Gobsmacked, but not surprised

Kristan Hawkins got on a panel with Joy Reid, who recognized that they differed on the legality of abortion, but thought to find common ground by asking if everyone agreed that contraception was OK. She did not achieve her goal, because Hawkins was quite willing to announce that she thought several forms of birth control should be illegal. She was also kind of obnoxiously shouty about it all.

This is one of those things where liberals are often accused of failing to understand those good salt-of-the-earth types from the heartland (Hawkins is from Minnesota, unfortunately). And it’s true. We have a hard time understanding irrationality of that sort, and often can scarcely believe that people exist who hold such terrible, destructive views. You can tell that Reid and her panel are kind of stunned at how regressive and awful Hawkins was.

I wasn’t. Hawkins spoke at UMM almost two years ago. It was a dishonest talk, full of mangled and dishonest statistics, and most of her time was spent reciting anecdotes. The audience was full of adoring fans who had lies of their own to tell, too.

As I was leaving the talk, by the way, I passed their table where they were handing out literature, and a woman from the audience breathlessly recounted the latest conspiracy theory: did you know that Planned Parenthood intentionally injects young women who visit with hormones to make them fertile, so that they’re more likely to get pregnant and come back for an abortion? The woman from Students for Life of America behind the table said, I’m not surprised, they make millions of dollars from abortions.

Other half truths that emerged: Hawkins doesn’t like contraception, either, and announced that hormonal contraception is a carcinogen. So it is! Progesterone has properties that would get it classified as a human carcinogen, just like broccoli and beer. And that means, ladies, that your ovaries are trying to kill you, because they’re constantly trickling out a carcinogenic hormone.

Nothing in that television interview surprised me. Joy Reid should have called me (or any of the other people here in Minnesota who have encountered Hawkins), and I could have prepped her for the outrageousness she was going to get.

I thought Julius Streicher was dead!

Maybe he was reincarnated as Donald Trump. Hey, Trump was born in 1946, while Streicher was executed in 1946. Coincidence? Or FATE?

Further the president said that the Secretary of Homeland Security will be publishing a weekly list of crimes committed by immigrants, and of the cities that refused to turn them in for deportation. The order doesn’t say whether the list would single out only undocumented immigrants, or all immigrants.

The article compares this list to one regularly published in Breitbart. Pfft. We know better. Breitbart is just the slimy descendant of Der Stürmer.

Oh, interesting. Here’s a map of the countries where he’s blocked immigration.

bannedcountries

All those colored countries are mainly Muslim. The red ones are the bad Muslim countries; the yellow ones are the countries where Trump has business interests. No terrorists in Saudi Arabia, I guess, just money.

When are the impeachment proceedings beginning?

My alma mater has a fascism problem

The University of Washington doesn’t seem to be dealing with their fascist conservative students very well. Last week, they had a peaceful weekend of protests that were marred by one disgraceful incident: one of those “alt-right”, neo-Nazi, young Republican Milo Yiannopoulos supporters shot someone. By all accounts, the man who was shot was an unarmed anti-racist organizer who was trying to de-escalate the conflicts; the shooter we know little about, except that he was pro-Milo, and he came to a non-violent rally carrying a pistol.

Stop right there. The man came armed to a peaceful protest and shot someone. He was identified — they have video and eyewitness testimony and, apparently, the gun — and picked up by the police…who then let him go. The prosecutors say they need more time to build a case against him. Unbelievable. I’m going to go out on a limb and make another prediction about the shooter: he’s white.

There’s more. The College Republicans at the University of Washington came out with a statement afterwards, deploring the incident. Not the shooting, oh no — that is only mentioned indirectly, with the implication that it’s the fault of the anti-fascists.

As we all reflect on the events of last night, it has become clear to us that hundreds if not thousands within the UW community disagree with yesterday’s tactics utilized by the ‘Seattle Antifa’ movement.

Wha…? It’s your fascist side that shot a man.

The protestors had little regard for the safety of the community they claim to be protecting,

The protesters were unarmed. It was your side that brought a gun.

and people ended up going home covered in paint and much worse for some, their own blood.

Yeah. Because you shot a man.

It was an abhorrent display of what Seattle has come to,

I agree. That the UWPD allowed a man to walk away after shooting someone is abhorrent.

and we at the UWCR are determined now more than ever to continue fighting against this pseudo-terrorism that guises itself as justice.

Right. By promoting real violent terrorism to defend injustice.

It continues in this vein, patting themselves on the back for their popularity and how beloved their fascist organization is in the community, and reversing reality to pretend to be the heroes here.

Antifa, Anarchists, violent political agitators, you have been seen by the public for what you really are.

I can’t get over this. Their side brought a gun and used it, and they get all indignant and accuse the victims of being “violent political agitators”?

We see you occupiying our libraries, inhibiting education, and frightening students who are by and large not even aware of what your motives are.

Uh, you know what frightens me? Cocky right-wing assholes strutting about campus with guns in their pockets. We know what our motives are, and we’re quite clear about them, to the point where even you named it: anti-fascism. No authority without responsibility and accountability. Equality and democracy. All the stuff you oppose.

You have been seen in our cities damaging property that does not belong to you, and inciting violence and disobedience towards the men and women who protect us (yourselves included).

They protect you; you can shoot someone, and the police will let you walk. That doesn’t sound like they’re protecting the people who get shot.

But wait, now comes the fun part. After all this posturing as the victims, they’re going to threaten.

You have been seen on national television clearly being the cause of increased division in our society, and it’s time your flame is put out. If you keep prodding the right you may be unpleasantly surprised what the outcome will be. Youve obviously learned nothing after Trump’s election.

Trump justifies everything! Including shooting people, apparently. Or worse.

This is the executive who just made an executive order outright banning the immigration of refugees from predominantly Muslim countries, Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen. He also “ordered that Christians and others from minority religions be granted priority over Muslims.”

This is what he wants.

deadchild

That’s what you stand for, UWCR, and you’re proud of it. As an alumnus of the University of Washington, I stand against you, I despise you, and I consider you a corrupting poison in the community.

Meanwhile, over here on the left, we’ve got people wringing their hands over punching Nazis (fortunately, some of us still have the moral clarity to see that Nazis and other genocidal, racist cowards must be opposed).

Just remember this: your side shot an unarmed man, and then blamed him for it.

The UW has a fascism problem. And let’s not hide it: it’s name is the College Republicans.

Of pigs and people

chimeras

Calm down, people. Nobody is making human-pig hybrids, even if the news is making a big deal about it. To be honest, I’m not even very impressed with the utility of the experiment, although it is interesting and technically accomplished. It’s being touted as a step in developing pigs with human-derived organs for transplants, and no, I just don’t see it.

The experiments involve xenografts in the blastocyst; that is, they take pluripotent stem cells from one organism, and inject them into the embryos of a different species at a very early stage of development, when the embryo is a hollow ball of cells with an inner cell mass that will eventually become the fetus proper. Then they look for incorporation of the injected cells into the embryo.

It doesn’t always work. The inner cell mass doesn’t necessarily accept these alien cells, or the injected cells don’t thrive in this unusual environment, so you might do the injections, implant the resultant hybrids, and when you open up the host days or weeks later, your injected cells are all gone. It is non-trivial to get this to work, so what they’ve accomplished is technically impressive.

It was a lot of work, too. They injected 2,181 pig blastocysts with human pluripotent stem cells, cultured them in vitro for a few days, and had 2075 embryos that were then implanted in masses of 40-50 embryos into host pigs (which implies that many would be expected to be lost), and collected 186 embryos about 4 weeks later. This is a good yield — I’ve done experiments with much lower rates of success — but the real question is whether any of the human cells were incorporated into the pig embryos.

It worked! They got incorporation of human cells into the pig embryos. Unfortunately, there are a few problems: one is that the embryos with incorporated human cells were significantly retarded in their growth. This ought to be expected; just the timing of development for the two kinds of cells will be out of sync, so I’d actually have expected even greater problems. It’s promising that they got incorporation at all. The other problem is that the incorporation was very low: 0.001% of the embryo’s cells were human. Uh, that’s not very good. If you’re trying to generate organs grown in pigs that have exclusively human antigens, even 99.9% human isn’t going to be good enough — it’s going to trigger an immune response when transplanted.

None of these cells made up the majority of cells in any organ, even; the experiment doesn’t really test the feasibility of accomplishing that, and I suspect that trying to increase the percentage of human cells is going to also increase the incompatibilities and lead to greater and greater rates of developmental failure. They do have some interesting ideas for increasing the rates, though. If the host pig cells are transgenically modified to make them unable to make a pancreas, for instance, any pancreas in the pig would have to be derived from human cells. It would still be infiltrated with pig-derived nerves and blood vessels and connective tissue, though, so that’s insufficient to create a transplant-ready organ.

As pure basic research, it’s a good experiment, and I’ll be interested to see how much further it can go — if nothing else, it’s going to expose evolutionary disparities in development between different mammalian species. The head investigator has an appropriate perspective on it, I think:

Scientific American: So this is very, very basic biology?

JCIB: So I feel that there has been a little bit of exaggeration of where we could go with this now. If you look on the Internet you see images of chimeras between human and animal. And I feel that that’s a little bit of exaggeration. It’s true that it works very nicely between rat and mouse — just this experimental protocol that I am telling you. It’s only a couple of months ago that we have been able to put human cells into another animal. In this case in a mouse and realized that they can differentiate in the three germ layers. The three germ layers are the mesoderm, ectoderm and endoderm that will give rise to the more than 250 different cell types. So that’s a major accomplishment I will say. But from there, dreaming that they will generate a functional structure, I think we’re going to need time and a lot of luck.
So we need to go for a lot of basic research still. It’s my own feeling, of course. There are other people who think that tomorrow we are going to create human organs. And I wish that I am wrong and they are right, but I think it will take time.

Yes! It’s basic research, which is a grand and worthy thing. It’s too bad so much of the press coverage can only grasp it in terms of making organs for human transplantation — I doubt that this approach will ever work for that, but will instead teach us more about development and evolution and molecular biology.

Charles Blow tells it like it is

liarofyear

We need more of this kind of truth-telling:

Donald Trump is a proven liar. He lies often and effortlessly. He lies about the profound and the trivial. He lies to avoid guilt and invite glory. He lies when his pride is injured and when his pomposity is challenged.

Indeed, one of the greatest threats Trump poses is that he corrupts and corrodes the absoluteness of truth, facts and science.

This is the straight talk you don’t usually get in our cautious, conservative, cozy-with-evil media: you get “euphemisms like “unsubstantiated,” or “unproven,” or “baseless.”” This has to stop.

We all have to adjust to this unprecedented assault on the truth and stand ready to vigilantly defend against it, because without truth, what’s left? Our president is a pathological liar. Say it. Write it. Never become inured to it. And dispense with the terms of art to describe it. A lie by any other name portends the same.

Our president is a LIAR. Say it loud.

The second week of ecological developmental biology

limbdevelopment

I’m trying to do weekly assessments of how my new class is going…and also to have a regular record of concerns and successes so I can remind myself of what not to do next time I teach the course. We’re wrapping up a rapid survey of a few developmental systems just to expose them to some of the concepts of the field first; last week we blitzed through early polarity formation and gastrulation. This week we covered neural tube formation and neural crest on Tuesday, and this morning it was limb formation and craniofacial development.

One of my concerns is that it’s really easy for me to dominate the class hour. Yeah, just trigger me with a few phrases like apical ectodermal ridge, progress zone, and zone of polarizing activity, wind me up, and I’ll happily talk about cool experiments and nifty results for a few hours, my eyes glazing over as I forget that those students are there. That’s bad. I have to slap myself out of that habit. And as I mentioned last week, it’s not helping that it’s 8am and the students eyes are a bit glazed over, and I’m concerned about drawing them out to talk more. My ideal class would be one where I just help answer questions for the entire period.

I’m happy to say that, while they aren’t quite at that point yet, the students are warming up and I’ve been getting a few sharp questions, including some that I was unable to answer, which always leaves me overjoyed. Challenging stuff! It’s the best!

It also helped that the last half of today was something completely different: I gave them a short review paper that was rather densely technical on craniofacial development. I warned them that I was throwing them into the deep end of the pool to start with, so we struggled our way through all the acronyms and unexplained syndromes and weird little genes. We puzzled out the molecular basics for common developmental problems, like cleft palate, and more exotic and severe ones like Bartsocas-Papas syndrome (if you read the paper, you might not want to follow up by googling the syndromes, because you’ll encounter lots of tragic children). I learned a few things myself, like how common ribosomopathies are in these craniofacial disorders — there are genes like TCOF1 which produce proteins that act specifically in the nucleolar regions to regulate ribosome expression in specific tissues, and haploinsufficency leads to all kinds of failures in cell migration and differentiation.

I got even more questions. That’s good — I wasn’t looking forward to a semester of talking at nodding heads. I’m beginning to relax a little now.

Next week will be even more of a shock. I won’t be leading the discussions at all — I’ll be the one sitting back and answering questions. Tuesday will be student-led reviews of the stages of human embryonic development, with discussions of clinical correlates. Each student has been assigned a tiny snippet of the sequence to explain to us. Thursday they all have to explain The Triple Helix to me. Next week is all about student engagement!