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China's western Shaanxi Province is known for rugged windswept terrain and its coal and wool, but not necessarily its science. Yet at the Shaanxi Provincial Engineering and Technology Research Center for Shaanbei Cashmere Goats, scientists have just created a new kind of goat, with bigger muscles and longer hair than normal. The goats were made not by breeding but by directly manipulating animal DNA—a sign of how rapidly China has embraced a global gene-changing revolution.
Geneticist Lei Qu wants to increase goatherd incomes by boosting how much meat and wool each animal produces. For years research projects at his lab in Yulin, a former garrison town along the Great Wall, stumbled along, Qu's colleagues say. "The results were not so obvious, although we had worked so many years," his research assistant, Haijing Zhu, wrote in an e-mail.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Gravis on Wednesday November 25 2015, @11:30PM
it's all cool science... until you make it into the most devastating weapon. nuclear physics is cool... nuclear bombs, not so much. genetic engineering is cool... a dormant STD that makes group-of-people-someone-doesn't-like bleed out, not so much.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday November 26 2015, @12:42AM
I will side with the scientists, not the ethicists. Virtually all of the scientists in question follow some kind of ethical guidelines. Those that don't can be punished after the fact if necessary.
Do not believe the scary engineered plague doomsday scenarios. They are overblown, and a little population reduction would not hurt the planet anyway.
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(Score: 2) by Gravis on Thursday November 26 2015, @01:16AM
Do not believe the scary engineered plague doomsday scenarios. They are overblown,
based on what? you think everyone is just going to agree to not commit genocide? the sad fact is that genocide happens regularly, it's just that it's ineffective. however, i would expect the plague to be more insidious and instead of killing them, it would make them a carrier of the disease and result in infertile offspring. it could go decades before being detected and by then it would be too late for an entire generation.
a little population reduction would not hurt the planet anyway.
sure... but losing 85% of the population would be devastating to the human race.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 26 2015, @01:37AM
genocide, ineffective, by what measure? Certainly, in the US and Canada, it was rather effective...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 26 2015, @02:29AM
Backpedaling so fast that you could be put on a treadmill and run an Amazon server farm off the electricity generated.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday November 26 2015, @02:48AM
Too bad everything I said is 100% true.
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(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 26 2015, @03:29AM
> I will side with the scientists, not the ethicists.
That is literally the scariest thing I've ever read on Soylent or Slashdot. At best it is staggeringly myopic.
> Virtually all of the scientists in question follow some kind of ethical guidelines.
Not all guidelines are created equal. You should be especially suspicious of corporate designed ethical guidelines because those are not about what's best for people but what's sufficient for the corporation to win, or at least minimize losses, in court. That sort of legalistic loophole seeking doesn't even deserve to be called ethics -- "CYA guidelines" is a lot closer to the truth.
> a little population reduction would not hurt the planet anyway.
Wow. I think someone with that callous of an attitude towards the well being of so many people is simply incapable of having an informed opinion about ethics.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 26 2015, @01:08AM
Right, at least the Chinese haven't nuked anyone. About the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Admiral William F. Halsey said [google.com] that "the first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment." Something called the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission [wikipedia.org] was formed, to study the survivors. I wonder: was knowledge about the bombs' effects on people a motivation for dropping them?
People were injected [wikipedia.org] with radionuclides, among them plutonium, as part of the Manhattan Project. Soldiers were brought to the vicinity of above-ground nuclear explosions. Civilians exposed to the fallout were provided with disinformation.
About STDs: In Guatemala between 1945 and 1956, U.S. researchers [news-medical.net] deliberately infected [theguardian.com] human subjects with syphilis, gonorrhea and other diseases, to test [nature.com] the effectiveness of penicillin. The victims were not told that they were being experimented upon.
There was also the Tuskegee [wikipedia.org] experiment, in which sham treatment [cdc.gov] was given to people who had contracted syphilis on their own.
Wikipedia has a page about unethical human experimentation in the United States [wikipedia.org].