By popular demand.....

[FromTheSouth]

You guys didn't want to hear about Chinese hookers and stimulus money, so I found....

Fox News:

Scientists May Have Found How Life Began

Friday, May 15, 2009

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British scientists said on Wednesday that they had figured out key steps in the process by which life on Earth may have emerged from a seething soup of simple chemicals, according to Agence France-Presse.

Genetic information in living organisms today is held in deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), the famous "double helix" molecule of sugar, phosphate and a base.

But DNA is too sophisticated to have popped up in an instant, and one avenue of thought says its single-stranded cousin, ribonucleic acid, or RNA, came first.

RNA plays a key role in making proteins and, in viruses, is used to store genetic code.

It is chemically similar to DNA but is simpler and tougher in structure, and thus looks like a good candidate for Earth's first information-coding nucleic acid.

But for all its allure, the "RNA first" theory has run into practical problems.

Now a paper published in the British journal Nature by University of Manchester chemists, led by Professor John Sutherland, ventures that an RNA-like synthesis took place through a series of chemical reactions and an important intermediate substance.

My first thought here was that the two most important scientific breakthroughs of the last 20 years no longer have to be blocked by religion.

The regulars would know that I often take the side of religion, however, I feel that there are greater benefits to life provided by cloning and stem cells.

If RNA is, in fact, the original building block of life, then a simple drop of blood can for new life. RNA farming would allow a life to be made through finding the RNA strands, and combining them. Therefore, we could clone anyone. There would be no more gamete harvesting. This would allow for unlimited stores of organs, a never ending supply of food, and no more reason for religion to play a part in the new life sciences.

Furthermore, RNA farming would allow for stem cells to be produced without fertilizing an egg. I have often stated that if abortions have to be legal, why can't we harvest the stem cells from the child that was just killed? Without an answer to that question, it seemed that we would have to create life for the purpose of destroying it. Now, we can combine strands of RNA, at specific points, and cells would divide into stem cells, saving multiple lives, without destroying a single one.

I think that science has given a blow to those who feel conflicted about life and death, and what we do in between. Now, we can save lives, improve lives, and possibly cure disease without having to kill to do it.

Morals and ethics often collide with new discoveries, but this new discovery can definitively remove all moral and ethical barriers from cloning and stem cells.

 

[HBK-aholic]

I just don't care. I don't see why we have to know how life began, and why there are so many debates about it. And I REALLY don't understand why so much money is spent on it. At the end of the day, we're here. Whether God put us here or a huge collision of particles did, we are living at the moment. Will finding out how life started affect us in any way?

 

[Planty]

I think knowing how we started existing will just distract us from actually living itself.

There will just be some chain reactions. Once we know how it happened then scientists would try to create some DNA without the use of cloning etc. Then there would be artificial humans try to be created etc.

Yes, science is amazing. But in a moral aspect, this discovery is really damaging.

I think the biggest problem that faces mankind other than the inevitable growth of the sun... is itself.

Bleak post #34050503

 

[Razor]

I have often stated that if abortions have to be legal, why can't we harvest the stem cells from the child that was just killed?

First of all, THIS. I have always found it confusing as to why scientists don't use aborted fetuses as stem cell sources. No matter how you look at it, the woman has discarded the fetus, so we might as well get something good out of the moral quagmire that is abortion.

But, as far as the topic of the thread, this has the potential to help science hammer down even better medical breakthroughs and the like. If we can link RNA to the synthesis of DNA (and not just DNA using RNA to communicate it's structure throughout the cell, but that RNA in fact led to the evolutionary outcome that is DNA) then we can use that DNA to make new organs for people or new blood for people or new anything, really.

This already is happening in my field of schooling, Biomedical Engineering. Biomedical Engineers are already using cellular models of organs to make organs for people. It's still in the experimental stages, but basically the engineers take stem cells from the adult and place them on the cellular model of the organ. So, say I lose a kidney. The doctors can take some of my stem cells, (or donor stem cells. depending on how the reader feels on Stem Cell research), and place them on the model. In no time I have a new kidney that is a 100% match to me. Score.

Honestly, anyway to make organ donation/cancer recovery/blood transfusions/medicine in general easier and more efficient is a godsend.