Carey Rowland's blog

PGD: a new stem cell reconciliation?

When a man and a woman make love and give life together to a new person, this is a beautiful event. The love act is creative in every sense of the word, but most especially because of this: the two lovers have contributed to an eternally procreative art project that has been blooming on our planet for a very long time.

Whoever or whatever the Creator of this life process is, or is up to, is not my question to explore just now, although I have made some decisions in my belief about that question. I merely want to point out a fact or two about the process through which we humans have come to have our individual existences. 

Fact #1 is this: you, as a human person, have 46 chromosomes. 

2.) 23 of your chromosomes were passed to you from your father; the other 23 came from your mother.

3.) These chromosomes, or coded genetic programs, establish a biological framework for your physical existence and life-long development.

4.) Since the unique man who is your father paired his 23 with the 23 chromosomes within that unique woman who is your mother, then you yourself are unique. You--your particular combination of 46 chromosomes-- had never existed before. So you are a unique creation. Congratulations. There has never been another "you"; nor will there ever be.  

These days, microbiologists can husband this human-making process in a laboratory. Believe it or not. It is not as much fun--not nearly as satisfying-- as making babies the time-tested Adam and Eve hubba hubba way. But hey, this test-tube thing is happening. This is what humans, in their quest for improvement, do. The scientific rationale for in vitro fertilization is this: some couples have not been able to conceive a child naturally, and so they can get  clinical help to bridge that fertility gap.    After obtaining sperm from a man, and an egg from a woman, the microbiologist combines them (in the famous "test tube"), and a new human is begun. 

Here's where the scientific work, and the ethical discussion surrounding it, becomes a breeding ground for controversy. My opinion is: Since a unique, never-before-existing 46-chromosome arrangement is manifested in space and time, soon to be flesh and blood--no matter how the conception was facilitated-- we have a new human being our hands. This is creation, by which we men and women participate with the original Creator. And it is serious business, because a person's life--and entire lifetime development--is at stake. There are great--dare I say "sacred" responsibilities present here.

Well, simple enough, really. Not. The further you climb on the tree of knowledge (or the double-helix of DNA), the more complex do your choices become. This is part of what Moses was getting at when he wrote Genesis. But I'll not go there now, as if I could. Anyway,  as it turns out, there is another reason that scientists have for working with in vitro embryos. Some of them are leftovers.  

Yes, Virginia, the outcome of the test-tube baby boom is that we have thousands, possibly millions, of little embryos suspended in cold-storage, probably at about -196º C.  Most of them will never be implanted in a mother's womb. Some of them will be, but not all. So guess what--another thing that's happening is this: the key to medical progress is contained deep within the very life process itself, beginning with its earliest stage, the embryo. These frozen embryos. So the scientific community wants to call these microscopic potentialities into the service of mankind--involuntarily, of course--by harvesting their totipotent genetic characteristics to improve the health of living persons.These little ones are the source for the famous "embryonic stem cell" lines that are cultured in petri dishes in laboratories all over the world.

So then the question becomes, quite infamously: Are we, as a human race of civilized persons, going to allow these suspended potential kids to be sacrificed, for the sake of medical progress, so that already-living persons can have qualitatively better lives?

We don't want to kill those 46-chromosome-bearing new creations just for the sake of heartlessly improving our own already-established lives. That would be, in the biblical sense, not unlike child sacrifice. Civilized people don't do that, do we?

Well guess what. I heard on the radio yesterday that microbiologists have developed a technique for obtaining individual embryonic stem cells from a 3-day embryo (in what's called the "cleavage" stage of fetal development) without killing the embryo. The procedure is called PGD, which stands for pre-implantation diagnosis. In it, the microbiologist extracts a single cell  from the 8-cell embryo, leaving the embryo virtually intact for further development and life. 

The PGD single-cell extraction procedure has been widely used all over the world. According Dr. Robert Lanza, in his statement during an interview with Ira Flatow on ScienceFriday (NPR), its use is dependable. http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/201201275 Dr. Lanza's research pertains to stem cell therapy for improved eyesight in patients who have suffered macular degeneration. http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2812%2960028-2/abstract  

But what caught my pro-life ear was Dr. Lanza's mention of this technique for obtaining totipotent embryonic stem cells without killing the fetus. The little guy gives up a single cell, then moves on to further development. Assuming the best, maybe its a little like giving blood. 

A little further reading brought me to: 

http://www.pennmedicine.org/fertility/patient/clinical-services/pgd-preimplantation-genetic-diagnosis/#step-by-step-process and this explanation: "After three days in culture, the embryos typically reach the eight–cell stage. One to two cells are removed from each embryo on day three and analyzed..." 

The extracted cell ia generally used for a genetic assessment of the embryo, so that parents, assisted by the scientists and doctors, can make choices about which of the embryos to choose for implantation in the mother's womb. This is another controversial development in the can-of-DNA-worms that constitutes genetic research and practices--"designer babies," and so and so on…

But my interest in this procedure revolves around its potential as a reconciliation between the value that we pro-lifers place on embryonic sanctity, and scientific use of surplus embryos without wholesale killing of them. A little more googling brought me to more info, from a fertility clinic in Houston, where I found this (emphasis mine):

http://www.houstonivf.net/Services/PreimplantationGeneticDiagnosis.aspx 

"Preimplantation genetics can be performed in vitro at any of the following developmental stages, the zygote (day 1), cleavage stage (day 3) or blastocyst (day 5). At each of these stages, cell(s) are removed from the embryo for genetic testing in special laboratories. This does not appear to harm the ongoing development of the embryo with over 1000 healthy babies born worldwide after preimplantation genetic screening. However, an insufficient number of babies have been born to confirm that the procedure is completely without risk.

So now I'm wondering: Does this change, at all, the debate between pro-life opponents of embryonic stem-cell research, and the researchers whose microscope sights are trained on all those frozen surplus embryos?

Glass Chimera

This is Psalm 19:

(Blatant childlike, anthropomorphic faith, and lovin' it)

The heavens are telling of the glory of God, and their expanse is declaring the work of His hands.

Day to day they  pour forth the message, and night reveals knowledge. Yet there is no speech; nor are there words. No voice is heard.

The vibrations of the heavens have gone out through all the earth, and their utterances to the end of the world. 

In them he has placed a tent for the sun, which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, who rejoices like a strong man to run his course. The sun's rising is from one end of the heavens, and its circuit to the other end of them, and there is nothing hidden from its heat.

The law of the Lord is perfect, restoring the soul; the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple.

The precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart. The commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes.

The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever; the judgments of the Lord are true; they are righteous altogether. They are more desirable than gold, yes!, more desirable than fine gold, sweeter than honey and the drippings of the honeycomb.

Moreover, by them your servant is warned; in keeping them there is great reward.  What man can discern his own errors? Oh God! Acquit me of my hidden faults, and keep me--your servant--from presumptuous sins. Let them not rule over me.

Then I will be blameless before you, and I shall be acquitted of great transgression.

Let the words of my mouth and the mediataion of my heart be acceptable in your sight, Oh Lord, my rock and my redeemer!

 

Defunding H2 from H20

I learn a lot about what's on the cutting edge of scientific research by listening to Ira Flatow on ScienceFriday, NPR. The segment I heard today (8 April 2011) was downright inspiring as the program presented some good possibilities for  generating energy from sunlight by  experimental technology that could separate of hydrogen and oxygen from water.They call it artificial leaf; its something like synthesized photosynthesis. This ScienceFriday edition is worth a listen.

http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/201104081

Dr. Daniel Nocera of MIT talks with Ira about this very promising technology of using silicon to  function in energy-gathering ways simulating what photosynthesis does in natural leaves, only better. Nocera's rap goes like this:

What does a leaf do? It turns photons into electrical current, stores the solar energy while splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen. In this new tech, silicon replaces the leaf. Stored hydrogen produced thereby runs a fuel cell. This silicon system catches the sun as much as a hundred times more efficiently than a leaf.
The real breakthrough is that these researchers are using earth-abundant materials: silicon, cobalt, phosphate and cheap metal.  Hence, some practical applications for energy generation are realized; they're building prototypes at MIT, with the experimental apparatus going for days  with no drop in productivity. This water-breaking work has propelled progress well beyond the science; now its in the engineering phase.

Ira asks: whats next for commercial viability? Dr. Nocera says they're working toward the apparatus being the workable size of two doors and thus operating effectively. Passing water over silicon and producing energy, but without wires--that's the breakthrough-- making the necessary gases  over surface of silicon. Next  challenge is engineering a gas collection system, and now they're using regular water instead of something rarer, so that's the real  promise of significant improvement.

Dr. Nocera also mentions in the closing comments that people in developing world are less dependent on old technologies  than we are; that is something to be aware of. Folks in the developing world are more open to new techs, being less dependent on the old (fossil-fuel) ones.

This is cutting edge; you won't hear about it on fox or hln. That's why I appreciate ScienceFriday, and that's why I appreciate NPR.
Although I do not subscribe to the exclusively materialistic hypotheses through which Ira interprets our cosmological origins, I do appreciate the excellent coverage that he and his staff regularly provide on scientic frontiers.

And my appreciation extends beyond the ScienceFriday crew, to NPR generally, which is an informative aural venue through which we Americans can garner fuller understanding of our life on this finite planet as it exists today. National Public Radio is a place in broadcast space where we can hear, and participate in, real disscussions about relevant, timely issues. A little "liberal" perhaps, but its more productive, I think, than listening to some self-made mouthpiece who pontificates through a microphone and insults callers who disagree.

As a supporter of public radio, I hope to see ScienceFriday and all the other NPR programs continue. If the Repubs, of which I am one, succeed in cutting the funds for public broadcasting, I do not see that as an insurmountable obstacle for its continuance. I plan to continue my financial support. I truly believe that the excellence in journalism and educative programming supplied therein will find adequate means to prosper in the competitive world of commercial media--and without compromising their high journalistic and first-amendment standards.

If our Congress is inclined to consider cutting NPR out of the federal funding trough, I suggest that they defund Planned Parenthood instead, and then appropriate that money that would have otherwise aborted feti to promote growth--growth in public comprehension of the issues that define our existence in 21st-century America.

There's no sense in aborting feti when we will have dire need, in the future, for young working citizens to support our expanding Medicare demands and our waning energies.

Glass Chimera

We all feel a need to clean up our act.

Maybe its because Mama always said "Go wash your hands!"
Her command established good practice right? Good hygiene, before a meal, not a bad idea at any other time either.
How do moms know that? How did we humans figure out that washing is an essential part of good health and personal hygiene?
Modern science has alerted us to the infectious world of microscopic germs. But even more compelling than that, I think, is the frequent encounter with grody substances, greasy surfaces, and just generally dirty stuff that seems to latch on to us every day in this world. We use the bathroom how many times per day? Then we wash, intuitively, or maybe its because mama taught us.
Long before science revealed to us the need to lather away noxious micro-organisms, parents and sages were training their children to wash themselves.

 At some point, the cleansing act afforded such significance that it became an element of religious practice. There must be something holy about getting cleaned up
Torah prescribes washing in specific situations, as in Leviticus 15.
In Three Cups of Tea, page 68, Greg Mortenson describes the pre-prayer washing performed by his guide, Manzoor, in the Pakistani city of Taxali, as a response to the muezzin's call.

Jesus washed the feet of his disciples; might have been a message there.
These days, we take washing for granted, as if humans have always done it with constant regularity. But I think our hygienic impulse was encoded as a divine prompting to compel us toward self-improvement and species preservation. Ultimately it invigorates not only the body, but the soul as well.
Clean living is perhaps not the only human improvement that arose from the godly awareness.

Glass half-Full

Today's Mystery Question

Today's Mystery Question is:
Do you know what this is?

"basehitz" says:
(Quote:)

"Signs of manipulation are everywhere.
"Example: My live trading screen provides 1 second resolution. Monitoring with volume is the key. When I’m looking for what the puppet masters “want” the market to do, I watch SPY. I have repeatedly observed this sequence:
• Bad economic data is released.
• Market plunges 1%+.
• Some minutes pass.
• If the fall pauses, an unusually high spike in SPY begins the reverse. The volume spike might be 250,000+ shares. That’s $25M spent in < 1 sec.
• A few minutes passes, another jolt follows.
• This process is repeated until the move back up starts. The algo-ramp bots are then in control and day traders chase it.
• Subsequent retracements are “allowed”, but not enough to disrupt the trend. More buy orders jolt the index higher again. In some cases, repeated jolts are fired.
• You can almost watch them “engineer” the turnaround and ramp."

(endQuote)


Hint:
http://seekingalpha.com/article/227731/comments

From jellyhead to crowning glory

Knowledge is limitless as the universe, extensive as Hubble images of distant nebula, intense as the intricacies of DNA. It just goes on forever. A person could acquire knowledge all his life and only scratch the surface of all that is happening.

Human history is full of wise people who acquired copious knowledge: Moses, Socrates, Confucius, Newton, Einstein, and many more. But the world we live in requires limiting knowledge, because too much of the stuff overwhelms us. History is also full of smart people who were frustrated because the general tide of human activity is determined more by baser instincts than by smartness. Most people are more concerned about being fed and comfortable than they are yearning for knowledge.

In ancient times, the wisdom given to Moses compelled him to write a book about the origins of the human race. Many people today consider Genesis a collection of myths or Hebrew/Chaldean folk tales. I don't see it that way. I believe that the work of Moses was divinely inspired. If you can attempt viewing it, as I do, beyond the veil of time and evolving human knowledge, you will see that it is raw truth.

That's not to say that its revealed truth is necessarily congruous with our ongoing revelation of scientific discovery. When Moses did his research many millenia ago, he had no benefit of Hubble telescopes, the scientific method, libraries or Google. Because his treatise is not equipped with these contemporary intellectual supports, we jaded moderners tend to dismiss the Genesis account of creation as something quaint and anthropologically curious, and therefore of lesser value  than scientifically established knowledge. I do not see it that way. Moses was, like, the Einstein of his time.

According to Moses, there were two trees in the the Creator's garden about which he had given humans specific instruction. Adam and Eve, first prototypes of civilized humans, were commanded by God to eat from the tree of Life, but not to eat from the tree of Knowledge of Good/Evil.This makes an awful lot of sense when you think about it, because knowledge is as limitless as the universe, whereas life itself--well, it must go on.

You see, Moses wasn't forbidding knowledge; he was putting it in its rightful place. Knowledge is quite stimulating, and at times very useful, but it does not sustain the spirit of God which inhabits the tree of life.

I'll tell you how all this rumination started. A couple of days ago, I heard on my nearby public radio station, WFDD, two very different perspectives that pertain to this conundrum, but they were right next to each other in time. The contrast between Dr. David Linden's mind-opening knowledge of neuroscience, and Ms. Gerry Patton's account of her lifelong struggle to find the right hairstyle, is quite stark. I've been thinking about the difference between their two perspectives for two days now. And yet both of these precious people, miles apart in their perspectives, represent together the great, fascinating spectrum of human experience.  There is so much that could be written about this, you know, but instead of attempting to uncover all the nuances of truth from both sources I will simply supply two audio links and two quotes from these two amazing people whom I heard on a sunny Monday morning, talking about a little something  they each have learned in this life.

Dr. David Linden, neuroscientist, talking about 600 million years of evolution and how the life process had patched together, from disparate genetic parts, the human brain, said this:

"A miracle happens. You have enough neurons in this cortical circuit, massively interconnected, and somehow, what emerges from that are these amazing human traits - the ability for me to know what you are thinking based on social cues that you give me, other forms of observational learning and high-level cognition."  

What I  like about this statement from Dr. Linden is his use of the word "somehow," and that's what I've been contemplating for two days.
Meanwhile, in Winston-Salem, NC, an hour-and-a-drive from my home, Ms. Gerry Patton offered, after describing the lengthy quest for her optimum hair expression, this kernel of wisdom:

"After many years of searching and finally accepting that the good Lord knew what he was doing when he placed this hair on my head, I'm working with it and loving it...I'm growing locks...Now I'm happy and nappy...He gave me something extraordinary and beautiful, a head full of kinky hair and now I found a way of letting it be my natural crowning glory."

What I like about this testimony from Ms. Patton is her use of the phrase "the good Lord knew..."

And both of these extraordinary people I heard on public radio within ten minutes of each other.  It takes all kinds to make a world, you know. Thank God for diversity.

What about them brahmin, minimum-wagers, and every Tom, Dick and Mary in between?

How many travelers, in the history of this world, have ever traveled to Egypt and gazed with awe upon those ancient pyramids?
Have you?
Everybody knows they were built with slave labor.

Here in the civilized world, we have a canon of historical texts by which we recount, examine, and evaluate the history of our species. One cultural record by which westerners have established societal norms is the Torah. Moses wrote it some four or five thousand years ago. Within that hallowed accounting is found a book called Exodus, wherein a reference is read to Hebrew workers  making, under duress as forced labor, bricks, and "bricks with straw."

So, did Hebrew slaves  form some of those weighty blocks that were stacked to construct the Egyptian pyramids? I suppose so. If you're a historian, maybe you can help me out here.

By and by,though, through God's direction and Moses' leadership, the descendants of Jacob were able to extricate themselves from Egyptian slavery and escape to the wilderness and eventually to the promised land, aka Palestine, aka the most disputed real estate in the world, aka Israel and Gaza/WestBank.

That story of the Jews' exodus from Egypt--their overcoming of slavery--has been a source of great inspiration for many oppressed people groups in subsequent human history. One of the most recent emancipation movements propelled by the liberating example in Hebrew scripture was our own American one.
The Pentateuch/Torah having been also a part of Christian revelation, some of us religious Americans have traditionally derived powerful motivation, from reading  Moses's account, for declaring the triumph of freedom over slavery.

...although that whole "freedom" idea is not a concept that people truly appreciated until the Enlightenment. That's the period of time in which our nation was conceived, under the auspices of enlightened leaders such as Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and of course Mr. Washington along and with a host of other notables whose names you learned in middle-school history.

During that Revolutionary era, we threw the Brits out, while the French were at about the same time overthrowing their decadent monarchy. It was a wild time--a chaotic period of history, in which much blood was spilt.In France, as they say, the heads rolled. On this side of the Atlantic, we were a little less bizarre with our justice.  The fundamental Enlightenment fabric from which our independence was sewn had been cut cut from the same Euro-heritage we shared with the French. Our two democratic nations have since evolved in different directions.

In the 1780s, we wrote a Constitution, which later became the basis for the law of our land.
It was a truly inspired piece of work--a comprehensive, far-sighted document that has served us well in many ways, but not universally well. Our Constitution, you understand had a serious--a near-fatal--flaw. Its framers neglected to (for they were incapable of) solving the divisive question of slavery.
So the forced-labor infection festered for a few generations until it finally burst forth as a boiling civil war.
Providentially,  our nation's body politic survived the violent surgery, although the slavery problem did not, just because we fought a bloody war over it, go away.
In truth, the contagion of economic servitude may be raising its ugly head again. How so?
Ponder these dialectic scenarios of history:

Free people or Slaves
Kings/Queens or their Subjects,
Lords or Vassals,
Capitalists or Proletariat
Upper class or Lower(middle) class
Brahmins or Untouchables
Chinese Communist Party members or All those other Chinese
Educated people and Everybody else
Elites and Everybody else.

With these kernels of sociological spectra, I pose an inquiry: Is America becoming, in this era of polarizing economic extremities, a nation of media-lobotomized, minimum-wage debilitated vassals, ruled by a super-rich, technocratic, professionally-equivocating  elite?

IAre we reverting to a kind of neo-slavery?
A society divided into classes...or even...castes?

The dreadful question crossed my mind  when I encountered this lengthy American Spectator article by Angelo Codevilla (Professor emeritus of international relations, Boston University) in which he doth protest (too much) that an elite political class (of both Dems and Repubs) is unable, or unwilling, to arrest...
(in my words) a jabba-the-hut governmental behemoth, thus slowly waterboarding us to death with the drip, drip, drip of creeping taxes,  while the confoundingly complex issues of our age (health care legislation, financial reform, global warming, etc) act as a smokescreen, or oilscreen? to impose a constrictive political/corporate hegemony that leads ultimately to serfdom?

As I considered Mr. Codevilla's exhaustive array of evidence...

    for instance, in his summation, he wields this statement: "it has become conventional wisdom among our ruling class that they may transcend the Constitution while pretending allegiance to it"...
...and about the time I turned to page 4 of his rant, the thought hit me like a ton of
 bricks (with straw):

It's always been this way. The rich get rich; the poor get poorer.
That whole "created equal" idea is an 18th-century illusion, irrelevant to our 21st-century debt-enslaved, dire straits predicament.
Freedom, when times get hard, regresses to Slavery.
Or does it?
It's up to us to decide.

Life is a skills marathon

Unemployed?  Now it's time to get busy.

The cold hard truth is you were born into this world to acquire some marketable skills so you could get out there in the human race and make a living.  What are you going to do about it?
Are you not getting a check now?
Here. Accept this reality check. You'll be cultivating new job skills from now until you die, because the world is changing so fast. Are you up to it?
Life is a skills marathon.  Will the skills you develop as a young worker still be relevant and applicable when you hit middle age, and when you get old?

Since the dawn of human industry we've been making Things--necessary Things: foods, tools, clothes, etc, and selling them to one another. Since the beginning of our industrial age a few hundred years ago, we have evolved to technologizing our manufacture of Things. And because those consumer products have become plentiful and affordable, we've rendered them virtually necessary. We would find life difficult in the present arrangement without refrigerators, ovens and cars, and all those other Things.

When we started getting fat and happy with more leisure time, we prospered beyond just making necessary Things, to making Stuff, like gourmet foods, fashionable clothes and cars, phonographs and records, computers, vcrs dvds, etc. It's Stuff you don't really need, but you have perhaps cultivated desire for it. And such Stuff all contributes to our accumulated wealth and economy, and thus puts bread and meat on a lot of tables.

In the modern economy of things, SERVICES have become more and more important, in many ways replacing the making of Things as a propellant of economic well-being.
Some of us cut hair,some do laundry, wait tables, provide legal advice, teach, etc.

In the expanding world economy, we're noticing in the last forty years or so that the manufacturing of Things and Stuff tends to gravitate to countries where wages are low. Now in the 21st century we discover that even Services are being outsourced to low-cost countries.
We Americans are suffering economic doldrums because most everyone else in the world can make things, and provide services, cheaper than we can.
I've been noticing this for quite a while now, and wondering just how we will ever get back to making enough Things and Stuff to generate enough money to afford each others' Services.

Yesterday I discovered a very insightful article pertaining to this dilemma.
Here are a few insightful talking points from Ryan Avent about our prospects for getting back in the productivity game:

"What is really important is the level, supply, and transferability of skills. And it is here that we seem to have run into problems. We’re not producing enough skilled workers to keep up with the demand for skills, and we’re producing too many unskilled workers."

"What will maintenance (of skills) involve? Investment in health and education. Protection against many personal risks. A safety net. The time and resources to retrain, to maintain and improve social capital, and so on."

Ryan Avent concludes his timely and insightful article, "Forget Manufacturing," with this advice:

"Forget manufacturing. Forget things. We need to be trying to create an environment in which workers can thrive in an utterly unpredictable world, where the world will be turned on its head tens or hundreds of times over the length of an adult’s career."


Who is the "we"? --the government, the community, the state, the social club, the peer group, the church, the union,  big brother?
Whom can we expect to plan and act on behalf of our own well-being (welfare? ha!).

We the People need to be asking ourselves these hard questions.
In the big picture, the  real answer for our provision is found ultimately in God.  I'm not just being religious here; I truly believe it. We would do well to  be wary of  earthly entities that claim to care for us. Even family, as a source of help, is sometimes suspect, especially these days, with families falling apart at the drop of a hat. As for those sketchy worldly entities..the government, the community, the state, the social club, the peer group, the church, the union, the big brother...don't hold your breath.

In the real nitty gritty here and now, each and every one of us needs to be resourceful, energetic, and wise in our use of time.

Take care of yo own dam self, and those you love, if you can. Here's how:

Stay in school if you can; Keep learning.
If you can't do school full-time, take courses, even if only one at a time. Check out availability of skill-enhancing classes at your nearby community college or university, or online.
Get busy.  Nobody else is going to do this for you.

And get a part-time job if you can--anything is better than nothing. And yes--any job is better than collecting unemployment, because the government really doesn't have enough money to keep everyone on the dole, even if they claim to.
So get the job; you've got to keep those people skills sharp, and you need a little real income rolling in--not that fake government stuff.
Don't let some governmental program or entitlement like unemployment benefits determine your employment options for you.You need to stay busy; keep those neurons firing.  You need to work on something every day, for yourself or for someone else, for your own mental, moral, and career development.

Keep thinking, and watching.
And pray.
Turn to God for help; society doesn't care about you.
You don't want big brother looking out for you, because he is a heartless master.

Oil-bustin' mycoplasm laboratorium, someday?

The nano-revolution is presently poised to catapult genetics biology into an exponential expansion.
Thanks to Professors Craig Venter, Hamilton Smith, and their colleagues, we now know we can "boot up" software in a living cell.
According to this week's Economist article about their gene-bustin' research, we've now crossed "a milestone on the road from the craft of biotechnology, which manipulates genes one at a time, to the industry of synthetic biology, which aims to make wholesale changes to living things."
Pretty big progress, coming from a little mycoplasma.
These persistent researchers have now demonstrated that synthetic chromosomes can be gathered and harnessed, like oxen or a mules bred for specific purposes, to perform genetic tasks in the laboratory.
The scientists started with a computer program, and four chemicals--adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine. They whipped up a laboratory concoction, inserted it into a host organism, and came up with a designer life-form.

Intelligent design, don't you know.
Surely this is a Nobel Prize breakthrough. These guys put together a self-replicating cell whose parent is a computer.

Perhaps one day, they, or those researchers who come after them, will engineer, let's say, a new algae organism that can produce biofuels on a commercially viable scale.  The naturally-occurring algae are, you see, not inclined to do such a thing. But with a little nudging from us human taskmasters, they could be persuaded to maybe plow up our hydrocarbonal fallow ground for us.
These constructed genes can, as David Baltimore said on the Diane Rehm Show, "drive a cell."
I think we'll be, in days to come, like the pioneers of old, who would drive a mule to get the back forty plowed, except that our new customized chromosomal critters will be breaking new ground for medical and environmental progress. Agricultural too, no doubt.

Steve Roberts, sitting in for Diane Rehm this (Monday) morning, facilitated an incredibly instructive discussion about this most recent accomplishment. David Rejeski referred to the breakthrough as "gaining control of matter at a nano level." Steve Roberts mentioned that we are moving forward toward "controlling the building blocks" of the next industrial revolution.

David Baltimore recounted that we have been on a path of microbiological progress that turned a big corner in 1953. That's when Watson and Crick described the molecular structure of DNA.  Since that time we've learned to read that genetic code, and to even recreate it. Now, according to Baltimore, we can "see the trajectory of it (our accumulating knowledge.)"

Scientists work collaboratively toward synthesizing more and more genes. It will be a lot of work, for a long time. In the human genome--the main one we're trying to sustain and protect-- are contained 3 billion base-pairs of nucleotides.

This blob-buster microcoding has been a long time in the making--three and a half billion years, accoding to Craig Ventor, the originator of the mycoplasma laboratoriam project.

 What an amazing age we live in.

However, not to oil on our parade or anything, but meanwhile down in the gulf...
Other, less controlled human experiments spew hydrocarbon muck irretrievably  into the murky waters just south of Louisiana.
Maybe one day we'll concoct a nano chromosome to corral a brand-new organism into eating up oil spills.
It will be a petri-dish organism, a Glass Chimera.

from Relativity to Rock

As the big bang or whatever you want to call it manifested a universe through ever-widening time and space,  Logos asserted, in the midst of diverging matter and energy, a creative force to countermand  the default entropy. It was good.

So good, in fact, that Logos got excited and wanted to share the exuberance with someone. So Logos arranged a certain solar system so that it would  fling out a planet upon which optimum conditions could evolve to produce sentient beings.

After those living entities had developed to an optimum condition, Logos breathed into one chosen specimen a new dimension called Spirit, which enabled the new species to communicate with Logos, which is why Logos referred to homo sapiens as being "in our image."

What that in our image attribute meant was: able to communicate with its creator. This was no small step for mankind.

One day many generations later an important turning point in the history of homo sapiens was reached. On a clear starry night, a certain very sensitive, intelligent man stepped out of his tent, looked up at the heavens and  thought: This world, with its accompanying heavens and creatures, is quite impressive. I'd like to write a book about how it all happened, because my people have been wondering about its origins.
 
And Logos, reading his mind, replied: Good idea. I've been waiting for someone like you to come along. Sit down and start writing; I'll instruct you. I'll give you some material that will help the people understand what's going on in the universe, and will also help them to make a better life for themselves.

From our perspective several thousand years later, the man's opus was quite limited by his place and time. But he did a nice job of it, and  managed to produce, with a little divine help, a best seller. You can still get a copy today.

His name was Moses.