Transgenic Fish

[lizwinz]

Originally posted by CoNMaN
Okay all the perfect baby talk is very wrong....We have lost the topic, it is a glowing fish.

considering that the research that these fish are a by-product of is genectic in nature and could be applied to human babies in the future i dont think its too off topic to discuss this

A fish. A fish that was bought at a store, born in a store, and then laid eggs, then had its babys taken from it before it would eat them, had their eggs altered with a big scary word "genetically". This is a good thing that we have scientists that can do this. This isn't even a step yet. this is crawling.

true...but thats not the problem in my eyes, its the fact that there will be a demand for more of the same and someones going to do it cheaper by painting fish to get the same results...so people will be duped into buying unhealthy fish and supporting cruelty and appalling below poverty work conditions

--liz

 

[colesea]

Crawling ConMan? I'd say more a toddle considering science has already cloned sheep, pigs, mice, rats, cats, and cattle. Like I believe I stated earlier, glow-in-the-dark mice have been around for a hell of a lot longer than glow-in-the-dark fish. Heck, transgenetic fruit-flies have been around for decades!!! So the fact that we have glow-in-the-dark fish isn't something worth getting all up and arms about. These fish have probably been around a whole lot longer than the articles imply, floating through the scientific community as research tools and idle curiosities gracing the tanks of some PhD's office or University classroom.

What's new is that they are actually being sold commercially. This is the first time anything developed by transgentics has been available to the public in its, ah, transmutated form. Sure, we have all used the products of transgenetic animals before, ie insuline, cancer therapies, Alzhiemer's research. It's the McDonald's syndrome, I call it. So long as the cow isn't butchered in front of them, people will continue to eat hamburgers yet confess that killing cows for meat is something humans ought to feel guilty about. Nobody of the non-elite scientific community has ever owned a human-insuline producing pig before, or have handled a glow-in-the-dark mouse. Yet now we will all have the distinct priviledge of netting a transgentic danio in our LFS.

These fish represent the first time the public has had transgentics made an in-your-face reallity. Something they can see, touch, watch, own. Transgenetics is no longer just the ravings of eccentric sci-fi writers. It is fact. But people are still in fear of the fiction. They fear that if we allow science into the hands of the common people, common people will run rampant with it and produce monsters. Unfortunately I don't think the common person has enough intelligence to do so. If we did, we'd all be employed by companies that produce transgentic fish.

Such, contridiction, in human thought and nature are what I try to provoke people into seeing. How can you say that "transgentics is bad" and get up on a soap-box against hybridization, yet still eat corn on the cob and walk your dog? If the human species has one major fault, it is living in ignorance of such contridictions that will eventually cause self-distruction.
~~Colesea

 

[CoNMaN]

I completely agree with your last paragraph colesea. That is what i was sort of trying to express wiht my story of the built people. And i definatly see your point now that why this is diffrent because it is in our hands now. As opposed to hearing on teh street scientist have made a octopus with only one tenticle. this is true they made this fish for us to buy now. And cloneing and altering genetics are different. And in my opinoin should not be considered the same thing at all.

and Lizwinz that is what I was saying about being way off. The distant future this will be applied to babies. It will be aplied to people like colesea's niece and my father and I before they will alter babies in my opinon.

 

[tony-da-tiger]

now how would all of you feel about glow in the dark babys?

 

[CoNMaN]

for my children, or to be behind glass for me to stare at when im at a bar?

 

[valdok]

just wanted to add--playing god isn't manipulating genes. in effect, you cannot play god, for god is omnipotent, and we, as humans, are bound the laws of a phyiscal universe. if you believe in god, he is not. "playing god" is such an ignorant term.

 

[nifran]

Well, you wouldn't have to worry about him/her wearing reflective clothing trick or treating - or walking at night, or hiding.

 

[HawkEye_Pierce]

lizwinz, thank you for understanding my earlier post...I felt like I was being made out to be the evil executioner!!! Colesea, what I was/am trying to say is that nature has to take its course...when its time to die the "herd gets thinned"...I am not saying to reinvent the gas chamber and kill the weak...And there IS a predator out there MUCH more powerful than humans...TIME...time will decide when we die...not humans...we are so worried about curing every disease to prolong human life we are stealing resources from other lifeforms (ie. animals) is that fair to them?...water, land, food...we are polluting all of these at a much faster rate because our population is overloading our aquarium (bringing it back to fish..LOL!!)...in your 10 gallon aquarium you would't put 150 fish would you? So why are we doing it to Mother Earth the ultimate aquarium!! One inch of fish per gallon, right? We need to control birthrates by education and accept the fact that our lives will end sometime and possibly go on to a different form of life/energy (life is energy and energy continues in some form or another).

I apologize if I offended you about your niece...that was not my intent...the obstacle I refer to is having a disability in a "non-disabled world"...If she is in a wheelchair she has to deal with stereotypes, homes built for the "average" person standing, cars built for "able-Bodied" people, abuse, etc....I always have said that it is the "non-disabled" persons who have the handicap...not the person in the wheelchair, walker, etc... here is my website and you will see that I do what I can to help individuals with disablities... http://mikespe2002.schoolreference.com/

CoNMaN, you mentioned that this is "just a fish"...is its life of any less value than a human life? According to humans it is...what if we bread a human baby that would glow? Would that be wrong? Lets to research on humans ONLY...at least the human can make their own choice... I am sure that EVERY person here and everywhere would be OUTRAGED...Life is a life...human, animal, fish, insect, alien (had to throw that one in!! LOL)...

valdok, I agree with you..."playing God" would entail a HECK of a lot more than gene manipulation!!

If you look at my original post my last statement was "Someday you may need an organ transplant and genetic engineering could save you...What would YOU do?

 

[420Loach]

ok all i want to say is that it doesnt matter what we think! these desicions are made by people who give no more of a damn about anything but fattening their own pockets. they could give a crap about if we think its wrong, and no matter if they did because their are more people out there that dont know or dont care if genetics were used to make those fish.

ill agree with conman on the fact that they should use these kinds of things to help people that are ALREADY LIVING with disabilities, or diseases(im diabetic, id love to see a cure, but then i have also expressed my veiws on overpopulation in the other thread, but then again if we had no diseases maybe we could focus on more on things like food production.

i do not agree with making fish, but they are life, and we need to respect them as such, as we should respect EVERY living thing.

 

[CoNMaN]

that is exactly the point im makin Hawk-eye. it is a fish. And yes i do put human life above all other forms of life.

 

[diver]

I think it is widely acknowledged that genetic engineering to humans is unethical--playing God. But I do not see a problem with making fish that glow! One of the things that bugs me about a lot of people is that they keep saying "Nature must take its course" We ARE nature. We are taking our own course. This is evolution. Humans have evolved to a point where we can do this. I'm actually very religious and do not believe the full evolutionary story as put forth by some scientists BUT you can not deny that we are evolving. We're not messing with evolution--we're living evolution. Just because we understand evolution doesn't mean we don't go through it. It is in my opinion that aside from human life which is sacred, we should use our tools to explore the genome. And if that leads to creating glow-in-the-dark fish for profit, I'm all for it. Now if the changes cause the fish to be in pain, that's a different story. But please, somebody tell me, what's wrong with a glow-in-the-dark fish?

 

[CoNMaN]

I couldnt tell ya diver. Excellent point how we are evolution.

 

[HawkEye_Pierce]

Evolution does not include messing with other species...Evolution Defined:

"In the broadest sense, evolution is merely change, and so is all-pervasive; galaxies, languages, and political systems all evolve. Biological evolution ... is change in the properties of populations of organisms that transcend the lifetime of a single individual. The ontogeny of an individual is not considered evolution; individual organisms do not evolve. The changes in populations that are considered evolutionary are those that are inheritable via the genetic material from one generation to the next. Biological evolution may be slight or substantial; it embraces everything from slight changes in the proportion of different alleles within a population (such as those determining blood types) to the successive alterations that led from the earliest protoorganism to snails, bees, giraffes, and dandelions."
- Douglas J. Futuyma in Evolutionary Biology, Sinauer Associates 1986

Evolution is a process that results in heritable changes in a population spread over many generations. For those of you that watch Star Trek thee is something called the "Prime Directive" which is the Non-interference in the progress of less evolved lifeforms...Gene Rodenberry (creator of Star Trek) knew what it was all about..LOL

 

[colesea]

Hmm:

On the topic of "playing God." The word "play" in and of itself implies a certain nievate and childish disregard for dangers or consequence. There's not enough room to write all the Webster's definitions of the word "play" in this post. Do you think God (if you so happen to believe in a Christian god) is meerly playing with us humans? Do you believe His creation of humankind was a dallying whim? Was He responsible when He set forth Adam upon this Earth? But if God's human creation was so noble, why the hell did he have to send Jeasus for? God screwed up while he was playing at creation folks, and that is the biggest irony of religion. Want to blame it on Adam and Eve, go ahead, Noah's flood was suppose to make up for that. God gives humans free will, and when they don't choose to worship Him and live by His rules, He resorts to genocide. Hmmm...Aren't their a few dicators alive today who have just that train of thought. And yet, God's actions are okay, and the dictator's actions are not.....?

And yet, seeing as how I have a completely different view of God than most people here, believing as I do in a more internal God than external one, to "play at being God" is pretty insulting. "Play" implies a release from responsibilities, a regression into the infantile. Responsiblities, mind you, that I believe we have to each other as well as to all life. You can't "play" at being God. You either accept the responsiblities of being God, all the weaknesses that being God entails as well as its strengths, or you crawl backwards into the muck that spawned you. Being God is taking a personal responsiblity for how you affect and effect this world for your time here.

I am not God in the Christian sense, you need to think outside of religion in order to understand what I talk about, and the shattering of that illusion can be pretty painful to take. Instead of externalizing God, you must internalize God. A very difficult transition being how society is very entrenched in dogma. Being God is also the ablity to create morallity, to judge morallity, and to internallize being a moral individual. But what is morallity? What somebody else has convinced you to believe is the difference between right and wrong. That's all it is. If you own your own morallity, you are your own God, and you are your own religion.

Yes, time will indeed take its course. My niece will most likely die before I do. If she makes it into her twenties it will be a miracle. But must her current life be in such misery? It is totally acceptable to euthanize an animal that would be suffering as she is, but it is not so acceptable to ease her suffering? Transgentic research may not help her, but it could prevent other children from living in the pain that she must. Physical pain, emotional pain, the difficulty of living in a world of disabled thinking. I wouldn't want to extend my life. Living forever would be quite boring IMO. She will have all the love and support our family can give her for as long as she lives and be given the best quality of care possible, but the tragedy is, her life will be no more idealistic than any of our own.

The reason the human life has been extended is because of advanced medical care. Without it, well, you and I would be living in third-word countries. Live without health-insurance, live without vaccines, live without band-aids.

The contradiction is, if given a choice, you would not choose everything you have an opinion about Hawkeye. People do live exactly as you describe, they just don't do so on your doorstep. If you were told, this instant, that you were infected with cancer, would you choose chemo or would you allow the cancer to kill you because it is so obvious that your time on this planet is intended to last only the duration of your disease? My brother has cancer, and he has stated more than once that he would not wish chemo treatments on anybody, yet he has no desire to die right now. He's only 24 years old. His cancer has been in remission for only two months. It may yet still resurface, but hopefully, not today. Today he goes and registers for college this fall. Perhaps he should not have ever recieved chemo, seeing as how the world would be much better off with one less person on it.

Gene Rodenberry broke the Prime Directive so many times as to make the damn concept laughable. Each time was rationalized because, one way or another, breaking the Prime Directive benefitted humankind in some way. If the Prime Directive held any water at all, humans had no business leaving the planet Earth in the first place. A more convincing concept he invented was IDIC, Infinate Diversity in Infinate Conbination. The essesence of the dynamic equlibrium that life is in, the constant state of flux that implies at any moment, on even the most slimmest of probability, anything that can happen, might indeed actually happen.

If all animals and humans were created equal, than indeed, the same morallity must be given to both. Therefore it should be no more acceptable to euthanize a suffering animal than it is to euthanize a suffering human.....or, perhaps it should be just as acceptable to euthanize a suffering human as it is to euthanize a suffering animal. Two sides, my friend, of the same coin. That is, if you believe all live was created equal.
~~Colesea

 

[HawkEye_Pierce]

I guess this debate could go on forever...and I am sure those that are not participating wish it would stop (and maybe those who are participating would wish it to stop...)...

Mother Nature will find a way to limit our population growth if we don't...research has said that the dinosaurs were over-crowding the Earth at one point and that problem was taken care of...Today there are so many "new" diseases and new strains of old ones...Maybe these diseases existed 200 years ago and technology of the time could not detect it...OR maybe Mother Nature is giving us a warning that we are exceeding our "1 inch per gallon" rule...3 ways to kill off any species...infect their food/water supply, air, and/or reproductive systems...AIDS, SARS, E Coli (just to name a few) have done just this...and as time goes on these diseases will get more and more powerful...

colesea, I hope you understand that I do not wish pain and suffering upon your niece or anybody...it is tough playing Devil's Advocate on this topic...a part of me wishes what you wish...for people like your niece to be happy...but the other part wants what's best for ALL (including animals) globally...If this genetic power gets into the wrong hands it will make today's terrorist looking like Girl Scouts (an American Club for those across the pond...LOL)...to quote Star Trek again (I know, I know I will stop...) Mr Spock said "The needs of the many out weigh the needs of the few or the One"...Now this is probably true 99% of the time but there is that 1% that makes it tough to take the side I have taken...

 

[colesea]

Aye, "for the good of the many..." Therefore, are you taking a position of God to dictate what is good for the many?

If you want this debate to end, don't reply, that's fine. People who aren't interested don't have a gun to their head and someone forcing themselves to read it. And those who don't want to participate are more than welcomed to pass it by. Don't bother me none. If someone wants to complain this argument is taking up too much bandwidth on the server, Johny can delete it if he wishes.

The shame of the matter is, dispite E. coli, SARS, AIDS, and other diseases, be they old or new, you would wish to quell the one thing that might be the most noble about humans, their ability to maintain hope and faith in the face of all evils. This pretty much boils down to, plain and simple animalistic survival instinct. Sure, those diseases may eventually overpower the human population. Or perhaps the human population will simply evolve a strong immune system. Or maybe, some "mad scientist" will happen upon a vaccine. Do you see what tomorrow holds?

If you do, please, email me the NY State lotto numbers.

=IF= genetic power gets into the wrong hands....Oh please...who's hands are the right ones? Your's? Mine? The President of the United States? Bush is just as much terrorist as Hussain is. A schoolyard bully is just as much terrorist as a suicide bomber.

Yet an alian religious group, the Rigilians, claim to have cloned the first human baby. They seem pretty peaceful enough in their beliefs. They don't want to hurt no one, they just want the Rigilians to come and bring peace to the Earth.

Being Devil's Advocate is a good way to goad intellectual thinking. The Bible says God marks the fall of every sparrow. If you think about what 1% of six billion is, that's a large enough number to make progess and research worthwhile in my book, be it a vaccine for small pox (small pox still exists BTW, dormant, waiting to prey upon the unvaccinated, which is about 1%

 

[colesea]

(con't)

...of the world's population), or transgenetics, or growing organs for transplant.

~~Colesea

 

[HawkEye_Pierce]

"Take the position of God"...No that's not what I am doing...I feel humans are trying to do that by genetically altering these poor animals without their consent, for the sake of HumanKind...if there should be testing lets do it on humans....its their lives we want to improve, right? so let's skip the "middle man" (ie. animals) and go right to the source of the matter...that way we will know EXACTLY the affect it will have on humans and won't have to speculate...

"=IF= genetic power gets into the wrong hands....Oh please...who's hands are the right ones? Your's? Mine? The President of the United States? Bush is just as much terrorist as Hussain is. A schoolyard bully is just as much terrorist as a suicide bomber. "

This is exactly what I mean...look at nuclear/atomic energy...I am sure the scientist who invented it didn't intend for it to kill MILLIONS of innocent people in Japan...I am sure it was meant to help humankind...but history proves that way of thinking wrong...Genetic engineering is FARworse than nuclear power...how you may ask? Because nuclear bombs just kill you...instantly...Genetic altering can be made to manipulate the world the way the powers that be want it to be...

I'll be quite honest with you, if they were to ONLY test humans I probably wouldn't have AS MUCH of a problem (I still wouldn't like it but at least proper consent could be given)...but animals are modern day slaves...and maybe I am a hypocrite by keeping fish in a tank for my enjoyment, or chewing down a juicy hamburger...but come on... A GLOWING FISH? How does that help humankind? What's next: A real life version of Attack of the Clones!! I better get my light sabre ready...LOL!

 

[Davy]

I just read throught this whole thread and saw two completely different sides but both with valid points. Like the fact that this could help mankind by finding a cure for something(I'm just using this as and example). It could also help mankind in that whoever makes or produces these fish could sell large numbers of them therefore putting food on their table and a roof over their head. My point is that a lot of the comments made here can be twisted many ways and most are only the persons opinions that they have been asked to share.

The likely hood of these fish really catching on and being in every aquarium is slim. I think this because I really have two hobbies: fish and R/C planes. Where I live there is a man trying to make a living out of manufacturing R/C planes. In one category of planes(flying wings to be exact), he made something radically different from every thing else in hopes that it will catch on just like these fish could. People were very interested when it first came out. Then they found out it has it share of defects just like every thing else and either went back to the old ones or didn't buy it at all. I think glowing fish will be the same way. Some people will buy them and others won't. The ones that do buy them might not think they are as cool as they thought or just get sick of them. Some people may always buy them but that will be a small percentage.

If you want my opinion then here it is. Coloring fish has nothing to do with anything. If they want to find a cure for somthing using fish great, more power to them. Changing fish to make a profit or for some other wierd or twisted reason is a bad idea. At some point it may get to hurting the fish in order to change them at that is even worse. If you want to change the fish for any reason, make the change a good one for the fish not just the humans changing them.

This is all only what I think but hey, what do I know, I'm only 14 years old.