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Carl -
Steve, when the Dengue Fever looked to get out of control in downtown Tokyo last fall they became very interested indeed. West Nile outbreaks occur in the US every year. What do people do? They do what is widely perceived to be the right thing: they spray. A lot. It may not be the best solution (it may not actually work very well at all, depending on the situation, but even "astute" folks seize on what they think is logical and will work when it hits the fan ).In the first world, West Nile and Dengue are pretty survivable through symptom control. As I understand it (and I'm prone to mixing things up if I don't fact-check), Dengue is almost exclusively a problem *only* the second time you get it. In the first world this is relatively easy to avoid, in the third, not so much. Even in the third world, the first (and powerful) line of defense for both is mosquito control of all kinds with sleeping nets perhaps being the most important/effective? But the remaining risk suggests pharmaceuticals at some point. As I understand it, the level of interest/funding for both has risen significantly in the past few years for the reasons you reference... they have begun to threaten the first world more directly. Of course, shotgun drug-discovery is embarassingly parallel while understanding (with an eye to interfering) with various mechanisms of the viruses is a little more intrinsically "serial", so abruptly throwing huge sums of more money at the former makes more sense than the latter, but for the most part, positive results have limited value in understanding the organisms and processes involved better. I'm not quite sure that there will turn out to be a clean line between germline and non-germline gene therapy. Many genes (most?) are regulatory, they make new capabilities (a gene is something you can do with your genome) by turning other genes and/or gene products on and off depending on situations encountered. Some combinations will turn out to be useful or deleterious depending on, well, what happens to the environment or other genes sometime in the future. So, I don't think it will be possible to judge safe or non-safe outcomes based solely on observed effects.I believe that Marcus' point was that germline genetic modification would propagate with reproduction while non-germline would have a natural lifespan of a single generation... which, as you point out, does not mean that there aren't likely to be wildly unforeseen consequences... just (mostly?) firewalled from runaway propagation. Yet we have to get better at regulation (the cat has left the bag, if not the building), which doesn't mean abjuring that activity because we currently believe we suck at it.I am hopeful that the study of biological regulatory networks (including self-referentially gene and/or protein regulation) may provide some bio-inspired approaches to our own problems of regulation. All, where do musicians fall on the Faber, Sapiens, Ludens continua? Do we need to redefine any of the 3 to accommodate them?good question! As a non-musician, it looks to me like it starts with Ludens... or at least *playing* music has a huge component of "play" built into it. The formal analysis of music looks to be the domain of Sapiens. Formal composition of musical scores and design and building of instruments would be in the domain of Faber. Perhaps in music, my thought that Ludens is who ties Sapiens and Faber together, is more highly motivated than other domains? What are your thoughts? - S |
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