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[wierd]

More cultures have access to insulin pumps than just our western world, penguin.  Not all share the west's code of morality.

[~Neri]

I imagine it'd be closer to a rat tail than the dog tail of your dreams, Kevak. Indeed, humans born with vestigal tails have hairless tails, even ones that have vertebrae in them. They also look pretty horrible, truth be told.

Growing one would not be good for getting a fluffy tail.

Grafting one would work better.

Grafting one would fail, too. Unless you want to be on steroids and potentially facing major organ rejection.

Or (as I mentioned earlier) it was grown from stem cells that were formed from your own cells.

They're wanting a FLUFFY tail, though. So far as I'm aware, we can't really get fluffy because our hair is too thick. Also that problem of there being no follicles on tails when people are born with them...

I suppose hypothetically there could be some kind of surgery that would add fake hairs onto the tail, but that would probably be fairly expensive (if you can afford a tail, though...) and would need redoing every so often because of them falling/being pulled out.

Our hair follicles are too big to be technically fluffy. However it is quite possible while you're printing the tail to graft onto the person to use smaller follicles. I mean, it's not that hard to copy how hair follicles work on animals. You wouldn't need surgery to put fake hair on. You wouldn't need to grow the tail from your body. Just print based on your dna with the smaller follicles, graft, and go through a bunch of physical therapy and doctors visits while it heals and you gain control.

[Bohandas]

Nice eugenism discussion there.

And yes i am on weird's side on that matter. Babies that are born with basically no cognitive function should be left to die, because they are only shells in the form of a human. And emotional crutches to the parents, but you can buy a cat/dog or have another non-braindead child and it'll give you back far more affection than a braindead son/daughter. Relationships are made to be twofold : one-sided ones end poorly.

I'm not saying we should kill babies that are deformed, no, because we don't kill people that lose legs, and even without legs they can live meaningful life.

Babies that have a few organs seriously malfunctioning and cannot live on their own, however, or people who have such weak immune systems they cannot get out of a bubble... it's another thing. Because a life without meaning is not a life worth living.

All things are without meaning.

[GiglameshDespair]

Our hair follicles are too big to be technically fluffy. However it is quite possible while you're printing the tail to graft onto the person to use smaller follicles. I mean, it's not that hard to copy how hair follicles work on animals. You wouldn't need surgery to put fake hair on. You wouldn't need to grow the tail from your body. Just print based on your dna with the smaller follicles, graft, and go through a bunch of physical therapy and doctors visits while it heals and you gain control.

When has it been done previously?

[wierd]

Here?

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21042975

[wierd]

http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=13824207

??

[GiglameshDespair]

It talks about making cultures of hair papilla cells, but not about reducing follicle size, far as I can tell.

[BFEL]

wierd's arguments all seem to hinge on the concept that humans deciding things is a terrible thing. Wonder why he thinks that?

[wierd]

World financial crisis 2008, and various other things.
I have seen bureaucracies in action.


hair folicle stuff:

Just being ABLE to cultivate them is a BIG milestone in the past 2 or 3 years!!!  However, that's the really big hurdle. Gene modified stemcells should be able to manipulate the hair type produced.

[wierd]

IPS cells are induced using gene modification. They introduce extra copies of genes to increase expression levels, so that the cells revert to progenitor cells.

[GiglameshDespair]

Considering I get ingrown hairs a plenty without messing with follicles, I remain skeptical.

Should.

...

It's a huge amount of time, effort and money to give a furry an actual tail, in the end.

[scrdest]

Complete derail, but the thread title bothers me. It CLEARLY should be called Gene-gineering.

[Bohandas]

Well, we don't need to match it exactly. Just match up the receptors that the immune system uses to check whether it is "correct" or not; otherwise, blood transfusions would be impossible, among other things. The reason why organ rejection happens so frequently is because there are so many differences between you and anyone else- this is why they always recommend family first. If the cells come straight from you with only a slight change or two, the chances of rejection are null.

The thing about rejection is it's not a yes/no switch. You'll reject the organs unless it's from an identical twin (since they are, for all intents and purposes, a clone).

Or if it's from a more distant relative but you're both really inbred. (In zoology there have been recorded incidences in inbred populatioms of tasmanian devils where they actually caught cancer from each other)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil_facial_tumour_disease

[Andres]

How would the tail get caught in zippers? I mean, you have control over it, just don't let it be near your zippers when you zip them.

Shedding is a non issue in my view~

Not the tail itself, but the fur that's on the tail. As for how the fur could get caught, it would happen if you've folded it around yourself or when sitting down. The fur could get caught in your fly, your jacket zipper, a button, in the crack of a chair, etc.

Eh, some people would feel the need to clean up after themselves. Whatever.

No, not really.  Are you familiar with the "Skin gun"?

Spoiler: possibly graphic youtube video (click to show/hide)

The Skin Gun

Similar stemcell research is being done with hair follicles. A similar approach involving a stemcell "ink", and a tattoo gun and follicular unit generating stemcells could be directly injected into your ugly naked tail, and it would grow the hair later.

That video's not available in my country.

[Eldin00]

I just wanted to weigh in on the natural selection vs. humans altering genetics/environment ideas that have come up in this thread.

They are both, at their core, the same thing. Humans like to think that we are 'above' or 'separate from' nature, and that the things we do are somehow not natural. But this is pure hubris. Every person reading this is as much a part of nature as any animal or tree or microbe. And because humans are a part of nature, everything we do or create is a part of nature (unless you'd argue that a bird's nest or beaver's dam is unnatural because it was created by a living creature instead of just happening). It's been mentioned that humans modify their environment to the point where traditional evolutionary pressures don't apply. This is true. This is also perfectly natural. Many organisms alter their environments to some extent. We just happen to be a whole lot better at it than most. And from the point of view that humans and all human works are natural, those changes in selection pressures are completely natural as well. If we start making extensive modifications to our own genes, might we screw ourselves horribly? Absolutely. Nature screws organisms over horribly all the time. There are a variety of natural ways that changes can be introduced into the genome. Humans deciding to make these changes is just another one.

Now all that being said, wierd certainly has a point that allowing severe genetic defects to spread through the population via treating the symptoms so that those who suffer from them can lead a relatively normal life and pass those defects on, could certainly have disastrous consequences down the road. Possibly leading to large die-offs of humans, or even human extinction if it goes on long enough. And everyone needs to decide for themselves whether or not they believe that potential future harm to the species/society outweighs the immediate needs of the individual. I'm personally of the opinion that the best course of action is "Treat the individual (to the extent that they desire treatment, and resources to treat them are available), but acknowledge the long-term problem that can create, and devote as many resources as feasible to figuring out a way to mitigate or prevent the long term issue".

I hope this is all coherent, because it's nearly 4am and I haven't slept yet.