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Did Viruses Help Create Mammals?

  2. sajh
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Woah. I'm still trying to wrap my brain around this: humans have extinct viruses in our DNA.

You've gotta read the whole article but I'll try to boil one of the main ideas down to this: viruses may have contributed to the evolution of species in more than one way.
sajh
  • sajh
  • 10 months ago

5 responses // Did Viruses Help Create Mammals?

  • The part of the article that strikes me most is this:

    “If you think about this for five minutes, it is wild stuff,” John Coffin told me when I visited him in his laboratory at Tufts University, where he is the American Cancer Society Research Professor. Coffin is one of the country’s most distinguished molecular biologists, and was one of the first to explore the role of endogenous retroviruses in human evolution. “I understand that the idea of bringing something dead back to life is fundamentally frightening,” he went on. “It’s a power that science has come to possess and it makes us queasy, and it should. But there are many viruses that are more dangerous than these—more infectious, far riskier to work with, and less potentially useful.’’

    My point being a trained professional even is having a problem grasping this idea...

    Do you guys think this kind of research should be pursued?
    woodywoodbeck
  • Scarey crap. Why are these fools permitted to do this stuff? Should I be able to do anything that I want to do in the name of finding a cure for Cancer? I'm so disgusted with these scientists who think they can do whatever the hell they want. What the hell ever happened to Ethics??!!!!!!!! Will these scientists be held responsible if and when they screw up and kill millions? Will they be put on trial and then put to death like a common murderer? THEY SHOULD BE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
    Uckfay
  • http://www.nbc.com/Heroes/images/episodes/season2/207/h...
    The part that scares me is that this type of research was begun under Nazi Germany when they were experimenting with splicing viruses together to create super-viruses that no human being would have a natural immunity to.

    There are so many freaky parallels to the period of time just before the rise of Nazi Germany to the time we are living in now. Experimenting on humans is part of that. Creating viruses that haven't been around for millions of years sounds like the doomsday scenario in the most recent few episodes of Heroes from NBC.

    A company creates a virus called the Shanti virus that wipes out 97% of the worlds population.

    In the film V for Vendetta, the pharmaceutical company perpetrates the terrorist attack on England to bring about their totalitarian regime by releasing a virus that they had created and also created the cure. The owners of the pharmaceutical company made untold billions of pounds because they released the cure once the death toll was nearing 100,000.

    Is it so far fetched to believe that our wonderfully greedy pharmaceutical companies aren't capable of manufacturing diseases so they can sell us the cure? These tactics are taught in basic Gangster or Thugery 101 classes, its called extortion!
    jubal
  • ... you two are kidding me right? this is amazing, simply amazing.
    woodywoodybeck, did you even read the entire article or just the first page? this is evolution! this is the reason why we are alive today, how can you say that someone with that high caliber and education has the right to decide whether or not this is true or helpful in anyway? why should this research be punished? you can't honestly say that you've never wondered where we come from and why we've evolved the way we have, can you? this is groundbreaking stuff here, these people are discovering how we've evolved to become immune to certain viruses and why these viruses don't exist today, and you're saying that it shouldn't be studied?
    and uckfay, how can you POSSIBLY call this unethical? you have no right, your position makes no sense. they're recreating viruses that humans are already immune to, what harm can it do other than show us how we became immune to it? if it doesn't hurt us, the only harm its doing is educating us. and obviously, their experiments are in controlled environments, i'm sure there's little chance of them screwing up. plus they've got several people working on these things, you really think the chances of them screwing up are good in anyway?

    i think this stuff is absolutely amazing. its providing us with a looking glass view of how exactly we've come to be alive and in existence today. its providing evidence and showing us exactly how we've evolved and why we're still alive and thriving today. to call any of this research useless or unethical is a disgrace to knowledge and information. think about it, the prospects that discovering how exactly people became immune to these viruses can help, not only cure today's horrible diseases, but as well, many future diseases yet to come. we can finally figure out how to actually cure the world of any lethal and mankind-threatening obstacles that come in our way, evolutionary wise. and the fact that there may even be a new form of human species in centuries to come... you don't find that fascinating? how could you be so naive and only look at the small amount of negative in this research? its disgusting to me, it really is
    nooboneone
  • ethics means "what the uneducated think god would want us to do". the minute a scientist does something they don't understand they are labeled godless. but isn't god all seeing all knowing? didn't god create the people who are playing god? i don't see em bursting into flame. the more they create in a lab, the more they prove there is no god. i can see that people who spend their lives believing in fairy tales could be spooked they wasted their lives believing in a fable. or that the fable had them covered when they die as well....
    now i do think that science needs a system of checks and balances, so fragile ecosystems aren't ruined. decades of studies must be done properly, to fully understand the potential fallout when you are leapfrogging millions of years of natural development. computer sims don't cover all the bases.
    EvilVet

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