Clutching her Hermes holiday bag under her arm, Susan Barrington, a 52-year-old housewife from Buckinghamshire, can't help smiling as she leaves the exclusive clinic in London's Wimpole Street. She has been given the final go-ahead to travel abroad for a cutting edge nonsurgical treatment that promises to make her look ten years younger.
She doesn't care if the treatment is expensive, involves babies and is so controversial that it is not allowed to be performed in this country - among her well-heeled friends, this is the ultimate new elixir of youth. The attractive brunette has opted for a controversial stem- cell therapy where umbilical cord tissue from new-born babies will be injected into her body.
It may seem distasteful, but thousands of women have already done it and it is organised by a seemingly respectable British clinic then carried out in Rotterdam, Holland, where rules regarding stemcell therapies are not so strict.
#2
Vain women putting themselves at serious risk, paying huge sums for to be the proving grounds for unvetted treatments. Ignoring that the entire situation is immoral, that is just plain Darwin-award dumb. I will feel no sympathy for any of the parties when the horrific side effects appear.
It was the same a decade ago when Human Growth hormone replacement therapy was the hot thing, only it turns out the cascading side effects are killer dangerous at the levels then prescribed.
#3
TW, I know you weren't implying otherwise, but to me, the moral argument is the only one worth having. BTW - I actually HOPE there are horrific side effects.
I'm reminded of the tale "Akallabeth" in the Silmarillion.
Posted by: no mo uro ||
08/07/2006 14:37 Comments ||
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#5
Telegraph.co.uk
Unpalatable but true: cannibalism was routine
By Tim Taylor
(Filed: 15/10/2003)
The science of cannibalism has just become respectable, as irrefutable bio-molecular evidence that we have eaten each other for millennia spurs renewed efforts by archaeologists, geneticists and anthropologists to find out when we started to do it, and why.
With the Lendu and Hema militias currently cooking human hearts and livers under the eyes of UN observers in north-east Congo, and the abduction of children for food in North Korea, it is hard to believe that until recently academia was dominated by politically correct assertions that cannibalism did not exist. While no one denied that psychopaths and the very hungry do it sometimes, eye-witness accounts of routine cannibalism were ignored.
In his 1979 book, The Man-Eating Myth, the social anthropologist William Arens told a generation of scholars what they wanted to hear: stories of cannibal tribes were the racist slanders of white imperialist scientists.
Survival cannibalism made headlines after the 1973 Andes air crash. Sixteen Catholics had stayed alive by eating those who either died on impact or subsequently. The Vatican advised that, although those who had chosen to starve were not guilty of the sin of suicide, those who practised cannibalism had not sinned either: the souls of the deceased were with God, the corpses profane husks.
The ease with which humans switch into survival mode should have alerted the anthropologists who espoused Arens that their cherished theory was fictional. Archaeologically, cannibal behaviour was evident all along, from prehistoric Fiji to the Aztecs to the Neanderthals of Europe.
There is now an overwhelming case that cannibalism is a worldwide phenomenon, stretching back to our evolutionary origins: wild chimpanzees and 70 other mammal species have been observed killing and eating each other, while the two-million-year-old Homo habilis cranium known as Stw 53 is covered with deliberate cut marks.
With this in our behavioural inheritance, the question of why we started to do it fades away. More interesting is the cannibalism we have chosen. The emerging picture is of two main types, one aggressive, as on Pueblo-Indian sites where children's skulls were used to cook their brains; the other reverential, as in the Siberian Iron Age, where select cuts of meat were removed from bodies before burial to make a funeral meal.
Sceptics who have argued against these interpretations now have the findings of molecular biology to deal with. Desiccated human faeces, preserved for a thousand years among smashed bone at the Pueblo-Indian site of Cowboy Wash , have been found to contain protein unique to human heart muscle.
This is the remains of just one meal, eaten in one place, but there is new evidence that is global in extent. Researchers from University College London, having identified gene-based resistance to diseases of the mad-cow type among the Fore of Papua New Guinea - who only recently gave up eating their dead - went on to identify it in all the rest of us as well. John Collinge of UCL sees the pattern of chromosomal modification as due to the evolutionary "selection pressure" of past cannibalism-related diseases.
The question is why has cannibalism, by and large, stopped? The answer has less to do with innate decency or moral progress than with status. For most of the hunter-gatherer period a community could not afford not to eat its dead or its dead enemies. With farming came a certain pride in displaying a life of plenty. Human burials and cremations were (and are) acts of conspicuous consumption.
It is easy to think that what "we" do is what all right-thinking humans do. And it is hard, in our supermarket culture, to imagine what it is like to scavenge for food. But the careful procedures of science can uncover the truth in the face of hardened preconceptions.
Now we know that cannibalism was a widespread norm in the past, we need to find out why particular societies gave it up. Somewhat uncomfortably, the reason in Papua New Guinea, after the Australian government's suppression of funerary cannibalism in the Fifties, seems to have been a desire on the part of the indigenous population to be reincarnated as affluent white people.
Dr Taylor teaches at the Department of Archaeological Sciences, University of Bradford. His book, The Buried Soul: How Humans Invented Death was published in paperback this week (Fourth Estate) and is available for £8.99 + £2.25 p&p. To order call Telegraph Books Direct on 0870 155 7222.
19 June 2003: 160,000-year-old skulls fill crucial gap in evolution
8 June 2003[News]: Famine-struck N Koreans 'eating children'
1 March 2001: Bones point to Iron Age cannibalism
The left's wished-for myth of the noble, gentle savage, whether promoted in books like the one mentioned in your post or in events like the popularization of the mythical Tasaday people, show just how delusional and dyfunctional and insecure the descendants of the French Revolution have become.
Tolkien was a classical liberal, not a modernist or post-modernist, and unlike the advocates of movements, recognized that consuming your own was immoral as well as unworkable.
A regression to pre-civilization, really.
Posted by: no mo uro ||
08/07/2006 15:00 Comments ||
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#7
In case anyone missed it... the money quote:
Here, poverty-stricken young women are paid 200 U.S. dollars to carry babies up to the optimum eight to 12-week period - thought to be best for harvesting stem cells. They are then sold on to cosmetic clinics.
In short these fetuses are being grown and then killed so some rich bitch can have a cleaner face.
If you want to read a chilling book on this very subject, pick up "Never Let Me Go". Very well written, and a good treatise on how easy it might be for people to grow humans for transplants.
Posted by: no mo uro ||
08/07/2006 15:04 Comments ||
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#9
Beoserker: Have you ever read much about the mythology and history re: the Pueblo Indians?
Posted by: Phil ||
08/07/2006 15:21 Comments ||
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#10
Human Life now given stature below that of live stock.
The slope was so slippery no one realized they were sliding.
#14
I think people are missing a key distinction. The article states "opted for a controversial stem- cell therapy where umbilical cord tissue from new-born babies will be injected into her body. " and not fetal stem cells. I think the article is missleading in that point and people are falling. There's no ban on stem cell research on the whole let alone umbilical cord, just research that come directly from the destruction of a fetus, which I wholehartedly agree is very controversial.
And as for it being used for cosmetics well its their money and if they want to waste it well whatever. I'm sure I would think differently if I were old and shrivelled though.
#15
The clinic claims that the foetal tissue derived from elective abortions at six to 12 weeks is rich in regenerative stem cells. 'We inject the cells taken from the liver tissue of human foetuses directly into the vein in the back of your hand,' explains the well-spoken English consultant Jenny, who gives telephone consultations to potential patients.
And where does it stop? Today its fetuses. What will it be tomorrow - baby organs? And then what?
Say - you have pretty eyes. I want them and am going to pay someone top dollar to take them from you. Too bad for you but as you say.... its my money....
The passion and energy fueling the antiwar challenge to Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman in Connecticut's Senate primary signal a power shift inside the Democratic Party that could reshape the politics of national security and dramatically alter the battle for the party's 2008 presidential nomination, according to strategists in both political parties.
A victory by businessman Ned Lamont on Tuesday would confirm the growing strength of the grass-roots and Internet activists who first emerged in Howard Dean's presidential campaign. Driven by intense anger at President Bush and fierce opposition to the Iraq war, they are on the brink of claiming their most significant political triumph, one that will reverberate far beyond the borders here if Lieberman loses.
An upset by Lamont would affect the political calculations of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), who like Lieberman supported giving Bush authority to wage the Iraq war, and could excite interest in a comeback by former vice president Al Gore, who warned in 2002 that the war could be a grave strategic error. For at least the next year, any Democrat hoping to play on the 2008 stage would need to reckon with the implications of Lieberman's repudiation. Even backers of the 2000 Democratic vice presidential nominee are now expecting this scenario. Two public polls in the past three days show Lamont with a lead of at least 10 percentage points.
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Fred ||
08/07/2006 00:00 ||
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#2
CLINTONISM > America = Amerika is a SSSSSSHHHHHHHH
pro-Socialist and pro-Communist nation and mianstream thats being led by the "wrong kind" of Socialism. FASCISM = defective, mere Authoritarian LIMITED COMMUNISM-TOTALITARIANISM-GOVERNMENTISM, etc. Federalism = Centralism, National Constitution = POLITBURO/Party Central Committee, don't ya know - just becuz America = Amerika is allegedly a representative democracy doesn't mean our elected leaders have to tell us = voters anything. The Motherly "polite" extermination of 200Milyuhn-plus Americans =Fascist/Limited Commie Amerikans = is the
"status quo" or better, don't ya know.
#3
they are on the brink of claiming their most significant political triumph, one that will reverberate far beyond the borders here if Lieberman loses.
the Kossaks have had such a BAD run that defeating Liberman would be their most significant political triumph ONLY because it would be their ONLY political triumph.
#6
This primary election will only serve to snowball the "Rove strategy" of moving small amounts of traditional Dem voter groups into being either nonvoters or wobbly Republican voters.
The 5-8% that peeled off of the Jewish vote in 2004 will continue to increase as a result of this primary alone.
Ned Lamont's rich-boy high handedness and dedication to socialized medicine and extreme left social agenda will undoubtedly peel a few votes off of those few lunch pail union guys who still vote Dem.
Those few military moms and dads who still vote Dem for social issues or for family tradition will have to take pause at a party which wants to repeat the mistakes of the post-Nixon Dem Congress which cut and run in Vietnam and made their sons' sacrifices all for nought.
To anyone who has strong devotion to their faith - whatever faith - the implications of this primary are very, very chilling.
Thing is, Lieberman will most likely ultimately win as an independent (from the polling data I've seen) and this will be a pyrrhic victory at best for the far left, with Lieberman still intact in his Senate seat and less likely to vote favorably for leftist causes.
Posted by: no mo uro ||
08/07/2006 8:07 Comments ||
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#7
This is good for the right in the long run, but I wonder if the increased hazard to Shays and other endangered CT Repubs may cost us the House.
FAISALABAD: The Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) will stage a countrywide protest if the government did not remove the restriction on the use of loudspeakers in mosques, said MMA Punjab President Liaqat Baloch, while speaking at an Ulema and Mushaikh convention held at Press Club on Sunday. He said the present regime wanted to eliminate Islamic edification from the country only to please foreign powers.
"We are Moose limbs! We demand the right to be subjected to amplified caterwauling at all hours of the day or the night!"
Wouldn't a car alarm be cheaper?
However, he said, the Muslims of the country would resist the government's move. He said the MMA would take to street if the ban was not lifted. He said that it was due to erroneous decisions of President Musharraf's government that Pakistan had lost its Islamic recognition and hence failed to lead Muslim Ummah.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/07/2006 00:00 ||
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US researchers have taken a mouse back in time some 500 million years by reversing the process of evolution.
By engineering its genetic blueprint, they have rebuilt a gene that was present in primitive animals.
The ancient gene later mutated and split, giving rise to a pair of genes that play a key role in brain development in modern mammals.
The scientists say the experiments shed light on how evolution works and could lead to new gene therapy techniques.
"We are first to reconstruct an ancient gene," said co-researcher Petr Tvrdik of the University of Utah. "We have proven that from two specialised modern genes, we can reconstruct the ancient gene they split off from.
"It illuminates the mechanisms and processes that evolution uses, and tells us more about how Mother Nature engineers life."
The study, published in the academic journal Developmental Cell, involved a suite of genes involved in embryonic development.
Until about 500 million years ago, early animals had 13 such Hox genes. Then each gene split into four, making 52 genes.
Over the course of evolution, further mutations occurred, and some genes became redundant and disappeared, leading to today's tally in mammals of 39 Hox genes.
The Utah team looked at two of these genes; Hoxa1, which controls embryonic brain development, and Hoxb1, which plays a key role in the development of nerve cells that control facial expressions in animals.
The Utah pair combined critical sections of each gene, reconstructing a gene similar to its equivalent some 530 million years ago.
The hybrid gene is not completely identical to the ancient one, but the scientists say it performs essentially the same functions.
"What we have done is essentially go back in time to when Hox1 did what Hoxa1 and Hoxb1 do today," said Mario Capecchi, professor of human genetics at the University of Utah School of Medicine.
"It gives a real example of how evolution works because we can reverse it." Reminds of when Bugs Bunny was hit with the de-evolutionizer by Marvin the Martian.
#1
Ummmm...I hate to break it to these guys, but mice (and most other mammals) aren't even close to 500 million years old as species.
It was the end of the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago that gave rise to the mammals - theretofore forced to remain small and relatively unassuming (and limited in territory and actual numbers of species) - and allowed the mammal species to differentiate and expand to what we see today.
It's possible that mice might be 65-100 million years old as species, but it's unlikely they've remained what they originally were way back when.
I understand what the article is trying to say, but they're saying it horribly and producing as fact what is merely fancy.
#2
Essentialy, as Mario says, the BBC forgot to give al Rooters the photo credit, essentialy on the mouse. (FOTSGreg nails the time line error.) Grant money available?
#3
Well, there is a major difference between evolution of a species on the macro level and evolution of a protien and the gene(s) which encode it.
Basically, this is very true at a genetic / protien level.
This is something that confuses many people, the difference between molecular evolution and evolution. The article is essentially correct in what it is saying.
Many genes can stay un-evolved for millions of years while others can change at amazing rates.
Again, the difference between protien evolution and evolution of a species.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
The passion and energy fueling the antiwar challenge to Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman in Connecticut's Senate primary signal a power shift inside the Democratic Party that could reshape the politics of national security and dramatically alter the battle for the party's 2008 presidential nomination, according to strategists in both political parties.
FAISALABAD: The Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) will stage a countrywide protest if the government did not remove the restriction on the use of loudspeakers in mosques, said MMA Punjab President Liaqat Baloch, while speaking at an Ulema and Mushaikh convention held at Press Club on Sunday. He said the present regime wanted to eliminate Islamic edification from the country only to please foreign powers. 
