Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Come On Man!

Come On Man!

Someone reading a DNA sequence had better get used to no spaces or punctuation. No surprise then that less than 90% of the Human Genome, currently being decoded, is understood. That which is… sort of understood, is the inherited data needed to direct how the human body functions. This is the area that has the Science Geeks lathered up and understandably gets the most attention.

Science is going “balls to the wall” on the one hand and on the other speaks with hand to mouth, in a squeaky little voice, cautioning us on the moral and social implications of what lies ahead.

“Come on Man,” the people with the money are the ones who will benefit from all this research. Our own health service sector is about to be overwhelmed and is heading off the fiscal cliff with all the rest of this Socialist nonsense. In the next decade most will get to know how socialized medicine works. In a nutshell it means age discrimination, long waits and rationed health care.

Listen up! Soon, some will be able to make serious enhancements to what their offspring could otherwise expect. However, unless you have big bucks… (Too bad, so sad) you are destined to have children in the category 2 or lower brackets. Plato will at last have his dream realized. A socialist utopia led by an elite class of golden fair haired citizens, who by virtue of their superior attributes will SCHOOL and lead the unwashed, in the best interests of the State.

Those with serious money will soon wake up to the benefits of genetic engineering… of how to design a better body and mind. At the very least an off shore clinic will be able to squeeze the max from a gene pool’s potential and if that isn’t good enough, add in some very creative and expensive options for your unborn children.

Then there will come the medical benefits. There are going to be some major discoveries in the treating of illnesses. Again, who do you suppose the beneficiaries are going to be? Death was once the great equalizer, but with the advances that lie ahead the table will be decidedly tilted. The wealthy will significantly prolong their lives and their offspring will be better equipped to carry on the legacy.

In a human being there are more or less 3 billion bits of information contained on what is estimated to be 30 to 60 thousand genes. To put this in perspective, mankind gets about twice the press a fruit fly receives. Now that should really make your chest puff out… A man or woman is twice as complicated as an earthworm.

A mouse, as I might have mentioned has 2.5 billion bits, only slightly smaller and 5% of the code is identical to humans. This suggests somewhere in the distant past mice and men shared a common ancestor. Do you suppose that was the underlying message in Steinbeck’s classic?