Skip to main content

Home/ New Media Ethics 2009 course/ Group items tagged Genetics

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Jun Jie Tan

Animal Cloning: Old MacDonald's Farm Is Not What It Used To Be - 6 views

http://www.actionbioscience.org/biotech/pecorino.html Cloning leads to amazing possibilities such as ability to harvest organs from genetically-engineered pigs to save human lives, to pres...

biotechnology

started by Jun Jie Tan on 21 Oct 09 no follow-up yet
juliet huang

tools to live forever? - 1 views

www.heraldsun.com.au/...story-e6frfinf-1225791751968

nanotechnology biotechnology

shared by juliet huang on 28 Oct 09 - No Cached
  • juliet huang on 28 Oct 09
     
    According to a news story on nanotechnology, in the future, the wealthy will be able to make use of nanotechnology to modify parts of their existing or future genetic heritage, ie they can alter body parts in non-invasive procedures, or modify future children's anomalies. http://www.heraldsun.com.au/business/fully-frank/the-tools-to-live-forever/story-e6frfinf-1225791751968 these will then help them evolve into a different species, a better species. ethical questions: most of the issues we've talked about in ethics are at the macro level, perpetuating a social group's agenda. however, biotechnology has the potential to make this divide a reality. it's no longer an ethical question but it has the power to make what we discuss in class a reality. to frame it as an ethical perspective, who gets to decide how is the power evenly distributed? power will always be present behind the use of technologies, but who will decide how this technology is used, and for whose good? and if its for a larger good, then, who can moderate this technology usage to ensure all social actors are represented?
juliet huang

The tools to live forever ? - 1 views

According to a news story on nanotechnology, in the future, the wealthy will be able to make use of nanotechnology to modify parts of their existing or future genetic heritage, ie they can alter bo...

nanotechnology biotechnology

started by juliet huang on 28 Oct 09 no follow-up yet
Weiye Loh

11.01.97 - Misconceptions about the causes of cancer lead to skewed priorities and wast... - 0 views

berkeley.edu/...11_01_97a.html

Pollution Cancer Policy Science Risk

shared by Weiye Loh on 09 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • One of the big misconceptions is that artificial chemicals such as pesticides have a lot to do with human cancer, but that's just not true," says Bruce N. Ames, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of California at Berkeley and co-author of a new review of what is known about environmental pollution and cancer. "Nevertheless, it's conventional wisdom and society spends billions on this each year." "We consume more carcinogens in one cup of coffee than we get from the pesticide residues on all the fruits and vegetables we eat in a year," he adds.
  • there may be many excellent reasons for cleaning up pollution of our air, water and soil, the researchers say, prevention of cancer is not one of them.
  • "The problem is that lifestyle changes are tough," says Gold, director of the Carcinogenic Potency Project at UC Berkeley's National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences Center and a senior scientist in the cell and molecular biology division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "But by targeting pesticide residues as a major problem, we risk making fruits and vegetables more expensive and indirectly increasing cancer risks, especially among the poor."
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Whereas 99.9 percent of all the chemicals we ingest are natural, 78 percent of the chemicals tested are synthetic. So when more than half of all synthetic chemicals are found to cause cancer in rodents, it's not surprising that people link cancer with synthetic chemicals. But of the natural chemicals in our diet that have been tested in animals, half also cause cancer, Gold says.
  • "We need to recognize that there are far more carcinogens in the natural world than in the synthetic world, and go after the important things, such as lifestyle change."
  • Misconception: Cancer rates are soaring. In fact, the researchers say, if lung cancer due to smoking is excluded, overall cancer deaths in the U.S. have declined 16 percent since 1950.
  • Misconception: Reducing pesticide residues is an effective way to prevent diet-related cancer. Because fruits and vegetables are of major importance in reducing cancer, the unintended effect of requiring expensive efforts to reduce the amount of pesticides remaining on fruits and vegetables will be to increase their cost. This will lead to an increase in cancer among low income people who no longer will be able to afford to eat them.
  • Misconception: Human exposures to carcinogens and other potential hazards are primarily due to synthetic chemicals. Americans actually eat about 10,000 times more natural pesticides from fruits and vegetables than synthetic pesticide residues on food. Natural pesticides are chemicals that plants produce to defend themselves against fungi, insects, and other predators. And half of all natural pesticides tested in rodents turn out to be rodent carcinogens. In addition, we consume many other carcinogens in foods because of the chemicals produced in cooking. In a single cup of roasted coffee, for example, the natural chemicals known to be rodent carcinogens are about equal in weight to an entire year's work of synthetic pesticide residues.
  • Misconception: Cancer risks to humans can be assessed by standard high-dose animal cancer tests. In cancer tests, animals are given very high, nearly toxic doses. The effect on humans at lower doses is extrapolated from these results, as if the relationship were a straight line from high dose to low dose. However, the fact that half of all chemicals tested, whether natural or synthetic, turn out to cause cancer in rodents implies that this is an artifact of using high doses. High doses of any chemical can chronically kill cells and wound tissue, a risk factor for cancer . "Our conclusion is that the scientific evidence shows that there are high-dose effects," Ames says. "But even though government regulatory agencies recognize this, they still decide which synthetic chemicals to regulate based on linear extrapolation of high dose cancer tests in animals."
  • Misconception: Synthetic chemicals pose greater carcinogenic hazards than natural chemicals. Naturally occurring carcinogens represent an enormous background compared to the low-dose exposures to residues of synthetic chemicals such as pesticides, the researchers conclude. These results call for a reevaluation of whether animal cancer tests are really useful guides for protecting the public against minor hypothetical risks.
  • Misconception: The toxicology of synthetic chemicals is different from that of natural chemicals. No evidence exists for this, but the assumption could lead to unfortunate tradeoffs between natural and synthetic pesticides. Recently, for example, when a new variety of highly insect-resistant celery was introduced on a farm, the workers handling the celery developed rashes when they were exposed to sunlight. The pest-resistant celery turned out to contain almost eight times more natural pesticide in the form of psoralens -- chemicals known to cause cancer and genetic mutations -- than common celery.
  • Misconception: Pesticides and other synthetic chemicals are disrupting human hormones. Claims that synthetic chemicals with hormonal activity contribute to cancer and reduced sperm count ignore the fact that natural chemicals have hormone-like activity millions of times greater than do traces of synthetic chemicals. Rather, lifestyle -- lack of exercise, obesity, alcohol use and reproductive history -- are known to lead to marked changes in hormone levels in the body.
  • Misconception: Regulating low, hypothetical risks advances public health. Society -- primarily the private sector -- will spend an estimated $140 billion to comply with environmental regulations this year, according to projections by the Environmental Protection Agency. Much of this is aimed at reducing low-level human exposure to chemicals solely because they are rodent carcinogens, despite the fact that this rationale is flawed. Our improved ability to detect even minuscule concentrations of chemicals makes regulation even more expensive.
  • Weiye Loh on 09 Apr 11
     
    BERKELEY -- Despite a lack of convincing evidence that pollution is an important cause of human cancer, this misconception drives government policy today and results in billions of dollars spent to clean up minuscule amounts of synthetic chemicals, say two UC Berkeley researchers.
Weiye Loh

BioMed Central | Full text | Mistaken Identifiers: Gene name errors can be introduced i... - 0 views

www.biomedcentral.com/...80

Technology Excel Genetic

shared by Weiye Loh on 18 Apr 11 - Cached
  • Background When processing microarray data sets, we recently noticed that some gene names were being changed inadvertently to non-gene names. Results A little detective work traced the problem to default date format conversions and floating-point format conversions in the very useful Excel program package. The date conversions affect at least 30 gene names; the floating-point conversions affect at least 2,000 if Riken identifiers are included. These conversions are irreversible; the original gene names cannot be recovered. Conclusions Users of Excel for analyses involving gene names should be aware of this problem, which can cause genes, including medically important ones, to be lost from view and which has contaminated even carefully curated public databases. We provide work-arounds and scripts for circumventing the problem.
« First ‹ Previous 41 - 45 of 45
Showing 20▼ items per page