http://www.actionbioscience.org/biotech/agar.html

Designer Babies: Ethical Considerations
Nicholas Agar

In 2004 the word designer baby went to the dictionary. There are two of the main questions that deals with the designer baby topic. The first is "Are the technologies of genetic modification and selection safe enough to be used on humans" and the second question is "Even if the technologies are safe, can they be morally defended?" There are many geneticists that have been doing experiments involving mice. There are many safety concerns for the technology. One of them is disrupting one of the genes that is beneficial for survival. The process is also very expensive. Pre-implantation genetic diagnosis is not a risk free procedure too. Cloning is also an alternative method and this could lead to parental preference for an enhanced child.

One of the movies that I watched this weekend was Click. This movie stars Adam Sandler who is one of my favorite actors. The movie is about a husband/father recieving a universal remote that actually controls the universe. There are plenty of times where I say I wish I could take that back or I wish I could skip past something. I say I wish i could skip through Anthropology all the time. However the problem in the movie was that the more he used the remote, the more it was making him fast forward the time in his life. He went through his entire life within a couple of days with the remote. At the end of the movie he was able to go back to his normal life and get the chance to use the remote again. He decided not to and threw it away. I think I would not have used the remote because of this. I do not want to change my past, because then I would not be where I am today. Everything happens for a reason and even mistakes you made will pass in time.

This semester has gone by extremely fast to me. We only have like two weeks left and then exams. However I am not looking forward to the week of exams or the previous week of studying for them. The only good thing about the exams is after they are over, my christmas break starts. It is going to be very fun not having to think about school for a while. I am probably going to spend my christmas break with my family and hang out with some friends that I did not get to see as much during the semester. A part of me kind of wants to go out of town somewhere but not sure of any specific location. I was thinking about trying out snowboarding somewhere. I always see people snowboarding and just wanted to try it. I would probably fall a lot though. I still think it would a cool experience and something exciting to do.

Annotated Bibliography 11/24

http://jme.bmj.com/content/28/5/290.extract

J Med Ethics
2002

There was this woman who was thirty at the time and was bound to have Alzheimers by the time she would reach forty. However she was able to use PGD (pre implantation genetic diagnosis) and track down an embryo that was not a carrier of the particular gene. The woman was then able to birth a child that was completely free of this disease. This marked a very important time for the PGD and the designer baby as a whole. This was the first case where the PGD has been used to find an embyro with the defect 1-3. This most likely gives people an abundance of hope and reliance on the PGD test. This can give people a certain feeling of safety with this, and will probably attract more and more people in time with getting good results.

This past Saturday I went bowling with a group of friends. I am not the best bowler in the world but I do enjoy bowling anytime I am able to. We were cosmic bowling and I was not really in the competing mood. I saw a couple of my close friends from high school at the bowling alley and I was happy to see them. I had not seen one of the them since like junior year, and the other one since the summer. It started off with just April, Houston, and me, but then Kenny joined in with us. He was really good compared to us, and I joked around with him saying that he needs to get into a different lane. He won all of the games except one. I even tried bowling with a size 6 ball, just trying to put a lot of spin and power on the ball. It didn't turn out too well. I got a lot of gutter balls, but it was still fun. The next time we go bowling, I am still going to have fun but also be more competivie and try to win some games.

I hate it when you go through the drive-thru at a fast food restaurant and they completely screw your order up. This happened to me twice in one day on sunday. The first time was when I went to get some breakfast as Mrs. Winners. I had ordered two chicken and biscuits and it seemed they had given me it at first. I looked in the bag and there were two sandwiches there and it looked right to me. It just so happens those were biscuits with just egg on them. I was really angry at them, because all i ordered were chicken and biscuits. I mean like what is so hard about that? A couple hours later, I decided to go get some taco bell for lunch. I prefer to get my food from there without the sauce on it. I always just chicken and cheese, no sauce. They usually do a good job of getting it correct, but they have messed up before. I got some quesadillas (plain) and some chicken taquito's. The order was correct on the menu too. I got my food, and they messed up on both of these items! The quesadilla's definately had the sauce on it and they even gave me steak taquito's. I thought to myself this could be a sign to quit eating fast food. It just was not happening for me that day.

http://www.hplusmagazine.com/articles/bio/great-designer-baby-controversy-%E2%80%9909

Michael Anissimov

June 11, 2009

The Great Designer Baby Controversy of ’09

Fertility centers are the places where the deisgner babies are being made. Some of these clinics guarrantee a 100% chance for their pick of gender for the child. Controversy arrived when the idea of hair and eye color rose. Steinberg said, "I would not say this is a dangerous road, but an uncharted road." They have never gone this far before and it is all very risky.An overwhelming seventy five percent of people would use the pgd for the gene of mental retardation, fifty- six for blindness, fifty-four for deafness, and even fifty-one percent for cancer. The lesser percents like ten and twelve were for athletics and intelligence. This shows that majority of people just want their children to be able to live a regular life. They are not trying so much to build a perfect baby, but a baby that does not have any diseases or disorders at birth.

Tonight is our fourth indoor game for intramural soccer at Memphis. We are having a rematch against the first team we played that beat us 12 to 2. That score seems really pathetic, however we did only play with four players and had no substitutions when we got tired like the other team did. It was funny how we have like 15 people on our sign up sheet but only four made it. It will definately be a different game tonight. Supposedly we are having more talent show up for tonight which is always helpful too. I just love to compete and give it my best to win. I think that our team gets better after every game. I was not there for the game last week but heard it was a close one. The games are really fun, even though you get extremely tired out there. Soccer is like an escape to me. Whenever I am playing, it seems like everything goes out the window except for the game. It is an awesome feeling, but sadly it only lasts for 40 minutes.

Alvin Lau (Poet)Outside Event

I went to see Alvin Lau with Casey at the tiger den. I got there about five minutes before it started and it was extremely crowded. It was very dark in the den where we were sitting. Alvin is Asian and his performance was nothing like I expected. I was expecting him to actually read some poetry that would put me to sleep, however that was not the case with him at all. He used a extreme amount of profanity in every one of his poems. Some of the poems he read were about his ex girlfriend, his teacher, and even his hair. He said the poems really fast and they did not rhyme. He was very entertaining and i did not get bored with his performance. The audience enjoyed him as well throughout his poem. A bunch of people were laughing and he made it a good show. He showed me a different side of poetry that seemed more laid back and entertaining than serious and boring. He used things he could relate to that made sense to us and make us enjoy the poems. He was not embarrassed at all to tell about his ex girlfriend that left him, or even make fun about his hair that he lost over time.

Annotated Bibliography

http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=861

"Designer Babies and the Pro-Choice Movement"
Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow
Summer 2007

This article states that one of the biggest problems ahead for this is an increase in competing values such as individual liberty and social equality. In the beginning the families were using this process to cure common diseases such as Tay-Sachs and sickle cell anemia. However some parents are using their money and getting to pick the gender of their child. People will spend money on this and it will create a huge controversial dispute and will most likely lead to some sort of separation. This will be a huge debate in the reproductive rights movement. There is going to be a big challenge for the pro choice groups to distinguish their concept of reproductive rights. There could be a possibility of numerous law suits involving this too.

Works in Progess #2

The second presentation I went to was the "Thinking in Color" which was presented by Samantha Patton. The idea of this presentation was embodied cognition. She was experimenting concrete words against abstract words. Her first experiment involved fifty two students, fifty concrete words, and 150 abstract words. The object was to say whatever color comes to mind when you hear a certain word. She experiemented in this to see if there was a pattern in people's answers. She took the top half (seventy five) of students to the next experiment. They moved on to seventy five abstract words and seventy five filled words. The purpose was to emphasize semantic processing over syntactic processing, while they excluded the color brown. The expectations of this experiment were to hope for an effect, look at response time, and look at the accuracy.

Works In Progess #1

The first presentation I wen to was "Nutritional and visual enhancement of pureed food products" and was presented by Matthew Fascio and Cathy Draper. They started off by going over basic questions for their experiment. Mathhew started talking first about a pureed sandwich. His garden component was a bell pepper and his left over component was dell bread. He said the reason he wanted to do this was because of an old teacher he had that gave a similiar situation. There were three parts to his experiment He changed the cheese pepper mixture to try to get better results. He had a scale on the tasting of the food that was from one to five. One was disliking the food very much and five was liking the food very much. One of his main goals was to increase the protein, and he accomplished this by adding more eggwhites. Cathy was doing the pureed stir fry meal. Her garden component was also bell pepper but her left over component was cooked rice. She wanted to make her food more appealing in appearance, taste great, and be nutritious. She did basically the same testing as Matthew. Mathhew's biggest challenge was the bread, because it did not want to be pureed. Cathy's biggest problem was solved by decreasing the portion of meat and adding more eggwhites in the mixture. This was able to make it hold better and be more fluffy. Her taste scores were less than his. His taste scores were always higher than his appearance scores.

Annotated Bibliography 4

http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/routledg/csac/2003/00000012/00000004/art00002

THE FIRST 'DESIGNER BABY': The Role of Narratives, Cliche´s and
Metaphors in the Year 2000 Media Debate
NERLICH B.; JOHNSON S.; CLARKE D.D.
December 2003

The world's first claim of the "designer baby" was Adam Nash who was born in America in August of the year 2000. He had a sister named Molly, who had unfortunately acquired an extremely rare genetic disease named Fanconi Anaemia. He was chosen to be the donor for his sister. His sister Molly would have died before she had turned ten if she had been able to get a bone marrow transplant. Her parents decided at the last minute to undergo the PGD (preimplantation genetic diagnosis) so they would be able to select an embryo and would make Adam a donor for his sister. When Adam was born his blood was transplanted into his sister for her to be free of this disease. Reports have been claimed that so far the treatment has been successful. I believe this is one of the reasons "designer babies" are a good idea and can better help the world.

Interview of April - Expert on Boxers (dogs)

April is an expert on the breed of boxers. She actually owns a boxer as well that is named Bruno. She is very attached to him and cares for him tremendously. Boxers are very playful with children and not a serious threat to them. Some of the diseases that these dgos may encounter can include cancer, hip dysplasia and various allergies. These dogs can be used for many purposes, which some include seeing eye dogs for the blind and guard dogs. Boxers can arrange from quite a few different colors. Some of the more familiar colors are fawn and brindle, fawn, and rarely all white. Purebred black boxers do not exist. These dogs should stay in shape and get in a good amount of exercise daily. April says that the dogs should be fed at at least twice a day.These dogs do not have a bunch of hair so they do not have a bad shedding problem. They rarely drool, the only time is probably after they get done drinking some water. Overall the dogs are great pets, either for protection or just an animal for the family. They are very loving, adorable, and a great breed.

English Movie

On Thursday we watched a movie about the Genographic Project that was done in Queens, New York. They were getting DNA samples from everyone in the city from mouthswabs. There was such a diverse group of people that were from all different kinds of countries around the world. They did this experiment to try and prove that everyone came from the same location. After they did some research they were able to find out that everyone was traced back to Africa. Everyone's ancestors were traced back to this continent and it showed everyone originated in the same location. It also proves to us how many people have migrated and explored away from Africa. It shows that people go different directions and that they took different routes to get where they are in life now.

I was called by my work and they practically begged me to come back for at least one day a week to work. They had some people quit and were extremely desperate. As happy as I was to leave there, I decided to do this for them. They always worked around my shedule and I thought it would only be fair if I helped them out. I still want to be free of the job, but one day a week s not going to kill me. I went into work saturday and worked the day shift and immediately saw the servers in costumes. I did not know we were able to dress up. I was a little upset but since I was not there for a week, no one was able to tell me we could dress up. I arrived there a bit early, so I left and went to a Big Lots store around the corner. I just wanted to find a halloween shirt so I would have been able to get out of uniform. I had no luck finding one, because everything seemed to sold out so I had to suck it up and just work in my uniform. My friend Josh came in and he was dressed up as Dr. Jeckel and Mr. Hyde and his costume was ridiculous. He said it took him like an hour for the makeup on his face. The funniest part was he went outside and started to wave in customers to come to the restaurant. Honestly I am not sure if he got more people to come or scared more people out of coming.