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Saturday, March 28, 2009
Upbeat Economic Indicators Give Americans Hope That Worst May be Over
Upbeat Economic Indicators Give Americans Hope That Worst May be Over
By Harold BrubakerPrint Article Print Article
business-web3RISMEDIA, March 28, 2009-(MCT)-A run of encouraging economic reports that have recently been released may mean the worst, panic-inducing stage of the economic downturn is over. Emphasis on the word may. “I think there are signs of economic life,” Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com in West Chester, PA, said. “The downturn is no longer intensifying, and the clearest evidence of this can be found in the retail sector as retail sales have turned since the beginning of the year,” Zandi said.
Upbeat economic indicators, including government reports showing gains in durable-goods orders and new-homes sales, may not mean the economy has struck bottom, however. Job losses will continue, and growth is not expected until late this year, economists said.
Gloomier economic forecasts, by the likes of Martin Feldstein, a Harvard University economics professor and a member of President Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, have pushed the turnaround well into next year, according to a Reuter’s interview.
Even relatively optimistic economists are quick to warn that not too much should be read into reports like these released by the Commerce Department on new-home sales and durable-goods orders.
New-home sales in February jumped 4.7% to an annual pace of 337,000 from a record low in January. February marked the first increase in sales since the summer, and the report added to a string of “better-than-expected” housing data, according to Wachovia Bank economist Adam G. York.
New orders for computers, machinery, and other durable goods climbed an unexpectedly strong 3.4% in February as well. “This was a surprisingly strong bounce in view of the severe global recession,” said Brian Bethune, chief U.S. financial economist at IHS Global Insight Inc., “but we would not read too much into it,” as he said he expected the overall downward trend to continue for several more months.
Zandi called the climb in durable-goods orders a hopeful sign and pointed to other reasons for optimism, including the rally in the stock market. “That’s important in terms of the collective psyche,” he said.
The Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index has gained 20% since March 9 - when it closed at a level last seen more than a decade before and The Dow Jones industrial average has risen 18.4% in the same amount of time.
The tax portion of the federal-stimulus program is kicking in, as a decline in tax withholding is starting to boost take-home pay, Zandi said, which could bolster the positive trend in consumer spending seen earlier this year.
William C. Dunkelberg, an economics professor at Temple University, said pent-up demand in the economy was huge because consumers had reduced spending out of fear. “As confidence returns,” he said, “they’ll spend.”
Dunkelberg went out on a limb and said that the economy had bottomed, citing the gain in construction, the upturn in new-home sales, and the decline in inventories to record lows.
An executive at National Penn Bancshares Inc. is not ready to go that far. “I think our stance here is to prepare for the worst and be pleasantly surprised if things turn out better,” said Michael R. Reinhard, the Boyertown, Pa., bank’s chief financial officer. “We’re not ready to call this the bottom, and everything’s uphill from here.”
Copyright © 2009, The Philadelphia Inquirer
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
By Harold BrubakerPrint Article Print Article
business-web3RISMEDIA, March 28, 2009-(MCT)-A run of encouraging economic reports that have recently been released may mean the worst, panic-inducing stage of the economic downturn is over. Emphasis on the word may. “I think there are signs of economic life,” Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com in West Chester, PA, said. “The downturn is no longer intensifying, and the clearest evidence of this can be found in the retail sector as retail sales have turned since the beginning of the year,” Zandi said.
Upbeat economic indicators, including government reports showing gains in durable-goods orders and new-homes sales, may not mean the economy has struck bottom, however. Job losses will continue, and growth is not expected until late this year, economists said.
Gloomier economic forecasts, by the likes of Martin Feldstein, a Harvard University economics professor and a member of President Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, have pushed the turnaround well into next year, according to a Reuter’s interview.
Even relatively optimistic economists are quick to warn that not too much should be read into reports like these released by the Commerce Department on new-home sales and durable-goods orders.
New-home sales in February jumped 4.7% to an annual pace of 337,000 from a record low in January. February marked the first increase in sales since the summer, and the report added to a string of “better-than-expected” housing data, according to Wachovia Bank economist Adam G. York.
New orders for computers, machinery, and other durable goods climbed an unexpectedly strong 3.4% in February as well. “This was a surprisingly strong bounce in view of the severe global recession,” said Brian Bethune, chief U.S. financial economist at IHS Global Insight Inc., “but we would not read too much into it,” as he said he expected the overall downward trend to continue for several more months.
Zandi called the climb in durable-goods orders a hopeful sign and pointed to other reasons for optimism, including the rally in the stock market. “That’s important in terms of the collective psyche,” he said.
The Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index has gained 20% since March 9 - when it closed at a level last seen more than a decade before and The Dow Jones industrial average has risen 18.4% in the same amount of time.
The tax portion of the federal-stimulus program is kicking in, as a decline in tax withholding is starting to boost take-home pay, Zandi said, which could bolster the positive trend in consumer spending seen earlier this year.
William C. Dunkelberg, an economics professor at Temple University, said pent-up demand in the economy was huge because consumers had reduced spending out of fear. “As confidence returns,” he said, “they’ll spend.”
Dunkelberg went out on a limb and said that the economy had bottomed, citing the gain in construction, the upturn in new-home sales, and the decline in inventories to record lows.
An executive at National Penn Bancshares Inc. is not ready to go that far. “I think our stance here is to prepare for the worst and be pleasantly surprised if things turn out better,” said Michael R. Reinhard, the Boyertown, Pa., bank’s chief financial officer. “We’re not ready to call this the bottom, and everything’s uphill from here.”
Copyright © 2009, The Philadelphia Inquirer
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Sunday, March 22, 2009
U.S. plan to buy toxic assets near
Treasury chief Geithner is poised to announce details of next step in rescuing banks: Public-private partnerships.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- The Obama administration will soon unveil a program to help banks clean up their books by purchasing their bad assets, two senior administration officials told CNN.
Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner will announce the plan early next week, the officials said.
The effort represents a big change in Washington's six-month-old bank rescue, which has so far mostly entailed making capital investments in exchange for stock shares and insuring bank obligations.
Investors have been waiting expectantly for details since last month when Geithner announced the framework of a plan to address two of the biggest problems in the banking sector: the toxic assets keeping banks from lending and the shortage of capital at major institutions.
At the time, Geithner pledged to raise as much as $500 billion from public and private sources to relieve banks of toxic assets. But he didn't explain how the program would bring together buyers and sellers who have been locked in a stalemate for 18 months.
Under the plan being considered, government funds will be used to effectively seed partnerships with private firms to buy up assets backed by mortgages and other loans.
A Treasury spokesman declined to comment.
The effort will involve the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., Treasury Department or Federal Reserve, the administration officials said.
The FDIC will set up investment partnerships and lend those partnerships about 85% of the money needed to buy toxic assets. Treasury will hire several investment firms to raise private funds, and also work with the Federal Reserve to expand lending.
"We do know that banks have these so-called toxic assets on their balance sheets," Christina Romer, a top White House economic adviser, said Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union."
"They are making banks unwilling to lend, they're making private investors unwilling to come into banks," Romer said. "We need to get those off the banks' balance sheets."
Getting private sector involved
So-called public-private partnerships could accomplish two critical goals: to lure private capital into the process of rescuing troubled institutions, and to use market forces to set prices for hard-to-value assets.
In the end, the aim is to unfreeze the credit markets, which have been weighed down by consumer and investor fears about future losses at the nation's banks.
The financial crisis, considered the worst since the Great Depression, was sparked by a rapid decline of housing prices leading to high levels of mortgage defaults. Banks and other institutions that bet on those mortgages, often in the form of complex securities that packaged up slices of loans, have suffered huge losses in recent quarters.
Last fall, Congress and the Bush administration came together to pass an unprecedented $700 billion bailout plan, which has among other things pumped nearly $200 billion into hundreds of banks big and small.
President Obama and Geithner have been working for months, even before Obama took office in January, to fashion a comprehensive strategy for rescuing the banks.
0:00 /24:35Geithner opens up
Geithner's plans have been weighed down in recent days by congressional and public backlash against retention bonuses paid to employees of American International Group, a troubled insurer now majority owned by the government that has become a magnet for criticism.
-CNN senior White House correspondent Ed Henry contributed to this report. To top of page
First Published: March 21, 2009: 12:24 PM ET
Treasury chief Geithner is poised to announce details of next step in rescuing banks: Public-private partnerships.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- The Obama administration will soon unveil a program to help banks clean up their books by purchasing their bad assets, two senior administration officials told CNN.
Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner will announce the plan early next week, the officials said.
The effort represents a big change in Washington's six-month-old bank rescue, which has so far mostly entailed making capital investments in exchange for stock shares and insuring bank obligations.
Investors have been waiting expectantly for details since last month when Geithner announced the framework of a plan to address two of the biggest problems in the banking sector: the toxic assets keeping banks from lending and the shortage of capital at major institutions.
At the time, Geithner pledged to raise as much as $500 billion from public and private sources to relieve banks of toxic assets. But he didn't explain how the program would bring together buyers and sellers who have been locked in a stalemate for 18 months.
Under the plan being considered, government funds will be used to effectively seed partnerships with private firms to buy up assets backed by mortgages and other loans.
A Treasury spokesman declined to comment.
The effort will involve the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., Treasury Department or Federal Reserve, the administration officials said.
The FDIC will set up investment partnerships and lend those partnerships about 85% of the money needed to buy toxic assets. Treasury will hire several investment firms to raise private funds, and also work with the Federal Reserve to expand lending.
"We do know that banks have these so-called toxic assets on their balance sheets," Christina Romer, a top White House economic adviser, said Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union."
"They are making banks unwilling to lend, they're making private investors unwilling to come into banks," Romer said. "We need to get those off the banks' balance sheets."
Getting private sector involved
So-called public-private partnerships could accomplish two critical goals: to lure private capital into the process of rescuing troubled institutions, and to use market forces to set prices for hard-to-value assets.
In the end, the aim is to unfreeze the credit markets, which have been weighed down by consumer and investor fears about future losses at the nation's banks.
The financial crisis, considered the worst since the Great Depression, was sparked by a rapid decline of housing prices leading to high levels of mortgage defaults. Banks and other institutions that bet on those mortgages, often in the form of complex securities that packaged up slices of loans, have suffered huge losses in recent quarters.
Last fall, Congress and the Bush administration came together to pass an unprecedented $700 billion bailout plan, which has among other things pumped nearly $200 billion into hundreds of banks big and small.
President Obama and Geithner have been working for months, even before Obama took office in January, to fashion a comprehensive strategy for rescuing the banks.
0:00 /24:35Geithner opens up
Geithner's plans have been weighed down in recent days by congressional and public backlash against retention bonuses paid to employees of American International Group, a troubled insurer now majority owned by the government that has become a magnet for criticism.
-CNN senior White House correspondent Ed Henry contributed to this report. To top of page
First Published: March 21, 2009: 12:24 PM ET
Saturday, March 21, 2009
The First GM Human Embryo Could Dramatically Alter the Future
Human_embryo “The advance of genetic engineering makes it quite conceivable that we will begin to design our own evolutionary progress.”
~Isaac Asimov, famous thinker and sci-fi writer
Cornell University researchers in New York revealed that they had produced what is believed to be the world’s first genetically altered human embryo—an ironic twist considering all the criticism the US has heaped on South Korea over the past several years for going “too far” with its genetic research programs. The Cornell team, led by Nikica Zaninovic, used a virus to add a green fluorescent protein gene, to a human embryo left over from an in vitro fertilization procedure. The research was presented at a meeting of the American Society of Reproductive Medicine last year, but details have emerged only after new controversy has emerged over the ethics and science of genetically modifying humans.
Zaninovic has pointed out that in order to be sure that the new gene had been inserted and the embryo had been genetically modified, scientists would ideally want to keep growing the embryo and carry out further tests. However, the Cornell team did not get permission to keep the embryo alive. The GM embryos created could theoretically have become the world’s first genetically altered man or woman, but it was destroyed after five days.
British regulators form the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority (HFEA), have warned that such controversial experiments cause “large ethical and public interest issues”.
Much of the debate stems from the fact that the effects of genetically altering an embryo would be generational and permanent. In other words, if we create a mutant baby and it grows up to have children of it’s own—they’ll all be mutant gene carriers too. Genes injected into embryos and reproductive cells, such as sperm, affect every cells in the body and would be passed on to future generations. Critics say current humans don’t have the right to tamper with the gene pool of future generations.
On the other hand, proponents of such technology say that this science could potentially erase diseases such as cystic fibrosis, hemophilia and even cancer. In theory, any “good” gene could be added to embryos to offset any “bad” genes they are currently carrying. That could potentially mean the difference between life and death for many children.
John Harris, the Sir David Alliance Professor of Bioethics at Manchester University, takes it a step further. He believes that as parents, citizens, and scientists, we are morally obliged to do whatever we can genetically to make life better and longer for our children and ourselves. Society currently devotes so much energy and resources towards saving lives, which, in reality, is simply postponing death, he notes. If it is right to save life, Harris reasons, then it should also be right to postpone death by stemming the flow of diseases that carry us to the grave.
For Harris, having the ability to improve our species lot in life but refusing to do so, makes little sense. He has a difficult time understanding why some people are so insistent that we shouldn’t try to improve upon human evolution.
“Can you imagine our ape ancestors getting together and saying, ‘this is pretty good, guys. Let’s stop it right here!’. That’s the equivalent of what people say today.”
Ethicists, however, warn that genetically modifying embryos will lead to designer babies preloaded with socially desirable traits involving height, intelligence and coloring.
Dr David King, director of Human Genetics Alert, warns, “This is the first step on the road that will lead to the nightmare of designer babies and a new eugenics.”
Harris, however, doesn’t support that argument. He says it’s not about “beauty” it’s about health, and what parent wouldn’t want a healthy child, he asks.
“Certainly, sometimes we want competitive advantage [for our children], but for the enhancements I talk about, the competitive advantage is not the prime motive. I didn’t give my son a good diet in the hope that others eat a bad diet and die prematurely. I’m happy if everyone has a good diet. The moral imperative should be that enhancements are generally available because they are good for everyone.”
The only other route to equality, he says, is to level down so that everyone is as uneducated, unhealthy and unenhanced as the lowest in society – which would be much more unethical in his opinion. Even though we can’t offer a liver transplant to all who need them, he says, we still carry them out for the lucky few. “Much better to try to raise the baseline, even if some are left behind.”
The Human Fertilization and Embryology Bill in currently under consideration in Britain will likely make it legal to create GM embryos in that country, but only for research—implantation in the womb will still be banned—at least for now. However, ethicists believe that the legislation could easily be relaxed even further in the future.
People who believe that genetically modified humans is something way into the future might want to consider that many experts are worried that some forms of it are already happening in the sports world.
Faster, bigger, better, stronger—in theory, the single most effective way to radically alter your physical capacities is to manipulate your genes. Athletes are beginning to take notice. Now that we’ve mapped out the human genome and identified exactly which genes make you buff, tough and rough—experts are concerned about the future of genetic doping.
Gene doping could spawn athletes capable of out-running, out-jumping and out-cycling even the world’s greatest champions. However, researchers at the University of Florida are attempting to prevent that from happening by detecting the first cases of gene doping in professional athletes before the practice becomes mainstream.
Montreal-based World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), responsible for monitoring the conduct of athletes, is working with investigators around the globe to develop testing to identify competitors who have injected themselves with genetic material that is capable of enhancing muscle mass or heightening endurance.
“If an athlete injects himself in the muscle with DNA, would we be able to detect that?” asked one of France’s leading gene therapy researchers, Philippe Moullier, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Gene Therapy Laboratory at the Universite de Nantes in France.
Right now, he says the answer is clearly “no”. But that may soon change. The UF scientists are among several groups collaborating with national and global anti-doping organizations to develop a test that can detect evidence of “doped” DNA.
“WADA has had a research program in place for some years now, to try to develop tests for gene-based doping,” said Theodore Friedmann, M.D., head of the agency’s panel on genetic doping and director of the gene therapy program at the University of California, San Diego.
Nearly every day now we are inundated with new genetic discoveries. Scientists can now pinpoint many specific genes including being lean, living a long life, improved self-healing, thrill seeking behavior, and having an improved memory among many other incredible traits. Many believe that these genes can be manipulated in ordinary humans, in effect creating Super-Mutants.
Theoretically, options are nearly limitless. Even a gene that exists in another species could be brought over to a human cell. Imagine some of the incredible traits of the animal kingdom that some humans don’t possess such as night vision, amazing agility, or the ability to breath underwater. The precedence for these types of radical changes is already in place. Experimental mice, for example, were successfully given the human ability to see in color. If animals can be engineered to have human traits, then humans can certainly be mutated to have desirable animal traits.
It is even thought possible to so drastically alter human genomes that a type of superhuman species could emerge. The fear with germline engineering is that since it is inheritable, offspring and all succeeding generations would carry the modified traits. This is one reason why this type of engineering is currently banned- it could lead to irreversible alteration of the entire human species.
Ethics, not scientific limitations, is the real brick wall. Most scientists believe manipulating genes in order to make an individual healthy is a noble and worthwhile pursuit. Some are against even that notion, arguing that historically amazing individuals have sometimes been plagued by genetic mental and physical disorders, which inadvertently shaped the greatness of their lives. Should we rob the human race of character shaping frailty? Very few scientists would dare to publicly endorse the idea of using genetic engineering to make a normal, healthy individuals somehow superior to the rest of the human race.
“The push to redesign human beings, animals and plants to meet the commercial goals of a limited number of individuals is fundamentally at odds with the principle of respect for nature,”
said Brent Blackwelder, President of Friends of the Earth in his testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee.
However, would it be so bad if the human race were slightly improved? What if a relatively simple procedure could make an individual and his or her offspring resistant to cancer? After all, Nature isn’t always right. Nature has naturally selected many people to carry the burden of uncomfortable and often lethal genetic disorders. If nature knows best, then shouldn’t we quit trying to “improve” upon nature by “curing” people of genetic conditions we consider inferior? Many say we shouldn’t change human genetics, UNLESS it’s the RIGHT thing to do. Who gets to decide where the line is between righteous endeavor and the corruption of nature? These are the questions facing our generation.
Posted by Rebecca Sato
Human_embryo “The advance of genetic engineering makes it quite conceivable that we will begin to design our own evolutionary progress.”
~Isaac Asimov, famous thinker and sci-fi writer
Cornell University researchers in New York revealed that they had produced what is believed to be the world’s first genetically altered human embryo—an ironic twist considering all the criticism the US has heaped on South Korea over the past several years for going “too far” with its genetic research programs. The Cornell team, led by Nikica Zaninovic, used a virus to add a green fluorescent protein gene, to a human embryo left over from an in vitro fertilization procedure. The research was presented at a meeting of the American Society of Reproductive Medicine last year, but details have emerged only after new controversy has emerged over the ethics and science of genetically modifying humans.
Zaninovic has pointed out that in order to be sure that the new gene had been inserted and the embryo had been genetically modified, scientists would ideally want to keep growing the embryo and carry out further tests. However, the Cornell team did not get permission to keep the embryo alive. The GM embryos created could theoretically have become the world’s first genetically altered man or woman, but it was destroyed after five days.
British regulators form the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority (HFEA), have warned that such controversial experiments cause “large ethical and public interest issues”.
Much of the debate stems from the fact that the effects of genetically altering an embryo would be generational and permanent. In other words, if we create a mutant baby and it grows up to have children of it’s own—they’ll all be mutant gene carriers too. Genes injected into embryos and reproductive cells, such as sperm, affect every cells in the body and would be passed on to future generations. Critics say current humans don’t have the right to tamper with the gene pool of future generations.
On the other hand, proponents of such technology say that this science could potentially erase diseases such as cystic fibrosis, hemophilia and even cancer. In theory, any “good” gene could be added to embryos to offset any “bad” genes they are currently carrying. That could potentially mean the difference between life and death for many children.
John Harris, the Sir David Alliance Professor of Bioethics at Manchester University, takes it a step further. He believes that as parents, citizens, and scientists, we are morally obliged to do whatever we can genetically to make life better and longer for our children and ourselves. Society currently devotes so much energy and resources towards saving lives, which, in reality, is simply postponing death, he notes. If it is right to save life, Harris reasons, then it should also be right to postpone death by stemming the flow of diseases that carry us to the grave.
For Harris, having the ability to improve our species lot in life but refusing to do so, makes little sense. He has a difficult time understanding why some people are so insistent that we shouldn’t try to improve upon human evolution.
“Can you imagine our ape ancestors getting together and saying, ‘this is pretty good, guys. Let’s stop it right here!’. That’s the equivalent of what people say today.”
Ethicists, however, warn that genetically modifying embryos will lead to designer babies preloaded with socially desirable traits involving height, intelligence and coloring.
Dr David King, director of Human Genetics Alert, warns, “This is the first step on the road that will lead to the nightmare of designer babies and a new eugenics.”
Harris, however, doesn’t support that argument. He says it’s not about “beauty” it’s about health, and what parent wouldn’t want a healthy child, he asks.
“Certainly, sometimes we want competitive advantage [for our children], but for the enhancements I talk about, the competitive advantage is not the prime motive. I didn’t give my son a good diet in the hope that others eat a bad diet and die prematurely. I’m happy if everyone has a good diet. The moral imperative should be that enhancements are generally available because they are good for everyone.”
The only other route to equality, he says, is to level down so that everyone is as uneducated, unhealthy and unenhanced as the lowest in society – which would be much more unethical in his opinion. Even though we can’t offer a liver transplant to all who need them, he says, we still carry them out for the lucky few. “Much better to try to raise the baseline, even if some are left behind.”
The Human Fertilization and Embryology Bill in currently under consideration in Britain will likely make it legal to create GM embryos in that country, but only for research—implantation in the womb will still be banned—at least for now. However, ethicists believe that the legislation could easily be relaxed even further in the future.
People who believe that genetically modified humans is something way into the future might want to consider that many experts are worried that some forms of it are already happening in the sports world.
Faster, bigger, better, stronger—in theory, the single most effective way to radically alter your physical capacities is to manipulate your genes. Athletes are beginning to take notice. Now that we’ve mapped out the human genome and identified exactly which genes make you buff, tough and rough—experts are concerned about the future of genetic doping.
Gene doping could spawn athletes capable of out-running, out-jumping and out-cycling even the world’s greatest champions. However, researchers at the University of Florida are attempting to prevent that from happening by detecting the first cases of gene doping in professional athletes before the practice becomes mainstream.
Montreal-based World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), responsible for monitoring the conduct of athletes, is working with investigators around the globe to develop testing to identify competitors who have injected themselves with genetic material that is capable of enhancing muscle mass or heightening endurance.
“If an athlete injects himself in the muscle with DNA, would we be able to detect that?” asked one of France’s leading gene therapy researchers, Philippe Moullier, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Gene Therapy Laboratory at the Universite de Nantes in France.
Right now, he says the answer is clearly “no”. But that may soon change. The UF scientists are among several groups collaborating with national and global anti-doping organizations to develop a test that can detect evidence of “doped” DNA.
“WADA has had a research program in place for some years now, to try to develop tests for gene-based doping,” said Theodore Friedmann, M.D., head of the agency’s panel on genetic doping and director of the gene therapy program at the University of California, San Diego.
Nearly every day now we are inundated with new genetic discoveries. Scientists can now pinpoint many specific genes including being lean, living a long life, improved self-healing, thrill seeking behavior, and having an improved memory among many other incredible traits. Many believe that these genes can be manipulated in ordinary humans, in effect creating Super-Mutants.
Theoretically, options are nearly limitless. Even a gene that exists in another species could be brought over to a human cell. Imagine some of the incredible traits of the animal kingdom that some humans don’t possess such as night vision, amazing agility, or the ability to breath underwater. The precedence for these types of radical changes is already in place. Experimental mice, for example, were successfully given the human ability to see in color. If animals can be engineered to have human traits, then humans can certainly be mutated to have desirable animal traits.
It is even thought possible to so drastically alter human genomes that a type of superhuman species could emerge. The fear with germline engineering is that since it is inheritable, offspring and all succeeding generations would carry the modified traits. This is one reason why this type of engineering is currently banned- it could lead to irreversible alteration of the entire human species.
Ethics, not scientific limitations, is the real brick wall. Most scientists believe manipulating genes in order to make an individual healthy is a noble and worthwhile pursuit. Some are against even that notion, arguing that historically amazing individuals have sometimes been plagued by genetic mental and physical disorders, which inadvertently shaped the greatness of their lives. Should we rob the human race of character shaping frailty? Very few scientists would dare to publicly endorse the idea of using genetic engineering to make a normal, healthy individuals somehow superior to the rest of the human race.
“The push to redesign human beings, animals and plants to meet the commercial goals of a limited number of individuals is fundamentally at odds with the principle of respect for nature,”
said Brent Blackwelder, President of Friends of the Earth in his testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee.
However, would it be so bad if the human race were slightly improved? What if a relatively simple procedure could make an individual and his or her offspring resistant to cancer? After all, Nature isn’t always right. Nature has naturally selected many people to carry the burden of uncomfortable and often lethal genetic disorders. If nature knows best, then shouldn’t we quit trying to “improve” upon nature by “curing” people of genetic conditions we consider inferior? Many say we shouldn’t change human genetics, UNLESS it’s the RIGHT thing to do. Who gets to decide where the line is between righteous endeavor and the corruption of nature? These are the questions facing our generation.
Posted by Rebecca Sato
Facebook Users' Verdict On Redesign: Hate! - CBS News
So there's a new Facebook app out there, designed to poll users on the social network's latest redesign. The results? Hundreds of thousands have responded. 94 percent give it a thumbs-down. Ouch.
read more | digg story
read more | digg story