{"id":39946,"date":"2011-10-02T07:58:39","date_gmt":"2011-10-02T07:58:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/decency-not-by-law-alone-gene-expression\/"},"modified":"2011-10-02T07:58:39","modified_gmt":"2011-10-02T07:58:39","slug":"decency-not-by-law-alone-gene-expression","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/astronomy\/decency-not-by-law-alone-gene-expression.php","title":{"rendered":"Decency not by law alone | Gene Expression"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/2011\/09\/all-you-genes-belong-the-tribal-council\/#comment-92667\">Rasmus Nielsen<\/a> <a rel=\"nofollow\">has a long response below<\/a> to the issue of the getting some sort of consent from Aboriginals in the local region in regards to a specimen from a deceased individual. He <a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/cteg.berkeley.edu\/~nielsen\/2011\/do-the-genes-belong-to-the-tribal-council\/\">has a full entry on this <\/a> at the <a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/cteg.berkeley.edu\/~nielsen\/blog\/\">new weblog<\/a> of his research group. <\/p><p><span><\/span><br>As an aside, let me say that it is heartening to see such an eminent young scientist put up an initial post where he forthrightly states that &ldquo;We will use this space to spread our opinions about the state of affairs in evolutionary genomics.  <b>If you disagree with us &ndash; leave a comment.<\/b>&rdquo; This makes me less skeptical of the medium term future which <a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.genomesunzipped.org\/2011\/07\/why-publish-science-in-peer-reviewed-journals.php\">Joe Pickrell outlined<\/a> last summer in relation to peer review. More specifically in this case it would be interesting to see what exchanges, disagreements, and agreements, the authors of the <a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.sciencemag.org\/content\/early\/2011\/09\/21\/science.1211177\">Science<\/a> Aboriginal genomics paper had with the authors of the broader Denisovan admixture paper in <a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.cell.com\/AJHG\/abstract\/S0002-9297(11)00395-8\">The American Journal of Human Genetics<\/a>. My friends at <a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/ib.berkeley.edu\/\">IB<\/a> surely know if there was any such exchange, but it feels kind of lame asking people for possible personal communication constantly.<\/p><p>Going back to Nielsen&rsquo;s post he contends that it would be the &ldquo;nice thing&rdquo; for him to do to consult his sibling if he was going to disclose genetic information which might have broader impact upon him (in this case, the potential presence of a gene predisposing someone to Alzheimer&rsquo;s). I think that&rsquo;s key: <b>I don&rsquo;t have much of an issue with scientists who follow their conscience, and try to be decent human beings.<\/b> Scientists are people too; not just analytic computation machines. The problem is when a legal framework emerges which regulates what science is, and isn&rsquo;t, done. Obviously at the boundary I totally agree with the idea that science has some ethical constraints. We wouldn&rsquo;t want a thousand Mengele&rsquo;s to bloom. But I think the <b>legal threshold<\/b> should be set rather high. If governmental bodies begin to regulate the bounds of scientific inquiry at a fine-grained level that&rsquo;s a pretty strong incentive for aspiring <a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Leon_Kass\">Leon Kass&rsquo;<\/a> to take over such agencies.<\/p><p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-content\/plugins\/wp-o-matic\/cache\/85bff_R8VyWDLjJYE\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\" style=\"padding-left:10px; padding-right: 10px;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-content\/plugins\/wp-o-matic\/cache\/85bff_9hLPHWieOSo\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\" style=\"padding-left:10px; padding-right: 10px;\"><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Rasmus Nielsen has a long response below to the issue of the getting some sort of consent from Aboriginals in the local region in regards to a specimen from a deceased individual. He has a full entry on this at &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/astronomy\/decency-not-by-law-alone-gene-expression.php\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"limit_modified_date":"","last_modified_date":"","_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39946","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astronomy"],"modified_by":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39946"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39946"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39946\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39946"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39946"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39946"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}