Had to go to the doctor today, to get a ‘new patient physical’ for
my new insurance coverage. I have to say, there’s really no better way
to start a Monday morning than having a stranger wearing rubber gloves
grab your wibbly bits and tell you to turn your head and cough. At the
very least, you can be pretty sure it’s going to be uphill for the
rest of the day…
Oh, I want one of these: “curb ‘door-to-door disciples’ in
your neighborhood” with
this sticker.
Steve’s
searing slams about recent political events here in America pretty
much nail shut the coffin for anything I’d be saying, so I’ll just
save you the time, and point to him instead. I think
Mike is probably going
to be the anchor man for the other side, but he’s rooting for somebody
I’m not even considering, so it’s harder for me to get into what he
has to say.
I’ve been on a big Woody Guthrie jag since Mermaid Avenue
came out, so
this
interview with Billy Bragg, discussing the history of the project,
was a must read. The exhibit at the Smithsonian should be back open
now; any DC area bloggers want to check it out this
weekend?
(Copped from
Looka.)
Congrats to Graham on the new
digs.
Contrarian
view of the ‘golden rice’ issue. While there’s nothing I can
really argue with in the broad issues raised, there are a couple nits
I’ll pick:
The fundamental problem with genetic engineering from
the very beginning has been the absence of anything like an ecological
approach. Genes are not the unilateral “controllers” of the cell’s
“mechanisms”. Rather, genes enter into a vast and as yet scarcely
monitored conversation with each other and with all the other parts of
the cell. Who it is that speaks through the whole of this
conversation — what unity expresses itself through the entire
organism — is a question the genetic engineers have not yet even
raised, let alone begun to answer.
This is simply not true — while we haven’t ‘begun to answer’ the
question, it’s certainly being raised — that’s the whole point of
genomics and proteomics. Figuring out how genetic networks are
perturbed by the introduction of new genes is a critical question, and
lots of effort is going to devoted over the next decade or two
figuring out what the rules are (or if there are generalizable rules
at all).
But without an awareness of the organism as a whole,
we can hardly guess the consequences of the most “innocent” genetic
modification. The analogy with ecological studies is a close one.
Change one element of the complex balance — in an ecological setting
or within an organism — and you change everything.
Not quite true — you don’t actually change everything; you
potentially change everything. This is actually worse,
because the problem is that many or most of these potential changes
are very small and not terribly important to the big picture — but
some of them are. Figuring out which is which, and how to fix them (or
not introduce them in the first place) is the Big Question.
And then there are the other Big Questions: will the use of the
‘golden rice’ help more people than it hurts? Even if we’re pretty
sure that the long-term effects of the use will be negative, does that
justify blocking this use altogether, thus (potentially) eliminating
some short-term positive effects? Finally, does our (presumed) greater
understanding of the technology and the consequences of using it give
us any right to tell Asian people whether or not they should use
it?
(I nicked the original link from Rebecca’s Pocket, BTW.)
Here’s a Scientific American article on a different type of gold:
The
Bioinformatics Gold Rush. I really like the closing quote:
Systematic improvements will help, but progress—and
ultimately profit—still relies on the ingenuity of the end user,
according to David J. Lipman, director of NCBI. “It’s about
brainware,” he says, “not hardware or software.”
A couple of meeting announcements for the bioinfo people in the
crowd: RECOMB 2001 and
Transcriptome 2000.
Jay ‘Baylink’ Ashworth sent
along a link to
his
ePinion of Spider’s latest, which I mentioned yesterday. His
opinion is basically the same as mine, with the exception that I don’t
tear up at the end of To Sail Beyond the Sunset, but rather
at the end of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
Okay, so I said above that I was going to stay out of the politics
thing, but I do want to note one interesting thing. Over at
BadAssMofo.com (where, umm, I
only go to read the articles. Really. Ahem.) Sharkey notes that Lieberman,
Gore’s new running mate, was the leading force behind some recent
efforts to ban various video games, in the name of
‘anti-violence’. I’m also sure I won’t have to remind too many people
of my generation that Tipper Gore, Al’s wife, was one of the leaders
of the PMRC effort of the 80’s — another attempt to get media banned
in the name of ‘decency’. Interesting coincidence, or sinister plot?
Meanwhile, on the other side, we’ve got Bush, who apparently used to
like to party a bit, and Cheney, who has an openly gay daughter who
will be helping with her father’s campaign. What the hell is going on
here? I think that both parties, in their mad-cap rush to the
so-called ‘center’ of American politics, have over-shot, and ended up
in enemy territory. Got that? Black is white, bad is good, down is up,
cats and dogs, living together…sorry, lost it there for a
minute. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that the coming election
appears to have been scripted by Hunter S. Thompson, on one of his
less together days, and more frighteningly, nobody seems to have
noticed, or to care.
So, what am I going to do? Personally, I’m leaning pretty hard
towards Jorn’s
advice. It’ll make for a nice change from (a) holding my nose and
voting Democrat or (b) voting for good ol’ Hopeless Harry Brown.
Okay, that’s it for politics for awhile — pinky swear. See y’all
tomorrow…
