141–150 of 166 posts
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These are called regular Syrian universities and there are plenty of those.
Sure, and they are happy to sign up any number of ISIS members?
To a lesser extent, there are some sort of universities in rebel controlled areas.
No idea how good/bad they are.
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> The guy that you can see in one of the pictures drinking from a glass recipient was in a Netflix documentary (I can't remember the title from top of my mind) where he was advocating for everyone being able to use genetic engineering for self-improvement, even without any previous knowledge of genetics. You mean the documentary unnatural selection. I have seen it, but I recall something quite different. He did infac…
Broad-scale co-evolution means that if you use your co-evolved common sense on the co-evolved natural world, you will broadly speaking be safe. Even with a bit of experimentation on the fringes. Our technological world has then co-evolved with our common sense, which is why despite the several ways our houses have things running through them which can kill us, they don't manage to do it very often. When you start pla…
- it is immoral to genetically experiment on others (especially children) without their consent.
- individuals should have the right to attempt to genetically engineer themselves if they wish: if they understand and accept the risk society should not seek to stop them.
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I'm inclined to agree with you; the thought of just "some dude" mucking about with the genetics of a virus is horrifying. And yet, computers are extremely powerful tools, arguably the most powerful we have created. And look what free access to them has accomplished... Sure, it has caused quite a bit of cyber crime, but it's all balanced out by a massive amount of open and freely exchanged innovation. Now imagine an a…
Your genome is so much more complex than C - if you can't appreciate that, it sort of reinforces the fact that average people should not muck around in it. I, a computer programmer with a fancy degree in biochemistry, would not touch this stuff without a significant amount of work up front to understand what I am messing with.
Even just having an expert level in any one of those pieces is a serious undertaking.
Similarly, albeit to a vastly greater degree, nobody entirely understands the multitude of cellular machinery, their interactions, their chemical processes, or encoding, in any species. Even 50% in a single organism is probably lifetimes away.
So yeah, biohackers are equal parts arrogant, reckless, and stupid... Life should be given appropriate respect, and it's hard to see how "DIY bioengineering" doesn't spit in the face of that.
Yet I would hate to see a future where people are barred from their own physiology, their own code. Removing your right to mess with your own life just seems authoritarian and oppressive to me, at the most fundamental level.
Editing OTHER people's genome should be highly regulated, as well as anything that has the potential to reproduce outside a controlled environment. This of course includes microbes within your own body, viral infections, gut bacteria, etc.
But I think people not being able to edit their own code is horrifically dystopian. Should probably be a requirement that you also have your reproductive rights removed too though, since your descendants wouldn't have a say.
As a parent of a child with a genetic disorder for which it is perfectly possible to develop a therapy using current technology, I'm delighted to see that biohackers are stirring things up. Let's hope this inspires the industry to rethink their approach to drug development.
To all the folks who are so concerned about bad actors trying to develop organisms that will harm people: Have you forgotten that the world is full of bad actors who are literally trying to eat people? There are not merely thousands of them but hundreds of trillions of them. They spend all day long everyday trying to find a random path to something that can eat you. It is the height of hubris to imagine that humans c…
It's more subtle than that. They spend all day every day trying to perpetuate themselves, which incidentally may be helped by eating you, but probably isn't. Much better to let you fly around the world and let you help them spread onto more surfaces.
The Bacterial Edit Kit is very dangerous. The sale should be controlled. Imagine if they edit the gene of a bacterium and we get a new pandemic? Only ultra-safe labs should handle this.
And that E.Coli strain... I believe I may have more dangerous stuff in my lower intestine.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Broad-scale co-evolution means that if you use your co-evolved common sense on the co-evolved natural world, you will broadly speaking be safe. Even with a bit of experimentation on the fringes. Our technological world has then co-evolved with our common sense, which is why despite the several ways our houses have things running through them which can kill us, they don't manage to do it very often. When you start pla…
It's a lot simpler than that: - it is immoral to genetically experiment on others (especially children) without their consent. - individuals should have the right to attempt to genetically engineer themselves if they wish: if they understand and accept the risk society should not seek to stop them.
I'm also curious if there are any scenarios where this might be used on a host and an infectious agent is present in the host which shares the right cut point to create some unknown mutation. It's probably 1 in a million, if it's even possible. But it's interesting to think about.
As a parent of a child with a genetic disorder for which it is perfectly possible to develop a therapy using current technology, I'm delighted to see that biohackers are stirring things up. Let's hope this inspires the industry to rethink their approach to drug development.
I joined a biohacker Discord a while ago out of curiousity.
One of the channels was dedicated to getting a Chinese company to synthesize a pipeline pharmaceutical that was being researched in mice by some company. The people in the channel didn't want to wait for the human trials to experiment on themselves.
Long story short, they got a synthesis and paid thousands to confirm its purity. Several people took it and experienced some extremely concerning, potentially life threatening side effects. I noped out of the Discord because I didn't want to be associated with that group in any way after watching how they operated.
Genetic engineering is a whole new level of potential problems.
I wonder how long it'll take until there are yeast cultures to produce various psychoactive/scheduled substances on the dark web. https://news.stanford.edu/2020/09/02/scientists-turn-yeast-c...
That seems like a bad idea. Just waiting for the escape and autobrewery syndrome