I was a lot more "hippie" before I started. I even got into it because of my kooky spiritual nonsense beliefs. My parents told me to get to a real university or I would be kicked out, so I did it and joined the Environmental and Occupational health program. However, I believe the universe (or god or whatever) directs us to the best path in our lives via feelings of excitement and joy. I was in my class for about 10 minutes when I realized I couldnt give a shit, got up and and left and dropped all my classes. I was looking through the other bio majors and saw the classes for biotech and thought that one sounded the coolest because it involved a lot of chemistry, physics, and fun sounding courses like DNA recombinant techniques and neural biology. Good lord did I get an education. Ever since then I've been fascinated with it, we are HACKING LIFE. We are taking the creation and functioning of organisms and biochemistry into our own hands, and it is leading us into the dawn of a new era where the actual process of evolution has evolved itself to a new level where organisms intelligently alter and create new forms of biological processes. Biology is like any other form of technology, only it is far more advanced. To be able to harness it for our own purposes is going to lead to an explosion of new ways of doing things, like reverse engineering advanced alien tech. the things we are learning and doing these days is absolutely mind blowing and it saddens me that the general population has no clue what is going on and what's actually involved.LoopStationZebra wrote:
I'm right with you, Android, but you do get seriously pissed. I'm not sure if that really helps your position. I'm not judging, mind you. Just find it interesting.
What's your own ethical journey on this issue? How did you feel about it when you were getting your undergrad vs how you felt before school? You don't have to answer, of course, but I don't personally know anyone in the field and am curious.
For instance, if I told you that we actually use lentiviruses like HIV routinely in the lab, you'd probably freak the fuck out. But you wouldn't understand how we are using the virus code to inject our own custom DNA into the DNA of another organism after removing the parts of the virus RNA that code for other viruses. There isnt any danger because the vector doesnt have the ability to replicate itself, but if the public got word that we use HIV to genetically modify animals that could later be used in agriculture they would throw a shit fit. I probably would have too, but I've been learning this and doing this after years of hard work to gain an understanding of how it actually works and now I'm excited to use it. Unfortunately, science is under attack from all directions and most of it is coming from people who dont know SHIT. That's the problem, in order to know shit, you have to put in a lot of time and effort to learn a LOT of stuff to get a fundamental grasp of how all this stuff fits together. I get upset that people have the unmitigated gall to throw baseless accusations and spout nonsense like "animal research never solved anything" when they dont know anything about what they are talking about and refuse to put in the same amount of effort to learn it that the scientists did. Its insulting to the amazing things brilliant people have accomplished through scientific research.
I see a lot of issue dodging in this thread. I say if you are against animal research, go back to school and learn everything there is to know about biology and biochemistry and biotechnology and animal research and all that so you have a grasp of the subject and are therefore in a position to find some sort of alternative. Otherwise its just a bunch of horseshit based upon worthless opinions grounded in a lack of knowledge of the subject at hand.
omfg you just pop up to say that arguing is wrong.
