A bit of a rant coming up.
I watched on the news yesterday that a scientist has come up with a way to re-create an animal from only remainders of its DNA. (Like Jurrasic park). They took this extinct Tasmanian Tiger DNA from museum relics and have produced a tasmanian tiger embryon, well its skin and cartilage anyway. And I'm thinking to myself:
WHO CARES???????????
What on earth are you going to do with a Tasmanian Tiger? What is it good for? What purpose did it fill on the earth? How are you going to re-enter them back into the ecosystem? And HOW MUCH MONEY did you spend doing this?
When 50,000 people are dead in China I think earthquake proof buildings would be a better use of money and time. Or when children are starving to death. Or when war ravages a country.
And you want me to care for 5 seconds about tasmanian tiger half embryo? Come on!!!
Sorry to offend any Tasmanian Tiger fans out there. Not looking for a fight, just venting. There are just a lot of hurting people out there.
3 comments:
I completely agree! Plus, it's sort of bordering on the whole messing with reproduction/cloning/etc. thing - which is a moral issue that I don't agree with.
I find that it's that way with animal protection, too. Now don't get me wrong, I love animals and certainly don't think people should abuse them in anyway. HOWEVER - we as a society put so much more effort into saving the animals when there are so many children that are abused daily. When did our priorities make such a drastic switch?! Shame on us!
I disagree but not completely. I think it is difficult to pick one scientific breakthrough to pick on when every single day there are an abundance of equally drastic and important discoveries made. As Jerry Seinfeld pointed out why do we have a team of scientists working on removing seeds from watermelon when cancer and other harmful things still plague our everyday lives. These discoveries need to be made so that people can build on the research and maybe a more direct way to help people will be a result such as finding ways to cure Parkinson's, MS or other diseases. Not to mention the cost of this research is insignificant compared to the cost of any war or conflict going on in the world and which do you think is really doing more damage, researching how to save endangered animals or bombing countries.
So yes we should be redirecting our efforts and abilities as a planet to help people and to essentially save ourselves but as far as stopping medical research I think we could take funding and resources from elsewhere (military, corporate, etc).
Nano technology, cloning, growing vital organs, electrically interfacing with the brain, new ways of generating energy, etc... are all right at our door step and the next few years are going to dictate where we go as humanity. I believe that we need to continue moving forward but with great caution and understanding.
I have to agree with good ol' Darwin here. The whole survival of the fittest rule. These animals are extinct for a reason, because they could not cope in our inevitably changing world. Perhaps they are meant to be extinct for a reason. Where would we be if the dinosaurs had never become extint? If something is gone, let it be gone and maybe we as mankind should look at the way we're treating our planet and take responsability that it is us causing these animals to become extinct (for the most part) A lot of it is pure evolution. The new breakthroughs in tissue regeneration and cloning scare the crap out of me and at the same time I am astonished at the possiblities that could come with them. It would be amazing if one day things like cancer were a thing of the past. But there is a moral line and hopfully it will never be crossed.
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