muad'dib

Another cause may be telomeres at the end of eukaryotic chromosomes. They are nucleotide sequences at the end of chromosomes that protect against degradation. There is an enzyme called telomerase that can lengthen the telomeres but unfortunately it isn't found in most cells of multicellular organisms like ourselves. This means that every time our cells divide our telomeres get shorter which means our DNA could eventually erode away because of replication. Telomerase has been found in cancer cells, meaning they can replicate forever without dying, which is pretty much what happens.

I read an article in my Bioethics textbook that said often (I don't remember the actually statistics, I will try to find them) when terminally ill patients request suicide it is for psychological reasons, such as isolation, a feeling of hopelessness, etc. If we were to say yes it is okay to use PAS to relieve this mental suffering people suffering from bipolar disorder will probably be seeking PAS as a solution, as well as anyone suffering any mental pain; where would we draw the line?

Actually most people with Down's syndrome are sterile.

Actually most people with Down's syndrome are sterile.

Go for it, it is your choice, nobody disputes that. What some may dispute is the morality of it.

Down's syndrome is due to a malfunction of the 21st chromosome, called trisomy 21. What happens in most cases is that nondisjuntion occurs during meiosis I resulting in one gamete having an extra 21st chromosome. This means that when this gamete combines with another from the opposite sex the zygote has 47 chromosomes not 46. There is not Down's syndrome allele as far as I know.

It's happened in the Netherlands, plus read what I was replying to when I wrote what you quoted.

haha....I'm glad to see someone else thought the same thing when they read that

Are you saying in all cases when people choose to commit suicide or just the terminally ill? It seems as if you're implying in all cases even if it's just a depressed teenager.

The Principal of Double Effect is a guideline that judges whether certain actions that produce both a desired effect (good) and undesired effect (bad), are moral or immoral. There are four guidlines that judge whether the undesired effect is acceptable. The first is that the action itself is not immoral, the second that the undesired effect cannnot be a means to the desired effect. Thirdly the undesired effect is not directly intended and the fourth is that the desirable effect has to produce a great enough amount of good to be at least proportional to the desired. Natural Law states firstly that the basic instinct of humans is self preservation/survival, it is built into us. If this is true then we have the right not to be killed because if we instinctly want to survive our life must be good. If we have a natural right not to be killed then we must have a natural duty not to kill others. The presumption of this is in favor of keeping ourselves and others alive.

Do you mean that the Principle of Double Effect and Natural Law are now defunct as moral principles, because if that is what you mean that's not true; or do you mean so many people violate them that we should just ignore them and they don't matter? Do you mean something else by that? Pain medication and hospice care do a lot in terms of relieving suffering. Just because physician assited suicide isn't available doesn't mean that terminally ill patients suffer. Granted there are many out there that don't have the money or family required for them, it is a very imperfect system, but physician assisted suicide could most likely lead to a much more imperfect system.

I myself vote no because I believe physician assisted suicide (PAS) is a direct violation of the Principle of Double Effect and Natural Law.

I am curious as to others feel about this issue; please explain your reasoning.

I just checked and I found that the accuracy does depend on who performed the study (as is the case with most studies in which one group has a vested interest in the outcome) as someone stated earlier, and can vary from 50% to 87%. So I was obviously wrong with the last post I made. Thanks for the correction LucidDreamer; next time I'll be sure to check more thouroughly when I use any statistics. I did find that the Supreme Court will not allow polygraph tests in court because of the unreliability, and that most polygraph examiners will say that polygraph tests do not detect lies, they measure physiological functions only, it was the media and public that first called them lie detectors. Check out http://www.howstuffworks.com that's where I got any information in this post, as to its reliability....who knows

In reply number two Lance seemed questionable over whether or not polygraph results are allowed as evidence in court in some states. I don't believe they are allowed in court in any state because they aren't perfect and can give false positives; they are accurate about 98 to 99% of the time.

Peptide bond formation cannont be spontaneous becuase it is a dehydration reaction in which energy is taken out of the surroundings. Joining monomers together (in this case amino acids) to form a polymer (a polypeptide in this case) is an endergonic, or exothermic reaction; a cell expends energy to do this. In order for a reaction to be spontaneous the change in Gibb's free energy is negative meaning the energy of the system decreases. That's not the case with peptide bond formation, in which the energy of the system increases; or in other words the free energy of the products is higher than the free energy of the reactants. The purpose of enzymes is to lower the activation energy of a reaction (the energy that is required to start the reaction). There are some reactions that are spontaneous but would take so long to occur that there is no appreciable change after years. In cases like these enzymes make the reaction occur much faster. There are cases though where without enzymes no change whatsoever would occur because the reaction itself is nonspontaneous.

It may not be the klonopin; when I go to the dentist I have to have four or five shots of novacaine before they can fill a cavity becuase it doesn't work very well for me; when I had my wisdom teeth out the pain meds they gave me didn't work either. I have heard of doctors prescribing anit-seizure medications for anxiety though. Probably because a real anxiety attack can be almost seizure-like so that's not uncommon as badchad's post insinuates.

A peptide bond is a covalent bond between two amino acids as a result of a dehydration reaction. When the carboxyl group of an amino acid is adjacent to the carboxyl group of another an enzyme can catalyze a dehydration reaction (loss of a water molecule) and join the two amino acids together. This happens in ribosomes during translation. A ribosome is made up of two subunits consisting of ribosomal RNA (rRNA) and proteins. Since enzymes are proteins I guess it could be said that in this case the ribosome is the enzyme, but it does take an enzyme for the bond to be made. I'm sure under certain conditions (like high temperatures) the dehydration reaction joining the two amino acids will occur without the enzyme, but it wouldn't be spontaneous. The joining of two amino acids is an endergonic reaction meaning that energy is absorbed or taken out of the surroundings. This type of reaction is nonspontaneous. That is why without an enzyme it would take something like heat to form peptide bond.

The speed of light is not relative to an observer. If Three spaceships were traveling in different directions with different speeds and all measured the speed of the same beam of light they would all get the same result.

Before a cell divides it duplicates each chromosome. In humans there are 46 chromosomes in each cell (except in gametes, which have 23), 23 from each parent. This means that each cell has two versions of chromosome 6, and 12, and 2, and so on, one version from each parent. So right after all the chromomsomes are duplicated but before the cell divides there are four versions of chromosome 6; the one from the father and its duplicate, and the one from the mother and its duplicate. When the chromosomes start to move to opposite ends of the cell during ananphase one copy of each chromosome goes to either end. Each end of the cell gets two versions of chromosome 6, the version from the father and the version from the mother.

I've never had a bad lab accident as of yet but my favorite is one that my high school biology teacher told me. When he was in college his lab partner was an idiot and instead of wafting his hand over a solution to smell it he put it directly up to his nose and inhaled deeply. He immediately passed out and hit the floor. When someone asked for some smelling salts to wake him up the professor said they wouldn't work becuase smelling salts are three percent ammonia and what the student had inhaled was thirty percent ammonia. My teacher said that the tissue in the guy's nose throat and mouth just sloughed off over the two weeks after the incident.