Posts by Peter Ashby
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Pah, New Scientist keeps promising cute things like scanning barcodes with your phone and getting a screenful of info on it, which you can then either magnify or have your phone speak to you.
Russ if you are short sighted try taking your glasses off. I take mine off to do close work and have always been able to read a book without them.
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I would have no problem with the GE salmon as described in that article. They would end up just the same as for eg winter cabbage or many of our domestic animals that have been selected to grow year round. In this case GE simply short circuits the selection event, instead of screening millions of salmon smoult for a rare mutation you make it happen.
If we are going to farm salmon as domesticated animals then it would make sense to have animals that grow year round. Any escapees would not survive in the wild being unable to meet their calorie requirements during the winter, which is why wild type salmon stop growing in the winter.
We can argue about the wisdom and environmental impacts of salmon farming, but if we are going to do it then it would seem sensible to do it as efficiently as possible.
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they get apoplectic about the perceived moral failings of others, but when it comes to themselves there's always some reason why it doesn't apply.
But, but, Atlas Shrugged. Supermen like that can't let the pifling concerns of the little people distract them from their MISSION.
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@Craig Young
I can attest from the Antipodes that Being Human is very good. I caught it early on despite thinking from the trailers that it looked weak but they take the concept and run well with it. It is a sort of Buffy/Angel crossed with Coupling as in how if you are a werewolf do you deal with having scratched and thus infected your naive human girlfriend (small and blonde, and a nurse). Also the problems of trying to have a human boyfriend if you are a ghost and thus insubstantial.
A nice dark side and some creepily good baddies as only the British can do them (why American directors hire Brit actors to play bad guys).
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BTW insects are highly nutritious. It is only that Britain does not host sufficient numbers of large edible insects that eating them is not culturally part of our diets, here or in NZ. Since they are all arthropods if you would eat a shrimp or a prawn you should not turn your nose up at a cricket. It's a pity wetas are not much more common in fact.
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@Dyan Campbell
Well I am 44 so I am not sure what your age has to do with anything. Secondly
And my point is, why do we as consumers have to embrace every part of technology as if it were some kind of double-dog-dare?
Who says you do? who makes you buy a TV or a radio? We still have an old fashioned cathode ray TV. It still works just fine so I see no need thereby to spend money to 'upgrade' it.
And why should consumers who overwhelmingly don't want a product have that product foisted on them? Whether it does harm or not?
I find this funny, as informed consumers my wife and I bought two tins of flavr savr tomato paste when it first appeared on supermarket shelves here in the UK. Then our choice as consumers to buy and eat this technology was taken away from us by hysterical new age greenies who threatened all sorts action against the supermarkets if they continued to stock this, suitably labelled product (terrrorism by any definition) and not only did the supermarkets cave in but the government did not hunt these people down and charge them with threatening behaviour and blackmail.
So for you from a position as a consumer to reply to me that about consumer choice wrt GM/GE is deeply funny. Can you read a label? IIMU that NZ has GE labelling requirements just like the UK has. So unless you are illiterate or stupid or too lazy to read a label I fail to see how or in what way you are being 'forced' as a consumer to eat GE? Any more than food regulations on the maximum amount of insect parts your chocolate can contain force you to eat them. Oh you didn't know about that? Which category are you in from the above then?
This is the information age, your cry of impotence is absurd and pathetic.
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@Sacha
I get the shirts, but the legwear implies a strong mutation. Long gene from the father and intermediate length from the mother has warped into extreme shortness with headgear. Could be a form of homeotic mutation I guess.
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@Dyan Campbell
I happen to have met Lewis Wolpert and worked with and for two of his ex PhD students in fact. He would not disagree with anything I wrote in my previous post. I bet he is just as aware of lateral gene transfer (the technical term for gene swapping) as I am. We would agree that on the basis of the precautionary principle the first generation GM plants should not have had an antibiotic resistance gene. At the time hit and run techniques were all the rage, so it was really just laziness. In the lab we only put antibiotic resistance genes into bugs and cells that cannot escape the lab.
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Sorry for coming late to this party but nature has been doing cross species, cross genera, cross, class, cross order and cross phyla even cross kingdom genetic transfer for aeons without reference to our planning laws or worries about environmental effects.
Take sea squirts for eg, scientifically known as tunicates because when the adults settle down to a stationary lifestyle from being free swimming chordate larvae they protect themselves by growing a tough leather tunic around themselves. It turns out this tunic is made of cellulose, plant fibre and that it is not produced by an algal symbiont but by the tunicate itself. It half inched the entire cellulose synthesis pathway, several genes from a marine algae, a seaweed, millions of years ago.
The process is so rampant amongst bacteria that you cannot draw family trees for them as large chunks of their genomes come from disparate places.
Neither are we immune and examples turn up when you are not even looking for them. I was once in the lab trying to pcr up a chicken gene (3 prime RACE to be precise) and when I threw yet another group of clones off to be sequenced, got the sequences back and the threw them at the online genome database one leapt out at me. It was not what I was after, but what jumped out was that the sequence hit only two other species: Anopheles gambiae-- the malaria mosquito and __Homo sapiens. So two hosts (I got it from a chicken) and a vector. Note that at the time the database had the full mouse genome, countless EST's from lots of species and none of them were even close. Humans have lived both with chickens and mosquitos for a long time.
So all those who claim the process of moving genes from one species to another is unnatural, you are unfortunately displaying ignorance. To those who say it is unsafe, better sterilise your skin and gut to get rid of all those gene swapping bateria, purge your genome and not reproduce (syncetin an essential gene for placental formation almost certainly came from a virus). Better not eat anything natural either in case you catch a gene from your food like the tunicates did. But it gets worse your cells contain bacteria, they sit there eating our food and making ATP all day long. They are called mitochondria but don't let that fool you, they are bacteria with their own genomes. It gets worse though, whole swathes of mitochondrial genes have migrated into our nuclear genomes over time.
Do you feel unclean yet?
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@bmk
Perhaps you don't know, but here in the UK during a paedophile scare a couple of years ago a woman paediatrician in the Welsh borders had to leave her home after a group of ignorant idiots misinterpreted the word. My use of paediatrician then was a subtle reference to that, being a bit sarcastic, it was no typo.