Truth stranger than fiction, etc...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/medicine/story/0,,2081755,00.html

Scary!!

It's chilling, but only a matter of time. This will eventually lead to cloning and a 'sub spieces' of humanity, as predicted by Philip K.Dick and a thousand other sci-fi writers.

And there was I thinking that the speculated date for Endangerment Dolls was too early at 2050. Maybe not.

JB

Sorry, JB, but I have to disagree – and I'm someone who generally doesn’t approve of messing about with gene therapy and suchlike. However, I plead being Aquarian (love new technology while longing for the good old days of oil lamps and the penny-post). I think this is a step forward. It’s certainly a more humane and logical alternative to the abuse and inefficiencies of testing on sensate animals.

I'm just not sure why they have to mix human and animal cells. Does anyone know?

Dee

Brave New World - and that horrible scene in O Lucky Man?

Sarah

This is excellent news and will hopefully pave the way to cures for many diseases and theoretically all diseases, not excluding the regeneration/generation of missing, deformed or damaged limbs.

Dee I think the main reason is that there's a lack of human eggs from which to make the required cells. Despite all the brouhaha it's no big deal really.

Essentially what happens is they remove the genetic material from the animal cell and replace it with human DNA, basically it's like taking a seed and putting it in a slightly different soil.

JB there are lots of people that would argue that we are well on the way to creating subspecies of human, and we don't need genetic technologies to get there.

Dee, I was being a bit flippant. Yes, the scientific part of me can see the benefits, and sure if handled correctly, this technology will help save lives. However, as with most scientific endevours, there can sometimes be a downside, and a lot of sci-fi turns out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, so who knows what will happen once we seriously start messing around with the gene pool?

JB

A lot of sci-fi creates dystopian futures/worlds to create conflict to allow a story to progress, the reality, however, will always be much more mundane. Though I'd be interested in what you meant by

a lot of sci-fi turns out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy

Technically we've been messing around with the gene pool for thousands of years all plant crops are genetically engineered it was just done by a very labour intensive breeding method, the same goes for animals. At present, as much as we know, we are still stumbling around in the dark but you wouldn't believe the pace at which it's progressing. To think that the structure of DNA was really only discovered in the year that my dad was born and today we already have the human genome and that of countless other species. Progress is exponential, within the next 10 years, through genomics, proteomics and molecular biology I think we'll have covered the vast majority of unknowns.

the reality, however, will always be much more mundane

Yes, Geoff, like A-Bombs and Hiroshima. Remember that? Now, go back to the Middle Ages and try to describe it to the people writing about the end of the world.

JB

A bit off the ideological point but has anyone read Atwood's 'Oryx and Crake' which features some forms of animal/human blends. The pigoons are particularly alarming.

Naomi R

As devastating, horrendous and unforgivable as Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the real problems of a nuclear age tend to deal more with disposal and long term storage issues than killing millions. We could extend that argument to anything though, they couldn't have dropped the bomb without aeroplanes but for all the stupidity for which aeroplanes have been used the real issue they present is carbon dioxide emissions.

It's interesting that you use the A-bomb example though as Oppenheimer's famous quote "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds" comes from the Bhagavad Gita which is said to contain many references to weapons of mass destruction.

To be honest though I haven't read as much sci-fi as you, though I think it's still easy enough to see the tendency of gross exaggeration or taking something to the nth degree.

Yes, there has been exaggeration - after all, it is fiction, but there is a line of thinking that sci-fi in particular not only predicts the general course of future technology, it may even have something to do with plotting it.

In 1901, H G Wells'sFirst Men in the Moon was scoffed at by the scholars and scientists of the time. Men on the Moon, imagine! Yet in 1969, Neil Armstrong was there putting the reality to the fiction. HG Wells also described both fighter planes and bombers in When the Sleeper Awakes, four years before the Wright Brothers' project even got off the ground.

Jules Verne wrote about space, air and underwater travel by machine long before such things existed. He practically invented the idea of the submarine!

Star Trek's personal communication devices can easily be seen by science fiction fans as a precursor to mobile phones.

In the seventies tv show, Space: 1999, predicted that we'd be living on the moon in cream flares. 'Moonbase Alpha', NASA's station on the moon, is going ahead 25 years ahead of schedule.

In George Orwell's 1984 there is a telescreen in every home, because 'Big Brother is watching you' - though as it turns out, it's us who are watching Big Brother.

Asimov wrote about robots. Robots are now a reality.

Philp K. Dick wrote a fair amount about 'replicated' human beings in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and The Simulacra. He also wrote about colonies on the moon and Mars, but such things at the time were entirely the realm of the imagination.

There are countless other cases, enough to support my claim that science fiction predicts the future endevours of humankind, so I don't make such a claim lightly. Admittedly, there have also been plenty of erroneous predictions, from teleportation to journeys to the centre of the Earth. But the race isn't over yet, so who knows what will happen?

I find it all fascinating, personally.

JB

I'm with you on that one, personally I can't wait for the death of death, true artificial intelligence and interstellar space travel

Maybe one day we'll be teleporting to the local Spar for our shopping.

JB

Now there's an apocalyptical idea! Spar still existing in the future, I would hope that someone manages to come up with a cure for that one