says Bhullar.
The beak is also the part of the avian skeleton that has "diversified most extensively and most radically", says Bhullar.
Despite this diversity – ranging from flamingos to pelicans - very little work has been done to figure out "what the heck a beak actually is", he adds.
"I wanted to know what the beak was skeletally, functionally and when this major transformation occurred from a normal vertebrate snout to the very unique structures used in birds."
To begin to understand this, the team trawled though changes in the ways genes are expressed in the embryos of chickens and several other animals. They looked at the embryos of mice, emus, alligators, lizards and turtles, representing many of the major animal groups.
They found that birds have a unique cluster of genes related to facial development, which the non-beaked creatures lacked.
When they silenced these genes, the beak structure reverted back to its ancestral state. So too did the palatal bone in the roof of the mouth.
Control chicken embryo, altered chicken embryo and alligator embryo
To make this genetic tweak, Bhullar and his colleagues isolated the proteins that would have gone on to develop beaks. Then they suppressed them using tiny beads coated with an inhibiting substance.
When their skeletons started to develop inside the eggs, these animals had short, rounded bones instead of elongated, fused beaks that bird skeletons have.
"By affecting this early protein you are actually altering gene expression," added Bhullar.
The work highlights that beaks develop very differently from snouts, using a different set of genes, says Michael Benton of Bristol University in the UK. "That's what proves the beak is a real adaptation or 'thing', not just a slightly different nose shape."
The shift from snouts to beaks happened well into the evolution of birds, 40-50 million years after Archaeopteryx, says Benton.
For now Bhullar has no plans, or ethical approval, to hatch the snouted chickens. But he believes they would have been able to survive "just fine".
"These weren't drastic modifications," says Bhullar. "They are far less weird than many breeds of chicken developed by chicken hobbyists and breeders."
"The rest of the animal looked OK, but one needs to think about this carefully from an ethical point of view."
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Here we THE ADDAMS FAMILY and GOMEZ is suggesting the need to CHANGE THE VOICE of cousin IT. Of course cousin IT------is that TRANSHUMANIST sub-species of homo-sapiens who seems to need a genetic TWEAK to alter voice.
Cousin IT kind of resembles a BREED OF SHEEP DOG-----as a GMO HUMAN bred for shaggy hair.
BRED WITH HAIR OVER EYES MAKING DOG HIGH-STRUNG AND NERVOUS BECAUSE HE CANNOT SEE WELL.
Well, let's just tie back the hair over the eyes.
SO, WHY WAS THIS BREED CREATED AS A HERDING DOG?
Cousin IT is the TRANSHUMAN BREED equivalent to THE SHEEPDOG and as ADAMS FAMILY points out-------cousin IT needs more GENETIC MODIFICATIONS----
being GMO HUMAN is a PUNCTUATED EVOLUTIONARY WORK IN PROGRESS.
GOULD'S PUNCTUATED THEORY OF EVOLUTION JUST HAPPENED TO BE RELEASED AT THE SAME TIME GLOBAL BANKING 1% RELEASED TV ADDAMS FAMILY.
'The Addams Family (1964 TV series) -
Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Addams_Family_
(1964_TV...
The Addams Family is an American horror/black comedy sitcom based on the characters from Charles Addams' New Yorker cartoons. The 30-minute television series was created by David Levy and Donald Saltzman and shot in black-and-white, airing for two seasons on ABC from September 18, 1964, to April 8, 1966, for a total of 64 episodes'.
Old English Sheepdogs: What's Good About 'Em, What's Bad About 'Em
Old English Sheepdog temperament, personality, training, behavior, pros and cons, advice, and information, by Michele Welton, Dog Trainer, Behavioral Consultant, Author of 15 Dog Books
Last Updated: October, 2019
Old English Sheepdog dog breed
Good-natured and sociable, enthusiastic and bumptious, the Old English Sheepdog does best in the suburbs or country, with at least an hour of daily exercise and space to romp.
The OES (or "Sheepie") loves people, can be quite the clown, and is demanding of attention. If left without the companionship of humans or other pets, he will become unhappy, destructive, and noisy.
Most Old English Sheepdogs are polite with strangers. They make sensible watchdogs with a deep, ringing bark, but they're not guard dogs. In fact, there is timidity and skittishness in some lines, sharpness in others. Extensive socialization is important to develop a confident, stable temperament.
Like other herding breeds, a few Old English Sheepdogs may try to "herd" children and other pets by circling, poking, or nipping at them. However, since the vast majority of Old English Sheepdogs are bred to be show dogs or pets, rather than working sheepdogs, their herding instincts are typically diminished or absent.
The rustic Old English Sheepdog is not for fastidious households. He tracks in mud, splashes in his water bowl, and affectionately thrusts his wet and/or dirty beard into your lap. Some individuals drool.
MAN-MADE EVOLUTIONARY INNOVATIONS REPLACE GOD'S NATURAL GRADUALISM CREATES A SPIKE IN 'NEW' GMO SPECIES.
Below we see the earliest PUNCTUATED EVOLUTION-----for plants----GMO MONSANTO.
'Six companies are about to merge into the biggest farm-business oligopoly in history
Chase Purdy
QuartzSeptember 20, 2016
Top executives from Bayer, Monsanto, DuPont, Dow Chemical, and Syngenta today (Sept. 20) testified before the US Senate Judiciary Committee in Washington, making a case for why federal regulators should approve the mega-mergers, which stand to fundamentally reorganize global agriculture. (Executives from the sixth company involved in the consolidation, China National Chemical Corp., declined an invitation to appear at the hearing'.)
BREEDING HUMANS to create sub-species is MOVING FORWARD thanks to CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA---global banking 1% OLD WORLD KINGS---KNIGHTS OF MALTA TRIBE OF JUDAH.
NOSY NEIGHBORS AND THE GANG yesterday made fun saying I WAS TRANSHUMAN-----I am a 'dog bred human'. My use of the term DOG BREEDING connected to TRANSHUMANISM is not simply DISMISSIVE JARGON. To understand the goals of TRANSHUMANISM we must move away from all these ties to MEDICINE and the idea of making a SUPER HUMAN. There is no plan to make a SUPER HUMAN---there is no plan to try to extend life and quality of life for 99.9% WE THE PEOPLE.
THAT IS NOT TRANSHUMANISM.
The medical research surrounding ARTIFICIAL LIMBS----and connectivity of nerves from missing LEG OR ARM to MUSCLE MOVEMENT is MEDICINE. If that human with 'BIONIC LEG' removes that leg-----that human is the same HOMO SAPIEN he/she was before having that MEDICAL PROCEDURE. TRANSHUMANISM is about GENETIC CHANGES which cannot be reversed.
A TOY POODLE CAN NEVER RETURN TO BEING A WOLF. THE WOLF IS THE NATURAL SOURCE OF DOG SPECIES.
MY LAWSUIT against HOSTING SERVER NOSY NEIGHBORS AND THE GANG of BARBER SURGEONS and criminal installation of BODY/BRAIN IMPLANTS ------does not make for TRANSHUMANISM. I could have them removed if our US doctors were not BARBER SURGEONS. As it is BATTERIES DIE------IMPLANTS ARE TURNED OFF---and I am still a HOMO SAPIEN----not a SUB-SPECIES of humans---that will be GMO ---GENETICALLY MODIFIED HUMANS.
What has happened in HUMAN MEDICAL RESEARCH so far has been BRAIN/BODY IMPLANT with goals of CONTROLLING HUMAN MIND AND BODY. We have seen a beginning of TRANSHUMANISM with EMBRYONIC STEM CELL MANIPULATION. What has manifested physically from these genetic manipulations are GENDER-BLENDED HUMANS-----we call that GMO HUMANS.
The future of robotics: in a transhuman world, the disabled will be the ones without prosthetic limbs…
Bertolt Meyer's amazing bionic hand controlled by an iPhone app is a glimpse of the advances being made in prosthetics. But in years to come, will everyone want one?
Bertolt Meyer is used to being viewed as not fully human. Born with a stump where his left hand should have been, he spent his childhood wearing a hook connected to an elaborate pulley and harness. "To open the hook and grasp things I had to flex my shoulders like this," he says, striking a he-man pose. "The harness was very uncomfortable. To stop it chafing my skin, I had to wear a shirt underneath it at all times. I was always sweating."
Even when, at the age of 19, Meyer exchanged his body-powered hook for a myoelectric prosthesis with a more realistic plastic hand, he kept his disfigured left arm hidden from view. "It wasn't simply a question of aesthetics," he explains, proffering the plastic hand, now grubby and discoloured with use. "You have to understand, this is a stigma. People think it's weird and that is how you come to perceive it. You walk around with a sense of shame."
Today, that shame is gone. In 2009 Meyer, a social psychologist at the University of Zurich, was fitted with an i-limb, a state-of-the-art bionic prosthesis developed by a Scottish company, Touch Bionics, that comes with an aluminium chassis and 24 different grip patterns. To select a new suite of gestures, Meyer simply taps an app on his iPhone.
"This is the first prosthesis where the aesthetics match the engineering," he says, balancing a Biro between his purring electronic fingers. "It's part of me and I'm proud of it."
Since appearing in the Channel 4 documentary How to Build a Bionic Man, in which he allowed engineers to build a robotic replica of the rest of his body complete with artificial heart, lungs and an alarming prosthetic likeness of his face, Meyer has become something of a poster boy for "transhumanism". Encompassing everything from robotic limbs to memory-enhancing neural implants to gene therapies that slow ageing, transhumanism (or posthumanism) concerns the technologies and drugs that are rapidly altering the limits of human performance, as well as notions about what we might look like in future.
As Nick Bostrom, the head of the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford and a leading transhumanist thinker puts it, transhumanism "challenges the premise that the human condition is and will remain essentially unalterable". "It seems to me fairly obvious why one might have reason to desire to become a posthuman in the sense of having a greatly enhanced capacity to stay alive and healthy," he writes. "I suspect that the majority of humankind already has such a desire implicitly."
But while some medical interventions such as organ transplants to replace malfunctioning livers and kidneys, or vaccines to boost the immune system, command wide social acceptance, others invite moral approbation. This is particularly the case where the enhancement is regarded as a vanity or may be detrimental to health, as was the case with substandard silicon breast implants.
Then there is the question of access – an i-limb costs £30,000, while an artificial heart will set you back £70,000 – and whether it is OK to turn a blind eye to the "off-label" use of drugs such as Ritalin, which was developed as a treatment for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, but is increasingly being used to enhance cognitive performance.
Even more ethically fraught is the line between restorative therapy and elective surgery. Last year, for instance, an Austrian man who damaged his hand in a motorcycle accident opted for an amputation and had a bionic replacement fitted.
At the moment, bionic hands are poor substitutes for the real thing – they can grasp and manipulate objects, but cannot feel. But what if in the future we could make bionic hands with a sense of touch that were also capable of enhanced performance? Would we be happy if a struggling concert pianist elected to amputate his hand so that he could perform Rachmaninoff's infamously difficult third concerto?
For the moment, the answer is almost certainly no, but that may change as people become more comfortable with posthuman technologies and the opportunities they afford for improved health and function. "What's crucial about these technologies is they don't just repair us, they make us better than well," says Andy Miah, director of the Creative Futures Institute and professor of ethics and emerging technologies at the University of the West of Scotland. "The human enhancement market will reveal the truth about our biological conditions – we are all disabled. This is why human enhancements are here to stay and likely to become more popular."
A good example of the way that these technologies are already changing our perception of human identity and notions of disability comes from the world of sport. When Oscar Pistorius donned a pair of carbon-fibre blades to compete alongside able-bodied athletes at the 2012 Olympics, he had ceased to be a disabled athlete; instead, he offered us a glimpse of a "superhuman" future where Paralympians aided by bionics or performance-enhancing drugs might set hitherto unimaginable sporting records. At the moment, such enhancements are considered unfair and athletes who seek to evade anti-doping regulations are pilloried as cheats. But in a posthuman future where everyone has access to these technologies, such objections may become moot. As Bostrom puts it: "If every athlete takes a lot of dangerous performance-enhancing drugs, there will still only be one gold medallist."
Future prosthetic limbs will be immersed within our flesh, rather than being outside it or replacing it. Athletes will also be able to use 3D printing to create new limbs perfectly tailored to their bodies, or grow replacement body parts when their old ones wear out.
Nor is bionics the only technology transforming norms of health and human performance. For example, in search of enhanced cognitive performance, many people are experimenting with modafinil, a treatment for narcolepsy, while others routinely take selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) such as Paxil and Zoloft to regulate their moods and sense of wellbeing.
HMMM, THIS IS WHAT TRANSHUMANISTS CALL 'BETTER'---'ENHANCED QUALITY OF LIFE'
- SSRI Antidepressant Lawsuits - The Sanders Firmthesandersfirm.com/.../ssri-antidepressant-lawsuits Lawsuits involving SSRI side effects and injuries have been filed against the makers of Prozac, Zoloft and Paxil, based on allegations of design defect, failure to warn, breach of implied warranty and negligence, among other causes of action. While some claims are still pending in the federal court system, others have already been settled.
- Petition Class Action Lawsuit Against Manufacturers of Celexa ...www.ipetitions.com/petition/classactionlawsuit... Class Action Lawsuit Against Manufacturers of Celexa, Prozac, Zoloft, Effexor, Lexapro, Paxil, Seroquel and Ativan ... (Ativan) and diazepam, please sign up for a ...
- Zoloft Class Action Lawsuit - Talk to a Lawyer about filing a ...www.fda-recalls.us/zoloft_class_action_lawsuit A Zoloft class action lawsuit would be a form of Zoloft lawsuit in which a large group of plaintiffs bring a lawsuit to court in the form of a "class action" against the manufacturers of the Zoloft, the defendant. In a class action lawsuit involving personal injury that results from a defective drug such Zoloft (sertraline) all SSRI Zoloft ...
These drugs are but the forerunners of a new generation of neuroenhancers and brain stimulation devices that promise shortcuts to even greater intellectual heights – and all without the social awkwardness we usually associate with superior cognitive functioning (think Bradley Cooper in Limitless, rather than Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man).
In Switzerland, which leads the way in many of these technologies and therapies, concerns about the health and ethical impacts are leading to calls for greater regulation. Currently, there are three proposals before the Swiss legislature, many of them focusing on Ritalin, which is manufactured by the Swiss pharmaceuticals firm Novartis. In June the Swiss public health service reported that adolescent use of methylphenidate, the generic name for Ritalin, had increased by 40% between 2005 and 2008, mirroring trends in the US where off-label use is rife among high-school and college students. There is similar concern about the wide uptake of anti-anxiety drugs as pharmaceutical companies seek to redefine social pathologies as treatable psychiatric conditions and aggressively market the therapies to consumers. Meanwhile, Martial Saugy, the head of Switzerland's anti-doping laboratory, remains under fire over US allegations that he helped Lance Armstrong evade doping tests before the 2002 Tour de France – a row that has highlighted the scope for sporting figures to abuse anabolic steroids and other performance-enhancing supplements.
The problem is that as technology blurs the distinction between illness and optimal health, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish normal from abnormal. "It's not only question of human enhancement," says Anne Eckhardt, the author of a recent report on the opportunities and risks of the human enhancement market for the Swiss Centre for Technology Assessment. "It's also about medicalisation and changing definitions of disease and disability."
Like Siegfried tasting the blood of the dragon, people have long dreamt of acquiring superhuman powers. The difference today is that it is no longer enough to manipulate our external environment by, for instance, donning a pair of Nikes or boarding a plane. Instead, enhancement increasingly focuses on the re-engineering of bodies and minds themselves.
For the moment, this posthuman future still lies some way off. We don't need a brain implant to use Google – Google's glasses, iPads and mobile phones are, at the moment, more than sufficient for most people's needs. "In the long run, technology will surpass our biological nature, but we should not underestimate the technical challenges in getting to that stage," says Bostrom.
It is an assessment with which Meyer concurs. Since being fitted with his i-limb, Meyer says that actions that used to be unimaginable – such as wheeling a suitcase through duty free while talking on his mobile phone – he now performs with confidence and ease. However, although the i-limb has enabled him to transcend his feelings of inadequacy and shame, he is a long way from considering himself transhuman, let alone superhuman.
"It's a question of standards," he says. "Compared to the normal human standard, I wouldn't describe myself as transhuman, but compared to my own standard, then yes."
That could soon change however. Meyer is already on his fourth generation i-limb and during the filming of the Channel 4 documentary he saw how US military-funded research is resulting in ever more sophisticated developments, including robotic legs with articulated joints that can negotiate stairs and give the appearance of a natural walking gait. "The question is, as the technology gets better, will it become the norm to have one of these, and what will people go through to get one?" asks Meyer, indicating his i-limb with his "good" hand.
The only point in the Channel 4 documentary at which Meyer appeared to balk at the brave new transhuman future was when he came face to face with "Bionic Bertolt" – the robot bearing his hand and a prosthetic version of his face. He was clearly appalled by the transformation. "It was a face version of this," he says tapping his old plastic prosthesis. "It really freaked me out."
Indeed, Meyer's visceral reaction drove home the extent to which these posthuman technologies provoke visions of dystopian futures or what Miah pithily calls "the yuck factor".
Ultimately, however, these are technical issues and Meyer recognises that it is only a matter of time before engineering companies are in a position to offer us products that not only look human but offer functionality way beyond the human. "That is the point where we may need to find a larger set of ethical criteria, because, from what I have seen, we cannot rely on engineers and business people to come up with them," he warns.
________________________________________________
Fruit tree hybridization has been happening for thousands of years. A branch of one fruit tree species is grafted onto a different fruit tree species creating a different kind of fruit. This is NATURAL HYBRIDIZATION.
Placing a robotic prosthetic limb on a human does not make a human a DIFFERENT SPECIES------this person is still HOMO SAPIEN.
This is the UK GUARDIAN FAKE NEWS MEDIA OUTLET PRETENDING THAT A PROSTHETIC LIMB IS GMO HUMAN--TRANSHUMAN.
Our US and global 99.9% of WE THE PEOPLE are deliberately being CONFUSED/FOOLED into thinking these medical enhancement which are social benefit-----are TRANSHUMANISM.
TRANSHUMANISM IS CHANGING THE GENETICS OF HUMANS JUST AS GMO PLANTS.
'The future of robotics: in a transhuman world, the disabled will be the ones without prosthetic limbs…'
Can a human who has been GENDER-BLENDED as a fetal/egg genetic manipulation change back to being a NATURAL HUMAN? NO, that gender-blended human will always been GENETICALLY MANIPULATED. The human with a PROSTHETIC LEG -------is still genetically a NATURAL HUMAN.
So, NOSY NEIGHBORS AND THE GANG as black market illegal 24/7 VIDEO PORN saying I was a dog breed---I am transhuman because I was criminally IMPLANTED------
DON'T UNDERSTAND TRANSHUMANISM.
Biotechnology /
CRISPREngineering the Perfect BabyScientists are developing ways to edit the DNA of tomorrow’s children. Should they stop before it’s too late?
by Antonio Regalado
Mar 5, 2015
If anyone had devised a way to create a genetically engineered baby, I figured George Church would know about it.
At his labyrinthine laboratory on the Harvard Medical School campus, you can find researchers giving E. Coli a novel genetic code never seen in nature. Around another bend, others are carrying out a plan to use DNA engineering to resurrect the woolly mammoth. His lab, Church likes to say, is the center of a new technological genesis—one in which man rebuilds creation to suit himself.
When I visited the lab last June, Church proposed that I speak to a young postdoctoral scientist named Luhan Yang. A Harvard recruit from Beijing, she’d been a key player in developing a powerful new technology for editing DNA, called CRISPR-Cas9. With Church, Yang had founded a small biotechnology company to engineer the genomes of pigs and cattle, sliding in beneficial genes and editing away bad ones.
As I listened to Yang, I waited for a chance to ask my real questions: Can any of this be done to human beings? Can we improve the human gene pool? The position of much of mainstream science has been that such meddling would be unsafe, irresponsible, and even impossible. But Yang didn’t hesitate. Yes, of course, she said. In fact, the Harvard laboratory had a project under way to determine how it could be achieved. She flipped open her laptop to a PowerPoint slide titled “Germline Editing Meeting.”
Here it was: a technical proposal to alter human heredity. “Germ line” is biologists’ jargon for the egg and sperm, which combine to form an embryo. By editing the DNA of these cells or the embryo itself, it could be possible to correct disease genes and pass those genetic fixes on to future generations. Such a technology could be used to rid families of scourges like cystic fibrosis. It might also be possible to install genes that offer lifelong protection against infection, Alzheimer’s, and, Yang told me, maybe the effects of aging. Such history-making medical advances could be as important to this century as vaccines were to the last.
That’s the promise. The fear is that germ-line engineering is a path toward a dystopia of superpeople and designer babies for those who can afford it. Want a child with blue eyes and blond hair? Why not design a highly intelligent group of people who could be tomorrow’s leaders and scientists?
Just three years after its initial development, CRISPR technology is already widely used by biologists as a kind of search-and-replace tool to alter DNA, even down to the level of a single letter. It’s so precise that it’s expected to turn into a promising new approach for gene therapy in people with devastating illnesses. The idea is that physicians could directly correct a faulty gene, say, in the blood cells of a patient with sickle-cell anemia (see “Genome Surgery”). But that kind of gene therapy wouldn’t affect germ cells, and the changes in the DNA wouldn’t get passed to future generations.
In contrast, the genetic changes created by germ-line engineering would be passed on, and that’s what has made the idea seem so objectionable. So far, caution and ethical concerns have had the upper hand. A dozen countries, not including the United States, have banned germ-line engineering, and scientific societies have unanimously concluded that it would be too risky to do. The European Union’s convention on human rights and biomedicine says tampering with the gene pool would be a crime against “human dignity” and human rights.
But all these declarations were made before it was actually feasible to precisely engineer the germ line. Now, with CRISPR, it is possible.
The experiment Yang described, though not simple, would go like this: The researchers hoped to obtain, from a hospital in New York, the ovaries of a woman undergoing surgery for ovarian cancer caused by a mutation in a gene called BRCA1. Working with another Harvard laboratory, that of antiaging specialist David Sinclair, they would extract immature egg cells that could be coaxed to grow and divide in the laboratory. Yang would use CRISPR in these cells to correct the DNA of the BRCA1 gene. They would try to create a viable egg without the genetic error that caused the woman’s cancer.
Yang would later tell me that she dropped out of the project not long after we spoke. Yet it remained difficult to know if the experiment she described was occurring, canceled, or awaiting publication. Sinclair said that a collaboration between the two labs was ongoing, but then, like several other scientists whom I’d asked about germ-line engineering, he stopped replying to my e-mails.
Regardless of the fate of that particular experiment, human germ-line engineering has become a burgeoning research concept. At least three other centers in the United States are working on it, as are scientists in China, in the U.K., and at a biotechnology company called OvaScience, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that boasts some of the world’s leading fertility doctors on its advisory board.
All this means that germ-line engineering is much further along than anyone imagined.
The objective of these groups is to demonstrate that it’s possible to produce children free of specific genes involved in inherited disease. If it’s possible to correct the DNA in a woman’s egg, or a man’s sperm, those cells could be used in an in vitro fertilization (IVF) clinic to produce an embryo and then a child. It might also be possible to directly edit the DNA of an early-stage IVF embryo using CRISPR. Several people interviewed by MIT Technology Review said that such experiments had already been carried out in China and that results describing edited embryos were pending publication. These people, including two high-ranking specialists, didn’t wish to comment publicly because the papers are under review.
All this means that germ-line engineering is much further along than anyone imagined. “What you are talking about is a major issue for all humanity,” says Merle Berger, one of the founders of Boston IVF, a network of fertility clinics that is among the largest in the world and helps more than a thousand women get pregnant each year. “It would be the biggest thing that ever happened in our field.” Berger predicts that repairing genes involved in serious inherited diseases will win wide public acceptance but says the idea of using the technology beyond that would cause a public uproar because “everyone would want the perfect child”: people might pick and choose eye color and eventually intelligence. “These are things we talk about all the time,” he says. “But we have never had the opportunity to do it.”
Editing embryos
How easy would it be to edit a human embryo using CRISPR? Very easy, experts say. “Any scientist with molecular biology skills and knowledge of how to work with [embryos] is going to be able to do this,” says Jennifer Doudna, a biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who in 2012 co-discovered how to use CRISPR to edit genes.
To find out how it could be done, I visited the lab of Guoping Feng, a biologist at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, where a colony of marmoset monkeys is being established with the aim of using CRISPR to create accurate models of human brain diseases. To create the models, Feng will edit the DNA of embryos and then transfer them into female marmosets to produce live monkeys. One gene Feng hopes to alter in the animals is SHANK3. The gene is involved in how neurons communicate; when it’s damaged in children, it is known to cause autism.
Feng said that before CRISPR, it was not possible to introduce precise changes into a primate’s DNA. With CRISPR, the technique should be relatively straightforward. The CRISPR system includes a gene-snipping enzyme and a guide molecule that can be programmed to target unique combinations of the DNA letters, A, G, C, and T; get these ingredients into a cell and they will cut and modify the genome at the targeted sites.
But CRISPR is not perfect—and it would be a very haphazard way to edit human embryos, as Feng’s efforts to create gene-edited marmosets show. To employ the CRISPR system in the monkeys, his students simply inject the chemicals into a fertilized egg, which is known as a zygote—the stage just before it starts dividing.
Feng said the efficiency with which CRISPR can delete or disable a gene in a zygote is about 40 percent, whereas making specific edits, or swapping DNA letters, works less frequently—more like 20 percent of the time. Like a person, a monkey has two copies of most genes, one from each parent. Sometimes both copies get edited, but sometimes just one does, or neither. Only about half the embryos will lead to live births, and of those that do, many could contain a mixture of cells with edited DNA and without. If you add up the odds, you find you’d need to edit 20 embryos to get a live monkey with the version you want.
That’s not an insurmountable problem for Feng, since the MIT breeding colony will give him access to many monkey eggs and he’ll be able to generate many embryos. However, it would present obvious problems in humans. Putting the ingredients of CRISPR into a human embryo would be scientifically trivial. But it wouldn’t be practical for much just yet. This is one reason that many scientists view such an experiment (whether or not it has really occurred in China) with scorn, seeing it more as a provocative bid to grab attention than as real science. Rudolf Jaenisch, an MIT biologist who works across the street from Feng and who in the 1970s created the first gene-modified mice, calls attempts to edit human embryos “totally premature.” He says he hopes these papers will be rejected and not published. “It’s just a sensational thing that will stir things up,” says Jaenisch. “We know it’s possible, but is it of practical use? I kind of doubt it.”
For his part, Feng told me he approves of the idea of germ-line engineering. Isn’t the goal of medicine to reduce suffering? Considering the state of the technology, however, he thinks actual gene-edited humans are “10 to 20 years away.” Among other problems, CRISPR can introduce off-target effects or change bits of the genome far from where scientists had intended. Any human embryo altered with CRISPR today would carry the risk that its genome had been changed in unexpected ways. But, Feng said, such problems may eventually be ironed out, and edited people will be born. “To me, it’s possible in the long run to dramatically improve health, lower costs. It’s a kind of prevention,” he said. “It’s hard to predict the future, but correcting disease risks is definitely a possibility and should be supported. I think it will be a reality.”
Editing eggs
Elsewhere in the Boston area, scientists are exploring a different approach to engineering the germ line, one that is technically more demanding but probably more powerful. This strategy combines CRISPR with unfolding discoveries related to stem cells. Scientists at several centers, including Church’s, think they will soon be able to use stem cells to produce eggs and sperm in the laboratory. Unlike embryos, stem cells can be grown and multiplied. Thus they could offer a vastly improved way to create edited offspring with CRISPR. The recipe goes like this: First, edit the genes of the stem cells. Second, turn them into an egg or sperm. Third, produce an offspring.
Some investors got an early view of the technique on December 17, at the Benjamin Hotel in Manhattan, during commercial presentations by OvaScience. The company, which was founded four years ago, aims to commercialize the scientific work of David Sinclair, who is based at Harvard, and Jonathan Tilly, an expert on egg stem cells and the chairman of the biology department at Northeastern University (see “10 Emerging Technologies: Egg Stem Cells,” May/June 2012). It made the presentations as part of a successful effort to raise $132 million in new capital during January.
During the meeting, Sinclair, a velvet-voiced Australian whom Time last year named one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World,” took the podium and provided Wall Street with a peek at what he called “truly world-changing” developments. People would look back at this moment in time and recognize it as a new chapter in “how humans control their bodies,” he said, because it would let parents determine “when and how they have children and how healthy those children are actually going to be.”
The company has not perfected its stem-cell technology—it has not reported that the eggs it grows in the lab are viable—but Sinclair predicted that functional eggs were “a when, and not an if.” Once the technology works, he said, infertile women will be able to produce hundreds of eggs, and maybe hundreds of embryos. Using DNA sequencing to analyze their genes, they could pick among them for the healthiest ones.
Genetically improved children may also be possible. Sinclair told the investors that he was trying to alter the DNA of these egg stem cells using gene editing, work he later told me he was doing with Church’s lab. “We think the new technologies with genome editing will allow it to be used on individuals who aren’t just interested in using IVF to have children but have healthier children as well, if there is a genetic disease in their family,” Sinclair told the investors. He gave the example of Huntington’s disease, caused by a gene that will trigger a fatal brain condition even in someone who inherits only one copy. Sinclair said gene editing could be used to remove the lethal gene defect from an egg cell. His goal, and that of OvaScience, is to “correct those mutations before we generate your child,” he said. “It’s still experimental, but there is no reason to expect it won’t be possible in coming years.”
Sinclair spoke to me briefly on the phone while he was navigating in a cab across a snowed-in Boston, but later he referred my questions to OvaScience. When I contacted OvaScience, Cara Mayfield, a spokeswoman, said its executives could not comment because of their travel schedules but confirmed that the company was working on treating inherited disorders with gene editing. What was surprising to me was that OvaScience’s research in “crossing the germ line,” as critics of human engineering sometimes put it, has generated scarcely any notice. In December of 2013, OvaScience even announced it was putting $1.5 million into a joint venture with a synthetic biology company called Intrexon, whose R&D objectives include gene-editing eggs to “prevent the propagation” of human disease “in future generations.”
When I reached Tilly at Northeastern, he laughed when I told him what I was calling about. “It’s going to be a hot-button issue,” he said. Tilly also said his lab was trying to edit egg stem cells with CRISPR “right now” to rid them of an inherited genetic disease that he didn’t want to name. Tilly emphasized that there are “two pieces of the puzzle”—one being stem cells and the other gene editing. The ability to create large numbers of egg stem cells is critical, because only with sizable quantities can genetic changes be stably introduced using CRISPR, characterized using DNA sequencing, and carefully studied to check for mistakes before producing an egg.
Tilly predicted that the whole end-to-end technology—cells to stem cells, stem cells to sperm or egg and then to offspring—would end up being worked out first in animals, such as cattle, either by his lab or by companies such as eGenesis, the spinoff from the Church lab working on livestock. But he isn’t sure what the next step should be with edited human eggs. You wouldn’t want to fertilize one “willy nilly,” he said. You’d be making a potential human being. And doing that would raise questions he’s not sure he can answer. He told me, “‘Can you do it?’ is one thing. If you can, then the most important questions come up. ‘Would you do it? Why would you want to do it? What is the purpose?’ As scientists we want to know if it’s feasible, but then we get into the bigger questions, and it’s not a science question—it’s a society question.”
Improving humans
If germ-line engineering becomes part of medical practice, it could lead to transformative changes in human well-being, with consequences to people’s life span, identity, and economic output. But it would create ethical dilemmas and social challenges. What if these improvements were available only to the richest societies, or the richest people? An in vitro fertility procedure costs about $20,000 in the United States. Add genetic testing and egg donation or a surrogate mother, and the price soars toward $100,000.
Others believe the idea is dubious because it’s not medically necessary. Hank Greely, a lawyer and ethicist at Stanford University, says proponents “can’t really say what it is good for.” The problem, says Greely, is that it’s already possible to test the DNA of IVF embryos and pick healthy ones, a process that adds about $4,000 to the cost of a fertility procedure. A man with Huntington’s, for instance, could have his sperm used to fertilize a dozen of his partner’s eggs. Half those embryos would not have the Huntington’s gene, and those could be used to begin a pregnancy.
Indeed, some people are adamant that germ-line engineering is being pushed ahead with “false arguments.” That is the view of Edward Lanphier, CEO of Sangamo Biosciences, a California biotechnology company that is using another gene-editing technique, called zinc fingers nucleases, to try to treat HIV in adults by altering their blood cells. “We’ve looked at [germ-line engineering] for a disease rationale, and there is none,” he says. “You can do it. But there really isn’t a medical reason. People say, well, we don’t want children born with this, or born with that—but it’s a completely false argument and a slippery slope toward much more unacceptable uses.”
Critics cite a host of fears.
Children would be the subject of experiments. Parents would be influenced by genetic advertising from IVF clinics. Germ-line engineering would encourage the spread of allegedly superior traits. And it would affect people not yet born, without their being able to agree to it. The American Medical Association, for instance, holds that germ-line engineering shouldn’t be done “at this time” because it “affects the welfare of future generations” and could cause “unpredictable and irreversible results.” But like a lot of official statements that forbid changing the genome, the AMA’s, which was last updated in 1996, predates today’s technology. “A lot of people just agreed to these statements,” says Greely. “It wasn’t hard to renounce something that you couldn’t do.”
The fear?
A dystopia of superpeople and designer babies for those who can afford it.
Others predict that hard-to-oppose medical uses will be identified. A couple with several genetic diseases at once might not be able to find a suitable embryo. Treating infertility is another possibility. Some men don’t produce any sperm, a condition called azoospermia. One cause is a genetic defect in which a region of about one million to six million DNA letters is missing from the Y chromosome. It might be possible to take a skin cell from such a man, turn it into a stem cell, repair the DNA, and then make sperm, says Werner Neuhausser, a young Austrian doctor who splits his time between the Boston IVF fertility-clinic network and Harvard’s Stem Cell Institute. “That will change medicine forever, right? You could cure infertility, that is for sure,” he says.
I spoke with Church several times by telephone over the last few months, and he told me what’s driving everything is the “incredible specificity” of CRISPR. Although not all the details have been worked out, he thinks the technology could replace DNA letters essentially without side effects. He says this is what makes it “tempting to use.” Church says his laboratory is focused mostly on experiments in engineering animals. He added that his lab would not make or edit human embryos, calling such a step “not our style.”
What is Church’s style is human enhancement. And he’s been making a broad case that CRISPR can do more than eliminate disease genes. It can lead to augmentation. At meetings, some involving groups of “transhumanists” interested in next steps for human evolution, Church likes to show a slide on which he lists naturally occurring variants of around 10 genes that, when people are born with them, confer extraordinary qualities or resistance to disease. One makes your bones so hard they’ll break a surgical drill. Another drastically cuts the risk of heart attacks. And a variant of the gene for the amyloid precursor protein, or APP, was found by Icelandic researchers to protect against Alzheimer’s. People with it never get dementia and remain sharp into old age.
Church thinks CRISPR could be used to provide people with favorable versions of genes, making DNA edits that would act as vaccines against some of the most common diseases we face today. Although he told me anything “edgy” should be done only to adults who can consent, it’s obvious to him that the earlier such interventions occur, the better.
Church tends to dodge questions about genetically modified babies. The idea of improving the human species has always had “enormously bad press,” he wrote in the introduction to Regenesis, his 2012 book on synthetic biology, whose cover was a painting by Eustache Le Sueur of a bearded God creating the world. But that’s ultimately what he’s suggesting: enhancements in the form of protective genes. “An argument will be made that the ultimate prevention is that the earlier you go, the better the prevention,” he told an audience at MIT’s Media Lab last spring. “I do think it’s the ultimate preventive, if we get to the point where it’s very inexpensive, extremely safe, and very predictable.” Church, who has a less cautious side, proceeded to tell the audience that he thought changing genes “is going to get to the point where it’s like you are doing the equivalent of cosmetic surgery.”
Some thinkers have concluded that we should not pass up the chance to make improvements to our species. “The human genome is not perfect,” says John Harris, a bioethicist at Manchester University, in the U.K. “It’s ethically imperative to positively support this technology.” By some measures, U.S. public opinion is not particularly negative toward the idea. A Pew Research survey carried out last August found that 46 percent of adults approved of genetic modification of babies to reduce the risk of serious diseases.
The same survey found that 83 percent said genetic modification to make a baby smarter would be “taking medical advances too far.” But other observers say higher IQ is exactly what we should be considering. Nick Bostrom, an Oxford philosopher best known for his 2014 book Superintelligence, which raised alarms about the risks of artificial intelligence in computers, has also looked at whether humans could use reproductive technology to improve human intellect. Although the ways in which genes affect intelligence aren’t well understood and there are far too many relevant genes to permit easy engineering, such realities don’t dim speculation on the possibility of high-tech eugenics.
“The human genome is not perfect. It’s ethically imperative to positively support this technology.”
What if everyone could be a little bit smarter? Or a few people could be a lot smarter?
HMMMMM, ISN'T THAT WHAT GLOBAL BANKING 1% EXPECT SUPER-DUPER BIG DEAD HEAD TO BE---THE REPLACEMENT FOR NATURAL HUMAN GENIUS?
Even a small number of “super-enhanced” individuals, Bostrom wrote in a 2013 paper, could change the world through their creativity and discoveries, and through innovations that everyone else would use. In his view, genetic enhancement is an important long-range issue like climate change or financial planning by nations, “since human problem-solving ability is a factor in every challenge we face.”
To some scientists, the explosive advance of genetics and biotech means germ-line engineering is inevitable. Of course, safety questions would be paramount. Before there’s a genetically edited baby saying “Mama,” there would have to be tests in rats, rabbits, and probably monkeys, to make sure they are normal. But ultimately, if the benefits seem to outweigh the risks, medicine would take the chance. “It was the same with IVF when it first happened,” says Neuhausser. “We never really knew if that baby was going to be healthy at 40 or 50 years. But someone had to take the plunge.”
Wine country
In January, on Saturday the 24th, around 20 scientists, ethicists, and legal experts traveled to Napa Valley, California, for a retreat among the vineyards at the Carneros Inn. They had been convened by Doudna, the Berkeley scientist who co-discovered the CRISPR system a little over two years ago. She had become aware that scientists might be thinking of crossing the germ line, and she was concerned. Now she wanted to know: could they be stopped?
“We as scientists have come to appreciate that CRISPR is incredibly powerful. But that swings both ways. We need to make sure that it’s applied carefully,” Doudna told me. “The issue is especially human germ-line editing and the appreciation that this is now a capability in everyone’s hands.”
At the meeting, along with ethicists like Greely, was Paul Berg, a Stanford biochemist and Nobel Prize winner known for having organized the Asilomar Conference, a historic 1975 forum at which biologists reached an agreement on how to safely proceed with recombinant DNA, the newly discovered method of splicing DNA into bacteria.
Should there be an Asilomar for germ-line engineering?
Doudna thinks so, but the prospects for consensus seem dim. Biotechnology research is now global, involving hundreds of thousands of people. There’s no single authority that speaks for science, and no easy way to put the genie back in the bottle. Doudna told me she hoped that if American scientists agreed to a moratorium on human germ-line engineering, it might influence researchers elsewhere in the world to cease their work.
Doudna said she felt that a self-imposed pause should apply not only to making gene-edited babies but also to using CRISPR to alter human embryos, eggs, or sperm—as researchers at Harvard, Northeastern, and OvaScience are doing. “I don’t feel that those experiments are appropriate to do right now in human cells that could turn into a person,” she told me. “I feel that the research that needs to be done right now is to understand safety, efficacy, and delivery. And I think those experiments can be done in nonhuman systems. I would like to see a lot more work done before it’s done for germ-line editing. I would favor a very cautious approach.”
Not everyone agrees that germ-line engineering is such a big worry, or that experiments should be padlocked. Greely notes that in the United States, there are piles of regulations to keep lab science from morphing into a genetically modified baby anytime soon. “I would not want to use safety as an excuse for a non-safety-based ban,” says Greely, who says he pushed back against talk of a moratorium. But he also says he agreed to sign Doudna’s letter, which now reflects the consensus of the group. “Although I don’t view this as a crisis moment, I think it’s probably about time for us to have this discussion,” he says.
GREELY IS THE TRANSHUMANIST FAKE MEDICAL ETHICIST
(After this article was published online in March, Doudna’s editorial appeared in Science (see “Scientists Call for a Summit on Gene-Edited Babies”.) Along with Greely, Berg, and 15 others, she called for a global moratorium on any effort to use CRISPR to generate gene-edited children until researchers could determine “what clinical applications, if any, might in the future be deemed permissible.” The group, however, endorsed basic research, including applying CRISPR to embryos. The final list of signatories included Church, although he did not attend the Napa meeting.)
As news has spread of germ-line experiments, some biotechnology companies now working on CRISPR have realized that they will have to take a stand. Nessan Bermingham is CEO of Intellia Therapeutics, a Boston startup that raised $15 million last year to develop CRISPR into gene therapy treatments for adults or children. He says germ-line engineering “is not on our commercial radar,” and he suggests that his company could use its patents to prevent anyone from commercializing it.
“The technology is in its infancy,” he says. “It is not appropriate for people to even be contemplating germ-line applications.”
Bermingham told me he never imagined he’d have to be taking a position on genetically modified babies so soon. Modifying human heredity has always been a theoretical possibility. Suddenly it’s a real one. But wasn’t the point always to understand and control our own biology—to become masters over the processes that created us?
Doudna says she is also thinking about these issues. “It cuts to the core of who we are as people, and it makes you ask if humans should be exercising that kind of power,” she told me. “There are moral and ethical issues, but one of the profound questions is just the appreciation that if germ-line editing is conducted in humans, that is changing human evolution.” One reason she feels the research should slow down is to give scientists a chance to spend more time explaining what their next steps could be.
“Most of the public,” she says, “does not appreciate what is coming.”
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To understand the goals of TRANSHUMANISM we are not suggesting that HUMANS ARE DOGS. We are using the thousand years of DOG BREEDING to show 99.9% of WE THE PEOPLE the goals of GMO HUMAN genetic breeding. NATURAL evolution took WOLF breeding with smaller wolf---breeding with smaller wolf----breeding with wolf having not grey fur but BROWN FUR and VOILA we have FOXES-----COYOTES------we have DOMESTICATED DOGS.
DOMESTICATED DOGS WERE BRED FOR WORK---OR AS LAP DOGS.
The chihuahua is a LAP DOG-----CHAMPION DOG.
'History of the Chihuahua Breed
www.chihuahuawardrobe.com/history-of-the...
I think the fennec fox connection is only in appearance, as the Chihuahua is genetically descended from the prehistoric predecessor of the grey wolf just like all other domestic dogs. The large ears are an adaptation to control body temperature in warm climates…'
How does global banking 1% make SUB-SPECIES of HUMANS -----taking HOMO SAPIEN as TOP/BEST OF SPECIES and create functional GMO HUMANS.
Below we what it takes to create a GMO HUMAN as DOG BREED------global banking 1% wants to blend ANIMAL TRAITS with HUMAN TRAITS. That is NATURALLY impossible yet they are manipulating to do just that because global banking says----
IT'S ALL ABOUT GLOBAL CORPORATE SUSTAINABILITY---YOU KNOW, THAT WORLD BANK/UNITED NATIONS/WORLD HEALTH GOALS OF MAXIMIZING GLOBAL CORPORATE PROFITS.
We see here just that----A CHICKEN would never be able to have a viable embryo with genes for ALLIGATOR TEETH. The chicken embryonic process would see that ALLIGATOR TEETH GENE as MUTATION and silence it.
TRANSHUMANISTS are working with CIS ---DNA as MUTATION to translate when our bodies would not translate a MUTATION. Chicken embryonic DNA inserted with ALLIGATOR GENE FOR TEETH and VOILA ------CHICKEN bred with ALLIGATOR makes a NEW CHICKEN SUB-SPECIES.
Naturally, we have been crossing through HYBRIDIZATION different kinds of chickens to create different species of CHICKEN. This GMO CHICKEN creates a completely different SUB-SPECIES ----
'Thirty-nine varieties of chicken (and one Guinea Fowl)'.
Cross a LEGHORN chicken with teeth genes from ALLIGATOR ----and you get a SUB-SPECIES of LEGHORN CHICKENS.
'The Leghorn (US: /ˈlɛɡhɔːrn/, UK: /lɛˈɡɔːrn/; Italian: Livorno or Livornese) is a breed of chicken originating in Tuscany, in central Italy'.
are different from CHICKEN ALLIGATOR SPECIES.
Global banking 1% say------COCK FIGHTING CHICKENS with ALLIGATOR TEETH----great for BUSINESS---MONEY-MAKING.
PUNCTUATED EVOLUTION would see this GMO CHICKEN as reverting back to dinosaurs------you know, JURASSIC PARK.
Sustainability
Mutant Chicken Grows Alligatorlike Teeth
- By David Biello on February 22, 2006
Working late in the developmental biology lab one night, Matthew Harris of the University of Wisconsin noticed that the beak of a mutant chicken embryo he was examining had fallen off. Upon closer examination of the snubbed beak, he found tiny bumps and protuberances along its edge that looked like teeth--alligator teeth to be specific. The accidental discovery revealed that chickens retain the ability to grow teeth, even though birds lost this feature long ago. The finding also resurrected the controversial theory of one of the founders of comparative anatomy, Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hillaire.
In the early 19th century, Saint-Hillaire observed that developing parrots have tiny bumps on their beaks that resemble teeth, something he ascribed to modern animals deriving from more basic primitive forms. But due to his developing battles with Georges Cuvier over evolution, the finding was forgotten until Harris, a graduate student, rediscovered it nearly 200 years later.
The mutant chickens Harris studied bear a recessive trait dubbed talpid2. This trait is lethal, meaning that such mutants are never born, but some incubate in eggs as long as 18 days. During that time, the same two tissues from which teeth develop in mammals come together in the jaw of the mutant embryo--and this leads to nascent teeth, a structure birds have lacked for at least 70 million years. "They don't make a molar," explains development biologist John Fallon, who oversaw Harris's work. "What they make is this conical, saber-shaped structure that is clearly a tooth. The other animal that has a tooth like that is an alligator."
Previous efforts to produce teeth in chickens had relied on introducing genetic information from mice, resulting in chickens growing mammalian molars. But a chicken's underlying ability to grow teeth derives from a common ancestor with alligators--archosaurs--that is more recent than the one linking birds and mammals. Nevertheless, the underlying genetic mechanism that produces teeth in mice, alligators and mutant chickens remains the same.
Exactly how the mutation causes the chickens to sprout teeth is unknown, Fallon notes, but a similar effect can be produced in normal chickens. Harris proved this by engineering a virus to mimic the molecular signals of the mutation and caused normal chickens to briefly develop teeth that were then reabsorbed into the beak. The finding of such an atavism--presented in yesterday's issue of Current Biology--opens a new avenue of exploration in the quest to understand how particular structures like teeth are lost in different evolutionary lineages. It also vindicates the long ago observations of one of the early fathers of comparative anatomy.
___________________________________________
If CHICKENS can have ALLIGATOR TEETH----then why not HUMANS?
Alligator teeth on humans would make for a FIERCE RAPTOR WARRIOR. Think about the fact that GMO HUMAN technology is driven by GLOBAL PRIVATE MILITARY CORPORATIONS------that would be the goal.
To bring this cross-hybridization of HUMAN and ALLIGATOR embryonic BLENDING----let's sell this as social benefit where humans would have their missing teeth grow back naturally.
This GMO HUMANS as bred with ANIMAL TRAITS is a REVERSAL of NATURAL SELECTION. Human evolution naturally evolved away from alligator teeth----no doubt because humans have all kinds of NEAT---PEACHY KEEN TRAITS needing room on our HUMAN DNA. If we are to put REPTILIAN TRAITS on HUMAN DNA then we are going back REVERTING-----IS NOT PROGRESSIVE.
So, global banking 1% says----LET'S JUST REMOVE some HUMAN BODY CORE genes----and replace them with genes for ALLIGATOR TEETH----
AND THAT WILL BE A SUB-SPECIES OF HOMO-SAPIENS.
This is what BREEDING HUMANS like DOGS looks like and this is TRANSHUMANISM.
While FAKE NEWS FAKE DATA global banking MEDIA AND ACADEMICS sell this idea of GMO HUMANS with sensationalism around BIONIC LEGS OR ARMS-----GMO HUMANS are CHICKENS WITH ALLIGATOR TEETH.
Hmmmm, says HOSTING SERVER NOSY NEIGHBOR with those RAPTORS as GANG members creating illegal black market 24/7 VIDEO PORN-------maybe I will invest in HUMANS with ALLIGATOR TEETH---that will keep the PORN coming.
Alligators Can Grow New Teeth, So Why Not Humans?
Scientists are trying to understand organ regeneration in hopes of stimulating new growth in humans.
By Jason Koebler, Contributor May 13, 2013, at 5:10 p.m.
Will Humans One Day Regrow Lost Teeth?
The key to keeping a sparkling set of pearly whites might lie with patients that dentists won't have any interest in seeing—alligators.
An alligator can regenerate a lost tooth up to 50 times. In what must come as good news for hockey players, researchers at the University of Southern California are studying alligators' teeth to see if doctors could one day stimulate adult humans to automatically replace a tooth if they lose one.
According to lead author Cheng Ming Chuong, alligator's teeth are very similar to humans, and his team may have discovered why they have regenerative properties.
Chuong says that alligators' teeth grow in sets of three: They have an adult tooth in their mouth, a replacement or "baby" tooth in waiting in case of a lost tooth, and then a stem cell that can become a replacement tooth if necessary.
"When the mature tooth falls out, the second one becomes a mature one, and the stem cell becomes a baby one. Interestingly, they are able to do this process repeatedly," he says. "In humans, we have a similar structure when we're born, but we don't have any stem cell there under normal conditions."
Though the understanding necessary to make regenerative medicine a possibility in humans is still far off, Chuong says that one day scientists will be able to inject hormones or molecules that will cause humans to grow new teeth.
"We have to understand the molecular pathway involved," he says. "We will need the ability to position and control the process in a strategic way."
The ability to regenerate cells isn't completely without precedent in humans, Chuong says.
"In a way, our hair can keep regenerating multiple times in our life. But human teeth only have one chance—when we change from [baby] teeth to permanent teeth," he says. "The motivation for studying this is so that we'll one day be able to do this."
Chuong says that the DNA of humans contains the genetic material necessary to grown teeth and even regenerate other parts of the body, but that code isn't "turned on."
Regeneration is relatively common in the animal kingdom—certain types of salamanders can regenerate limbs, lobsters and stone crabs can grow new claws, starfish can grown new appendages and many types of predators, including sharks and alligators, can regenerate teeth.
"Primitive animals have more robust regenerative power. Humans have more specialized cells, and the price we pay for that specialization is that we have fewer stem cells around," he says. "The percentage of stem cells in lower animals is much higher than it is in humans."
For now, the process is in its infancy as scientists are just beginning to understand the processes of regeneration in more primitive animals.
"I like to think we are learning the grammar of a new language. Once we learn more rules, we will be able to write an essay or a poem or a book," he says.
__________________________________________
PUCTUATED EVOLUTION as a goal of DE-POPULATION of EARTH-----subjectation by .00014% of all the world's 99.9% of people-----would indeed result in RETRO----EVOLUTION-----not PROGRESSIVE EVOLUTION and that would be PUNCTUATED because these MAN-MADE GMO processes are killing NATURAL HUMANS in record-breaking time-------
Below we see SCIENCE DAILY----this is a global banking 1% FAKE DATA FAKE NEWS media outlet selling this global banking GEO-POLITICAL ECONOMIC MODEL as real biological evolution.
'Human evolution was uneven and punctuated - ScienceDailywww.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/11/... Nov 16, 2017 ·
According to the new research, this process was not a straightforward, smooth one -- instead, it seems to have been punctuated, with different evolutionary patterns in different geographical regions'.
Whether people are ATHEIST or RELIGIOUS ----GOD'S NATURAL LAWS include how our human body replicates----all that DNA gradually created a most successful and intelligent species in HOMO SAPIENS. Today, we have global banking 1% who are GENETICALLY---CHALLENGED----being sociopaths----being without morals or ethics---having no attachment to HUMANITY trying to SUBVERT our GOD'S NATURAL LAWS surrounding HUMAN EVOLUTION.
'Darwinian evolution is the process in which in order for organisms to evolve, heritable variation and genetic mutations need to occur to better adapt to its environmental pressures(13). If we as a human race take on genetic engineering technology then we take control of natures process of evolution and heritable genetic variation and could potentially halt the very process that drives darwinian evolution. As well as this, depending on the method of genetic engineering, we could not only control that variation within our genes from our parents but we could suppress the mutations that occur that are necessary for our evolutionary future'.
As said above=======the result of MOVING FORWARD GMO HUMAN will indeed be COLLAPSE OF HUMANITY just as GMO FOODS is leading to the COLLAPSE OF FOOD production globally.
Chickens with ALLIGATOR TEETH will breed our domestic chickens away-----hmmm, will we be eathing these GMO CHICKENS or will they be EATING US---the HUMANS.
How Could Genetically Modifying Babies Effect the Course of Human Evolution
Author: Benjamin McColm-Pickford, n8847762
Introduction
Over the past couple of decades many debates have spawned over the topic of whether or not genetically modifying humans or even genetic engineering as a whole is acceptable or is it too much like playing god. The notion of genetically modifying humans so we have preferable phenotypes arose in the 1980's when genetic engineering and gene transfers first became advanced enough to be considered by the community. Since then, us as humans have adopted genetically modified crops and there has even been genetically modified babies without any fatal side effects. Although this is true, there is still a lot of unexplored possible consequences regarding genetic modification. For example, you might be able to genetically modify your baby with no side effects, but what if everyone was ensuring their babies were perfect through genetic engineering? Would the human race become a monoculture that had little or no diversity?
Would it completely stop the course of human evolution?
Methods of the Genetic Modification
Current Method of Genetic Modification
Today, Genetic Modification in babies is done through a process known as In Vitro Fertilisation(IVF), gene sequencing and cytoplasmic transfer(1). IVF is the process in which a female gamete is fertilised with a sperm outside of the fallopian tubes. With standard IVF treatment, multiple eggs are fertilised with thousands of sperm from the desired male and then inserted back into the uterus through embryo transfer (2). But with genetic modification of a baby, before the implementation of an egg, an ooplasm from an oocyte is transferred to another oocyte or zygote to modify the babies genetic make up. This transfer involves the transfer of the cytoplasmic material of an oocyte cell which includes mitochondria mRNA, proteins and organelles contained within the oocyte (3). When this mitochondria and mRNA are transferred into the oocyte, this creates a mixed mitochondria condition and can potentially be considered as a germline alteration. This mixed condition means that the genetic modified child could have two maternal mtDNA and generate mitochondrial heteroplasmy in the offspring (4). The Gene sequencing is used to locate the particular genotypes that control the desired phenotypes to ensure there is a higher chance of that phenotype being displayed in the baby.
(5)
Future Methods of Genetic Modification
Furthermore, there are several methods that are not currently used in humans but in the future could show potential in the field of human genetic modification. Some of these modification methods involve the process known as transgenesis. This process involves locating, then transferring the preferred or beneficial exogenous gene into a bacterial plasmid and implementing the plasmid so the organism will display a new hereditable phenotype (6). The most common way to implement this method is through pronuclear microinjection (shown in diagram 1) although the testing of this method in animals has proved ineffective with only 2% of zygotes resulting in transgenic genes.
(7)There are also many complications with this method including unintended deletions and duplications of certain gene sequences as well as other unwanted disruptions (8). Other methods of transgenesis include the use of retro viruses to transfer the genetic material in the form of RNA (9) and Embryonic cell transfer which involves the process of using stem cells to incorporate DNA into an embryo(10). To read more about these methods go to:
Retroviruses and Embryonic Transfer
Why it could affect course of Human Evolution
Although the future of human evolution is debatable and unpredictable, there will most likely be an undeniable effect on human evolution because of genetic modification, if the human race adopt genetic modification. Through several research prospects it has been observed that if a species turns into a genetic homogeneous species, the ability to adapt and respond to a environment is strongly impaired due to lack of diversity (11). This lack of diversity also increases the risk of large-scale hist-specific epidemics because of close the relatedness within the species. An example of this is the Irish Potato Famine in 1845 that caused pathogenic infestations of multiple infections and diseases throughout Ireland causing nearly 1/4 of the population to die(12).The general cause of this was the host phytopthora but the reason it spread so fast and far, causing what is known as potato blight, throughout is the development of a potato monoculture (shown below).
This monoculture developed from the Irish mass cloning their potatoes, causing little or no genetic variation within the species and therefore little room to adapt to the environmental pressure caused by this infectious eukaryotic fungi. Another example very similar happened in the 1900's, wiping out almost all wineries throughout Europe. Although both of these example involve plants and not animals, the concept is very much the same. If we all try to become phylogenetically perfect, we could potentially become close to a monoculture with little to no diversity and be wiped out by a single strain of a simple bacteria or fungi outbreak.
Darwinian evolution is the process in which in order for organisms to evolve, heritable variation and genetic mutations need to occur to better adapt to its environmental pressures(13). If we as a human race take on genetic engineering technology then we take control of natures process of evolution and heritable genetic variation and could potentially halt the very process that drives darwinian evolution. As well as this, depending on the method of genetic engineering, we could not only control that variation within our genes from our parents but we could suppress the mutations that occur that are necessary for our evolutionary future.
Conclusions
Although many of these claims are based on a time when genetic engineering is a common practice among humans and that humans are still evolving as a species, there are many scientific analysis and undeniable evidence that genetically modifying humans on a large scale could be potentially dangerous for the human race. We could potentially drive our species to the brink of extinction if we create a monocultured human species due to the vulnerabilities of a species with a genetic make up that is nearly identical. Overall, there are definitely potential evolutionary dangers that come with genetic modification in humans, but in saying that, the potential dangers described would take place over a long period of time, and as stated before, would need to be a common practice among all of man kind.
DON'T WORRY SAYS GLOBAL BANKING 1%----WE HAVE A GOAL OF PRODUCING LOTS OF DOG BREED GMO HUMANS------NOT MONOCULTURE.
_________________________________________
Here is that DINOSAUR CHICKEN with ALLIGATOR TEETH------and we can bet our domestic chickens as a prime source of FOOD FOR HUMANS-------we revert to chasing HUMANS down as FOOD for those REPTILIAN CHICKENS.
Well, this may be good for the global banking 1% wanting to kill HUMANITY----not so progressive for HUMANITY.
By the way-----my case of HOSTING SERVER NOSY NEIGHBORS AND THE GANG---------as RAPTORS for global banking-------do look a lot like this PHOTO-------WATCH OUT FOR THOSE MONSTERS IN THE CLOSET----illegal surveillance 24/7 video PORN for black market SEX TRADE.
A chicken embryo with a dinosaur-like snout instead of a beak has been developed by scientists
- By Melissa Hogenboom
Sixty-five million years ago, an asteroid is believed to have crashed into Earth. The impact wiped out huge numbers of species, including almost all of the dinosaurs.
One group of dinosaurs managed to survive the disaster. Today, we know them as birds.
The idea that birds evolved from dinosaurs has been around since the 19th century, when scientists discovered the fossil of an early bird called Archaeopteryx. It had wings and feathers, but it also looked a lot like a dinosaur. More recent fossils look similar.
But these early birds didn't look the same as modern ones. In particular, they didn't have beaks: they had snouts, like those of their dinosaur ancestors.
Velociraptors were small feathered theropod dinosaurs (Credit: Sabena Blackbird/Alamy)
To understand how one changed into another, a team has been tampering with the molecular processes that make up a beak in chickens.
By doing so, they have managed to create a chicken embryo with a dinosaur-like snout and palate, similar to that of small feathered dinosaurs like Velociraptor. The results are published in the journal Evolution.
The team's aim was to understand how the bird beak evolved, because the beak is such a vital part of bird anatomy. It has been crucial for their success. The 10,000 or more bird species occupy a wide range of habitats, and many have specialised beaks to help them survive.
But they did not set out to create a "dino-chicken", say lead authors Bhart-Anjan Bhullar of Yale University in New Haven and Arkhat Abzhanov of Harvard University in Cambridge, US.
"Whenever you examine an important evolutionary transformation, you want to learn the underlying mechanism," says Bhullar.
The beak is also the part of the avian skeleton that has "diversified most extensively and most radically", says Bhullar.
Despite this diversity – ranging from flamingos to pelicans - very little work has been done to figure out "what the heck a beak actually is", he adds.
"I wanted to know what the beak was skeletally, functionally and when this major transformation occurred from a normal vertebrate snout to the very unique structures used in birds."
To begin to understand this, the team trawled though changes in the ways genes are expressed in the embryos of chickens and several other animals. They looked at the embryos of mice, emus, alligators, lizards and turtles, representing many of the major animal groups.
They found that birds have a unique cluster of genes related to facial development, which the non-beaked creatures lacked.
When they silenced these genes, the beak structure reverted back to its ancestral state. So too did the palatal bone in the roof of the mouth.
Control chicken embryo, altered chicken embryo and alligator embryo
To make this genetic tweak, Bhullar and his colleagues isolated the proteins that would have gone on to develop beaks. Then they suppressed them using tiny beads coated with an inhibiting substance.
When their skeletons started to develop inside the eggs, these animals had short, rounded bones instead of elongated, fused beaks that bird skeletons have.
"By affecting this early protein you are actually altering gene expression," added Bhullar.
The work highlights that beaks develop very differently from snouts, using a different set of genes, says Michael Benton of Bristol University in the UK. "That's what proves the beak is a real adaptation or 'thing', not just a slightly different nose shape."
The shift from snouts to beaks happened well into the evolution of birds, 40-50 million years after Archaeopteryx, says Benton.
For now Bhullar has no plans, or ethical approval, to hatch the snouted chickens. But he believes they would have been able to survive "just fine".
"These weren't drastic modifications," says Bhullar. "They are far less weird than many breeds of chicken developed by chicken hobbyists and breeders."
"The rest of the animal looked OK, but one needs to think about this carefully from an ethical point of view."
_______________________________________________
Here we THE ADDAMS FAMILY and GOMEZ is suggesting the need to CHANGE THE VOICE of cousin IT. Of course cousin IT------is that TRANSHUMANIST sub-species of homo-sapiens who seems to need a genetic TWEAK to alter voice.
Cousin IT kind of resembles a BREED OF SHEEP DOG-----as a GMO HUMAN bred for shaggy hair.
BRED WITH HAIR OVER EYES MAKING DOG HIGH-STRUNG AND NERVOUS BECAUSE HE CANNOT SEE WELL.
Well, let's just tie back the hair over the eyes.
SO, WHY WAS THIS BREED CREATED AS A HERDING DOG?
Cousin IT is the TRANSHUMAN BREED equivalent to THE SHEEPDOG and as ADAMS FAMILY points out-------cousin IT needs more GENETIC MODIFICATIONS----
being GMO HUMAN is a PUNCTUATED EVOLUTIONARY WORK IN PROGRESS.
GOULD'S PUNCTUATED THEORY OF EVOLUTION JUST HAPPENED TO BE RELEASED AT THE SAME TIME GLOBAL BANKING 1% RELEASED TV ADDAMS FAMILY.
'The Addams Family (1964 TV series) -
Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Addams_Family_
(1964_TV...
The Addams Family is an American horror/black comedy sitcom based on the characters from Charles Addams' New Yorker cartoons. The 30-minute television series was created by David Levy and Donald Saltzman and shot in black-and-white, airing for two seasons on ABC from September 18, 1964, to April 8, 1966, for a total of 64 episodes'.
Old English Sheepdogs: What's Good About 'Em, What's Bad About 'Em
Old English Sheepdog temperament, personality, training, behavior, pros and cons, advice, and information, by Michele Welton, Dog Trainer, Behavioral Consultant, Author of 15 Dog Books
Last Updated: October, 2019
Old English Sheepdog dog breed
Good-natured and sociable, enthusiastic and bumptious, the Old English Sheepdog does best in the suburbs or country, with at least an hour of daily exercise and space to romp.
The OES (or "Sheepie") loves people, can be quite the clown, and is demanding of attention. If left without the companionship of humans or other pets, he will become unhappy, destructive, and noisy.
Most Old English Sheepdogs are polite with strangers. They make sensible watchdogs with a deep, ringing bark, but they're not guard dogs. In fact, there is timidity and skittishness in some lines, sharpness in others. Extensive socialization is important to develop a confident, stable temperament.
Like other herding breeds, a few Old English Sheepdogs may try to "herd" children and other pets by circling, poking, or nipping at them. However, since the vast majority of Old English Sheepdogs are bred to be show dogs or pets, rather than working sheepdogs, their herding instincts are typically diminished or absent.
The rustic Old English Sheepdog is not for fastidious households. He tracks in mud, splashes in his water bowl, and affectionately thrusts his wet and/or dirty beard into your lap. Some individuals drool.
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