If you haven’t seen Gattaca, it’s a near-future world where nearly everyone is genetically engineered. Those few who are not genetically engineered are social outcasts. Genetic testing is in depth, quick, cheap, and easy to do. As a result, everything is based on genes. Potential employers and even romantic partners will collect a dna sample from your hair, spit, fingernails, ect. Then they will pay a small fee to run the sample through a machine, and it will print a summary. This summary will include information about genetic defects like your chances of having heart failure; it even provides information about iq and physical fitness.
This type of genetic screening is already starting to be available. For under a $1000.00, you can buy a genetic testing kit. In fact, both 23andMe and deCODEme, let you can buy multiple kits. These tests work by both telling you which health problems are common among people with with a similar genotype, and by looking for specific genetic defects. There are no testing restrictions, so you could test that hot girl or guy you’ve started dating. While the testing isn’t as in depth as the ones in Gattaca, they do screen for quite a few genetic defects.
The price will continue to drop, and the testing will become more in depth. In a few decades, genetic testing will be very popular. People will test themselves, their children, and anyone they are curious about.
The first human clones will likely begin growing in wombs within a year. This procedure will be lead by scientist Panayiotis Zavos. A few groups claim they have already cloned humans. It’s possible that humans have already been cloned, but this will be the first public, verified, and wide-spread use of cloning.
Dr. Zavos runs one of the world’s leading invitro fertilization clinics. The cloning will be used to help infertile couples who want a child that shares their genes. There are around a 1000 couples on a waiting list for this procedure. He has already chosen which volunteers will undergo the first impregnation.
Embryos have already been cloned by Zavos and other groups. But, this will be the first verified account of cloned embryos developing into cloned babies.
The wall Zavos is currently blocked by is political rather than scientific. Both in the U.S. and Europe, governments are unwilling to give him permission. He has been meeting with leaders everywhere, and will carry out the procedure in whichever country gives him permission.
Below is a two minute interview of Dr. Zavos that was on CBS News. Unfortunately it is very uninformative, but it does give a face to the man who will be catalyzing socitie’s shift towards cloning humans.
This is a link to an extremely interesting documentary. It has interviews of Dr. Zavos and volunteers. It also brings political and ethical issus into light. The documentary is about 50 minutes long.
My wife was taking her usual 45 minute shower yesterday before we were to go up to her parent’s place for a Memorial Day grill out. Knowing I’d have ample time to kill, I started surfing the net and soon stumbled upon at advertisement for something called “Liquid Trust Enhanced”. Mildly intrigued, I clicked on the link for the product’s website.
The website declared that Liquid Trust Enhanced “has been specially designed to give a boost to the dating and relationship area of your life.” It went on to say that for the first time in your life, you can create a TRUSTING and PASSIONATE atmosphere. The stuff comes in a nasal spray bottle. I guess that once you shoot it up your honker, you instantly trust everbody around you and everybody trusts you- when they smell it on you. Heh heh.
Gee, it certainly sounds stronger than that pungent Axe armpit stuff so many guys are wearing these days to attract the ladies.
I don’t know if the claims of that website are true or not. I’m skeptical, to say the least. But what I found that was more fascinating was that one of the ingredients is something called oxytocin. And oxycotin is very real.
Oxytocin is a mammalian hormone that also acts as a neurotransmitter in the brain. Oxytocin is thought to be released during hugging, touching and orgasm in both sexes. In the brain, it is involved in social recognition and bonding. Pitocin and Syntocin are synthetic forms of Oxytocin and are sold as medication.
Upon further study, I found that Swiss researchers have shown that the hormone, first discovered for its role in labor, birth and breastfeeding, actually helps people to learn to trust again after betrayal.
“When trust has been broken, something has to allow you to move on with your life and learn to trust again,” says Mauricio Delgado, a cognitive neuroscientist at Rutgers University in Newark, N.J. That something is oxytocin, according to Delgado.
The chemical is important in being able to balance forgiving and forgetting with learning from mistakes, he says.
Researchers led by Thomas Baumgartner at the University of Zurich in Switzerland gathered 49 male volunteers to play games of trust and risk while in an fMRI scanner. Some of the volunteers got a nasal spray of oxytocin, while the rest received a squirt of placebo. The men could not tell the difference between the two nasal sprays.
Let The Games of Trust Begin
Baumgartner began testing his theories about the effects of oxycotin by creating games for his volunteers. The game involved the volunteers “investing” money (provided by the researchers) with a trustee. Half the time the trustee would share money with the investor. The rest of the time, the trustee pocketed all of the cash, violating the investor’s trust. In the other game, the volunteers played the lottery. This lottery paid off half the time just like the investment with the trustee, but the men didn’t feel betrayed if the lottery didn’t pay off. Researchers used the lottery game to determine how likely the men were to take risks.
The men that got the placebo spray, after being “betrayed” by the trustee, were less likely to want to invest with a new trustee. The men that got the oxycotin were quicker to hand over money to another trustee.
Brain scans of the volunteers revealed that oxytocin dampened activity in the amygdala, a part of the brain that helps regulate emotions such as fear. The amygdala has been shown to be involved with judging the trustworthiness of faces, but the new study is the first to show that oxytocin can alter activity in that part of the brain during a trust exercise, Baumgartner says.
The study helps to show oxytocin’s role in people’s general trust for other human beings after being betrayed, but does not show how oxytocin alters the outlook of a relationship when a family member, mate or friend screws you over and betrays that trust. The study also took place under controlled laboratory conditions and doesn’t address what happens in the real world.
In other words, oxycotin may encourage or heighten one’s ability to trust, but trust is not guaranteed by a squirt up the nose. There are just too many factors in play when it comes to the complex behavior of human beings.
The Large Hadron Collider will either affirm or obliterate some of the most important theories in physics. The downside? It also might destroy the earth.
The video below does a good job of explaining the importance of Higgs Particles. The LHC will either confirm or debunk the existence of Higgs Particles. In order to explain gravity, the Standard Model depends on the existence of Higgs Particles.
The Standard Model is currently the closest thing we have to a scientifically proven theory that explains everything. The widely debated String Theory depends on the Standard Model’s premise that everything can be explained by particles. Among other things, String Theory has the add on that all of these particles are the result of strings.
Some physicists think that the collisions in the LHC will cause miniature black holes. However, the theories that predict these miniature black holes depend on extra dimensions that might not exist. If these theories are correct and the black holes are created, most believe that they will not be sustained and will immediately evaporate.
However, extremely unlikely is much different than impossible. I trust that the physics community pushing this is much more knowledgeable than me, and would not carry out the experiment if they thought the earth would be destroyed. But, it is still a little disconcerting. If we are still alive in about three months, we will know that the LHC didn’t create an earth-consuming blackhole.
This post was inspired by one of Kelly’s comments. His blog, Psycho Carnival, takes a humorous look at the insanity of society, and the topics covered are often related to scifi.
