[RhetoricThug]

In conclusion, the scientific matrix (and its digital society) will override nature because our archaic system of checks & balances cannot keep up with scientific progression. Let's face it, we've most likely cloned humans inside one of the several deep underground military bases located around the world, and most of the cutting edge research may be compartmentalized & classified. The fixed perspective specialists are not afraid of ruining life on this planet and will continue to probe (deconstruct & reconstruct) material/matter within our visible spectrum of experience. Scientists are so out of touch with reality that they'll experiment with anything just because they can. The hubris of such logic is appallingly MAD. We need some sort of council of wise men to watch over these socially inept lunatics. As they open Pandora's box and program matter, with artificial intelligence, quantum computers, trans-human soldiers, robots, we sit and watch the brave neuron world of tomorrow unfold. We've moved away from thoughtful discourse, we now satisfy our conceited knowledge whenever we get a chance.

Follow me as I drunkenly mock science.

You Can Now Grow Human-Animal Hybrids, But You Can’t Breed ‘Em
http://www.wired.com/2016/08/new-nih-ru ... -breed-em/
Whew, the headline had me worried for a second...

The mighty Chimera—a single body sprouting lion, goat and snake heads—is one of the most recognizable mythological beasts. The modern chimera is not so physically striking, being a hybrid organism with organs or tissues from multiple species. But it could become an important tool for medical research. Scientists have mixed-and-matched human and animal cells for years, hoping to one day grow replacement human organs or discover genetic pathways of human diseases.

Let's see if your insurance will cover that. This is yet one more area of research that will enable organs to become replaceable parts and thus one more commodity on the market. Human Life spans will coincide with unethical socioeconomic Darwinism and just like how our current black market operates, organs with go to those who can afford em.

Last year, though, the National Institutes of Health banned funding of animal-human chimeras until it could figure out whether any of this work would bump against ethical boundaries. Like: Could brain scientists endow research animals with human cognitive abilities, or even consciousness, while transplanting human stem cells into the brain of a developing animal embryo? Would it be morally wrong to create animals with human feet, hands, or a face in order to study human morphology? Modern medicine thinks before it acts.

Modern medicine certainly thinks before it acts, it worries about funding, the supply, the demand, etc. The ethical boundaries are meaningless to many of the scientists which see this world through their scientific tunnel vision.

After a nearly year-long ban, on August 4 the NIH said it would soon lift its moratorium and again start accepting grant applications from research labs that want to develop human-animal chimeras. “We thought it was good time to take a deep breath, pause and make sure the ethical frameworks that we have in place allows us to move forward and conduct this research responsibly,” says Carrie Wolinetz, associate director for science policy at NIH.

In other words, they thought it was a good time to lobby for funding.

The boundary between human and animal is not just a philosophical debate. Human subjects in medical research have greater legal protections than laboratory animals, according to Rob Streiffer, assistant professor of bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “What it takes to cross a line is a contentious issue,” says Streiffer. For example, some people believe that a lot of animal testing is wrong, because many animals can feel pain and suffering. Others argue that any organism that displays uniquely human traits—things like autonomy, moral reasoning, and controlling one’s own behavior—ought to be excluded from research.

Oh, I get it, scientific jargon nullifies common-sense.

A new internal ethics panel will review any projects that change an animal’s brain functions, but the new guidelines keep existing restrictions against putting human cells in primates like chimpanzees, and prohibit breeding animals that have human cells inside—so any pigoons would have to be sterile.

Right, because a new external ethics panel would be a conflict of interest. However, thank you for addressing my Planet of the Apes concern.

Chimera research will be made easier by new gene-editing technologies like Crispr, in combination with human stem cell manipulations that let scientists form any kind of tissue. “The intersection of those two [gene-editing and stem cell technologies] allow us to create animal-human chimeras for research that are little more advanced than the past, triggering questions about animal welfare,” says Wolinetz. While animal-human chimeras have been around for several decades, the ability to transplant human brain tissue into developing animal embryos—potentially endowing animals with more human-like consciousness—drives the debate that led to the NIH’s initial ban.

Good thing you finally got your 'foot in the door,' eh? Incrementally normalize the dehumanization and desensitize the population (as they play their virtual reality apps) and when the time is right, just 'go big or go home.'

NIH officials say there are fewer than a dozen US academic labs researching with animal-human chimeras. One is at Stanford University, where Sean Wu is working to understand how to repair human heart tissue. He’s pleased that his work can continue, even if there may be an extra layer of bureaucracy.

That pesky extra layer of bureaucracy, stopping all that progress. I think I heard some Chinese scientist say that China wishes to sequence every living Genome, sounds like a fantastic plan. Once we live forever, what next? What is the point exactly, to say- at least we tried? I can't wait to live inside an artificial purgatory with my half-robot family.

Still, Wu says some ethical concerns about human behavior or functions being transplanted into animals are in the realm of science fiction. “There’s a lot of concern and speculation and no data that anyone can offer,” he says. “We think there should be a way to carefully move forward so we can know what are the limits.” The NIH wants to hear from the public and scientists over the next 30 days before coming up with final guidelines, and it expects to fund a new batch of human-animal chimera grants by January 2017.

I'm sure you'll get to that data, and once you do, it'll be too late.

One way to avoid the consciousness-raising quandary is by deleting bits of DNA that are responsible for the development of certain parts of the human brain before implanting into a lab animal. That way, you could still study the origins of Alzheimer’s or other brain diseases without worrying about creating a human-like animal. “The science is moving very fast,” says Wu. The NIH just wants to make sure its standards can keep up.

Or how about you avoid this approach (method, technique, etc) and wait for something less crude and primitive, you goofballs. Let's try to fix some of our more simple problems before you dismantle life as we know it. Perhaps you can start with poverty and hunger?

The first atomic bomb was detonated on July 16, 1945, in the Trinity test in New Mexico; Oppenheimer remarked later that it brought to mind words from the Bhagavad Gita: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

Thank you for that well-read and esoteric reflection. I'm glad you feel that way, you crazy old bastard.


Thank you for reading, 'Thoughts from one drunken alarmist.'

[Hong Wu]

Only religious people would stop "science", that's why the "smart" people hate them so much.

On one hand, most science fiction scenarios (including apocalyptic ones) are nonsense. A mouse with a human ear or even human brain cells won't hurt you. On the other hand, we are capable of causing quite a bit of damage with things that already exist. It's the stuff science fiction writers have mostly not thought of that might be really dangerous.

[RhetoricThug]

Only religious people would stop "science", that's why the "smart" people hate them so much.

Yeah, only paradigms think through paradigms! That's why paradigms suck so much. The truth being, science & religion can follow perverted practices and establish corrupt institutions. I guess all those little concentration camp children that had been experimented on by that Monster, Josef Mengele, were being punished for being dumb and religious. Luckily, animals are too stupid to be religious or else they would really have a tough time in this world.

[Hong Wu]

Yeah, only paradigms think through paradigms! That's why paradigms suck so much. The truth beinmg, science & religion can follow perverted practices and establish corrupt institutions.

Civilizations need to be ordered to survive, a good religion is counter-cultural and opposes the constructs or paradigms of civilization in a way that isn't self-destructive or purely chaotic... being against "paradigms" in of themselves sounds childish. You will just be replaced with a different paradigm, such as how Islam is advancing through Europe.

[RhetoricThug]

Civilizations need to be ordered to survive, a good religion is counter-cultural and opposes the constructs or paradigms of civilization in a way that isn't self-destructive or purely chaotic... being against "paradigms" in of themselves sounds childish. You will just be replaced with a different paradigm, such as how Islam is advancing through Europe.

Yesterday is the antithesis, today is the thesis, or is today the antithesis and yesterday the thesis... nonetheless, you get the synthesis, right? Thanks for explaining that, I didn't understand how triangles work. Growing human animal hybrids in laboratories shall not help with civilizations survival, and being religious has nothing to do with pointing out how out of touch with reality scientists can be. I highly doubt that these organs will become affordable for the majority of people that make up civilization as we know it.

[Hong Wu]

Yesterday is the antithesis, today is the thesis, or is today the antithesis and yesterday the thesis... nonetheless, you get the synthesis, right? Thanks for explaining that, I didn't understand how triangles work. Growing human animal hybrids in laboratories has nothing to do with civilization as we know it, and being religious has nothing to do with pointing out just how out of touch with reality scientists can be.

TBH I am not sure we understood each other so you might want to just ignore what I wrote.

[Atlantis]

The trouble is that religion (like philosophy) has been dethroned. Science has usurped the role religion used to have. However, science does not have what it takes to assume that leading role of religion. That's why modernity is rudderless. Science cannot give us a sense of direction. It cannot give meaning. Instead of leading society in a direction beneficial to it's members, science is pulled this or that way by special interests and money.

There is no way back to the religious systems of the past, yet materialism is a dead-end bound to destroy or pervert life on this planet. All-out consumerism produces nothing but the desire for even more consumer goods, gradually turning the living systems of the planet into dead waste. We have substituted a philosophy of life with a philosophy of death.

We need to go beyond materialism and develop a new moral that replaces the anthropocentric system with one that safeguards the sanctity of the ecosystem as a whole.

[Donna]

The trouble is that religion (like philosophy) has been dethroned. Science has usurped the role religion used to have. However, science does not have what it takes to assume that leading role of religion. That's why modernity is rudderless. Science cannot give us a sense of direction. It cannot give meaning. Instead of leading society in a direction beneficial to it's members, science is pulled this or that way by special interests and money.

There is no way back to the religious systems of the past, yet materialism is a dead-end bound to destroy or pervert life on this planet. All-out consumerism produces nothing but the desire for even more consumer goods, gradually turning the living systems of the planet into dead waste. We have substituted a philosophy of life with a philosophy of death.

We need to go beyond materialism and develop a new moral that replaces the anthropocentric system with one that safeguards the sanctity of the ecosystem as a whole.

lol, you sound like Rudolf Steiner :^)

[RhetoricThug]

@RhetoricThug, Hey, what if this technology saves your life or the life of someone you love? Sure, you can sit here and 'mock' science, but science gave you the ability to mock it. Science built the equipment you use to drunk-post on the internet. Science gave you the internet, the externalized human mind or 'noosphere.'

... Obviously I understand that... I'm not against science , I'm against our reckless quest for quasi-immortality, especially when scientific experiments threaten our entire genetic code. You shouldn't do something just because you can, why do you think we discipline naive children? Do these scientists consider the consequence(s) of their actions? It's like they experience some kind of 'tunnel vision,' as they throw the blinders up, and obsessively try to make/find the next big breakthrough. Generally, science is beneficial. However, this kind of research & development follows a disturbing pattern, where folks in white coats pursue their science as folks in black suits wait for results. Our priorities are messed up.

Why can we send celestial faring satellites across our galaxy, obliterate things with XYZ bombs, clone animals, find new particles, while the majority of folks be living off dinosaur blood, credit, and artificial food? You may claim- miniaturization can be expensive and hard to implement, but I don't buy that explanation. I am convinced that the international break-away civilization will do anything to secure its own immortality. You can find symptoms of the break-away civilization throughout the ages fucking things up with imperial empires, imperial perceptions, imperial science. The agenda or goal trickles down through our institutional networks so someone somewhere be always working toward quasi-immortality (plus our human condition reinforces our fear of death). If human-animal hybrids possess the potential to 'save lives,' so be it, but I personally think that this technology will rapidly create genetic chaos on this planet. Uncontrollable, unaccountable, ecogenetic chaos. I stand by my statement: Science will dismantle the human race as we know it.

The trouble is that religion (like philosophy) has been dethroned. Science has usurped the role religion used to have. However, science does not have what it takes to assume that leading role of religion. That's why modernity is rudderless. Science cannot give us a sense of direction. It cannot give meaning. Instead of leading society in a direction beneficial to it's members, science is pulled this or that way by special interests and money.

There is no way back to the religious systems of the past, yet materialism is a dead-end bound to destroy or pervert life on this planet. All-out consumerism produces nothing but the desire for even more consumer goods, gradually turning the living systems of the planet into dead waste. We have substituted a philosophy of life with a philosophy of death.

We need to go beyond materialism and develop a new moral that replaces the anthropocentric system with one that safeguards the sanctity of the ecosystem as a whole.

Nice post. I think we need to embrace transcendental neoism and eliminate thought formations which evolve around paradigms & our five sense reality. Indeed, we need to be careful when redesigning such things, because we wouldn't wish to utilize ANY of the known & failed formulas (ie: communism, fascism, central banking, etc). I'll reinforce your sentiment with: We must continuously, and perhaps cautiously, examine & reexamine our invented purpose, because the universe is perpetually evolving. Since man is one symptom of the universe, sentient, conscious, self-aware, we must recognize our human bias and deny our SELF-esque or selfish relationship to the universe when it threatens the universe & our existence. I personally believe that the best solution is usually aligned with natural law. We should discover, develop, and deploy our technologies with consideration for the largest medium, nature. We shouldn't bypass or ignore the medium known as nature, we should flow with it instead of against it.

I don't wish to live in a world where a human institution can own our genetic code and mass produce biological entities.

[Atlantis]

Nice post. I think we need to embrace transcendental neoism and eliminate thought formations which evolve around paradigms & our five sense reality. Indeed, we need to be careful when redesigning such things, because we wouldn't wish to utilize ANY of the known & failed formulas (ie: communism, fascism, central banking, etc). I'll reinforce your sentiment with: We must continuously, and perhaps cautiously, examine & reexamine our invented purpose, because the universe is perpetually evolving. Since man is one symptom of the universe, sentient, conscious, self-aware, we must recognize our human bias and deny our SELF-esque or selfish relationship to the universe when it threatens the universe & our existence. I personally believe that the best solution is usually aligned with natural law. We should discover, develop, and deploy our technologies with consideration for the largest medium, nature. We shouldn't bypass or ignore the medium known as nature, we should flow with it instead of against it.

I would like to propose the opposite

Natural Law is a human concept that led to the idea of science which is at the basis of everything you seem to object to, such as cloning, for example.

I think we need to transcend concepts of Nature such as natural law to reconnect with Nature without the bias of habit energy acquired over the ages. In other words, we need to reconnect with the divine in our daily life. We need to be able to see the whole at every instant so as not to get lost in the special interest of the particular.

As long as we are enclosed in the shell of our separate identity (cell, organism, family, clan, state, bloc, etc.), we'll be driven into a self-destructive behavior aiming to defend our identity against all others, like Cain slaying Abel. However, despite the killer instinct, individuals are also capable of defending the collective or the ecosystem in order to safeguard their own survival.

[ThirdTerm]

One of the pivotal biological discoveries in recent years has been the derivation of pluripotent hES cells. hES cell pluripotency has been screened by in vitro differentiation assays. In vivo, the predominant assay for pluripotency has been teratoma formation. Teratoma formation from hES cells injected subcutaneously into immune-deficient mice results in a tumor with many, potentially all, differentiated body cell types. Human-mouse chimeras carrying hES cell-derived teratomas are discussed in depth in Lensch et al. (2007).

There are only a few reports directly combining hES cells with the embryos of vertebrate model organisms. Chick embryos were used as a host to test hES cell potency (Goldstein et al., 2002). Clumps of 100–200 hES cells were grafted into somite stage embryos and incubated for 1–5 days to create human-chick chimeras. The transplanted hES cells were able to survive, proliferate, and differentiate into epithelia, dorsal root ganglia, and neural rosettes with differentiated human neurons associated with the host neural tube. There is currently one report describing the results of injection of hES cells into the cavities of mouse blastocysts (James et al., 2006). The injected hES cells were incorporated into the inner cell mass of the blastocysts and continued to express the pluripotency protein, Oct3/4. Of 28 hES cell-mouse chimeric blastocysts transferred into the uterus of female foster mice and collected 5 days later at head-fold stages, only four embryos had hES cell-derived cells and only one of the four appeared normal, containing just ten hES cell-derived cells in foregut endoderm and neuroepithelium. It is currently unclear why there was such poor incorporation of the hES cells into the mouse embryo. Finally, hES cells have been injected directly into the brain ventricles of fetal mice (Muotri et al., 2005). The hES cells were marked by enhanced green fluorescent protein (EGFP) expression and ∼105 were injected through the exposed uterus into the lateral ventricles of 14 days postcoitus mouse fetuses and then returned to the mothers to complete gestation. Differentiated and functional human neurons and glia formed that were incorporated into the brains of the host animal. Interestingly, the size and timing of differentiation of the human cells appeared to be regulated by the host environment. In addition, no hES cell-derived teratomas formed in this human-mouse chimera model. Although the above examples suggest that hES cells may have remarkable regenerative potential in embryos and fetuses, there are currently too few examples of these types of experiments to make many conclusions.

Model organisms offer in vivo systems to study fundamental biological processes, providing insights into human physiology. However, these animals are not human and have limitations for studying specific human cellular characters. Practical and ethical concerns preclude direct studies on humans. Thus, human-animal chimeras provide an in vivo system for studying human tissues without experimentation on human individuals. Most of the biological outcomes from the human-animal chimera studies presented above are no different than what might occur if hES cells were mixed with animal embryos. As with all animal experimentation, there must be regulatory oversight (see Hyun et al., 2007). However, current discussions about the potential biological outcomes of hES cell-animal chimeras should consider the long heritage of human-animal chimera research that has provided important insights into human physiology, disease, and drug discovery.

http://www.cell.com/cell-stem-cell/fulltext/S1934-5909(07)00087-2

The Minotaur was a creature with the head of a bull and the body of a man. The most common form of human-animal chimeras will be laboratory rats grafted with human ES cells. It sounds like a story from a sci-fi novel but allowing such experiments enables us to study human tissues without actually experimenting on human individuals, which is a nifty idea that will broaden our horizons in many areas.

[Donna]

I sympathize greatly with Atlantis's Neo-Romantic opposition to materialism, which is one of the great German contributions to humanity and is sadly absent from America's philosophical development.

(@RhetoricThug, this is perhaps my one complaint about your redpill-ness; it is too materialistic, too entangled in the Jewish psyche and is void of lightness - in other words, it's too American)

The rehabilitation of Goethean science, as an alternative to Anglo-American scientism and the soulless epistemology it has engendered, is a subject that I've been interested in for a number of years (alongside the work of Steiner and Anthroposophical movement).

Science must always be, at once, philosophical, religious, and artistic, as it was in the morning of civilization when the Mysteries were carefully guarded by the initiate-kings. If it divorces itself from these transcendentals, it will degenerate and threaten us in a number of horrible ways.

[Hong Wu]

The problem with Gaiaism (for lack of a better term; lots of people have made this argument) is not just that it looks awkward when written in English. It's that nature doesn't have a pro-human orientation any more than consumerism does. Any Gaia-based philosophy will not truly be nature based, it would at most be an imaginary version of nature. Queue Greenpeace people trying to live with bears that kill them or whatever other examples you might find.

Now if you look at your hands, people were made to do things. We do things in part to have things. Consumerism gives us things but it is only part of the equation. The road to hell is to have without doing, inner peace is achieved when you can do without having. Marxism inverted this to say that inner peace was a mind-game for people to take from you but doing without having doesn't need to involve a taker.

[Atlantis]

I sympathize greatly with Atlantis's Neo-Romantic opposition to materialism, which is one of the great German contributions to humanity and is sadly absent from America's philosophical development.

No, that's not what I mean. I abhor romanticism.

[Donna]

I abhor romanticism.

Of course you do.

[RhetoricThug]

Machine-esque psychopathy is society's operating system.

Hang around Silicon Valley for awhile and the obsession with immortality is clear. Techies want to solve that granddaddy of problems: Death.

Peter Thiel, the billionaire investor behind Facebook and co-founder of PayPal, recently made headlines for his reported personal and professional interest in whether blood transfusions from younger people can improve and even extend life for older people.

Ewww. Vampire alert.

Ghoulish and ethically questionable as it may seem, Thiel’s interest in young blood and other life extension gambits shouldn’t come as a surprise.

In the eyes of many technologists, the human body is just another machine that can be tinkered with and tweaked.

“Why are tech leaders interested in immortality? It’s a combination of scientism and extraordinary wealth,” said Adam Gollner, author of “The Book of Immortality.” “Are Silicon Valley CEOs investing millions into physical immortality any different from the fantastically rich and all-powerful emperors in the Tang dynasty of China who died taking mercury-based elixirs of never-ending life? Time will tell.”

That interest in immortality is a good thing. A generation of tech billionaires are funding the most cutting-edge research in science and medicine. Their support could result in a longer and healthier life for all of us.

“Biology has become an engineering project, and a lot of tech people are engineers,” said Sonia Arrison, author of “100 Plus,” a book on longevity research and the implications of people living longer. Thiel wrote the introduction.

http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/articl ... /160809575

"Parabiosis" means the biological joining of two individuals, and in this context, it entails infusing oneself with young blood. If you're imagining the system the bad guys in Mad Max: Fury Road used to keep themselves healthy, in which they stole the hero's precious blood, you're imagining something surprisingly close to the biology involved in anti-aging parabiosis.

http://www.vice.com/read/peter-thiel-yo ... g-research

[Atlantis]

We are still in a bull's run (to speak in stock market terms). People believe technical fudges will gradually increase human life expectancy so that their own death will keep on receding into the future. I think we have pretty much reached the limits of what life-prolonging techniques can do and life-expectancy will peak in the not to distant future. It may even dip due to genetic degeneration and unhealthy lifestyles. Expect there to be a great sobering up when life-expectancy starts to dip.