Boy, you hit a nerve here!
First of all, the guy is a "environmental scholar". I really think you have to be educated so that you can use the word cloning and know what you're talking about to be able to make an insightful contribution to the discussion of genetic engineering of humans. Artists and environmentalists can opine at length, and in fact I had a discussion with one, but beyond just making observations that cause people who know the meaning(s) of the word "cloning" to snort in derision, they got nothin'.

How do you make the jump from preventing an inherited disease, or even changing, for example, muscle cell differentiation signals, to behavior. Chaos theory aside(and it's a great point), we don't know of any endogenous proteins that cause any behavior. So we all NEED genetic engineering, just so we can understand what's going on in the world again. There's too much information for one person to grasp. We can't help sounding like idiots when we stray beyond our subspecialty. We could be on the cusp of the renaissance of the renaissance man...if we want to be.

Grady

Don't forget that peppers are anti-inflammatory as well. Isn't it ironic....

We're so far from an actual understanding of what it means to be conscious that this discussion strikes me as a little premature. If something can feel pain, it seems to me that it deserves pain-relief if you're going to do something to cause it pain, but that's a quite separate question. Invertebrates feel pain. Aplysia, a sea slug, was used as a model organism for some of the earliest studies on learning and memory by Kandel. Neither pain, nor ability learn or remember is sufficient for humanity, and isn't that why we have this debate? Because it's a human we don't want to kill? I personally think a woman should have the right to choose, but she shouldn't wait so long that an abortion will require inflicting pain on the unborn. Of course, pain medication can be used even very late, but that's dodging the issue.

Mardi Gras comes and goes here in New Orleans and I miss out on all the controversy.

If the comments on this forum are in anyway indicative of how the dialog will go on the larger scale(and I suspect that it is) things will be like every other debate about genetic engineering, cloning, or pre-emptive medical intervention.

The anti side will be ignorant of the basic science and will be composed of liberal art majors chattering about how wrong it is to "tamper with nature" and religious right-wingers chattering about how wrong it is to "tamper with god's creation." The pro side will be composed of those who understand the basic science involved and realize that this really is nothing new and nature has been doing it all along, but this side will be totally unable to communicate with the anti side because 1)the anti side is ignorant of the basic science, and 2)the anti side doesn't really want a reasoned debate anyways, they just want to yell and scream about how wrong it is.

Those who are less intelligent are canny enough to realize that if intelligence becomes officially realized as a good thing that decisions should be based upon, then the less intelligent become disenfranchised. They may not be able to spell disenfranchised, but they're canny enough to realize it when it's happening to them. That's the real reason there will be no real debate. Less intelligent people in power have a strong interest in continuing to push the blank slate doctrine.

I never missed a show when I was little.

What I found most interesting was the notion that we can discover the things which deplete willpower, and those which replenish it.

X inactivation is a really big thing. It's means that there's basically a 50-50 chance(except for some things for which the maternal origin is preferred - I don't know of anything that has a paternal preference - anyone?) that you'll express the maternal or paternal X-linked genes. There is a controversy right now around the effects of environment on X-inactivation. For the other 22, there are also environmental epigenetic effects regulating gene expression, so even when the genetic material is the same, the rate at which the gene is transcribed or the position effect of the cis-acting sequences is going to be different because that information is not inherited. In fact, important developmental processes depend on mRNA that was present in the egg or sperm or on maternal protein expression. So clearly there are many environmental effects to be considered, starting with fertilization, up to the point of expression of the trait. Far from inhibiting controversy, I think it opens up another whole area for contention.

john jay - it's not wrong to think something like that, but it is important to realize that there could be many explanations for the phenomenon, and to pick the most insulting theory right off the bat isn't something I would be letting other people know I do.

Let me illustrate with a story - I was driving around last month, and I kept track of the number of people who did "stupid traffic tricks", basically reckless driving and not paying attention. 19 out of 20 were little black girls, and as many on cell phones as not.

I just made the story up, but here's the point:

Does that mean that young black girls are bad drivers? Would it still mean they are bad drivers if I was in a section of town where 19/20 drivers overall were black?

More to the point, since crime doesn't always have to do with self-control, what about obesity(for which I can also present evidence of genetic influence)? How would the fact that african americans have a defective allele for a cholesterol transport protein change the picture here?

I don't mean to sound like I'm attacking you, but the fact is that we get accused enough of being racist here, so if you're going to make a comment like that you need to present a reasoned argument, backed up by evidence. There's room enough for wild-eyed speculation on your own blog.

When it comes to medicine, I don't think the attitude that "race doesn't exist" still holds down here. The serious scientists that I know accept it as fact that racial differences exist, physiologically, and require accounting for during treatment or study. Maybe having grappled with its demons has made the South more able to address the issue openly?

He sure did, but I'm going to have to wait until the redness from the gnxp tattoo goes away first.

ok, the swelling has gone down. Here it is. Do not click this link. I'm warning you....you could be scarred for life(like me).

I don't know many undergraduates, but there is someone in my program who did his undergraduate at Tulane, so I'll ask him. You're talking about yourself, right?

Ikram - you said culture is the last place we should look, here, and I tend to agree. However, my personal experience suggests it should be the first place for me to look. I have a fetish for cute jewish girls, perhaps it's a mis-preconception(which doesn't make it an insignificant factor in mate selection), but it's the culture that is part of the attraction for me. Take the pushiness and snobbiness and cultural identity away and it wouldn't be the same for me. Another cultural influence shows up in my feelings for some of the hot-bodied black girls I have known. There is one girl, in my program and in the same year as me(so the intellectual gap is basically non-existent), who has got a great petite little body and perky little tits. However, her grooming, though impeccable, is not attractive whatsoever to me. I don't like the hair, mostly. So to sum it up, turn a moderately attractive jewish girl into a WASP, and she's not as attractive, but turn that black girl into a WASP and I'd be all over it in a second. Keeping the body exactly the same.

Of course, you can go to infinite recursion saying I'm genetically programmed to like snobbishness or dislike black hair, but let's keep it real and in bounds here.

God! What a lame-ass Wired article. I expected better. Who gives a crap what the green party, just for example, thinks about the debate?

I signed it! I think for the second time...it's been a while.

Many of you are probably aware that the field of breast cancer research has been one of the hottest areas of cancer research for some time. You may not be aware that BRCA1 mutations are found in 1 of 40 Ashkenazi Jews. I just attended a lecture where this was brought up today, and reading your story made me think. I've always wondered why breast cancer is the model system of choice for hormone sensitive cancers, and I always figured it was because it's the most common, but it's not. Prostate cancer is actually more common. I don't know the history of how things got started with breast cancer research(one of my pointless hobbies is to wonder how certain practices came into being), but I do seem to remember some good publicity and a good deal of money coming available to support research on breast cancer, starting a while back. Does anyone care to speculate about this being just another facet of the practice mentioned in the article?

I agree that healthcare and teachers' salaries should get state money before a broadband subsidy, but missing from consideration here is that there's more to broadband than speed.

Education, communication, and enlightenment are the immediate effects of subsidized broadband, and important applications to come won't come if the conduit isn't there. Dialup never becomes as much a part of life as broadband because dialup involves having to find time to connect, interrupt phone usage, deal with busy signals and disconnections for a clunky web experience that only lets you experience part of the web, whereas with broadband you're simply online. Once the household has this convenience, it becomes part of their lifestyle. Googling replaces looking up things in the dictionary or set of encyclopedias, which not all homes will even have. The searcher has to learn to determine the relative authority and veracity of the information they read, and developing good bullshit filters is a critical part of the learning process. With broadband access a household would be more likely to watch on-demand programming rather than traditional broadcasting, with all the implications in terms of exposure to different quality of media. A subversion of media consumption habits helps do away with small-town provincial ideas such as the prevalent "all dark skinned people are towel-headed terrorists" idea. Here the message of the medium is that, speaking from personal experience**, no matter if you're the only person in your whole town who likes the things you like or feels the way you do, you aren't alone. You don't have to develop an interest in budweiser, buck-toothed girls, and big-wheeled trucks just to have friends. This creates opportunities for the smart-but-underexposed kids to rise above.

** I grew up in a small town in Mississippi, and though I am very proud of it because I learned things that can't be learned in a city that I would have hated to have missed out on, I knew I had to rise above. I don't miss the skoal-dipping buck-toothed girls, either.

Anne, Diana, Jimbo,

There's some good info over at www.t-mag.com. A lot of it is pretty high-level stuff, but they make a point to write for a general audience and they've reworked both diet(including atkins, paleo and variations) and exercise regimens(superslow, HIT-style, and others), taking into account the lessons learned from each.

Congrats on a mostly problem free move. In Netscape 7.0 there is an awful lot of grey space between the sidebar on the left and the text, so much that it's only half on screen @ 1024x768. Is this intentional?