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

The two types of stem cells

A couple of years ago, I delved into a personal research project,  in order to write my second novel,  Glass Chimera. From a layman’s perspective, I was learning about  genes, DNA, cloning, and other areas of scientific endeavor that pertain to the science of genetics.  I learned a lot about the human genome, more than I can ever understand or explain.

One particular area of genetics that is often discussed in our era is  the use of stem cells. My limited investigation into the subject has brought me to this observation about stem cells: there are basically two types of them.

 Embryonic stem cells are those found in the fertilized egg, or the embryo, of a newly-conceived fetus in a female’s uterus. These are the controversial stem cells, because the harvesting of them for medical use will most likely alter or terminate the embryo’s fetal development.  Embryonic stems cells are pluripotent, insofar as they have potential to differentiate into many types of cells that are necessary for a fully developed body to, after birth, sustain life. These cells can be directed by the DNA genetic code to become, for instance,  blood cells,  skin cells,  muscle,  nerve, or whatever cells. My limited studies have  indicated that the  main value of embryonic stem cells is found in their use for medical research.

 In the novel that I wrote while studying this, I include a hypothetical conversation between two graduate students in microbiology. In chapter 24, Erik is explaining  stem cells to his friend Sam:

 “. . .these guys that are doing this type of work, they remove the stem cells from the ICM (inner cell mass) that has congregated inside the 5-or-6-day old blastocyst—“

“So they’re sacrificing the embryo?” Sam wondered.

“I guess you could call it that,”

“What do they do with the outer part?”

“Oh, the trophoblast, God only knows.  I suppose they use it for something or other in the lab, or maybe they culture those cells for some other developmental purpose. I don’t know.  Anyway,  they place the totipotent stem cells into culture and propogate them.”

“That’s what we call a stem cell line,” observed Sam.

“Uhhuh, but it’s tricky.  Those cells have a built-in tendency toward differentiation.  If they’re kept alive unto themselves, without chemical restraints, they’ll start to organize themselves into an embryo again.”

 This “differentiation” potential of stem cells is their most useful attribute. At the same time, it is the very thing that makes them somewhat dangerous. 

 I mentioned above that there is another  type of stem cells: adult stem cell.  Their differentiation potential is quite limited, as compared to the embryonic type, but they are much safer for medical applications, mainly because they are obtained from a patient’s body, and then injected back into that same patient. So there’s no conflict between the genetic info in the medically modified stem cells and the genetic data resident in that patient’s other billions of cells.  This second type of stem cell, the “adult” type, exists in the body of every child and adult. They enable the growth of new bodily tissue, and they exist in every part of the body.   

 Yesterday, June 17 2011, I was fascinated as I listened to a very informative discussion  on the radio about new medical treatments  utilizing these adult stem cells to repair damaged tissue.

Ira Flatow was again demonstrating his customary excellence in science journalism. The depth and scope of  his NPR reporting  keeps  his show, Science Friday, on the cutting edge of popular science education. I always obtain galactical levels of new information and insight when I can listen to his Friday program, or catch it later online.

  The spot I heard yesterday was SciFri 061711 Hour 1: Black Holes, Untested Cell Therapies, Solar Update, which I had clicked on at

http://www.sciencefriday.com/about/listen.

 

Ira was speaking to two medical doctors about Bartolo Colon, the great NY Yankees pitcher whose injured pitching arm required medical treatment. Ira explained that since the pitcher was in the latter years of his baseball career, surgery to correct his elbow problem might be too risky. So Bartolo had elected to have this relatively untested therapy performed on his arm by doctors  in Dominican Republic.  And guess what, it worked! Bartholo has made an impressive comeback in his pitching career, at the age of 37.

 Dr. Rick Lehman, an orthopedic surgeon at the US  Center for Sports Medicine (in St. Louis), described how cells taken from Bartolo’s own body had been medically treated and then injected back into his injured shoulder and elbow. The immature stem cells, as the doc explained, act to recruit blood  supply, enhance healing of ligaments, and improve the natural healing mechanics inside the patient’s body.

 Dr. Scott Rodeo, orthopedic surgeon at the Hospital for Special Surgery (in New York City) contributed to their fleshing out of the subject with specific comments about Bartolo Colon’s surgery, but also with some interesting facts about the different kinds of stem cells.  For instance, risk of cancer is far lower with the use of these adult stem cells than the risk from using  more primitive stem cells, such as those pluripotent ones found in embryos.

 As a writer whose research had skirted these areas pioneering medicine, I was fortunate to have heard their productive talk on NPR about the  minimally surgical restoration of a great pitcher’s arm.

And congratulations to Bartolo Colon, whose baseball career has been renewed.

Glass Chimera

Robby's dream

From chapter 25 of Glass Chimera:

"                 Robby had a dream.

                   It was the hammer and sickle thing.  Freedom verses Slavery:     Embryos crying out for personhood, but being herded instead into  chimeric concentration  camps under glass,  their chromatic hammers swinging with molecular  blacksmithery,  forging the  plasmidic implements of a bogus new world.             

                    Eggs of Women crying out for fertility and progeny, but instead being scythed into  Auschwitzian  abyss.

                    And he heard their singing:

Hmphh .. . Ah .. .Hmphh .. . Ah .. .

That’s the sound of the men working on the chain

gang.

That’s the sound of the men working on the chain

gang.

                 And he knew the grunts of thousands of men a-groanin’;  he heard the songs of millions of  women a-moanin’,  giving birth. He heard the cries of their wounds,  the pangs of their wombs. Slaves, they were.  He heard them singing.  Don’t ya hear Jerusalem moan?  Don’t ya hear Jerusalem moan? No, it weren’t all voluntary.  No, Virginia, it weren’t all voluntary.  Hmphh .. . Ah .. . Hmphh .. . Ah .. . Pull that barge.  Tote that bale.  He saw the burlap cotton sacks dragged upon the ground. Hmphh .. . Ah .. . Hmphh .. . Ah .. . He heard Moses demanding of the pharaoh, Let my people go.  He heard Moses demanding of the pharaoh, Let my people go.   He heard America singing,  follow the drinking gourd, follow the drinking gourd.  

                  He saw the strong brown arm of Washington Jones pull his great grandfather from the  flood that swirled about a faltering riverboat. He felt the loss of  footing as the boat careened upon raging waters, felt the lurch as the boat hit the mama oak and came to a sloshing, creaking crashing halt.

                  He saw, beyond the torrential horizon,  the sod ripped from prairies by oxen teams, and he heard their bellowing, the cracking of the whips as Herculean animals strained and primordial prairie grasses became torn, the black earth turning up its wormy, smarmy loam to be kissed by the sun and drenched by the spring rains, the winter snows, the corn’s roots, the wheat’s shoots.  He heard America singing,  strains of music born of the resolve of freedmen, homesteaders, pioneers, farmers, Scandinavians, Scotch, Irish, African, indentured to the soil, and to their hopes for promised land.

Oklahoma!  He heard Oklahoma, thousands of homesteaders spread in expectation across the dawning prairie horizon, buckboard wagons, horses, mules in anticipation of that great sounding signal from Uncle Sam, brought forth beneath the billowing skirts of fertile farming women, freckle-faced children in the shaded wagons, oxen in the sun, horses on the run.

Freedom? Yes, some were free, but ‘t’weren’t all that sweat dripping into from free brows, Virginia. Much of it had come slitherin’  in wet slavery drops of toil and blood and tears.

He heard low, slow, insidious  munching of the dreaded boll weevil, chomping into oblivion acres upon millions of acres of lily-white wads of forced servitude.

He heard, like God, innocent blood crying out from the ground.

He heard the clanking of chains, the clashing of  cultures and civilizations.  Can you hear the Cherokee moan?  Can you hear the Chickasaw moan?.  He felt the tearing of their platted cords, the stomping of their ancestral hordes. It was a mournful cry heard round the world.

He heard the  low, slow  voice of Willie’s embryonic call, Freedom!

He heard the  high, spry  response of Bo’s ironic refrain,  Freedom! blasting forth in totipotent nuclear song.  The strains were there, ringing  in his dream, clear as a splitting bell, bringing forth the clarion knell.  He knew he heard the song; then it was gone.

"

from ridiculous genes to the sublime

Yesterday, I was repairing someone's front door. While cutting a piece of wood, I realized for the nteenth time just how close we are to the cutting edge of genetic engineering that will ultimately rearrange our living world. This particular flash of insight lit up my neurons as I was listening to Paul Raeburn while he interviewed Dr. Leonard Fleck on NPR's Science Friday


Dr. Fleck was filling us in on personalized medical treatments, which will be a large part of standard health care practice in our future world. But there are some problems associated with this genetic-research-enabled strategy, don't ya know, and if its anything like the practice of medicine generally its as complex as a can of microbial worms.

He was talking about cost-effective treatments, and how genetic identifications can improve our chances of customizing specific treatments for specific patients based on their DNA. In that connection, he was explaining cost-effective numbers, which are evaluations of dollars spent to extend life and/or improve quality of life for sick people. In some ways, this new technology will narrow treatment choices for some patients while broadening them for others. It will solve some problems while presenting more difficult decisions for health professionals and families whose financial resources are, your guessed it, quite limited.

So here's Dr. Fleck talking on the radio, educating us about hard treatment decisions that will have to be made by governmental and insurance evaluators. Some politicians have called such committees, erroneously, "death panels."
These are teams of medical personnel who have to decide what is the best use of public money, or insurance funds. They'll be dealing with questions, all day long every day of the year, like: Should we turn loose this $80,000 so Joe Blow can live for another ten years, or should we send it to John Doe's account so he can can live another ten months? Thorny stuff like that. Not easy appropriations to disburse, but there is only so much much money to go around.

Nevertheless, scientific exploration of the human genome is, these days, unwinding a path of data that will enable medical professionals to make better informed decisions about these investments in ongoing life.

But yesterday, while I was installing a door, and listening to this discussion on the radio... from the ridiculous to the sublime--that's what I was experiencing, because, you see, before guest host Paul Raeburn interviewed Dr. Fleck about these life and death matters, which was in the second hour of the broadcast, he had been talking to Jon Cohen in the first half of the show about genetic research of a different stripe--mating humans with chimpanzees.

I'm serious as a monkey with a crescent wrench, y'all. The first hour of the program had featured a discussion about the genomic differences between humans and chimpanzees. Genetically speaking, the differences are quite insignificant, according to Jon Cohen. He did mention, though, that "there's something really different about us...(humans). Something much more profound than the 1% difference in genes, is what I say. Call me a neanderthal; I don't care.

Anyway, part of their discussion touched, bizarrely, on insemination experiments that were made in 1929 by a Russian biologist named Ilya Ivanovich Ivanaov, who tried to impregnate three female chimps with human sperm. (whose?)
I was relieved to hear that Ivanov's early venture into in vitro fertilization did not work; none of the humans sperms found their fertility-seeking bliss in the ape ova. Thank God it didn't work. Or at least, we haven't seen any evidence of such a creature being yet born into the world, except maybe the president of Persia. Just kidding.

Suffice it to say that if Ivanov's seminal experiments 81 years ago had worked, and a humanzee had been brought into the world, it would have been one small step backwards for man, one giant regressive leap (from one branch of human descent to another) for mankind...and most assuredly a dumbing down of our homo sapiens gene pool.
Thank God we've come a long way in genetic research since those first days of darkly experimental laboratory shenanigans, or at least I hope we have. We shall see; the proof is in the (gene) pooling.

about stem cells

Here's an excerpt from my novel, Glass Chimera, which has, thank God, at last been committed to print.

...from chapter 24:

You were saying, Erik?”

                “Reproductive cloning is for procreation of superior breeding stock, kind of like tweaking natural selection.  We’re assisting nature, and stepping up the process, to yield progeny that is better-equipped.  Therapeutic cloning, on the other hand, is for improving specific genes—replacing defective ones that would lead to disease or disability with normal ones. In therapeutic procedures, the blastocyst is never implanted into a mother. It’s dissected so that the totipotent stem cells in its inner mass can be reproduced in large quantities in lab cultures.”  Erik took a bite from his donut.

                “Yeah, in Petri dishes,” added Sam.

                “Or whatever containers they’re using these days,” said Erik.

“Are you talking about mouse embryos, or human?”asked Sam.

“You know there’s been a lot of this type of work done in the last fifty years or so with frogs and mice and other small species.  Now they’re starting to refine these procedures so that they can be applied to human development.”

“So we’re talking about recovering the inner cell mass from human blastocysts?”

“For therapeutic purposes. This type of cloning affords us large quantities of totipotent cells in the laboratory, to identify and replace genes that express  as diseases .”

“Right, the congenital diseases like Parkinson’s, and cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anemia, muscular dystrophy—“

“Yeah.  There are a bunch of them.”

“So these guys at Wisconsin and Hopkins and other labs recover the inner cell mass, which is composed, during the cleavage stage in the first few days, of totipotent stem cells.”

“The most powerful cells on earth!” exclaimed Sam.

“Almost.” Erik laughed. “ Geron says the most totipotent—sounds  like some  tyrant that’s stuck on himself, doesn’t it?  ”

“He probably wants to clone himself,”cracked Sam.

“Hahahaha”

  Erik continued. “So the most totipotent” He lifted his hands in mock adoration“. . .are the ‘primordial germ cells.’”

“EG cells,” affirmed Sam.

“Exactly—the ‘key to human immortality’ as some have called them. They’re the ones that develop in the embryo, after gastrulation, in the testes or ovaries as the fetal sex organs begin  to form.”

“But anyway, getting back to the blastula stage,” Sam prompted.

“Yes, thank you, as I was saying before the most totipotent microscopic primordial germ cells  reared their germy little heads, hahaha. . .these guys that are doing this type of work, they remove the stem cells from the ICM that has congregated inside the 5-or-6-day old blastocyst—“

“So they’re sacrificing the embryo?” Sam wondered.

“I guess you could call it that,”

“What do they do with the outer part?”

“Oh, the trophoblast, God only knows.  I suppose they use it for something or other in the lab, or maybe they culture those cells for some other developmental purpose. I don’t know.  Anyway,  they place the totipotent stem cells into culture and propogate them.”

“That’s what we call a stem cell line,” observed Sam.

“Uhhuh, but it’s tricky.  Those cells have a built-in tendency toward differentiation.  If they’re kept alive unto themselves, without chemical restraints, they’ll start to organize themselves into an embryo again.”

“I was reading about this last week in Cell.  To keep them in the primordial state, they grow them on a feeder layer of mouse cells or something similar that have been irradiated so they won’t themselves be dividing.”

“Yeah.  The feeder layer underneath secretes proteins that nourish the stem cells above.”

“And I think there’s something about the feeder layer that stimulates the stems to multiply instead of differentiate,” Sam added.

“But at some point, they want to pull some of the stem cells out and let them differentiate,” said Erik.  “That’s really what it’s all about—generating a massive number of pluripotent cells that they can tinker with in order to produce muscle cells, or bone cells, blood cells, whatever is called for in the particular research that they’re doing.”

“Neurons?” Sam wondered.

“ I think they’re the hardest ones to reproduce.” said Erik.

“The cells of the central nervous system don’t take kindly to regenerating.  That’s what I’ve read.  They’re pretty stubborn,” agreed Sam.

“The myelin sheath keeps them kind of bundled up, or—“

“I think the lab guys are using neural stem cells to try and get some regeneration going with them.”

“Adult stem cells?” asked Erik.

“Yeah, neural stem cells, like those that are found in the brain and spinal cord of any adult,” said Sam. 

The unchosen frozen

The slice-and-dice strategy that dehumanized mortgage-backed securities trading is now threatening to similarly commandeer regenerative medical ethics. Jeff Jacoby's statement
is typical of the trend that desensitizes our appreciation of human life and human potential.
He writes: "there is no moral obstacle to using leftover fertility-clinic embryos that would otherwise be discarded for medical research. Nor do I regard a microscopic cluster of cells as a human person entitled to full legal protection."

Now on the other side of the ethical divide comes Judge Judge Royce Lamberth, who, on behalf of  a few plaintiffs and several other million conscientious people in this nation, decides to throw up the judicial warning flags on untethered embryonic stem cell research,
so that we are not sliding on some slippery slope of  moral morass toward nanosurgical human trafficking by which unchosen potential  persons are being frozen wholesale into an inventory of non-voluntary fetal sacrifice instead of being born into the robust life on  this groovy planet.
So here  come chicken-littleish federally-funded researchers  whining the cassandra blues because the whole unbridled research universe is said to revolve around the totipotent Federal Government with its infinite supply of fiat quantitative easing and perpetual petri-dish cultured NIH funding.
Only a couple days ago, even though I love to listen to the timely and informative discussions on my favorite news-talk source, the Diane Rehm show (August 31st),
I was alarmed to hear Dr. Daley and Mr. Tipton  protesting loudly that the sky is falling on stem cell research because without the feds all our research and stem cell lines are stopped in their nanoscopic tracks.
Not so.
There's nothing wrong with utilizing a few ethics-bounded parameters to level the funding field so that private investors can maintain an activating enterprise-based support for disease-breaking  medical progress.
Consider, for instance,  the progressive research being done at Geron Corporation.
Their  recent news release reports a few favorable developments in stem cell research:

~"The FDA notification enables Geron to move forward with the world's first clinical trial of a human embryonic stem cell (hESC)-based therapy in man. The Phase I multi-center trial is designed to establish the safety of GRNOPC1 in patients with "complete" American Spinal Injury Association (ASIA) Impairment Scale grade A subacute thoracic spinal cord injuries."

~"Thomas B. Okarma, Ph.D., M.D., Geron's president and CEO. 'Our goals for the application of GRNOPC1 in subacute spinal cord injury are unchanged - to achieve restoration of spinal cord function by the injection of hESC-derived oligodendrocyte progenitor cells directly into the lesion site of the patient's injured spinal cord.' "

~"GRNOPC1, Geron's lead hESC-based therapeutic candidate, contains hESC-derived oligodendrocyte progenitor cells that have demonstrated remyelinating and nerve growth stimulating properties leading to restoration of function in animal models of acute spinal cord injury (Journal of Neuroscience, Vol. 25, 2005)."

That's good news for people who've suffered spinal cord injuries.

The experimental and clinical work being conducted by this one company alone is evidence that privately funded research can contribute greatly to medical improvement. We need not put all our embryos in one federally-funded basket.
Let willing investors, instead of overburdened taxpayers, take the risk on some of this experimentation. Require  the feds to play by tighter ethical rules so that our developing standard regenerative procedures are founded (and funded!) on solid human rights practice. Furthermore, we can spread the money more equitably to better facilitate adult stem cell, and induced pluripotent adult stem cell, research.

Growing old could be hazardous to your health

The world  these days is frighteningly different from the one my 80-year-old father-in-law grew up in.
Laid up yesterday in medical suspension, his crankiest complaining-point centered on the attendant whose faulty assistance could not prevent the fall that now confines him to a hospital bed.
"No speaka de English," railed the old white guy about the "foreigner" minimum-wage health-care provider.
Yeah, it was all her fault, dad, that you fell.
They're not like your Irish-immigrant ancestors who were speaking the Queen's English (ha!) in New Jersey neighborhoods back in the day.  And I guess you forgot about the Italians who had lived around the corner, or maybe you blocked them out of your memory, although I know for a fact that you later gained an intense appreciation of their restaurants and their wine.

Anyway,
This slow drift toward chronic fault-finding with the presently-devolving world is something I've noticed lately. I've encountered it in my own late-50s bad self. My father-in-law, however, seems to have a full-blown case of the grumpies.

He always was a perfectionist, though. That's how it starts, you know, as if Aristotelian attempts to impose logical order on the chaotic--or some would say "dumb"-- world, might actually have a constructive impact. He's an engineer, able to make sense--and productive systems or machines--out of numbers and physical forces. Unfortunately, human beings--and anything that they initiate or maintain--do not conform to those logical paradigms.

A little bit later, though, as our attention to his present circumstance mellowed his attitude somewhat, I became amazed at the old guy's mental sharpness. Here's the grumpy fella imprisoned in a hospital bed, but he's been watching numerous reports about the infamous oil spill in the Gulf. While analyzing this world-threatening problem, his engineer's mind had recovered every millimeter of acuity. With a precise understanding of what BP guys were attempting to do to stop the gushing oil, he spoke lucidly about their mud-pumping strategies. His practical brain was striving to ascertain where such a massive amount of mud would be readily obtained and stored, and calculating pressure differentials between inside the pipe and outside it, in the mile-deep water...62 and a half pounds per cubic foot of water times x number of feet in height...

What a miserable cataclysm was being presented, by hospital-room tv on the wall, to his octogenerian eyes. What's happening to the world? Is it going down the tubes?  Where are ya when we need ya, Shirley Temple?

What a debilitating, toxifying effluent cast upon the fertile fish-yielding, mouth-of-Mississippi waters in which his sons had fished only six weeks ago!
What a screwed-up world has unwound during his eighty years...although it is maybe not so alarming compared to what Hitler was doing to Europe when the the Jersey kid was only pubescent.

What a messed up world!  Has it always been this way? Has it always been getting worse, with more pollution spewing, more politicians cheating, more lobbyists bribing, more people speaking alien languages at you, more rogue-states killing, more priests molesting,  more unruly kids fucking, more of the world sucking...has it always been this way?
Or is that paranoia just hyper-critical cantankerism of the washed-up geezers (could that soon be me ?) in a world that has always been so?
Well, I think not.
In times past, we could discern the possibility that man might someday destroy himself. But nowadays,  I fear we might actually have the technological capability to do it.
That's not a comforting thought for a middle-aged guy like me watching his father-in-law with all those tubes and wires stuck in him, knowing it might be me in the not-too-distant future.
Assuming we have a future.
Oh, shut yo mouth, fool!

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.

Who are the true patriots among us?

They were not even qualified to be there; many of them were bringing up the rear.
But on Monday, one thousand three hundred and fifty marathon runners in Boston set the pace, and a champion example of true patriotism, for the rest of us Americans. They ran their butts off for 26.2 miles so that others of lesser means can receive medical treatment for dire conditions.
Those runners  are leading the pack in our marathon effort for health care reform.
Everybody's biggest problem in health care reform these days is that there's not enough money to go around to pay all the bills. But today, $14 million was raised for patients who need special care.
That, my friends, is community service; that is true patriotism; that is getting off your couch potato ass to make a difference in the world.  
That is a stellar--as in stars and stripes--example for the rest of us.

And that was my thought when I heard Robin Young, hostess of Here and Now, as she interviewed one of those Boston Marathon charity runners, Tom Kansas. He said,

 "I just wanted to run the marathon; I needed a number somehow...I'm not fast enough to qualify, God knows. I'm a long way from that...so I'll just raise some money for charity...with the American Liver  Foundation."

So here's a guy who, like me, perhaps like you, couldn't quite qualify for the Big Dance, and yet he shows up for the main event with a mission.  But it happens that the mission in his mind--to just run the dam race--morphs to something far greater. He hangs around, hoping for a chance to run with the big dogs. Then, through willingness to take a lesser role, through persistence and perseverance and dedication to his craft--running--he gets his number in the most legendary race of all, and, as it turns out, make a positive contribution to the improvement of our human condition in the world.
Not bad for a day's run.

That's one marathon run for a man, one giant act of service for mankind.
--and an inspiration for the rest of us to strive for more than being couch potatoes in a nation that desperately needs help.

How appropriate

How utterly appropriate that moment was. In the final hours of  birthing health care reform, our laborious legislative transition pushed us into ensuring the most important coverage of all--protection of each child's inalienable birth.
Although this is an Inconvenient truth, every kid's entitled to it.