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DNA Testing and You

FYI Ancestry.com and it's subsidiaries are owned by Mormons. Not saying anything against Mormons but I've always been wary of that site since I'd be concerned of ulterior political/religious motives. I can't say there is any proof of that in any way, just my own paranoia.
 
I only need a drop of blood from you, plus a lock of your hair, and maybe an eyelash. Then we can trace back your lineage as far as you want.
 
Or a loogie. It's crazy to think that they get so much info from some saliva. In the 23andMe information video, they explain that they "duplicate" your DNA so that they have enough to sample/test. Having my DNA cloned freaks me out.
 
Speaking of this, I was watching a show on the theory of resurrection, inspired from the gospels as well as Egyptian philosophy . They are extracting DNA from the mummies (apparently their something with the moisture they did allowed for the DNA to be preserved), and they were talking about how they are getting close to being able to duplicate that DNA, which could result in ultimately resurrecting the dead.

I guess define close, but it was still incredibly interesting.
 
mind_blown.gif


Jurassic park, here we come.
 
Duplicating DNA has been done for ages. And resurrection, while sounding pretty awesome, is not that useful. You have to see that you would simply bring animals back to our time, that couldn´t survive in their time.
Doing the same thing with humans makes even less sense, because you don´t really get anything out of it. The interesting thing about humans is culture. And babies, as far as I am aware of, don´t have their culture embedded in their brains when they are born.
Cloning of humans is not a difficult task. But due to a high likelihood of disabilities it´s frowned upon in science, and in my opinion rightfully so.
 
It just depends. I had a high school friend lost their 18 month old child to brain cancer about a year ago. I'm sure they would pay top dollar to see her be alive for just one more day. Nonetheless, that becomes more of an ethical question.[DOUBLEPOST=1418918812,1418918765][/DOUBLEPOST]The argument that you "wouldn't get anything out of it" is extremely flawed, in my opinion.
 
LaNCeRs said:
top dollar to see her be alive
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It´s not her. It´s somebody with the same DNA as her. She might look similar, but probably not the same unless they raise her exactly the same. She will behave differently. Move differently as well.
Compare it to somebody with Alzheimers. They still look the same, but they have no memory of you and behave totally different from how you know them.
 
That is fair. I don't know much about how the stuff works. I would tend to agree with you, since you can't "resurrect" memories and what not. But for the parent's just the though of having her there, would be okay, no matter how she acts from that point on.

That is an interesting point though. Kind of opening an can of worms in its truest fashion. I'm not too sure what the reaction would be if for example, we resurrected Martin Luther King and he subsequently turned in to a gang banging thug lol.
 
Is that accurate though? From a brain chemistry perspective, if you breathe life back in to something once dead, could it be similar to plugging an appliance back in the wall? Kind of like an on and off switch where that person picks right up where they left off?
 
LaNCeRs said:
if you breathe life back in to something once dead,
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I think you don´t understand how this whole procedure works. First you take a DNA sample of somebody dead. Then you isolate the DNA and pack it into a artificial sperm. This you implant into a egg cell. And then you get a Baby with the same DNA as that somebody who was dead. It´s the same process with cloning btw.

Also from a brain chemistry perspective, if you are dead and not rotting, you might be able to get some parts of the brain back to work. This is why some people freeze themselves in liquid nitrogen. So far we were not able to successfully wake them up. So we have no evidence in either way. In principle it should work, as some frogs freeze over the winter and survive it. But I´m not a pro in neurology so I can´t say for sure.
Also remember that the human brain is crazy complicated. So there are far more possibilities to mess something up.
 
Yeah, I get the cloning thing but that wasn't what I was asking. I was referring more to your second part, where truly you are making someone that is dead come back to life.
 
I will put it that way, if somebody has just died there is a good chance of bringing him back to life if the brain is not yet starved of oxygen. As soon as this happens nope.
Reasons for this are 3 things:
  1. Your immune system collapses pretty fast, so any bacteria coming from the outside will have a easy time getting inside your body.
  2. Your own cells start to produce enzymes that slowly dissolve your body.
  3. After some time of 2. the bacteria from your intestinal system is leaking and will start to decompose the rest.
You can only battle these with either freezing the body or by pumping in a conservation liquid into the blood stream and use a pump so it reaches every part of your body, this is important if you want to do cuts of a brain for example, otherwise it will fall apart.

The mummies work in a different way. They remove all liquid out of the body, and then no bacteria can grow. This damages/destroys a lot of tissues that depend on water and the brain is one of them. So the connections between cells would break.
 
Like say for example, someone is in old age and their heart just literally starts pumping. For simplicity sake, lets say that we preserve that person so that they don't receive any decay from the essentials that would allow him to function if he were alive. Say we then cloned a heart, or a blood pumping device and put it in that person, say a month after he died. I would imagine that he would still be the same person.

I guess the true question would then be whether we could truly preserve that person.[DOUBLEPOST=1418923855,1418923786][/DOUBLEPOST]Yeah, that's what I figured. I added to my response as you were likely typing yours, so you answered my question.
 
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