If I may try to rephrase Myles's statement, I'd say that reproductive organs and survival instincts have taken over life over the course of evolution. That's what controls us and all animals and plants. It's not so much a purpose, it's what has taken over due natural progression. In the long run, the forms of life which weren't focusing on reproducing on surviving didn't make it as far as we have.

If a living organism can't reproduce, it's still life, but it will disappear very quickly since it will have no offspring.

As to the point of cloning neanderthals, I'd rather see us focusing on the important state of the art right now: creating artificial life. Just like Wintersong said:

This is the next step we are going to make. I don't know if you're aware, but we have been able to create the first artificial lifeform by emptying a host cell of its DNA contents and injecting our self-made DNA into it. After we get more proficient, we will be able to start creating plants and animals that have more desirable traits than the ones nature provide us. There will be setbacks, there will be all sorts of hurdles and unseen complications, but this is the path we're going down on. Occasionally we'll create something that might get out of hand, but we'll probably survive.

Creating new custom life will lead to creating enhanced human beings. This is not the same thing as cloning, though. And this is not about improving an already living human like in most movies - that's nearly impossible, or at least incredibly much more complicated than creating an improved creature from birth, when you only have to modify one cell. When we're far enough down this path, we've conquered one of the two main battles we have left against nature: we're able to control evolution and speed it up infinitely.

The other battle we have left is being fought at the same time - aging. It would be interesting to know which comes first, the ability to stop the aging of cells, essentially leading to endless life, or the mastery of evolution. Once we are able to do to humans what some tree cells already do, which is to not age, the whole concept of human life will change. These things seem like science-fiction, but if you study the field and start to get a grasp of how life actually functions, how aging works, what makes us the way we are in terms of species and how we evolve, it is actually pretty clear where we are heading.

I just wish I was born a bit later to see the biggest breakthroughs happen. I don't believe the biggest stuff is coming yet within the next 60 years...

Oh, and these breakthroughs will totally destroy most religions. Unless they can adapt, which they have done remarkably well within the last 2000 years or so.

We've been doing that for tens of thousands of years. Problem: What is 'desirable'? That definition shifts along with the results of our 'noble experiments'.

Really? I'd say there's an equal chance we won't. The systems we're playing with are so complex, and the 'ripples' and distant effects (viz. Chaos Theory) are so poorly perceived that basically we don't know what we're doing. No problem, though. We'll probably survive...or not.

Again, who defines "desirable" or "enhanced"? A bunch of degenerate maniacs tried that in the '30's and '40's, also. Substituting  white coats for black uniforms with silver piping doesn't change the principles involved.

While controlling the UV, Cosmic and every other type of radiation (mutations); the weather (another evolutionary pressure), etc. Beginning to sound ridiculous/impossible? I won't comment as to religion/faith...it's far too sensitive and deeply meaningful to people I care about here for idle speculation.

 

 

Stopping aging would be the worst mistake humans could make........unless we leave this planet. We are already overpopulated, stopping aging or allowing endless life would be torture for anyone who lives on this crowded, barren, stressed out planet.

Improving already living organisms is one of the most popular areas of research today. You should look into nanoparticles, synthetic viruses, stem cells........ect. Now that the human genome has been decoded, there's all kinds of things we can tweak..............from preventing diseases to improving living conditions.

And Doc's right about surviving an accident. That's all we need is to create something that causes formation of neurotoxic prions and we're all screwed.

Yes they can marry humans, Hillary married Bill didn't she.

Of course I may be wrong about that, I have always wondered if Bill and Hillary got a divorce would they still be brother and sister

DNA has not proved that in fact most scientists do no believe they inter married as there has been no conclusive evidence in the DNA genome

It's going to happen anyway. It's probably one of the easier things we could do with our DNA too. It's just a matter of adding extra material to our DNA so it can continue to split. Just need some sort of enzyme or nanite (nubot?) that can seek out and attach itself to our DNA or something. I'm a little foggy on the details, been a while since I looked into it. On the plus side it's probably going to be really expensive for a long time, so most of the poor and overcrowded areas of the world wont have access to it.

I realize it's probably (tragically) going to happen because most things we do are mindless. However, it's much more complicated than just adding a synthetic helicase enzyme to our DNA. Also, if you want to suggest something that helps cells divide, that's probably cancer. The tricky part of living forever is transferring life into a fake body because the human body will inevitably die. I'm not saying we won't find a way to do it, but it's (thankfully) outside our grasp right now.

we can't handle clones of any kind in the movies something always goes wrong and from what i have seen in real life .

well lets just leave that alone

 

I personally think Hitler should DEFINITELY be cloned, maybe one of the first humans to be cloned. Want to know why? Great studies for Psychologist ... have them grow up in different enviromnents under different families, and have a government owned Psychologist be "therapist" to each child and track their psychological behavior.

It would be an AWESOME study of nature vs nurture ... even better than studying twins. Especially if you had 10 of them in various cultures (of America).

for instance, one can grow up in Miami, another in small town Mid-west, another in Northern California, another in Oregon, another in New York, another in Massachusets, another in small town Tennessee, another in Dallas Texas, another in Chicago ... invaluable information. And different types of familes too. Perhaps have half grow up in familes that look like thelm, and the other half grow up in families of a different race.

Oh wow, a movie did it so it must be true. In movies, the hero always survives, and every tiny disaster always escalates into worldwide catastrophic proportions. Real life just isn't so.

Not sure if you've seen this or not: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1987568,00.html

 

I'm not talking about the ethics of these events. I'm just saying that this is what I believe is the natural progression of genetics. It will happen. What is considered desirable is irrelevant and depends on the task at hand. A few things I could imagine people would eventually do is to control the features relating to physical fitness and health, height and physical appearance of offspring, in addition to tweaking immunities to disease and allergies and such trivial things. For animals, making pets and animals that are more loyal and calm than their natural versions. There's a fundamental difference between doing this via the traditional methods, with more unforeseen consequences, slower pace and less control and doing this by injecting the dna in a controlled way.


I'm not saying that we won't get wiped out. Still, I think that we will probably be able to set up good enough defences and countermeasures to prevent us from actually screwing so bad we can't survive. Again, I'm not talking about what we should and should not do - I'm talking about what seems like will happen once we are able to start properly tweaking new life and the ramifications and potential of that technology set in. You're absolutely right that we might not survive, though. I'm just glad we haven't nuked ourselves to death yet.


It will be incredibly hard to control evolution. But I'd think mutations and long term evolutionary events would be irrelevant once we'd be able to evaluate and tweak the genome and epigenome and any possible additional relevant entities of life, we can nullify the effects of mutations and such during each new generation.

We're still a long, long way off, even if we have been able to create the first artificial lifeform now.

---


The idea of transfering your conciousness to another body seems more like science-fiction than anything in my opinion. I believe you would probably have to be able to transfer a 1:1 copy of your nervous system, not just the brain, since a lot of the nerve cells in brains and the peripheral nervous system are connected. It's just too complicated. Stopping the aging of cells seems much more feasible to me. That's incredibly complicated, too, as you would have to be able to stop the aging of a lot of different types of cells. While making skin cells live forever might be relatively simple, being able to do the same thing with nerve cells is a whole different story.

Also, making cells continue to be able to split would probably just lead to uncontrolled events and quite possibly death. There's a reason why not all cells are stem cells. As G3mpi3 mentioned, you only have to look at cancer to find the reason out.

My understanding of it is that aging is the result of our cells no longer being able to split and thus slowly dying off throughout the body. When a cell splits, a little piece of the "bottom" of the DNA is lost, I forgot what this was called, but when that stuff runs out the DNA can no longer split and the cell dies. Simply adding more of that stuff to certain cells would supposedly stop aging.

Cancer is a mutation in the DNA that causes it to replicate rapidly and uncontrollably. Allowing a cell to replicate more times before dying is not the same thing as it will continue to replicate at the same rate as normal. Obviously allowing all cells to live and split forever would cause problems though.

 

And ya, I don't see people ever transferring consciousness between bodies. If you copied every memory and electrical frequency (brain waves or whatever) to a new body, it wouldn't be you it would be a copy of you. We are our bodies not just our minds. At best we can transfer our brain to a new body, or to some sort of tank filled with a fluid that sustains it eternally while we control a remote body over the internet (I didn't watch that movie). If we can keep a brain alive forever though we can keep a body alive as well.

i.e. Ageless Hugo Chávez? (Ewwwwwww. )

Overpopulation can be compensated. Having some type of individuals live forever cannot be*. So I agree with the quoted part.

* you cannot depend on "accidents" to solve the situation... unless those "accidents" destroy all the "ageless clones" in the reserves and all the DNA traces in the universe of the individual.

I believe a life form deserves more than what some corporation wants it for. Of course it's an argument about ethics but also a lot deeper than that. You start 'selecting'  trait which are 'desirable' then you alter their frequency and the number of individuals with that trait and not another. When one trait is selected for another (and even more/less related traits) are altered and/or lost. You then have altered the species ability to respond to other pressures/events. *poof, you're extinct.

Unfortunately everything is NEVER considered. If it were, why did the latest economic catastrophe occur? We'll patch that problem more or less (less is more likely) and the one that's coming will be yet another unanticipated event or series of events.

We are blinded by what we accept as 'fundamental' and 'constant'. Real estate values always increase. Right?

That's just an example of our biases.  There are many others and more fundamental and correlate that with our arrogance and you've got a disaster which may not be recoverable to any meaningful degree.

In case of nerve cells you can't have cells splitting, since the nervous connections are what makes us ourselves. Nerve cells don't multiply and nearly no new nerve cells are created when we become adults. Making nerve cells multiply would be a recipe for disaster I think. Instead, you would have to stop the aging process of the single cell itself. I have no clue about how to go about doing such a thing, though. My knowledge on the issue ends here.

I don't know about adding more DNA to a cell...........Excess DNA would mean more genes, which would have to be placed on another chromosome, and when there is an extra chromosome, bad things happen. Chromosome 21 or even just a part of it (that's one more than normal) is what causes downs syndrome. I don't want to live forever with downs syndrome. Also, almost every single cell in the human body is replaced every year, so it would seem really tedious to somehow replicate that action or ensure it keeps happening.

Some of the responses here I can't help but remember a joke...

Little Johnny is asked...by his teacher...."Johnny....what is electricity?"

He replies...

"I used to know,....but I forgot."

The teacher replies....

"Terrific....there are only 2 entities in the world who know what electricity is...God, and you.

God won't tell us and you forgot." ...;)

 

Nerve cells are occasionally replaced (the rate at which this happens varies from one part of the brain to another). New nerve cells form from adult stem cells in the brain and essentially compete with nearby nerves for business. So ya, just plain throwing in bunch of nerves at a time would probably be a bad thing. However, if you were to over time replace neurons as fast as they degraded, either with new neurons or technologically based artificial neurons, you would effectively stop the aging process of the brain. As for how to do it, nanotechnology would have to be involved, with nanobots advanced enough to be currently called science fiction (or in other words, widely available in 30-50 years).

Here's a very good article in the latest The Economist on "Biology 2.0", or in other terms, the stuff I was talking about relating to modifying creatures. The first article is about Biology 2.0 in general, the second one is about the synthetic lifeform created this May.

http://www.economist.com/node/16349358?story_id=16349358 - Biology 2.0

http://www.economist.com/node/16349380 - Inhuman genomes

I urge you to read these. Enjoy!

PS. Note that there are even more articles within that special reports. The others are good too, if you're interested.

Neat, my topic is hot! 

Anywho, I think it's important that everyone understands the difficulty of genetically modifying organisms (since this is where the topic seems to have have, which is interesting in and of itself.)  Unfortunately, in most science fiction movies and literature biological technology like genetic engineering and reproductive cloning are depicted falsely and outlandishly.  Now don't get me wrong, I love science fiction and curiously, it's generally the hardcore sci-fi fans that are actually more familiar with how real science works.  However, when laypeople see movies like "Splice" they are left with vivid and patently false ideas about how the field works. 

So let's go through a few elements of bio sci fi that highly implausable. 

Species Hybridizing: The concept that we can mix and match whatever organisms you'd like is probably the most enduring plot device in the sci-fi genre, and it's completely and utterly impossible.  Only members of a biological genus can hybridize, and no amount of gene tinkering can make it happen otherwise.  So yeah, no repto-bird-bug-humans.

The Cat in the Vat: Cloning people or critters in vats.  Another distant implausability.  As of now and into the very distant future, reproductive cloning requires a female surrogate of the species being cloned.  In other words... they have to be born, raised, and mature just like anyone else.  In essence, a clone is just an identical twin of the individual being cloned.  So I guess you could say that nature clones people regularly.  No shared memories.  No accelerated growth (another impossibility).  No switching conciousness between bodies.  Curiously, a majority of the public is under the impression that if we were to clone someone, it would be done in some kind of chamber or vat.  Consequently, they take their science illiteracy to the voting booth. *facepalm*

Designer People:  The idea that we can one day in the near future create "designer people" with a broad range of selected genes is possible, but *very* limited.  Most genes code for proteins that very active and influence a broad range of other proteins.  We'll probably only ever be able to add genes or cassettes of genes to a person's genome that are simplistic and not very active.  The primary application will probably be alterting well known damaged genes will functional ones to prevent chronic diseases.  Other than that, you there's not much you can do in the area of engineering humans.

 

STardock double posted me

Actually? I was thinking H. sap. and a truly intelligent species.

If they were truly intelligent, they wouldn't get within light years of our solar system.