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We Live in a Gentlemen’s C- Universe

by Penny222167 Posted on October 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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Physicist Eugene Wigner is the author of a famous paper called “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.” Brad DeLong comments:

We are all, potentially, the Friends of Wigner. It has always seemed to me that anyone with the empathy and imagination to think of him or herself as one of the Friends of Wigner is then driven inescapably to either “quantum mechanics is totally wrong wrong wrong wrong and just predicts well for incomprehensible reasons” or “many-worlds”. There really are no other alternatives, or at least what alternatives there are are even stranger.

Au contraire. I consider quantum mechanics to be evidence that we are all constructs in somebody else’s virtual reality. All of the peculiarities of quantum mechanics are easily explainable if the universe is merely a computer-generated world subject to the whims of a programmer.

The only question left is why the programmer has created such a world. Whimsy? Amusement? As a test of some sociology theorem? Bad design?

Perhaps the last one is most likely. In reality, quantum mechanics is a desperate, ugly patch glued onto a poorly working universe by a stressed freshman at 2 am. Basically, the poor kid waited until the last minute, as freshmen everywhere do, and hadn’t really understood much of the text for the required “Plenum Creation and Maintenance” class. The result was a mess that kept falling apart even for small taus of only a few billion years. One thing led to another, and eventually the whole project became a Rube Goldberg monstrosity of black holes, 11 dimensions, wavicles, arbitrary speed-of-light caps on velocity, and observer-induced wave collapse as a last-ditch way of reducing the computing power needed to run it.

In the end it received a gentlemen’s C- from a sympathetic professor. That’s the universe we live in.

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We Live in a Gentlemen’s C- Universe

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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks – Rebecca Skloot

by Myrna Posted on September 5, 2016

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Rebecca Skloot

Genre: History

Price: $9.99

Publish Date: February 2, 2010

Publisher: Crown/Archetype

Seller: Penguin Random House LLC


#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor&#xa0;black tobacco farmer whose cells—taken without her knowledge in 1951—became one of the most important tools in medicine, vital for developing the polio vaccine, cloning, gene mapping, and more.&#xa0;Henrietta's cells&#xa0;have been bought and sold by the billions, yet&#xa0;she remains virtually unknown, and her family can't afford health insurance. This phenomenal New York Times bestseller tells a riveting story of the collision between ethics, race, and medicine; of scientific discovery and faith healing; and of a daughter consumed with questions about the mother she never knew.

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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks – Rebecca Skloot

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This Florida Community May Unleash Genetically Modified Mosquitoes to Fight Zika and Dengue

by EzequielQXI Posted on August 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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Genetically engineered mosquitoes may sound like a sci-fi superbug out of a Stephen Spielberg film, but these are the real deal. The altered insects are the latest approach to quell the spread of mosquito-borne diseases that claim an estimated 725,000 lives globally each year, not to mention Zika virus, which has spread rapidly in the Americas and causes alarming birth defects—and could turn out to affect the adult brain, too—but seldom kills.

Earlier this month, the FDA approved the first proposed US field trial of genetically modified mosquitoes. The trial is planned to launch in Key Haven, Florida, 161 miles south of the Miami-Dade neighborhood where the nation’s first locally transmitted Zika cases have been detected—and five miles from the the heart of Florida’s 2009-2010 outbreak of dengue, a potentially deadly virus that can be spread by the same mosquito. Local opposition has stalled the release of the altered bugs, even as the Zika virus continues to spread in South Florida. Now residents in this island community will get to weigh in on the fate of the trial via a nonbinding local referendum this November. A majority of the mosquito control commissioners for the Keys, who have final say in the matter, have vowed to side with the locals. If a trial is approved, the mosquitoes could be let loose as early as December.

Whether it happens this time or not, the interest in fighting mosquitoes with high-tech methods is only growing. In science labs across the globe, researchers are studying parasitic microbes, various types of genetic modifications, and even new techniques that, in theory, could nearly eradicate local mosquito populations or make it impossible for the mosquitoes to transmit a given disease. In the meantime, here’s what you should know about the proposed release in South Florida.

How are these mosquitoes modified?
Scientists at Oxitec, a UK-based company that has spent years honing its techniques in the lab and in the field, have altered Aedes aegypti—the primary mosquito conduit for Zika, dengue, yellow fever, and chikungunya—with a gene that causes its progeny to die in the larval stage. The researchers sort the altered mosquitoes by sex and release only the males, which then go out and mate with wild females, dooming their offspring. The modified mosquitoes, which can only survive a few days outside the climate-controlled comforts of a laboratory, also carry a gene for a fluorescent protein that lets researchers distinguish modified mosquitoes from wild ones. Both of the inserted genes are non-toxic and non-allergenic.

What if one of these mosquitoes were to bite me?
Assuming just males are released, they won’t—only females bite, because they need your blood to nourish their eggs. A few females get past the screening, but they comprise less than 0.2 percent of the insects released, and the chance of getting bit by one of these rare females is lower still. In the unlikely event that you are bitten by a modified mosquito, the result will be no different than with an ordinary one, according to Matthew DeGennero, a mosquito neurogeneticist at Florida International University. Mosquitoes have been around for 210 million years, he points out, yet we have no evidence that they’ve ever been able to transfer their DNA to any other organisms, including the ones they feed on.

But can’t releasing one organism to control another one mess with the natural balance?
Sure. Humans have made plenty of such blunders trying to control pests. Hawaii’s mongoose infestation, Australia’s poisonous cane toads, and Canada’s thistle-eating weevils are just a few examples of “biocontrol” gone awry. The difference with the Oxitec mosquitoes is that, unlike the introduced species of the past, they are engineered to disappear quickly. It’s actually a great business model, because the mosquito control boards will have to keep purchasing from Oxitec to keep local mosquito populations suppressed. But it also makes it easier to deal with unintended consequences—which the FDA deems unlikely in any case.

One valid concern is that reducing the numbers of Aedes aegypti may allow its cousin Aedes albopictus—which is capable of transmitting the same viruses—to move in. But in addition to being a less-efficient disease carrier, albopictus can have somewhat different habits and meal preferences. Aegypti feed almost exclusively on human blood, and tend to live alongside people in densely populated areas. Albopictus is just as prone to feeding on wildlife and livestock, and tends to stay in more rural settings, where they are less likely to spread disease. But they also show up in places like Los Angeles. In short, it’s complicated.

How will the GM mosquitoes affect other animals that feed on mosquitoes?
Most insect eaters have broad diets, so there’s no evidence that eliminating a specific mosquito will leave anyone without food. Nor will snacking on GM mosquitoes harm the birds, bats, and other fauna that eat the bloodsuckers. On the contrary, DeGennaro says, releasing modified mosquitos is a lot less harmful to the environment than spraying nasty chemicals. Each year 15 million acres across the US are doused in Naled, a neurotoxic insecticide used to keep mosquito populations in check. “Insecticides are very problematic for the environment,” DeGennaro says. “They disturb the ecosystem and affect insects other than the one you’re targeting.” Banned in Europe, Naled is known to kill bees, butterflies, birds, and fish indiscriminately. For this reason, Puerto Rico refused to accept Naled shipments from the US government to combat its Zika epidemic, even though a 20-25 percent infection rate is expected there by summer’s end. The United States, however, deploys tens of thousands of gallons of Naled annually to control Aedes aegypti. The FDA has concluded that the risk GM mosquitos pose for humans and other species is extremely low: “I can’t think of a potential problem with this,” DeGennaro says. “But I can think of a million potential problems with insecticides.”

What if I don’t want to be a guinea pig?
You won’t be, really. Oxitec has already released modified mosquitoes in several countries, including Malaysia, Brazil, and Panama—and more than three million altered skeeters lived out their short lives in the Cayman Islands in 2009 during the company’s first field trial. The proposed trial in the Keys isn’t intended to test the mosquitoes’ safety or environmental impacts—Oxitec has spent 14 years on such studies already. Rather, the purpose is to determine whether the altered mosquitoes can reduce Aedes aegypti populations in this environment the way they’ve done so elsewhere. Oxitec reports that wild aegypti populations have been slashed by more than 90 percent in areas where its mosquitoes were released. Given that aegypti puts more than 40 percent of the world’s population at risk for various diseases, those figures could prove convincing to many health and safety officials—at least until an effective vaccines becomes available.

Genetic tinkering is hardly new, of course. “Humans have been genetically modifying organisms since the dawn of civilization,” DeGennero says. “That’s why we have crops and domestic animals.” For nearly three decades, diabetics have been injecting themselves with insulin produced by genetically modified bacteria. In 2015, 444 million acres of genetically modified seed was planted across the globe, and genetically engineered salmon may be on the menu as early as next year. “This technology has potential to save people’s lives,” DeGennero says. “I would happily have these mosquitos where I live.”

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This Florida Community May Unleash Genetically Modified Mosquitoes to Fight Zika and Dengue

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Proton Gradients and the Origin of Life

by MairaWallner Posted on July 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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Where did complex life originate? The New York Times reports on new research from a team led by William Martin of Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf:

Their starting point was the known protein-coding genes of bacteria and archaea. Some six million such genes have accumulated over the last 20 years in DNA databanks….Of these, only 355 met their criteria for having probably originated in Luca, the joint ancestor of bacteria and archaea.

Genes are adapted to an organism’s environment. So Dr. Martin hoped that by pinpointing the genes likely to have been present in Luca, he would also get a glimpse of where and how Luca lived. “I was flabbergasted at the result, I couldn’t believe it,” he said.

The 355 genes pointed quite precisely to an organism that lived in the conditions found in deep sea vents, the gassy, metal-laden, intensely hot plumes caused by seawater interacting with magma erupting through the ocean floor….The 355 genes ascribable to Luca include some that metabolize hydrogen as a source of energy as well as a gene for an enzyme called reverse gyrase, found only in microbes that live at extremely high temperatures.

About a year ago I read The Vital Question, by British biochemist Nick Lane, which was all about this theory. Roughly speaking, his entire book was about the energy needs of these ancient organisms, which is based on something called a proton gradient. This, it turns out, is a complex and highly unusual way of providing energy, but it’s also nearly universal in modern life, suggesting that it goes back to the very beginnings of life. But if it’s so unusual, how did it get its start?

In the beginning, it could only work in a high-energy environment like a deep-sea vent. In these places, there was a natural gradient between proton-poor water and proton-rich water, and that was the beginning of the proton gradient. It’s not the most efficient way of producing energy, but it was the only thing around 4 billion years ago. So willy nilly, life evolved to take advantage of this, and eventually evolved its own proton gradient inside cells.

Martin has been a longtime proponent of this idea as well, and now he’s produced yet more evidence that it’s likely to be true. The energy producing mitochondria in all of your cells are the result of this. Even 4 billion years later, they still depend on a proton gradient. Protons, it turns out, are the key to life.

POSTSCRIPT: And how is the book? It’s good, though fairly dense at times if you’re not already familiar with some basic chemistry and biology. And toward the end it gets rather speculative, so take it for what it’s worth. But overall? If you’re interested in the origins of complex life, it’s worth a read.

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Proton Gradients and the Origin of Life

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Here’s one way GMOs aren’t beating evolution

by AudryBvdonzid Posted on May 24, 2016

Here’s one way GMOs aren’t beating evolution

By on May 24, 2016Share

There’s a smart piece in Nature about the limitations of genetic engineering in creating more efficient crops. It’s the story of old methods trumping the new. Whether it’s radio, vinyl records, or books, we see over and over again that older technologies fill a vital role in the modern world. Likewise, plant breeders working with traditional techniques “are overtaking agricultural-biotechnology companies that have invested years of work in tests with GM crops,” writes Natasha Gilbert.

Gilbert is focused on the breeding of nutrient-efficient crops — plants that can thrive with less fertilizer. In this competition, genetic engineers are squaring off against evolution and losing. There’s already an evolutionary incentive for plants to be efficient. If one plant survives in poor soil where others cannot, that plant will be more successful at spreading its DNA. So, for millions of years, evolution has already been working on the same task. Often the solutions are already out there. It’s just a matter of finding the right traits in the wild or in the plant’s genome.

Certain kinds of genetic engineering, especially small-scale gene editing, can still be useful in breeding nutrient-efficient crops. But GMOs are much more likely to be useful in areas where evolution hasn’t already been able to tackle the problem, like moving disease resistance between banana varieties that no longer reproduce sexually and therefore can’t exchange genes.

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Here’s one way GMOs aren’t beating evolution

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What’s the Deal With Oldsters and Hillary, Anyway?

by EfrainGilley Posted on April 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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It’s Sunday, and that’s time for some idle musing. Today’s idle musing is this: why is it that us oldsters tend to favor Hillary over Bernie? Obviously we have some substantive reasons, just as Bernie supporters have theirs. But it’s a funny thing. I pretty much agree with Bernie’s take on money in politics. I like his attitude toward Wall Street. I have reservations about his foreign policy, but I still suspect that he’d be less interventionist and more to my liking. And yet, I still lean toward Hillary. Partly this is also substantive—she’s better briefed, her proposals are more realistic, and I think she could get more done—but there’s no denying that a lot of it is mood affiliation.

For some reason this got me thinking about fight scenes in movies. Bear with me here. If you watch a movie from 50 years ago, the fight scenes will mostly strike you as ridiculous. The staging is weak, the sound effects are amateurish, and the choreography is slapdash. Things improved over the next couple of decades, but then they went overboard. Fight scenes began to devour blockbuster movies, with directors all trying to one up each other. But really, a fight is a fight. After a while, there’s little new you can do, and all the CGI in the world can’t hide that. Anyone who saw the most recent Star Trek movie knows what I’m talking about. The final fight scene was absurd, tedious, and completely unnecessary. But JJ Abrams put it in because he figured his audience demanded it. And I suppose they did. But those of us who have been watching movies since the 60s or 70s found it boring and predictable.

Now on to politics. To me, Bernie is like one of those fight scenes: I’ve seen it all before. On the Democratic side, primaries have specialized in having at least one bold truthteller like Bernie in every cycle since the 1960s. Sometimes they’re lefty truthtellers, sometimes they’re “hard truths” truthtellers, and sometimes they’re a bit of a mishmash. But the one thing they have in common is that they can afford to tell the truth—in the beginning, at least—because they’re mostly running as rebels who don’t really expect to win. And if you’re not seriously trying to win, there’s no downside to being entirely candid. Who cares if you’re going to lose a few important demographics in the process?

Since 1968, we’ve seen at least one of these in every contested Democratic primary. Off the top of my head, the list includes Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, Mo Udall, Gary Hart, Paul Simon, Paul Tsongas, Bill Bradley, Howard Dean, and Dennis Kucinich. They all attracted a crowd of fans, some more than others, and generally speaking they were lionized by the press. None of them won except for McGovern, who went down to an epic defeat in the general election. (Probably any Democrat would have lost that year, but McGovern lost in a landslide.)

So this year I look at Bernie, and I see the same old thing: a bold truthteller who could afford not to play conventional politics because he was never really planning to win. He just wanted to get his issues on the table. The fact that he’s running so close is probably as much of a surprise to him as it is to everyone else.

But this is obviously something that’s far more salient to older voters than to younger ones. Bernie doesn’t seem fresh and courageous to us. He seems like the same guy we’ve seen every four years. They all have one or two issues they care about. They want those issues on the table, and running for president is a good way to do it. They usually drop out by spring. And generally speaking, most of them probably didn’t have the temperament to make good presidents.

Obviously your mileage might vary. Maybe Bernie is finally the one to do it, and I’m just too old and jaded to see it. Maybe his temperament is different, and he’d surprise us all by being a pretty good president. Maybe he’d get serious about rallying his troops to care about downballot elections, and win control of Congress. Maybe he’d really get a lot of the stuff done that he’s been talking about.

I doubt it. But then again, none of the previous truthtellers has ever made it to the White House, so who knows? Maybe eight years from now we’ll all be feeling the Bern.

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What’s the Deal With Oldsters and Hillary, Anyway?

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This Actress Gets to Play Like a Dozen Clones on "Orphan Black"

by FranzisVangundy Posted on April 14, 2016

Mother Jones

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When I try to tell my friends about Orphan Black, I get excited and things come out garbled: “It’s about clones, but it’s also a mystery. The clones get sick, and there’s this race for a cure, but also a quest to find out where they come from and why—and there are these crazy pop-science researchers who modify their own bodies. The military might be involved.”

More calmly put, the BBC drama, whose fourth season kicks off tonight, is a complex futuristic thriller with themes ranging from self-identity and scientific ethics to religious extremism. But perhaps the show’s greatest strength is the reproductive rights storyline that has won it acclaim as a feminist triumph—even though it was created by a couple of guys. I reached out to one of those guys, Graeme Manson, to talk about entertainment, science, and feminism. For a little catchup, here’s the season 1 trailer.

Mother Jones: How did you and co-creator John Fawcett get to a series about cloned humans?

Graeme Manson: We were looking for a high-concept feature film idea, and that’s where we came to clones. We’d been friends for 20 years. John’s a horror and sci-fi person. I was into sci-fi, drama, and comedy. Our tastes intersected at black comedy. John pitched the opening scene for “Orphan Black,” where a girl gets off a train, looks across the tracks, sees her double, and in that moment the double commits suicide. That was all we had! It was like a four-sentence pitch, and we took it from there. John got juiced by the technical aspects of shooting a single actor playing multiple roles, and I got juiced on looking at clones as a concept and as something that was beginning to happen in the zeitgeist in terms of Dolly the Sheep. I found the psychological implications really rich: What happens if we clone humans? How do you feel about your genetic identicals—after 50 years, do you not even care that you bump into them in the supermarket?

MJ: Where do you stand on the ethics of cloning?

GM: We’re a sci-fi show, and a conspiracy mystery, so we naturally look at the scarier, more conspiratorial aspects of science, and that’s not real science. There is a consistent civilian mistrust of science where 98 percent of the time, scientists have mankind’s best interests in mind. But corporate science, big science, for-profits, military science—they’re not necessarily creating science that’s good for mankind. We like that question of what’s going on beyond the lab door. We think about what’s occurring right now that’s sinister or could be misused or is complex ethically. CRISPR technology, gene editing, germ-line editing: These are sciences that could change the face of mankind. We’re such irrepressible creatures. If you give us a technology; if you put a gun in a human being’s hand, sooner or later they’re gonna squeeze the trigger.

MJ: What kind of science are you guys eyeing for the upcoming seasons.

GM: Everything from genetic patents to “neolution”—self-directed evolution where humans are offered the technological choice of intervention in their bodies, be that biohack DIY experimentation, gene editing, or whatever. We have one really strong science writer, Chris Roberts, and story consultant Cosima Herter is a science historian—we like a historical context. Eugenics runs through all of the science we’re doing. From Victorian times to the early Cold River Institute genealogical studies, all these eugenical movements thought they had a good intention: “If only we had the right kinds of people, we would improve society.” But what are the right kinds of people? You’re talking about immigration, all these hot-button topics. If you’re gay, straight, or bi. What’s right? What’s legal? What’s defined? And then you get in there and start messing with the genome—it’s like, “Ugh!”

That’s a pretty juicy side of the show for us. We always find something there to be mulling and putting forward in the show as an interesting take on science or ethics that we don’t have an answer for, but you put it on the table and because there’s always these two sides to it—cutting-edge science is a good thing, but how could it manifest otherwise?

MJ: The show also has a strong reproductive rights theme: One clone’s eggs are harvested without her consent. Another narrowly escapes having her ovaries forcibly removed. And the clones are monitored—usually by men. What are we to make of all this?

GM: Those are ethical things, and it certainly plays as a very strong feminist statement on our show, which is something lead actress Tatiana Maslany is passionate about. John and I always say that when we started with the concept of clones, we didn’t realize what a feminist statement it would become in terms of body autonomy. These things became very apparent to us as we dug deeper, and the show as a whole is very committed to those kinds of issues portrayed in their complexity.

MJ: Tatiana has formidable task of playing all these different clones. Which one is the most challenging for her?

GM: I think Rachel, because she’s stiff and formal and cold and powerful and corporate and all of that—the opposite of Tatiana. Certainly in the beginning Rachel was very foreign to her. I know that she loves playing Krystal, because it’s not the kind of role she ever gets offered. They’re all a challenge. We work really closely with her on who the characters are when they’re coming. We come up with something we might need for story, and then we’ll take it to Tat to talk character.

MJ: It sounds like you give your actors a lot of input.

GM: We do. Our core actors are real pros and they’re all very good at finding things that we don’t necessarily see in the script. We love to give a little bit of leeway for the actors to play at the end of scenes or to bring their own flair to the scenes. We give our actors and our directors a chance to do some of that. Certainly Tat has a lot of input. When we run into story problems in the writer’s room, sometimes we’ll jog down to set and see what Tat thinks one of her many characters might do in that situation. She’s always very good at coming at it from a character point of view.

MJ: Where did you find Tatiana, anyway?

GM: Due to the vagaries of financing, we had to cast a Canadian lead. We saw everybody in that age range in Canada! The show wasn’t going to happen unless we had buy-in from both Canadian and American networks. Luckily, it was unanimous that Tatiana could handle it. But it was only once we started to see those clone scenes put together that we were like, “Damn, she’s good.”

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This Actress Gets to Play Like a Dozen Clones on "Orphan Black"

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How an Anti-Vax Scientist Helped Inspire the Planned Parenthood Videos

by LouisaMichalski Posted on April 11, 2016

Mother Jones

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After Theresa Deisher received a doctorate in molecular and cellular physiology at Stanford, she worked in a lab that studied heart muscle cells. One day, representatives from a biomedical company came to her workplace to sell fetal heart tissue. Deisher asked them how and where they got the tissue. “They told me ‘miscarriages,'” Deisher says. “I was like, ‘Woo hoo!'” But later she was confronted by one of the research assistants. “‘How can you be so naive?'” Deisher remembers the assistant saying. “‘You know that’s not from miscarriages; think about it, you’re better than that.'”

She did think about it, and eventually her previous ease with a woman’s right to choose was replaced by a conviction that the fetus was a human being and that, therefore, both abortion and the use of fetal tissue for research were morally wrong. “I don’t care what someone’s opinion is on abortion or women’s reproductive rights,” she says. “I just don’t believe that people really could support a living baby harvested like that for their organs.”

She founded Sound Choice Pharmaceutical Institute, a small nonprofit in Seattle dedicated to finding alternatives to vaccines that she describes as “manufactured in cell lines that were derived from electively aborted babies,” and she became a prominent activist in the anti-abortion and anti-vax movements. She is also credited with inspiring and educating David Daleiden, the self-proclaimed “citizen journalist” who now faces a second-degree felony charge of tampering with a government record and a misdemeanor charge of illegally offering to purchase human organs from Planned Parenthood doctors in his now infamous—and discredited—undercover video recordings.

How the stories of Theresa Deisher and David Daleiden intersected, and how her work as an anti-abortion activist aligns with her work in the anti-vax movement, reveals a great deal about the attempts by the movement opposing abortion to marshal science to support their agenda. An interview with Daleiden in the National Catholic Register characterized it this way: “Theresa Deisher helped to prepare Daleiden for his role as a biomedical representative, teaching him the ins and outs of the field.” Deisher’s company links to the National Catholic Register story on its website, and its newsletters repeatedly tout Deisher’s connection to Daleiden. “It was the work of Sound Choice that brought the human exploitation of biomedical research to the attention of The Center for Medical Progress,” the December newsletter states. Children of God for Life, an anti-vaxxer organization that warns against “aborted fetal vaccines” like Gardasil, has been cheering on Daleiden’s Center for Medical Progress from social media. Not long after the videos went viral, the group posted a link on its Facebook page to Daleiden’s interview with the National Catholic Register: “God bless Dr. Deisher for her help in exposing Planned Parenthood!” The group’s website identifies Sound Choice as one of its partners, and in January it posted a petition to clear Daleiden of his pending charges.

In the past, anti-abortion organizations focused on moral arguments to justify their position. But scientific research, much of it discredited, has been increasingly used to legitimize their opposition. For example, the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG)—a counterpart to the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG)—maintains through “international studies” and some marginal scientific research that there is a link between abortion and breast cancer. (The National Cancer Institute has since disputed this claim.) Another popular anti-abortion position that has come up in subsequent congressional hearings regarding Daleiden’s videos is that fetuses developed past 20 weeks are “pain capable.” The medical consensus is that the fetus must be nearly full-term before the systems necessary to sense pain are developed enough.

In an interview with The Church Boys podcast, Deisher explained that although she was not involved with shooting or editing any videos for the Center for Medical Progress, she had spoken to Daleiden regularly over the years and advised him in his research. “Just to make the Center for Medical Progress aware of how the material was being described, how the harvest was being described, and, most importantly, my suspicions that some of these babies were alive when they were being harvested,” she said.

Deisher and Daleiden’s relationship began about four years ago, when Daleiden called her asking for some help. Deisher said Daleiden had not been aware of “the day-to-day pervasive way” fetal tissue is used in biomedical research before he encountered her work—she can’t recall whether he’d heard her speak or had read one of her papers—and he wanted to know more. Together, they pored over articles in scientific publications, and Deisher explained the terminology. “What I did was translate science to him,” she said. “In many publications, it was very clear that especially the heart and brain research—where the stated optimal gestational age is 22 to 24 weeks for the best material, and those are times when babies are viable outside of the womb—it was very clear that some of these babies might have been alive when they were harvested.”

Viability has been a hotly debated subject since 1973, when the Supreme Court essentially legalized abortion in Roe v. Wade. One of the central points of the ruling concerned the “viability” of the fetus, arguing that state governments cannot prioritize the interests of a fetus over the interests of a pregnant woman until a time at which the fetus could survive outside the womb. Put simply, this has been interpreted as meaning that as long as a fetus could not exist outside its mother’s womb, it was basically not an individual person, and abortion remained a woman’s choice up until that imprecise point.

Since that time, medical technology, access to health care, and subsequent Supreme Court decisions about abortion have complicated the question of viability. A study published last year by the New England Journal of Medicine found that a very small number of 22-week-old babies could survive outside the womb, but it’s impossible to prescribe a blanket term of viability to a gestational age because survival depends on an array of factors. Researchers at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health, or ANSIRH, say viability can only be determined when taking into account the health of the pregnant woman and her fetus. Determining factors include “chromosomal abnormalities, the sex of the fetus, the conditions of a woman’s health, and the availability of sophisticated neonatology care.”

Deisher says her ideology is backed by science that works with her Catholic faith rather than against it. She takes issue with the use of fetal material for any scientific work on a moral basis, but scientifically the heart of her argument against vaccines is this: “When we use an animal- or a plant-based system to manufacture vaccines, there are animal- or plant-based contaminants that will be in the final product, and we mount an immune response to them and eliminate them from our body. In the case of the human fetal cell lines, those contaminants are human, and they could trigger an autoimmune attack, or what is called insertional mutagenesis.” Her nonprofit’s website has pages dedicated to the theories that vaccines cause autism and the use of fetal stem cells can cause cancerous tumors.

Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, says autoimmune theory is not plausible. “It’s like throwing a pingpong ball off the top of the Empire State Building and hoping that it lands in one of 7 billion little fishbowls.” In this analogy, the genetic material in vaccines represents Offit’s “pingpong ball,” and the “little fishbowls” are the cells in our bodies that are protected by cellular membranes, which would have to be penetrated by the DNA. Additionally, the DNA in the vaccine would have to do so without damaging the cell membrane to effectively contaminate it the way Deisher claims. Vaccines do contain some genetic material from the fetal cell lines they were derived from decades ago, but the amount is incredibly tiny— nanograms, which are roughly one-billionth of a gram. The material is highly fragmented to boot, and for genetic material to make its way into a cell, it would require an extraordinary chemical process. Offit notes that if what Deisher claims were actually true, “it would be the best news for gene therapy ever.”

Deisher disagrees with the previous Mother Jones article that reported the hindrance of life-saving research involving fetal tissue as a side effect of Daleiden’s videos. “It’s not true that there is no substitute for fetal tissue,” she says. “We have a very nice technology now called induced pluripotent cells that more effectively model what a postnatal heart cell does.”

Tim Kamp, the co-director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine Center, said it’s impossible to make pluripotent cells (also known as iPS cells) develop in a petri dish the way humans develop in utero—for that, and for the research on heart disease pioneered by his colleague Gail Robertson, they need fetal tissue. “There are aspects of developmental biology that can’t be done using iPS cells,” Kamp said. “There are different tools used for different research. You want to have access to all the different tools you can, but taking fetal tissue off the table will slow progress. It’s pretty straightforward.”

Deisher’s overall goal—to find alternative vaccines that weren’t developed using fetal cell lines—is not an impossibility. But Offit says it’s complicated, and the process of developing a new vaccine, putting it through clinical trials, and obtaining all the proper licensing along the way could amount to “hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars” in costs. “In the world of things we need to worry about and prevent, this is not one of them,” Offit said. “It’s more a perceptual problem than a physical problem; there’s nothing unsafe about that vaccine.”

Deisher believes the claims put forth by Daleiden’s videos—that Planned Parenthood has been “harvesting” fetal tissue to sell for profit. Twenty states so far have either cleared Planned Parenthood of wrongdoing or decided to not investigate, and five congressional committees have also failed to find any evidence of wrongdoing. Still, Deisher maintains that the videos from the Center for Medical Progress reveal a dark truth. “A picture says a thousand words,” Deisher said. “As a scientist, I can talk clinically ’til I’m blue in the face. When people see the pictures—it doesn’t matter if you’re religious or not—I think it really cuts to people’s hearts.”

The Planned Parenthood sting videos have had an undeniable effect on both the abortion debate and the questions around vaccines. As I previously reported for Mother Jones, the political controversy surrounding Planned Parenthood has undermined medical research and poses a potential threat to the safety of scientists. Further exacerbating this effect is a GOP-led House committee that recently issued subpoenas to eight medical institutions, demanding the names of researchers, students, and doctors. Democrats are calling this effort a “witch hunt;” committee chair Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) insists the group is simply trying to “get the complete picture,” as she told the New York Times. Five states have banned research on fetal tissue—Indiana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Ohio, and Oklahoma. Arizona bans the transfer of fetal tissue for research, and Florida bans the “purchase, sale, or transfer of fetal remains.”

For Deisher, her faith continues to be the final word when it comes to the debate surrounding Planned Parenthood. “You know, we get so caught up in pro-choice or pro-life, and if we throw the politics aside and really think about it, wouldn’t we all like a world where a woman didn’t have to make that choice?” she says. ” I think most people would; I think we’re all pro-life.”

Link to original – 

How an Anti-Vax Scientist Helped Inspire the Planned Parenthood Videos

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7 Great Environment Longreads From 2015

by AdelaidN61 Posted on December 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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From California’s nut boom to the green guru of professional sports, it’s been a great year for longreads about the environment here at Mother Jones. In case you missed them (or you just want to read ’em again), here are some of our favorites, in no particular order:

  1. “Invasion of the Hedge Fund Almonds,” by Tom Philpott. In California, farmers are converting their farms to almond, pistachio, and walnut orchards at a breakneck pace—and Wall Street firms are buying them up. No wonder, since these nuts are extremely valuable right now. That’s because they’re the health food du jour, both here and in China. There’s just one problem: Tree nuts suck up more water than practically any other crop. So how can there be a nut boom during the worst drought in California’s history? Tom Philpott has the fascinating answer.
  2. “How the Government Put Tens of Thousands of People at Risk of a Deadly Disease,” by David Ferry. Valley fever, a potentially fatal fungal disease, recently reached near-epidemic proportions among the Golden State’s prisoners. The illness is endemic to California’s Central Valley—which also happens to house a high concentration of state prisons. African American and Filipino people are particularly susceptible to the fungus, yet correctional officers repeatedly ignored recommendations to transfer these vulnerable prisoners away from Central Valley facilities. The results were nothing short of tragic.
  3. “Bark Beetles Are Decimating Our Forests. That Might Actually Be a Good Thing,” by Maddie Oatman. Ever-worsening infestations of pine beetles have killed large swaths of forests in the Western United States. As climate change intensifies, the beetle carnage is only expected to increase. The US Forest Service maintains that the only way to stop the marauding bugs is by thinning: cutting down trees to stop the beetles’ progress. But entomologist Diana Six, who has devoted her career to beetle ecology, thinks the beetles may actually know more than we do about how to make forests resilient in the face of big changes ahead as the planet warms.
  4. “This May Be the Most Radical Idea in All of Professional Sports,” by Ian Gordon. If you’ve ever been to a pro sports game, you may have noticed that most are not exactly green operations. In addition to the mountains of beer cans, Styrofoam nacho trays, and peanut shells, there’s the giant energy cost of powering a stadium, and all the carbon emissions that go with it. Sports execs considered all of that an unavoidable cost of doing business—until a charismatic scientist named Allen Hershkowitz came onto the scene a decade ago. Since then, thanks to Hershkowitz and his Green Sports Alliance, at least 28 venues have started using some kind of renewable energy and 20 stadiums have been LEED certified, while the National Hockey League, the National Basketball Association, and Major League Baseball have all made major changes to reduce their environmental footprints. So how did Hershkowitz do it?
  5. “Does Air Pollution Cause Dementia?,” by Aaron Reuben. Scientists have long known that air pollution causes and exacerbates respiratory problems—such as asthma and infections and cancers of the lungs—and they also suspect it contributes to a diverse range of other disorders, from heart disease to obesity. But now cutting-edge research suggests these particles play a role in some of humanity’s most terrifying and mysterious illnesses: degenerative brain diseases.
  6. “This Scientist Might End Animal Cruelty—Unless GMO Hardliners Stop Him,” by Kat McGowan. Scientist Scott Fahrenkrug has big plans to make life for millions of farm animals a whole lot better. Through a technique called gene editing, Fahrenkrug’s company has made dairy cows that can skip the painful dehorning process—because they don’t grow horns in the first place. He’s created male pigs that don’t have to be castrated because they never go through puberty. He’s tweaking the DNA of a few high-performance cattle breeds so they’re more heat tolerant and can thrive in a warming world. Fahrenkrug’s ultimate goal is animals with just the right mix of traits—and much less suffering. But many people see genetically modified foods as a symbol of all that’s wrong with the industrial food system. Fahrenkrug will have to convince them that it offers the surest and fastest route to more ethical and sustainable farming.
  7. “Heart of Agave,” by Ted Genoways. In Mexico, fine tequila is serious business. That’s in part because over the last 25 years, US imports of pure agave tequila have doubled—with the greatest leap coming in the super-premium division, where sales of high-end tequilas have increased five times over. The billion-dollar market has become so lucrative that George Clooney, Sean Combs, and Justin Timberlake each have their own brands. All that growth has pushed growers to plant vast monoculture fields and deploy the products of American agrichemical companies, like pesticides and synthetic fertilizer. But that could soon change: Journalist and author Ted Genoways tells the story of the rogue Mexican optometrist who has started an organic tequila revolution—and how his radical ideas are catching on.

Read More – 

7 Great Environment Longreads From 2015

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Forget insecticides. Scientists are making pests that destroy themselves

by LauriBruner Posted on August 31, 2015

Forget insecticides. Scientists are making pests that destroy themselves

By on 31 Aug 2015commentsShare

Let’s get this right out in the open: Scientists are genetically engineering moths to self destruct. I know, I know — sounds pretty mad scientist-y. But consider this: Those moths are wreaking havoc on sauerkraut-destined cabbage, kale, and other super-hip cruciferous super foods. So either the moths go, or you have to start microwaving leftover rice and hot sauce for lunch like everyone else.

Now that I’ve got your attention, pop open a jar of that artisanal sauerkraut and let’s begin. Diamondback moths are kind of the Incredible Hulks of the pest world. Try to kill them with a single pesticide, and they’ll just develop resistance and grow stronger. Farmers try to work around this by deploying multiple pesticides in rotation, but even then, the moths remain a stubborn foe. Here’s more from the New York Times:

An invasive species, the diamondback moth was once a minor nuisance. It became an agricultural headache in the late 1940s as chemical pesticide use exploded. The moth, the first crop pest to evolve resistance to DDT, multiplied as feebler competitors died off.

Today, the pest is found where kale, broccoli, Chinese cabbage and other cabbage cousins grow. Hungry caterpillars that hatch from eggs laid on the plants cost farmers an estimated $5 billion a year worldwide. And the diamondback moth continues to adapt to new generations of pesticides. In Malaysia, it is immune to all synthetic sprays.

OK — so chemicals don’t work. And the moths’ natural foe, wasps, are even less effective than chemicals, the Times reports. Desperate, scientists even tried sterilizing the suckers back in the ’90s using gamma radiation — something that totally screwed the unfortunately named screwworm — but that didn’t work either, according to the Times.

Fresh out of ideas, scientists at Cornell and the British biotech company Oxitec pieced together a gene that makes female moths dependent on an antibiotic for survival. That way, when they’re out in the wild, the females die before reaching reproductive age, the Times reports. (If the feminist in you is angry that the self-destruction works only on females, take comfort in knowing that the gene leaves a bunch of adult males without anyone to bang.)

Not surprisingly, these mutant moths have sparked some controversy. Here’s more from the Times:

Groups opposed to the use of genetically modified organisms worry that the protein made by the synthetic gene could harm wildlife that eat the moths.

“We would argue that more information should be collected,” said Helen Wallace, the director of GeneWatch U.K.

Haydn Parry, the chief executive of Oxitec, says the company addressed this concern and others in data submitted to the Department of Agriculture.

“We fed the protein to mosquitoes, fish, beetles, spiders and parasitoids,” he said. “It’s nontoxic.”

Scientists at Cornell are currently testing the effectiveness of the gene by putting modified moths and wild moths together in outdoor cages. Anyone concerned about mutant moths wandering around organic fields where they don’t belong needn’t worry, the Times says:

Studies suggest the likelihood of diamondback moths straying is low. Wild moths released into the open tend to stay put as long as they have food and company. Any that do venture farther afield are likely to be wiped out by New York’s cold winter.

Even if strays are found, legal experts say that national organic standards penalize only the deliberate use of a genetically modified organism.

And fortunately, the researchers at Oxitec equipped the moths with a gene from coral that makes them glow red under ultraviolet light, so if they do get out, they’ll be easy to spot (assuming most farmers are also aspiring crime scene investigators).

Just like those mosquitos modified for self destruction down South, these moths will face a lot of scientific and societal barriers before gaining acceptance in the agriculture world. Still, they’re slated for a test run in a small cabbage patch next summer, so it’s worth considering how you feel about them now. Personally, I’m not too torn up about scientists tinkering with disease-carrying mosquitos, and if it means less insecticide use, mutant moths don’t sound so bad either, especially considering they’re kind of wired for self destruction already.

Source:

Replacing Pesticides With Genetics

, The New York Times.

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Forget insecticides. Scientists are making pests that destroy themselves

Posted in Anchor, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, organic, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Forget insecticides. Scientists are making pests that destroy themselves