Listed somewhat chronologically: Beowulf, Shelley's "Frankenstein", Verne "20,000 Leagues Under the Seas", Wells "War of the Worlds", Bradbury "Fahrenheit 451", Asimov "I Robot", Ellison "I Have no Mouth and I Must Scream", Clarke "Childhood's End", and Card's "Ender's Game".

They just don't get it.

CCR5 is not about antibodies. I'm one of the individuals with the homozygous (two copies) CCR5 Delta 32 mutation. It's a deletion mutation, meaning that I lack functional receptors HIV-1 binds to on the surface of my T-cells. My understanding is that except for theoretical strains of HIV that bind to the CXCR4 co-receptor, most of the strains prevalent in the wild will have no more effect on me than parvo virus.

That doesn't mean I get a free pass to be irresponsible, but it does mean that I stand a significantly reduced chance of contracting HIV through stupid behavior, that if smallpox ever breaks out I'll be really busy helping to heal the sick, that bubonic plague isn't too much of a problem for me either, but that West Nile can really screw me up.

All dealing with tech support:

• "First, plug in the cord."
• "Hard drive or system case?"
• "I heard of that virus five years ago."
• "Pogo.com is not an approved application."
• "Yes, it is your fault."
• "Reboot your computer."
• "Your password is not 'emily@doodads.org'."
• "Your user name is not zXd4#7_uUc2."
• "HyperText Markup Language."
• "Bill Gates hates you."
• "Keep looking for the 'any' key."
• "Bill Gates hates me more."
• "Call Purchasing and request an abacus."
• "7"
• "I suggest one of the new tablets: a pen and paper."
• "I only golf when the network goes down."
• "I'll support your home PC when you support my expensive cigar habit."
• "Try again later."

One through three are good points, and your comment is excellent. The one sticking point for me though is birthing a non-human sentient being for experimental purposes. If it has human-level intelligence, is carried to term, and is used for experimental purposes I feel a line has been crossed.

I feel your point number four is equally as loathsome. For most humans -- at least at a level somewhere below that of the average elected official (ba-dum-bum) -- a brain isn't spare tissue. :)

-Joe

In my opinion individual rights just about always trump collective rights. About the only exceptions I could think about are when you're talking about minor rights for the individual and very fundamental rights for the society, but I'm hard-pressed to even come up with a good example that doesn't boil down to infringement of the rights of many individuals. The right of society (or even individuals) to advance knowledge does not trump the individual rights to life and liberty, and yet this is exactly what is proposed.

Over the past ten years we have seen the erosion of individual rights in many Western countries. I'm thinking that a neanderthal child will be born, somewhere, in the next hundred years. A question might be whether it occurs in a public lab or a corporate lab. With corporations now allowed to patent genomes, a human-compatible immune system with complete immunity to several of our peskier diseases might be damned attractive. Maybe neanderthals have a better mechanism for processing cholesterol? Wouldn't it be nice to know, and think of the money we could make?

A pertinent discussion might be: what should the legal punishment be for bringing an extinct hominid back to life with no ethical oversight? I'd say it's a crime against humanity on par with NAZI experimentation.

-Joe

It has nothing to do with the Geico commercials. As other posters have noted, the simple fact of the matter is the "resurrection" of a non-human species, be it homo neanderthalensis (homo sapiens neanderthalensis) or homo florensis, will happen some time this century.

The DNA we have extracted from mammoth hair is from two individual mammoths who died between twenty and sixty thousand years ago. The supposed limit of DNA viability is roughly sixty thousand years. H. neanderthalensis went extinct less than fifteen thousand years ago. H. florensis is thought to have been around as recently as the past thirteen thousand years. I'd say we stand a good chance of recovering genetic material from either, or both of these species.

Should we bring these species out of evolutionary retirement? It's a dilemma:

1. How badly do scientists want to cheese off the world's major religions? I am ambivalent towards this. Ya know, some of the self-righteous pious freaks we have walking around spouting nonsense today deserve a swift kick in the nads. Still, is it worth the potential backlash?

2. Is this ethically justifiable? What could we do with a living genome that we could not do with that genome in a comparative study? How will we justify the potential gain in knowledge versus the rights of the resultant being when he or she is carried to term, reared, and socialized? Will he or she have full rights? Will he or she be able to be valued within society? Is some loony with a gun going to go "big game hunting" or "abominatinon-killing"?

3. Someone else in the comments discussed dealing with this individual if he or she is significantly psychologically and mentally different from us. What can we offer such an individual besides life in a high tech zoo?

4. Some things will be forever beyond us. We'll never hear true Neanderthal language, we'll never observe untainted Neanderthal culture, and a feral child experiment with any of the homo genus we'd be capable of bring back is pretty much unconscionable. Are we looking for answers where there are none?

I guess it comes down to what we can learn versus the risks. I think the one thing we might be able to learn from h. neanderthalensis is how we as a species look to an outside observer. Do we really want them to look us in the eyes and tell us what they see?

I'm not certain we're prepared for it.

-Joe

If they answer "yes" I put a small mark on their application next to their experience. I find this answer indicates naïvété. I hear "I don't have enough experience to have realistic views or expectations of the field." In this case a "yes" answer drops them a bit lower in ranking.

Work in IT long enough that you experience your first dressing down (because his favorite screen saver quit working) from an idiotic supervisor whose idea of advanced technology is a toaster. Work in IT long enough to have your non-IT coworkers complain that they see you around all the time when the network is working correctly, and you disappear (into the NOC) when the network goes down. Work in IT long enough to *not* hear praise at how quickly you recovered the entire system after the server crash, but hear instead about how much overtime you burned (40 hours) in two days.

If you say "yes" after all of that, either you're lying or you're so pumped up on Prozac you could giggle your way through Saw IV. :)

-Joe

Exactly so. NASA is simply speeding up the process.

Talking about unusual contaminants, in my home town we had a particularly disturbing incident a few years ago at our local reservoir. A fisherman drowned. No body turned up. A month later divers found him, stuck in the city water intake ... For a month we had been drinking the most interesting "tea." Three days later they reported his body found washed up on shore. It sounded better in the newspaper.

Once the water has been filtered and treated, its source no longer matters.

-Joe

P.S. What if my toothbrush is shut in the medicine cabinet?

The homozygous CCR5 Delta 32 mutation is believed to occur in one in one hundred individuals of northern European descent. I am one of those individuals. Unfortunately for me, I rolled snake-eyes when it comes to lipid regulation, so hyperlipidemia seems to be poised to do to me (now in my mid 40's) what smallpox, bubonic plague, and HIV cannot.

Several companies offer tests for this allele. Possessing it is not an excuse to be irresponsible. There are variants of HIV that can infect T4 cells using the CCR4 coreceptor, as well as all of the other lovely diseases that can be acquired through unsafe practices.

-Joe

From what I read it should be possible to create images from paired photons over any distance. If we can read a photon a meter distant by observing its entangled twin, can't we just as easily do the same trick with photons from the edge of the visible universe?

-Joe