GATTACA

May 13, 2008 5:38 PM

The first ever, it is believed, has been produced at Cornell University. The feat was apparently much overlooked, and has many concerned over the lack of public debate of this field of research. Genetically modified human embryos.
posted by Kronos_to_Earth (45 comments total)

Sounds like Raelians have taken over Cornell.
posted by ornate insect at 5:42 PM on May 13, 2008 [1 favorite]

GM Humans. Cool. This will make it easier for the overlords to grow food.

Who owns the patent?
posted by rokusan at 5:45 PM on May 13, 2008

I wish I had been genetically engineered. Natural selection is balls.
posted by Mr. President Dr. Steve Elvis America at 5:48 PM on May 13, 2008 [6 favorites]

I'd like the Scarlett Johansson flavor, please.
posted by Kraftmatic Adjustable Cheese at 5:48 PM on May 13, 2008 [1 favorite]

Hear this robots: I want my matrix to be designed so I feel like I'm in that dozy comfortable late morning snooze in bed.
posted by jimmythefish at 5:48 PM on May 13, 2008 [1 favorite]

Sounds like a pretty poor return on investment, if you ask me. I'll go with cheap unskilled labour every time.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 5:53 PM on May 13, 2008

I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides, they wear black, which is such a beastly colour. I'm so glad I'm a Beta.
posted by GuyZero at 5:57 PM on May 13, 2008 [10 favorites]

I'm not concerned about a lack of public debate on this subject because the public, for the most part, are not scientists. Ignorant people discussing complex subjects doesn't do anybody any favours.

So what are the concerned everyday people amongst us to do? We have two options: either inform ourselves, or elect informed individuals to represent us.

To become informed we will need to apply ourselves fairly diligently to the subject, studying a range of relevant peer-reviewed material, which, frankly, isn't going to happen, because busybusybusy and fuck is a genome anyway?

In the unlikely event that we rally ourselves for long enough to elect well-educated and scientifically competent representatives, it's going to be irrelevant because OMG OVERRULED IN PARLIAMENT LOLLOBBYISTS (or whatever).

So, me? I'm not going to trouble myself with this at all.
posted by turgid dahlia at 6:03 PM on May 13, 2008 [7 favorites]

LETS GO RED
posted by Stynxno at 6:11 PM on May 13, 2008

I do not have access to the original article from the Cornell group and I must have missed the description of the type of genetic engineering. What did they engineer? Did they give the embryo a third eye, change hair color, cure it of a disease? Just curious.
posted by francesca too at 6:12 PM on May 13, 2008

They engineered the embryo to express a green fluorescent protein. Basically glow in the dark embryos.
posted by peacheater at 6:14 PM on May 13, 2008

Also people seem to be missing the part where they talk about destroying the embryos after five days -- at which point they'd look like nothing more remarkable than a fluorescent green glowing clump of cells.
posted by peacheater at 6:15 PM on May 13, 2008

GFP does not "glow in the dark" any more than a black-lite poster glows in the dark.
posted by rxrfrx at 6:18 PM on May 13, 2008

GFP does not "glow in the dark" any more than a black-lite poster glows in the dark.
I know, I was just having some fun with it.
posted by peacheater at 6:22 PM on May 13, 2008

destroying the embryos after five days

So we've successfully identified the abortionist baby-killers, and they're all at Cornell? Excellent.
posted by yhbc at 6:24 PM on May 13, 2008

The first ever, it is believed, has been produced at Cornell University. Genetically modified human embryos.

If only there were some way to make these two fragments one full sentence, and to lose the cute, coy phrasing.
posted by Eideteker at 6:29 PM on May 13, 2008 [1 favorite]

And, yes, go Big Red.
posted by Eideteker at 6:30 PM on May 13, 2008

DEAD BABY FETUS LIGHTSTICKS?!?!?!?!?!
posted by Large Marge at 6:30 PM on May 13, 2008 [3 favorites]

Oh, there's lots of public debate. It's just not in the crappy news you see on the teevee.

Lots of science-y blogs have fairly well-informed discussions about these issues on a regular basis. Also, a lot of us scientists know better than to think they can stop progress. If there's a demand for designer babies (and there will be), then someone is going to make them.

The real issue is creating policies that ensure the fruits of genetic medicine are available to everyone.
posted by chrisamiller at 6:38 PM on May 13, 2008

From the article: "Ethicists warn that genetically modifying embryos could lead to the addition of genes for desirable traits such as height, intelligence and hair colour."

Oh the horror!
posted by subgear at 6:49 PM on May 13, 2008

My sons had a cousin with cystic fibrois, back in the '70s, before their was much to be done about it, except beat the child's chest several times a day, and give him tons of antibiotics and mucus thinners. Bright kid, full of life, 6 months older than my oldest. Watching my kids grow up with him was painful for everyone, knowing the stats. His parents buried him at 14, 6 days after he caught his last cold. My guys have a certain kind of survivor's guilt, to this day. All because of this.

So, if they find a way to cure CF in vitro, along with the other 1,000 most horrendous DNA errors afflicting human lives, I'm gonna be hard pressed to get too indignant, regardless of who ultimately comes to own the patents. You can't have ever visited a children's hospital, and not wish these researchers well, on some level.
posted by paulsc at 6:50 PM on May 13, 2008 [8 favorites]

I do not have access to the original article from the Cornell group and I must have missed the description of the type of genetic engineering.

Just meeting abstracts so far, as far as I can tell. They used a lentiviral vector to transfect embryonic cells with a GFP gene.
posted by mr_roboto at 6:53 PM on May 13, 2008

You, for one, should welcome your new Brandon overlords.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:55 PM on May 13, 2008

I remember staying up late one night and stumbling across an event on CSPAN. Basically a bunch of extreme right-to-lifers and the politician pandering to them were demanding that legislation be enacted to ensure that the _thousands_upon_thousands_ of unused frozen embryos around would be 'adopted' and implanted into fertile wombs and not used for stem cell research.

Zygotes, what we're really discussing here, are really nothing more than an integer, represented by DNA, surrounded by basic cellular machinery for running the functions encoded in the integer.

Ironic how a religion based on judaism, which doesn't even recognize a person as being 'alive' until 30 days after birth, still screws it up. Acorns are not oak trees, and if acorn research can help living oak trees which are suffering horribly from cystic fibrosis, you're deeply confused for worrying about the damned acorns. Religion isn't all bad, but this is a concrete example of how, sometimes, it malfunctions and causes real harm.
posted by mullingitover at 7:38 PM on May 13, 2008

meh - the only thing of note about this is that it was H. sapiens tissue that it was done to.

So aside from having a soul or something, this is something that people do routinely do* in lots of other species, except that the engineered cells are implanted into a womb, allowed to come to term, and then studied right away or let grown up before being studied.

*well, not anymore. The genetic manipulations are much more sophisticated than just sticking in GFP.
posted by porpoise at 7:53 PM on May 13, 2008

You, for one, should welcome your new Brandon overlords.

I initially misread this as "Brando overlords". Now there's a scary thought.
posted by Crabby Appleton at 8:10 PM on May 13, 2008

Why did they destroy the embryos? I bet there would be plenty of people downright eager to have glowing green children. Seriously.
posted by Justinian at 8:12 PM on May 13, 2008

I blame the The Fraggle Rock Movie
posted by ornate insect at 8:17 PM on May 13, 2008

I read the post link -- in a sleepy haze -- as "genetically modified human eyebrows." Eeep.
posted by the littlest brussels sprout at 9:21 PM on May 13, 2008

I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides, they wear black, which is such a beastly colour. I'm so glad I'm a Beta.

It's been a long time since I read Brave New World, but one of the neat things about it, IIRC, is that there is exactly none of this going on in it. The lower castes are poisoned in "utero" with alcohol. But the Alphas and Betas are just normal, unaltered people with varying degrees of conditioning and education. No innately super-genius people.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 9:40 PM on May 13, 2008

Metafilter: Ignorant people discussing complex subjects doesn't do anybody any favours.
posted by Token Meme at 9:56 PM on May 13, 2008

The problem Paulsc, is if we can now, or in the near future, conceivably do something about cystic fibrosis or any number of other horrible ailments then we are primed to meddle in the affairs of the Divine like no age before us. Of course, when we say Divine in this usage we mean a sort of transcendent Jack the Ripper-esque entity who delights in slowly killing its victims, only taking time out to mail the odd bit that falls off to friends and loved ones.

Oh, and I could maybe pick my kids hair color if there were a clearly defined hair color gene. The horror.
posted by Kid Charlemagne at 9:59 PM on May 13, 2008

genetically modified human eyebrows
posted by subgear at 10:00 PM on May 13, 2008

Well, so Huxley wasn't much of a "hard" sci-fi writer - he was a social commentator and as such didn't worry too much about the mechanisms by which things came to pass. Definitely they retarded the lower castes but I believe they also did something to improve the Alphas - better nutrition or somesuch. More oxygen? Certainly in a society devoted to Soma they would had had some understanding of drugs. And I expect the Alphas were, like milk cattle, bred from a fairly narrow stock.

But what you say is true - we have enough smart people without doing anything special. The real fear from genetic engineering is not creating too many perfect people but creating imperfect ones on purpose to do the dirty work in life. Presumably all clones of Mike Rowe.

I just love using that quote though. Every time I see some half-baked Web 2.0 app proudly proclaiming "BETA!" I say to myself - "I'm so glad I'm a Beta."
posted by GuyZero at 10:08 PM on May 13, 2008 [1 favorite]

Uh, so at the risk of derailing things here, here's the "relevant" Huxley quote:

"And now," Mr. Foster went on, "I'd like to show you some very interesting conditioning for Alpha Plus Intellectuals. We have a big batch of them on Rack 5. First Gallery level," he called to two boys who had started to go down to the ground floor.

"They're round about Metre 900," he explained. "You can't really do any useful intellectual conditioning till the foetuses have lost their tails. Follow me."

But the Director had looked at his watch. "Ten to three," he said. "No time for the intellectual embryos, I'm afraid. We must go up to the Nurseries before the children have finished their afternoon sleep."

So they do something to the Alphas. They don't make them fluoresce though.
posted by GuyZero at 10:18 PM on May 13, 2008

The fluorescent protein is used pretty commonly in genetic research. It's a useful marker since it makes it very easy to tell if the genetic change has happened.

However, it seems to have a particularly high Yuck Factor.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 10:51 PM on May 13, 2008

I want to glow green...can I be born again (and not the Jesus-kind...)?
posted by JibberJabber at 11:23 PM on May 13, 2008

So they do something to the Alphas.

Educated and conditioned them in vitro. That is all. Otherwise, all that section says is that a batch of embryos were assigned to be Alphas at conception.

And I expect the Alphas were, like milk cattle, bred from a fairly narrow stock.

Nah, there are lines about how they use a set of ovaries until they're all used up, so all the products of a particular baby factory at a given time have the same genetic mother, from Alpha to Epsilon Semi-Moron.

That the society operates (mostly?) through conditioning and education instead of breeding was apparently a reaction to the eugenics movements of the time.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 6:05 AM on May 14, 2008

I'm gonna inject that lentivirus vector into my nuts so that any children I father will be fluorescent part human, part jellyfish monsters! That way I'll really know whose baby-daddy I am!
posted by nowonmai at 6:38 AM on May 14, 2008

This is nothing new. Norbert Gleicher did this in 03 (or similar).
posted by dasheekeejones at 9:28 AM on May 14, 2008

From the last link:
"He added: "I have been speaking to MPs all week and no one knows that the government is legalising GM embryos. The public has had enough of scientists sneaking these things through and then presenting us with a fait accompli.""

Even if the MPs didn't manage to read the whole Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, I'm not sure how they could fail to see any of the extensive newspaper coverage.

From comments on the same article:
"Great what happens when one of these genetically modified embryos gets out, is born, and passes on his genes to his descendants."

They'll be really bad at LaserQuest?
posted by penguinliz at 9:50 AM on May 14, 2008

Extended report and analysis.

Put me down as nay. I'm sick of scientism run amuck: processed beer, processed food, and now processed life. I like this from the report I linked to:

“The push to redesign human beings, animals and plants to meet the commercial goals of a limited number of individuals is fundamentally at odds with the principle of respect for nature,” said Brent Blackwelder, President of Friends of the Earth in his testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Vague appeals to possible health benefits do not sway me. The whole line of research is, in my view, a demonstration of completely distorted views of the nature of life and health.
posted by No Robots at 11:19 AM on May 14, 2008

Vague appeals to possible health benefits do not sway me. The whole line of research is, in my view, a demonstration of completely distorted views of the nature of life and health.

Funny, I was thinking that your comment represented a completely distorted view of the nature of scientific discovery. No one is sure that we can cure cancer, or come up with an AIDS vaccine, but that doesn't stop us from trying, dammit.

There are lots of reasons why this is an important step towards things like gene therapy.
posted by chrisamiller at 1:47 PM on May 14, 2008

Science is made for man, not man for science. We do not allow vivisection, no matter what the possible benefits may be. Nor do we allow any longer atmospheric nuclear bomb tests. Science must obey the democratic will. Some of us do not want experimentation on human embryos. You may disagree. But you are wrong to say that my opposition makes me anti-scientific. Science has an impact on the lives of all, and therefore all have an interest in the direction of scientific research.
posted by No Robots at 2:37 PM on May 14, 2008

I was referring to this line:

Vague appeals to possible health benefits do not sway me.

Lots of science is vague exploration of unknown areas, and *gasp* learning for the sake of knowledge. While practical applications may not be immediately apparent, science has a pretty good track record of paying off in the long run.

I can respect your argument against experimentation on human embryos. I disagree with it, but I'm not quibbling about that part.
posted by chrisamiller at 6:32 PM on May 14, 2008