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Adamantium
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19 Feb 2016, 1:49 pm

Aristophanes wrote:
I'm all for research. You want to find a cure for cancer, go on right ahead. You want to develop a rocket to go wherever in the solar system, all for it. You want to f**k with natural evolution, well there I have a problem because you're making fundamental decisions about what is and is not valuable to the macro organism of life itself. I'm sorry but you're not qualified to make that decision-- no one is. Any single one of us, hell even our giant metropolises, are small compared to the beast called life, there's no possible way a human, or humanity even, can have enough perspective to make decisions for all of it. The only real ignorance here is someone thinking they can fundamentally alter nature without any consequences.


I don't think you have any understanding of what this work is about. If it's not about the germ line, it has zero bearing on evolution.

What neither you nor ASPartOfMe seems to have considered is that researchers are required to make silly claims about the practical benefits of their research. This is almost always couched in vague claims about how the research might one day be used to fight some hot disease.

See for example, the claim here my italics added:
http://grantome.com/grant/NIH/R01-MH105519-02
Quote:
Public Health Relevance

The proposed research will establish a new regulatory relationship between miRNAs miR-9 and miR-139-5p with the FOXP1 and FOXP2 genes, and establish novel functions of miR-9 and miR-139-5p in the development and functions of a striatal circuit important for vocal learning behavior. The insights gained here will further our understanding of how genetic and environmental factors may contribute to many neural developmental disorders and mental illness related to the striatum. With further research, these miRNAs may lead to the development of novel diagnostic markers or therapeutic targets.


The researcher is interested in advancing basic knowledge, but needs to justify an application for funding with some utilitarian bs. This is because we live in the post Barry Goldwater era of congressional stupid interfering with science.
http://grants.nih.gov/grants/plain_language.htm

An honest answer to "what is the public health impact of this research?" will almost always be: "who knows, we have to see what we find out first." Most of the denizens of Congress and the Executive know less than nothing about basic science, so this doesn't make sense to them. So the researchers come up with this kind of thin nonsense "Novel therapies may someday emerge as we begin to learn basic facts about this area."

This is hardly the first nudge on a slippery slope leading to eugenics.


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Aristophanes
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19 Feb 2016, 1:58 pm

Well, we're arguing two different things. I could give a damn about this specific research, it's well down the branch of an entire tree of science I'm against investigating at this moment-- not due to some love ignorance, but due to the fact that I don't trust humanity's ignorance with the possible knowledge that results. Pandora's box has only been around ~2000 years, I still have hope that in another 2k years people will finally understand the lesson. No science is inherently good or bad, like math it's merely a tool, therefore the effects new science has is entirely up to the population that wields it-- I'm nowhere even close to the point of saying there's currently a civilization out there morally and ethically capable of borrowing nature's keys and driving the car for a bit.



Adamantium
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19 Feb 2016, 2:03 pm

But it's too late!

The gods left the instruction manual written in every part of the world around us.

Nuclear explosions did not start with us, nor did genetic recombination. Stars and viruses have been dancing and playing with this stuff for far longer than we or anything much like us has been on the planet.

We can't put the genie back in the bottle and not knowing just leaves us vulnerable to terrible things that aren't controlled by other wicked men but are thrown up randomly out of the seething chaos of nature.

Ignorance is not bliss and it isn't safe either.


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Aristophanes
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19 Feb 2016, 2:32 pm

Adamantium wrote:
But it's too late!

The gods left the instruction manual written in every part of the world around us.

Nuclear explosions did not start with us, nor did genetic recombination. Stars and viruses have been dancing and playing with this stuff for far longer than we or anything much like us has been on the planet.

We can't put the genie back in the bottle and not knowing just leaves us vulnerable to terrible things that aren't controlled by other wicked men but are thrown up randomly out of the seething chaos of nature.

Ignorance is not bliss and it isn't safe either.


Exactly, that seething chaos of nature exists for a reason, without it there's no evolution, without evolution there's not life. It's unpleasant sure, but it's also necessary. And therein lies the human conundrum with science-- nature doesn't give a s**t about any individual creature or species, it has a system and that system works; humans on the other hand will inevitably eliminate things they don't like without regard to the consequences, which inevitably leads to poor outcomes.

You're right, humans haven't actually created anything, we've merely created frameworks (math/science) to understand the world around us (physics). That being said, the scientist is arrogant, it's not their fault it's just a natural reaction to understanding things that 90% of the population doesn't understand. It's this very human, and it should be noted, illogical, feeling that lead scientists to opening Pandora's box and thus proving they aren't really even as smart as the truly ignorant people-- the ignorant know not to mess with things they don't fully understand, they're smart enough to avoid them and let others more qualified deal with them (nature in this case).

So the genie and the bottle-- it's out there so I should just gleefully march towards extinction because if I don't follow this path, someone else will? Sorry I don't play that game, if others want to open Pandora's box and spread disease I'll defend that goddamn nasty little box-- like I am now. I may lose but at least I feel good that I've fought ignorance and hubris instead of rolling out a red carpet for it.



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19 Feb 2016, 2:51 pm

HisMom wrote:
ASPartOfMe wrote:
Neuroscientists reverse autism symptoms Turning on a gene later in life can restore typical behavior in mice.
Quote:
There is more and more evidence showing that some of the defects are indeed reversible, giving hope that we can develop treatment for autistic patients in the future.”


They or you can deny this is eugenics all you want but the language of the scientists strongly suggest otherwise.
..

If "eugenics" will help my son communicate, learn, gain skills and live an independent life, then why not ? Autism isn't just about HFA, it is also about people on the opposite end of the spectrum whose quality of life and whose well being may be positively impacted by research like this.

HFAs who scream "autism pride" and condemn a research that might help individuals like my child are not doing themselves any favour. If they do not share my son's severe autism that affects every aspect of his existence, from understanding basic language to being able to use the toilet then they dont get to talk for him or to complain about research that might help him and others like him.

Not being potty trained at 6 or not saying a word at age 6 due to his autism is nothing to be proud of.

I hope this therapy is made available to LFA kids in my lifetime so I have the pleasure of my son's voice one day, some day, before I die.


You make a good point. Sometimes we Aspies forget not all people with autism are potential Sheldon Coopers or H.P. Lovecrafts.


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19 Feb 2016, 3:13 pm

Adamantium wrote:
Follow the money...
http://grantome.com/grant/NIH/R01-MH097104-03

Clearly the Trilateral Commission and their overlords from the Bilderberg Group are serving their alien overlords with area 51 technology and going all out to enable the nefarious Dr. Feng to
Quote:
To investigate the intrastriatal microcircuitry dysfunction in Shank3 mutant mice. (2) To determine the relative contributions of the direct and indirect pathway of the basal ganglia in repetitive behavior. (3) To dissect neural circuits involved in social interaction deficits in Shank3 mutant mice. Together, these studies may significantly enhance our understanding of neural circuitry mechanisms of autistic-like behaviors and may help to develop novel strategies for more effective treatment


Someday we may be in real trouble if we develop a greater understanding of how genetic regulation of protein production plays a role in neural signalling and repetitive behavior.

Ignorance is our only defense! Stamp out all knew knowledge today because who knows where it might lead???

/sarcasm


Nothing about Builderberg in that document, but autism as "pathological" and "devastating" is in that document. That is researching with a desperation agenda which can lead to "devastating" mistakes. It is researching with only partial understanding what they seem to so badly to want to eliminate.


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19 Feb 2016, 3:34 pm

Adamantium wrote:
But it's too late!

The gods left the instruction manual written in every part of the world around us.

Nuclear explosions did not start with us, nor did genetic recombination. Stars and viruses have been dancing and playing with this stuff for far longer than we or anything much like us has been on the planet.

We can't put the genie back in the bottle and not knowing just leaves us vulnerable to terrible things that aren't controlled by other wicked men but are thrown up randomly out of the seething chaos of nature.

Ignorance is not bliss and it isn't safe either.


It probably is to late. Fighting it has a minimal chance of success, not fighting it has zero chance of success. I will take minimal over zero as the lesser of two evils.


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19 Feb 2016, 3:43 pm

I think you are clutching at straws, there. Autism is devastating to some people. That doesn't mean to all people and quantifying or describing those aspects of the spectrum is outside the scope of that grant application.

And "elucidate the pathological mechanisms of ASDs" could be rewritten as "reveal the way ASDs cause pathology" -- now you can deny that ASDs ever do have pathological effects, but I don't think it's an argument you can win.

You fault them for having only partial understanding, but seem not to comprehend that it is precisely this kind of research that increases understanding.

You talk about eliminating something, but the grant application talks about "development of effective treatments."

I submit to you that this is something quite different than eliminating people or traits, meddling blindly with God's perfect evolutionary plan, or practicing any sort of eugenic program.


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19 Feb 2016, 3:44 pm

Just a question about the research, probably more for Adamantium than about the politics and whether or not it's eugenics...

So the research turns on the gene and more Shank3 protein is produced, and synaptic connections start happening better. Only knowing a tiny amount of brain science, I am surprised to see this much plasticity in the adult brain - aren't microcircuits, pathways, structure more defined by then? I mean, if my amagydalla is huge and I have a relative abundance of strands going to my visual center, will more Shank3 help? Will it change structure and circuits over time?

Also I wouldn't stress out too much about scientists' language - it's typically very specified and often doesn't carry the social implications that we use outside of these labs. For example, they may talk about a "toxic insult" to brain development, but it's really nothing personal.

Anyway, flame on... but I was curious to learn more about the content.


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19 Feb 2016, 3:55 pm

Adamantium wrote:
I think you are clutching at straws, there. Autism is devastating to some people. That doesn't mean to all people and quantifying or describing those aspects of the spectrum is outside the scope of that grant application.

And "elucidate the pathological mechanisms of ASDs" could be rewritten as "reveal the way ASDs cause pathology" -- now you can deny that ASDs ever do have pathological effects, but I don't think it's an argument you can win.

You fault them for having only partial understanding, but seem not to comprehend that it is precisely this kind of research that increases understanding.

You talk about eliminating something, but the grant application talks about "development of effective treatments."

I submit to you that this is something quite different than eliminating people or traits, meddling blindly with God's perfect evolutionary plan, or practicing any sort of eugenic program.


Like I said earlier I desperatly hope you are right only the good parts of autism live on, the bad parts go to the ashheap of history and the only causality is a self inflicted wound by one ignorent paranoid Aspie. History and experience tell me othewise but History does not have to repeat itself.


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19 Feb 2016, 4:27 pm

Adamantium wrote:
I submit to you that this is something quite different than eliminating people or traits, meddling blindly with God's perfect evolutionary plan, or practicing any sort of eugenic program.

Messing with the fundamental building blocks of life, whether permanently or temporarily, is still playing God. Think for a second Adamantium, really think, does humanity's 50 year experience with cellular genetics compare to nature's 4 billion year experience? If you're more visually inclined just look at the zeros-- Humans: 50, Nature: 4,000,000,000. Tack on eight zeros to human experience and then it can be involved in the discussion. Or to put it another way: I'm a musician, if I ran into another musician with 4 billion years of experience you better believe I'm listening to everything he/she has to say about music, not second guessing every decision they make. Disease isn't pleasant, nor is aging, nor is extinction, but did you ever stop to think those things, as unpleasant as they are, are actually necessary for life to function? No you didn't, you see them as a problem to your own small personal being and thus there has to be a solution-- just as a scientist would see it. But step back from the personal, the ego, the individual, for just one second and imagine you're in the space station looking down and there's an entire planet of life of which you're not even a spec of grain, do you really feel qualified making decisions for all of it? Let's say you have enough hubris that you think you can. I mean let's face it, you're right, you're not alone, there are a lot of people that want to push science to the limits, like's it's some kind of extreme sport for nerds like ourselves. Are those same people willing to shoulder the responsibility should their research turn out to be unsound or have gravely negative unforeseen consequences? Yeah, right, they'll pass it on to another person, country, or generation. And, that's making a huge assumption that their intent and motivation was pure to start with-- no need to mention the consequences if it's not.



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19 Feb 2016, 4:38 pm

Nine7752 wrote:
So the research turns on the gene and more Shank3 protein is produced, and synaptic connections start happening better. Only knowing a tiny amount of brain science, I am surprised to see this much plasticity in the adult brain - aren't microcircuits, pathways, structure more defined by then? I mean, if my amagydalla is huge and I have a relative abundance of strands going to my visual center, will more Shank3 help? Will it change structure and circuits over time?


Yes, the plasticity of the mature brain is fascinating. It was dogma into the 1980s that there was no neurological development after puberty, but then adult acquisition of second language studies revealed new growth of dendritic connections resulting in new synaptic pathways.

The is a (tragically paywalled) write up of this research here: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/va ... 16971.html

"SHANK3 is a postsynaptic scaffold protein that regulates synaptic development, function and plasticity by orchestrating the assembly of postsynaptic density macromolecular signalling complex. Disruptions of the Shank3 gene in mouse models have resulted in synaptic defects and autistic-like behaviours including anxiety, social interaction deficits, and repetitive behaviour. We generated a novel Shank3 conditional knock-in mouse model, and show that re-expression of the Shank3 gene in adult mice led to improvements in synaptic protein composition, spine density and neural function in the striatum. We also provide behavioural evidence that certain behavioural abnormalities including social interaction deficit and repetitive grooming behaviour could be rescued, while anxiety and motor coordination deficit could not be recovered in adulthood."

It is not at all clear that the mouse model created by Feng is a good model for autism, and Shank3 variations are rare in people with ASDs, so this is at best something with narrow relevance to a subset of autistic people.

It's much more interesting for what it reveals about plasticity in adult brains and the way the researchers are trying to track causal relationships from codon to synapse.

I will confess, this area has become a special interest and I find the structures and relationships revealed by this research thrilling, beautiful and awesome. This work moves me in very much the same way that physics and astronomy do.

In this interview, Feng talks about the role of Shank3 in some types of autism and schizophrenia. The cause of both outcomes is an errant stop codon where a coding codon should be. The difference between the schizophrenic and ASD outcomes is how early in the sequence the bogus stop codon is introduced. In the autistic version the stop comes early and no protein is produced. In the schizophrenic version the stop comes later in the sequence and a truncated protein is produced:

https://www.broadinstitute.org/blog/sin ... izophrenia

I'm sorry Aristophanes, I don't believe that this is any more playing god than anything else humans do. Your concept of what is necessary for life to function suggests a concept of plan and purpose that I don't share. The universe is as it is, we are part of it and that means all of us-our inquisitiveness and model making or symbolic storage and scientific exploration and rampant engineering. There is no pure, natural state that we are defiling by doing what we do. Everything changes and we, as individuals and as a species, have a little time to be part of that flow of change.


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19 Feb 2016, 4:50 pm

Aristophanes wrote:
Fugu wrote:
Aristophanes wrote:
Eliminating even a single gene from a pool is eugenics
this is such a broad definition that it makes the term meaningless, sorry. If it was defined that way, we've been practicing eugenics for millennia via selective breeding.

Yeah, exactly, that should make you stop and think a bit.
about a meaningless definition? no, not really.



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19 Feb 2016, 4:59 pm

Aristophanes wrote:
Messing with the fundamental building blocks of life, whether permanently or temporarily, is still playing God. Think for a second Adamantium, really think, does humanity's 50 year experience with cellular genetics compare to nature's 4 billion year experience? If you're more visually inclined just look at the zeros-- Humans: 50, Nature: 4,000,000,000. Tack on eight zeros to human experience and then it can be involved in the discussion. Or to put it another way: I'm a musician, if I ran into another musician with 4 billion years of experience you better believe I'm listening to everything he/she has to say about music, not second guessing every decision they make. Disease isn't pleasant, nor is aging, nor is extinction, but did you ever stop to think those things, as unpleasant as they are, are actually necessary for life to function? No you didn't, you see them as a problem to your own small personal being and thus there has to be a solution-- just as a scientist would see it. But step back from the personal, the ego, the individual, for just one second and imagine you're in the space station looking down and there's an entire planet of life of which you're not even a spec of grain, do you really feel qualified making decisions for all of it? Let's say you have enough hubris that you think you can. I mean let's face it, you're right, you're not alone, there are a lot of people that want to push science to the limits, like's it's some kind of extreme sport for nerds like ourselves. Are those same people willing to shoulder the responsibility should their research turn out to be unsound or have gravely negative unforeseen consequences? Yeah, right, they'll pass it on to another person, country, or generation. And, that's making a huge assumption that their intent and motivation was pure to start with-- no need to mention the consequences if it's not.
You're attributing random chance to nature as if it's an entity that can remember, when it's closer to a snowball rolling down an infinitely long mountainside with random bits flying off or being added.
are you really so selfish as to deny people freedom from what we have should they desire it?



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19 Feb 2016, 5:12 pm

Agree, it's an interesting area. The study does seem to show more about the function of the gene and plasticity than about "curing" autism per se. It also points to non-plastic areas, where the anxiety and motor stuck around in this case. It's an interesting time for this kind of work.

It'd be interesting to do an anonymous, not-on-my-record gene test to see what SNPs are active for me.

I feel like some quote from Carl Sagan would fit into this thread, but I'll just ignore it all.


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19 Feb 2016, 5:13 pm

Fugu wrote:
Aristophanes wrote:
Fugu wrote:
Aristophanes wrote:
Eliminating even a single gene from a pool is eugenics
this is such a broad definition that it makes the term meaningless, sorry. If it was defined that way, we've been practicing eugenics for millennia via selective breeding.

Yeah, exactly, that should make you stop and think a bit.
about a meaningless definition? no, not really.

No about the fact that we've genetically altered so much of our food supply that we basically don't even really know what we were eating from 10 million years ago to 10 thousand years ago. Meanwhile, obesity, of which there's no fossil evidence of ever having existed until circa 10k years ago (hint hint: that's the time modern farming and animal husbandry arose), just seemed to pop up out of nowhere and we can't figure out why. I'll give you hint with obesity: it's not all just exercise, the s**t people unwittingly shovel into their mouth is equally to blame. Nutrition from modern stores is nothing like real fresh food, it doesn't even look the same. Yeah, eugenics, selective breeding, whatever term you want to use for humans killing species they don't like, that gave us the food supply that's making us sick today.

When I started breeding plants about 15 years ago I was all gung-ho on maximizing the genetic output of my plants. After about 5 years I realized that while I was able to maximize the production I'd also unwittingly made my pepper plants bland and prone to disease. I spent the next five correcting the problems only to find the production dropped back down. That's when I realized that you can move the profile of genetics in one direction or the other, but it will always have consequences on other related genetics (not just pepper plants, they were my favorite that's why I used them as the penultimate example). There is no cure-all that has only positive effects, you can take from Peter to pay Paul with genetics, but you can't just mystically create something out of nothing or eliminate something like it was never intended to exist without consequences somewhere down the chain. This shouldn't be a surprise, the basis of all science is math and there's really only one fundamental of basic math: the equation must balance on both sides. I'm just happy I learned this lesson @25 and not @45.