Article out by Ron Bailey at Reason Magazine that discusses #transhumanism and #libertarianism:
Kai Weiss, a researcher at the Austrian Economics Center and Hayek Institute in Vienna, Austria, swiftly denounced the piece. “Transhumanism should be rejected by libertarians as an abomination of human evolution,” he wrote.
Clearly there is some disagreement.
Weiss is correct that Istvan doesn’t expend much intellectual effort linking transhumanism with libertarian thinking. Istvan largely assumes that people seeking to flourish should have the freedom to enhance their bodies and minds and those of their children without much government interference. So what abominable transhumanist technologies does Weiss denounce?
Weiss includes defeating death, robotic hearts, virtual reality sex, telepathy via mind-reading headsets, brain implants, ectogenesis, artificial intelligence, exoskeleton suits, designer babies, and gene editing tech. “At no point [does Istvan] wonder if we should even strive for these technologies,” Weiss thunders.
Announcement of CRISPR technology, which allows precise editing of the human genome, has been heralded as the future of individualized medicine, and a decried as a slippery slope to engineering individual human qualities. Of course, humans already know how to manipulate animal genomes through selective breeding, but there has been no appetite to try on humans what is the norm for dogs. That’s a good thing, says Dawkins. The results could well be dangerous. Does technology as a whole represent a threat to human welfare if it continues to evolve at its current rate? Not so fast, warns Dawkins. Comparing biological evolution to technological progress is an analogy at best. His newest book is Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist.
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Transcript: I think it’s — I’m a believer in the precautionary principle as I’ve just said, and I think we have to worry about possible consequences of things that we do, and the ability to edit our own genomes is one thing we ought to worry about. I’m not sure it’s so much an ethical problem as a more practical problem. What would the consequences be? Would the consequences be bad? And they might be.
I think it’s worth noticing that long before CRISPR long before it became capable of editing our genomes in anyway we have been editing the genomes of domestic animals and plants by artificial selection, not artificial mutation, which is what we’re now talking about, but artificial selection. When you think that a Pekingese is a wolf, a modified wolf, a genetically modified wolf—modified not by directly manipulating genes but by choosing for breeding individuals who have certain characteristics, for example, a small stubbed nose, et cetera, and making a wolf turn into a Pekingese. And we’ve been doing that very successfully with domestic animals like dogs, cows, domestic plants like maize for a long time, we’ve never done that to humans or hardly at all.
Hitler tried it but it’s never really been properly done with humans I’m glad to say. So if we’ve never done that with humans with the easy way, which is artificial selection, it’s not obvious why we would suddenly start doing it the difficult way, which is by direct genetic manipulation. There doesn’t seem to be any great eagerness to do it over the last few centuries anyway.
A lot of people have problems with what they call designer babies. You could imagine a future scenario in which people go to a doctor and say, “Doctor, we want our baby to be a musical genius. Please edit the genes so that we have the same genes as the Bach family had or something like that to make them into a musical genius.” I mean that horrifies many people.
A Stanford team has launched a new challenge on the Eterna computer game. Players will design a CRISPR-controlling molecule, and with it open the possibility of new research and therapies.
A team of researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine has launched a new challenge for the online computer game Eterna in which players are being asked to design an RNA molecule capable of acting as an on/off switch for the gene-editing tool CRISPR/Cas9.
Molecular biologists will then build and test the actual molecules, based on the most promising designs provided by the players.
How do we make it in today’s crazy, alternative facts, almost alternative world–we get creative, we get INNOVATIVE. Here on ScIQ, we’re talking to two incredible innovators in medical sciences and human health.
Just in her 20s, Kathrine Jin was part of the team of Columbia University students who developed a low-cost, technology-driven solution to meet the urgent challenges posed by the Ebola crisis. She has been honored the United Nations in celebration of International Day of Women and Girls in Science for her part in the creation of Highlight, a patent-pending disinfectant solution. Learn more about Kinnos here: https://www.kinnos.us/about-us/
When he’s not working at MLB, Keith Comito works with his research group, LifeSpan I.O. in projects related to longevity or age related disease, and receive funds from contributors to fulfill their goals. Thanks to generous funding and awards towards life-changing research, Lifespan I.O. has currently completed 6 diverse projects, which you can find on Lifespan I.O’s website. Learn about Lifespan I.O here: https://www.lifespan.io/
This video is presented by Jayde Lovell, at Youtube Space NY. Written by Wandy Oritz, directed by Ingrid Nin, edited by Mashnoon Ibtesum at the YouTube Space NYC. Camera work by Alicia Weaver, Lisa McCullough, Genesis Moran and Mashnoon Ibtesum. Production Assistant: Jordan Yaqoob
SCIQ ON THE YOUNG TURKS Produced by Jayde Lovell and Wandy Ortiz. Executive Producer: Bec Susan Gill. ScIQ is a partner of the The Young Turks Network.
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New Pneumonia In Chinese Hospitals Is Drug-Resistant, Deadly And Contagious : Goats and Soda When microbiologist Sheng Chen and his team sequenced the microbes found in the pneumonia infections, they were shocked at what they saw.
Nanomachines which can drill into cancer cells, killing them in just 60 seconds, have been developed by scientists.
The tiny spinning molecules are driven by light, and spin so quickly that they can burrow their way through cell linings when activated.
In one test conducted at Durham University the nanomachines took between one and three minutes to break through the outer membrane of prostate cancer cell, killing it instantly.
If there was a poster child of aging diseases, it would be Alzheimer’s disease. The brains of people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease have deposits of amyloids resulting from the loss of proteostasis. Alzheimer’s disease is accompanied by the presence of amyloid beta protein and tau protein as well as large numbers of activated pro-inflammatory immune cells.
The debate about which is primary has raged for many years in the research world, and it is still not clear how these three elements combine to cause disease progression. A new study has attempted to untangle the mystery and suggests the order is beta amyloid, inflammation, then tau, and this study identifies new targets for therapies[1].
The smallest chip the team has developed so far measures 22 microns (about a fifth the thickness of a human hair), which they plan to test reading with a specialized RFID interrogator.
It is important to note that none of the embryos were allowed to develop for more than a few days, and that the team never had any intention of implanting them into a womb. However, it seems that this is largely due to ongoing regulatory issues, as opposed to issues with the technology itself.
In the United States, all efforts to turn edited embryos into a baby — to bring the embryo to full term — have been blocked by Congress, which added language to the Department of Health and Human Services funding bill that forbids it from approving any such clinical trials.
