Posted by dagurp 13 hours ago
Yes, someone has attempted in the last to breed or alter for specific traits, we’ve cloned many kinds of life, and if there was extraterrestrial life here, someone probably mixed it with humans and animals.
But the pace of this is not going to increase anytime soon, if history is a judge. CRISPR was scaring people years ago when publicized, but those worries were unfounded and so shall these be. Life is much harder than coding apps.
It's instead a way to stitch together longer sequences of DNA. Still very cool
Sidewinder itself sounds neat.
Has anyone dabbled in hobbyist genome editing and DNA synthesis or is this something that requires a huge pile of capital?
Just include the genes for extreme-cold or extreme-arid climates. Or the genes for low oxygen environments, or even for metabolizing useful things from eating rocks. Or from spending 24 hours a day in salt water.
Right? I wouldn't expect genes for heat/cold tolerance in other organisms to necessarily be useful in humans. They work by mechanisms that are useful for that organism, but humans have our own set of problems.
It's like saying you can strap a jet engine on to a tractor and expect farm work to massively speed up. No: the machinery doesn't translate for a clean swap like that.
Buried in the Epstein files is a 14-page JPMorgan proposal called Project Molecule—a formal partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to transform pandemic preparedness into a permanently governed, privately controlled, transnational system of vaccine procurement, surveillance, and global health finance—developed within the same institutional ecosystem in which the convicted sex offender (Epstein) operated as a connective broker between Wall Street, global health, and political power.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/08/magazine/jeffrey-epstein-...
https://portside.org/2025-09-15/how-jpmorgan-enabled-crimes-...
https://www.tumlook.com/katiepavlich/post/807627515385561088
https://www.moneycontrol.com/world/how-jpmorgan-enabled-jeff...
World’s top 1% own more wealth than 95% of humanity, as “the shadow of global oligarchy hangs over UN General Assembly,” says Oxfam: https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/worlds-top-1-own-mor...
World's richest 10 percent holds more than three quarters of the world's total wealth: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1417996/wealth-held-rich...
Ten richest men double their fortunes in pandemic while incomes of 99 percent of humanity fall: https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/ten-richest-men-doub...
Over the past 30 years the U.S.’s top 1% got richer, and now hold nearly a third of the nation’s wealth: https://fortune.com/2024/10/08/congressional-budget-office-w...
TikTok's 'Addictive Design' Found to Be Illegal in Europe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46911869
Gen Z less intelligent than millennials: How skipping books and doomscrolling are taking a toll on cognitive abilities: says Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath: https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/India/gen-z-less-intelligent-...
Just tell your car to drive you to the airport. On the way just tell it to play that song you like.
I can already see the people protesting against the creation of space marines.
The same scientists who cry about ethics, have happily experimented on mice and guinea pigs in their labs, even if it causes the deaths or distress of those little sentient beings.
Mutations/mutatives like Halo's Master Chief and Marvel's Super Soldier serum won't remain sci-fi for much longer, methinks.
The field may not be fully constrained by ethics, which is just a way of saying that the work is done by people and people have varying ethical bounds, but from what I saw many of my colleagues were highly ethics driven.
I remember one Russian colleague who smuggled blood products out of Russia so they could be tested for HIV. Because the Russian government refused to help these patients. The man risked his life to help HIV sufferers.
Ethics is best when matched with courage, if a person is willing to put their life on the line for their beliefs.
Also noting that in the western world, experiments generally need approval of an ethics board before proceeding. That board's sense of ethics might make different judgments than you on, for example, mice experiments, but there is a big difference between "not constrained" and "some of the constraints are different than what I would choose".
where in this case, the ethics boards decided that provided a certain risk/reward barrier is crossed, and that the animals are otherwise treated well, sacrificing mice to improve human health is just fine.
That is an ethics based decision that was debated for a long time. And maybe should continue to be debated, there is real value in your stance that all beings are sentient and this demands a level of care.
I do understand what you mean, and I do comprehend that animal testing cannot be avoided for scientific advancements to help and progress humanity.
But I have a simple motto I want to adhere to (it is very hard though, to practice it in principle and action daily): Ethics is best when it is for the good of humanity, without being bad for Earth.
In recent years, I am starting to feel humanity is sharply veering away from its basic ethics (and the first ethic must be to not shit where one eats - but hey, we are actively aggressively destroying the only beautiful bountiful planet we know of, that can support humanity), and doing whatever the top richest most-powerful elites want.
And this unbridled greed and apathy is going to sow the seeds for the downfall of humanity, I'm afraid. At the cost of our precious Earth and its other denizens who share this planet with us humans.
There has been a catastrophic 73% decline in the average size of monitored wildlife populations* in just 50 years (1970-2020), according to World Wildlife Fund‘s (WWF) Living Planet Report 2024.
https://www.worldwildlife.org/news/press-releases/catastroph...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y3j0vzpl3o
Forests around the world disappeared at a rate of 18 soccer fields every minute, a global survey found.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/22/climate/deforestation-wri...
Our generation is the last one that can still save the wild forests of the Earth, which help us cope with the climate crisis and preserve the biodiversity of the planet. A new study by Greenpeace Russia and the University of Maryland has shown that if urgent and effective measures are not taken to preserve wild forests, most of them will disappear in the next 20 years.
https://www.greenpeace.org/international/story/51810/wild-fo...
Volkswagen (the same megacorp that did the infamous Dieselgate/Emissionsgate scams) forced monkeys to inhale exhaust from its automobiles, to try to show that fumes from current models (the cars, not the monkeys) were less noxious than previous models.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/science/sociology/20-of-the-most-u...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal
I guess this cannot be termed as "torturing animals" in the "name of science".
We humans also inhale vehicular exhaust fumes, don't we?
Oh wait, I forgot. Monkeys don't drive cars.
Or do they? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XW5NLeGEo94
Talking of "human life" and "experiment", did you know about this billionaire chap and what he's been really doing in the name of science, experiment and charity? https://m.economictimes.com/industry/healthcare/biotech/heal...
You just need a way to pack the TikToks into blank data centers.
(Note: blank data centers is a concept that kind of sorta makes sense. A blank cell doesn't make any sense at all)
Huh, I kinda assumed we'd already done that part with Dolly the sheep. But I'm not a biologist, I just saw headlines.
For a biologist, a summary might be like this: pcr fragments are generated with short reverse complementary sequences added to the end of one fragment that match that at the begining of the next to-be-joined fragment.
These will anneal to create a cross-shaped DNA molecule. The short arms of the cross being the complementary sequences. Like so:
======∥=====
Really clever.
It's one of those elegant solutions that just seem so obvious once they're presented. But this lot did it first.