Human Enhancement

[Super Existence]

http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/08/gene-ther...an-running.html

Fascinating stuff. Would you do it?

[*V Guyver]

it's a nice read, and there is good reason to research it. In fact, with the research you could solve lots of problems like loss of bone mass from weightlessness in outer space. Make humans durable enough to survive in harsh areas for colonization, and turn human beings into deadly biological warriors.

The flaw is that no one has ever managed to do it correctly. They tried back in the 1970's with disastrous results. They figured just changing the DNA and pumping that altered DNA back into a person would do the trick. But usually it ended up killing people. They failed to realise that proteins had to be changed along with the DNA. The DNA is the blueprint and the Proteins are the building blocks and tools to make a good DNA blue print. Problem is managing to alter DNA and proteins without killing a person.

The best option is to create a person from scratch with the altered DNA, basically test tube babies. Problem with that is that it's so complex that and dangerous that what we create may likely end up as a "Mistake", a human life form incapable of living, thinking, or full of various defects.

It will take decades before we can perfect most of this stuff.

[Super Existence]

I'm not so sure I think it's round the corner and in the 1970's we hadn't mapped out out the human genome or even discovered that altering one gene affects all the others around it.

Besides. This kind of discovery would have serious commercial and military implications and when the army and big business gets behind science it picks up the pace like crazy.

Speaking of astronaughts NASA's working with a university on a pill that stops muscle wasteage completely so they don't atrophy. this could also be used for old people, sportsmen and your average gym goer.

I go to the gym regularly and if I leave it for a couple of months I'm physcially weaker and have to build up again. Imagine not having to.

To tone up one has to do some serious CV work at the gym this means you still have to excersie your muscles and take protein to eep them as tey are. With a pill like that you could run all day lose the fat and none of the muscle.

What a fascinating, modern world we live in.

[*V Guyver]

I must be thinking wrong decade. lol

Yeah, that is a nice idea, but I wonder how your body absorbs all of it. People have been trying with vitamins for ages, and with almost nothing to show for it. Even if you were to condense it all into one pill, would it be harmful in some ways? If I recall correctly, too much of one protein is harmful, and even though you have that pill, you eat something bad, it could push your body over the edge or poison you (like too much iron in a diet). Then again, I'm probably thinking in archaic form and ideas.

[*Jess♥]

I believe our body is this way for a reason.

I think that if you increase one part, another part has to decrease. so if you increase the muscle part, your body has to reduce other parts to make up the difference.

on hte other hand, making fibres more efficient, could be the next step in evolution. our lifespans have slowed human evolution so perhaps it has to find other ways to improve on the model.

this could be evolution in progress.

I thik that in hte future, the only thing that determines how powerful you are, is how you think.

our bodies are just tools, and it will be how we use them that determines how successful we are.

[*Youngtusk]

I've been researching a lot about obesidty in children. If we could apply gene therapy to that somehow, I think thats the path we need to take. This coming generation may be the first in which they children die younger than their parents.

[*V Guyver]

There is usually no need for gene therapy for that problem, just change the diet, it works with 99% of the people. Still, if we could actually manage to be successful with gene therapy, we could solve many problems. Perhaps even regrow limbs for people who lost them in surgery or some other tragedy (or simply transplant limbs with gene therapy by making any limb transferable.)

But the gene therapy idea just reminded me of Designer babies... in the future, will parents be telling docs to genetically alter their kids hair to be naturally pink, have red eyes, to have better lungs, stronger bones, and maybe have increased brain capacity.

It would be great in some cases, but it's also scary, because the kid may suffer from the actions of a parent making such changes. In essence, playing god with your children. Then again, I wouldn't mind have genes that would make me 6'5" and Antonio Banderas's face.

[*Youngtusk]

Its harder to handle obesidty than you think. A many a folk consider it a disease, like alcoholism. Sure the brain can be rewired, but we're talking about 5 year olds that weight over a hundred pounds here, a lot of them.

Yeah I don't about designing genes for kids. It would be cool, but its a slippery slope. Where do you draw the line? I can forsee gene-trends surfacing, like its the cool thing to give your kid such and such traits. I think it would easily get out of hand.

Although I think it would be awesome to design my kid, whats gonna stop me from making my kids with peak abilities? Whats gonna stop everyone from doing that? The world will just become overrun with elite genetically altered humans. Wierd drenn.

[*V Guyver]

Well, I've seen many of those cases. From what I've seen, many of them are from parents who constantly over feed their children. Now I understand there are other causes, I had a friend and neighbor in school who swelled up and looked overweight because of side effects from cancer drugs. I understand there is also a rare gene in some cases, and even mental disorders towards food...

The mental disorders with food though can still be treated though, first is a rigid change in diet (and please no diet trends, they fail. It has to be a lifestyle change to succeed) and the second is the medical therapy needed, such as psychiatric help and antidepressants. Correct me if I'm wrong, though I studied obesity as well, and in my conclusions, I find it very similar to Hikimaru's/shutins, and mild drug addictions.

[*Jess♥]

I think it would be very dangerous to use gene therapy to tackle obesity..

if you change the way the body handles fat storage, you will start to get problems with lethargy, lack of productivity and also malnutrition.

the body stores stuff in fat that it feels it is lacking at other times. if you inhibit the body's normal storage capacity, you will have all sorts of defficiencies.

a lot of people will die young.

in that world, improper diets won't result in obesity, they'll result in death instead.

[*zeo]

Actually, I believe it depends on specifically how we will eventually modify our genome. . . Of course we're still a long way off from knowing enough to do it safely but research is showing some interesting discoveries that together seem to add up to the possibilities that we have only dreamt of before. . .

Here are two such examples...

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-08/si-kcy082008.php Keeping cells youthful: How telomere-building proteins get drawn into the fold

Novel Anti-Cancer Mechanism Found in Long-Lived Rodents

And there is many more such examples that when added all together holds the promise that we may not only make ourselves healthier in the future but eventually push the physical limits of our potential to extraordinary levels that will test our notions of what it means to be human. But I'm a bit of a science geek, so my view is of course optimistic. So take that with a grain of salt as they say. . .

[*YoungGuyver]

Just a thought, but how much do we have o change before we can not be considered human anymore? How 'peek' is peek?

In Guyver we call them zoanoids. In Exosquad we call them neo-sapiens. Would we come up with several new species, naming them after the company that designed the DNA? Dupont-sapien?

Ultimately, I can see this coming sooner than we are ready for. I mean, we already have genetically modified food being forced on us. Any butter/margerine/whatever that we buy on the American continent is genetically engineered-its the canola oil. It's in the chocolate bars, a good portion of the cereal, breads (we've got a gm wheat field about 10 minutes away from where I sleep at night), and other produce. Let's not forget the gm tomatoes that we recalled, what was it, seven years ago, because too many people were getting sick? And they weren't even told they were engineered.

I'm all for genetic engineering research. I think I stand with Zeo in the optimism for its advantages. But when you look at the METHOD of their scientific practices, its appalling. I would expect at least a decade for a single product-developed in a controlled green house. Instead, we've got fields and gardens with chain link and chicken wire fences. WTF?

Sorry, I'm starting to rant. yeah, super humans. Yeah. I want blue hair. That way it'll match my eyes.

[*Jess♥]

well i was reading about muscle fibres the other evening.

I found it very interestig and it got me thinking about strength etc.

not a lot of people know, but we have different types of muscle fibers. of course the more sceince-y guys will probably know all about this.

I'll make it simple though.

we have 2 basic types (actually more, but i'm simplifying) fast twitch muscles and slow twitch muscles.

fast twitch muscles operate mostly on anaerobic respiration and are extremely fast and strong types. they can generate extreme forces, but can get tired very quickly.

slow twitch muscles operate mostly on aerobic respiration and are extremely endurance. they cannot generate as strong forces or as fast as your fast twitch muscles, but they can operate for much longer periods of time.

now when i was thinking about this, i remembered that some animals are much stronger than humans when considering their size. I then realised that this has to be down to muscle types. some animals could be much stronger than humans but much less able to take part in endurance activities.

so i went on to think about how geneticists want to change some muscles to be 'more efficient' like some animals. but what they would be changing.. in my view... is simply changing the balance. it makes a human that can be insanely strong, but would get tired very very quickly.

you would end up turning humanity more caste species. you would have teh extreme lifters, you would have teh endurance type. and so on.

[*zeo]

Yes, balance is something many don't even consider most of the time.

Take professional athletes, it's virtually impossible to have any one person capable of doing all forms of athletic activity. In fact scientists estimate it would take about 20 years doing a constant regiment more strict than any present multi-discipline athletic activity, just to get to the physical perfection needed to be good at everything. "A pentathlete must train at least 10 years -- minimum"

And it is true that humans, though weaker than many other species, has far more stamina. In fact back in our hunter gatherer days we basically just out lasted anything we wanted to hunt and then killed the exhausted animal. It's just that most modern humans are pretty much lazy and nowhere near peak physical condition, so most people don't realize what a human body is really capable of.

Just look at some extreme sports like Parkour (pahr-KOR), which is a combination of running, leaping, and climbing that originated more than 20 years ago in France.

You see anyone jumping over a ten foot fence like they were hoping over a 3 foot fence then you probably seen someone who has played Parkour most of their life.

A good movie to show just how agile they can be is the French movie District B13.

There are also different types of strength, some for example have strengthened their body's to take blows that would shatter a normal persons bones, with forces equivalent to being hit by a 2 ton car at 35 MPH.

While others can lift heavy masses but could never bend a steel bar and others who can just ignore pain and bend metal with their bare hands by just putting continuous pressure and the right leverage.

But despite all that the human body isn't perfect. We have many inefficiencies that if corrected could indeed give us the best of both worlds. But like YoungGuyver stated we do have to be careful. Science is a bit like a loaded gun, we better know how to use it before we pull the trigger.

[*V Guyver]

Yeah there are some odd things about humans being manipulated in how they grow and their natural abilities. I can understand preventing human handicaps and such. Or even altering a human so that he can inhabit a new habitat such as outer space. No not living in the vacuum of space, I mean as in being better resistant to the side effects of bone loss and such. Then there are those humans who want to live in hostile parts of the planet, we could manipulate them into resisting the harsh weather in antarctica.

Problem is if we do end up messing our genetic makeup, or even become sterile over centuries of manipulating our genes.

As for the manipulation, there isn't much in terms of what we have to alter. It's a matter of activating and deactivating the correct genomes in the human body. Every so often you see a human being born with some weird traits. Not just humans, we've seen whales with useless legs, zebra's with patterns of extinct species, and suddenly develop new traits and abilities. The reason is that we have the genetic material of our ancestors, all life does. If it isn't broken, then don't fix it. That is how nature treats evolution, it gives us just what we need to survive most of the time without having to make unneeded changes anywhere else. Which is why if we mess with it, we could do horrible damage to the human race as a whole should we end up making genes that are too far back to be compatible with other humans active, and thus causing rapid human mutations in offspring, insanity, sterile reproductive organs, or open to disease we normally don't get effected by thanks to new genes that organisms can attack.

Oh and good points by Zeo and Youngguyver, we humans have limitations for a reason. Even if we do manage to safely alter human beings, that would mean our genes are no longer being passed on, and what's to stop "Perfect" humans from wiping out normal humans off the face of the earth? We'd be competing with super versions of ourselves, and likely loosing.

[RazorLaser]

In Guyver we call them zoanoids.

Haha that's exactly what I was thinking when I read it. Interesting stuff, although the world is not ready for 'Super Humans' yet IMO. (Refer to new video game 'Prototype' and Aptom).

[*V Guyver]

You know, I just recalled a couple of Batman Beyond Episodes. They had rebellious teenagers splicing animal DNA into themselves as if they were just another tattoo or body piercings.

Altering human genetics... I can easily see how it could lead to something like that. Hell, we have stomach stapling, plastic surgery, breasts and butt implants, and who can forget the ever so recent Botox craze. I dare say that we're just giving the option to people to further alter their beings. I'll put it this way, if we had the technology now, who here would bet that Micheal Jackson would spend a great deal of his fortune just to be genetically modified to look like a small child?

[*zeo]

Looks like we just took a major step forward to advancing custom genetic engineering...

Engineer Your Body Functions with Programmable RNA

[*sojiki]

make me super.. like wesker form RE games.. and ill say ok

[*zeo]

Nanofarm Your Body for Fun and Profit

[*V Guyver]

so... 30 years for now, I'm going to be getting "Manhood" enlargement spam from companies offering genetic improvements in that area. -_-0

[*zeo]

Concept, considering people are already augmenting their appearance. It may be time to consider just how far we may go with this...

Texting Thumb Sore? Adapt Your Body to Fit Your Technology