Genetic Modification

GMO.

It is, for some people, a curse word/phrase.

I've not really cared whether something has, or is, a genetically modified product/organism, I suppose partly, because I'm a science fiction fan. Between the Augments, the Denobulans, and just seeing all the kinds of things that we have done with genes already that have made human lives more comfortable, I haven't seen what.

Besides the Augments. They're something wrong, at least in their tyranny. And Linnea of Stargate SG-1. She's kind of evil. And Hathor too. Yes, those are examples of when we don't watch ourselves with the progress we seek to make.

Alas.

The bananas we eat are Cavendish, which did not exist in nature. We made them that way in efforts of genetic engineering (though, because it's botany, we don't really think about it that way). I hear all kinds of things about "frankenfish" (though, like the origins of "corrective rape", this too is something I've not actively gone researching just yet) and how people hate the thought of them. I do think of that term as a charged buzzword people use to engender automatic despise of the idea (like Obamacare).

We genetically engineer viruses and bacteria to produce vaccines, mass-produce silk, and try to eradicate malaria-carrying mosquitoes. These are all so we can be comfortable, or not die... Hell, we're all [eyeroll] living longer partly because of these things.

Is it more correct for genetic engineering to happen over millennia that to artificially give it a boost? Gregor Mendel kind of did that with his experiments.

My moderation wants to keep it in check, and I suppose after thinking about how moderate I am and how I want things in check, perhaps I'm leaning towards labeling. But people shouldn't care that it is a GMO, because there are plenty of things that are without the labeling anyway.

#RASP - Rant Around Several Paragraphs #1 - Idiocy

I’m starting a new subsection I’m titling RASP, an inspiration from @mallow610’s YouTube video channel-based RISS (Rant in Sixty Seconds, with its haunting, awesome intro tune), in which I get things off my mind that otherwise would stick there until the end of time.

Speed Limits
The United States has speed limits, and as much as especially these stupid-asses that don’t think there are any, or there is any need for any, there are speed limits. There was this guy who – and I don’t even know how he got a driving license, but he was driving – crossed a double yellow line to pass me.

Driving 101: double yellow lines demarcate a separation of traffic lanes that go in opposite directions that standard and commercial drivers should never cross in order to pass another driver (i.e. the diagram showing "Yes" and "No").

This is different from the diagram with the solid line and the dashed line. These also separate opposite traffic lanes, but one can pass another person with caution if everything is clear on the opposite lane!
So I beeped him. This should be another rant, but the point of this one is simply that speed limits exist. On Cooledge Road between US Road 78 and US Road 29 is 40 MPH. Not 50. Not 55. Forty. One the entire stretch of GA Interstate 285 – until such a time as they decide to enact the proposed digital variable speed limit signs that will change during based on DHSMV’s volition/judgment, the top speed limit is 55 MPH and the bottom speed limit is 40 MPH. Georgia State Road 20 has had a speed limit of 45 MPH since the SPLOST-funded renovation of the Loganville-outer Loganville stretch had completed. It’s no longer 55 MPH, people. They put tax-funded signage saying 45 MPH for a reason!

You – sorry – lazy-ass, law-flouting fuckers that don’t feel there should be a speed limit, move your asses to fucking Deutschland. Get over yourselves. I drive the speed limit, y'all should too.

Patents on Genes
The only reason people seem to want to patent genes is monetary. I keep hearing that not patenting stifles innovation; bull! If you can tell me that the drug companies researching the existence of the gene – and then locating it – created the gene as well as the method to detect it, go ahead and patent it. If you have a means of modifying the gene so it doesn’t cause breast or ovarian cancer, go ahead and patent that technique. If, though, that gene in all ovarian and breast cancer sufferers is exactly the same in all of them, and you didn’t do crap to make it so, you have no right to patent it. Sure, patent to Hell the means of detecting the gene, because The Lord knows there are alternative means of detecting anything, but you have no right to patent the gene.

The only reason they want to patent the gene is because licensing it out will yield more profits that getting a Nobel or some other prize in chemistry or genetics or whatever for discovering the actual gene.

Greed will kill the bearers of these genes faster than the genes will while you all sit on your asses trying to patent something you had no hand in creating, only discovering.



That’s all.

NewScientist - Viruses 'r' Us

I found this article fascinating because it could mean that the only reason we're so different from all other forms of life on this planet, why we're the only things capable of dooming the planet entirely, is because we're a mélange of what was and millions of years of viral activity.

My Christian upbringing side of my brain yields this: God is a being that uses what we've known as science, subtle interactions of everything in the universe - physics, chemistry, and whatever else - to make things as they are. He experimented, came up with viruses, and experimented with those to eventually make us.

The sci-fi-ish part of me says otherwise. Define otherwise as something like the Alterani/Ancients, experimenting millions of years ago with whatever life comes on a planet in their ever-expanding goal of ascenscion. This is just one sci-fi view though. As pesky and arrogant as they've been in the Stargate universe, they're pretty cool-like.

My mind keeps spooling me to think about the divergeance between what a good number of Christian researchers have said in regards to how old everything truly is and what conventional science has said. My wanting to reconcile the two always leads me to think perhaps they're both on to something, but then we need to work on some things. Perhaps we've not discovered it yet, but it might be that time flows differently for God, and perhaps He's arranged a slowed-down version of time for us.

Always the experimenter.

I don't know; I'm a bit confused myself.