Harriet Hall and Amy Roth have reconciled. I’m pleased to hear it; I wasn’t worried about Amy, but Hall was going to hit mantle at the rate she was digging. It is a great relief that she stopped, looked around, and considered her situation thoughtfully, and then responded well.
Maybe you know the feeling, too. You’ve got a career that you work at every day for years, that you take seriously and try to improve constantly, and you’re periodically dragged off to meetings where administrators and bureaucrats tell you what you should be doing — and the information is useless because they’ve never even tried to do it, preferring instead to kibitz professionally. So I felt that familiar sinking pit of despair as I read this article about the current political strategies for ‘fixing’ education. All that saved me from spitting on the screen was the author’s reply.
I’m thinking about the current health care debate. And I am wondering if I will be asked to sit on a national committee charged with the task of creating a core curriculum of medical procedures to be used in hospital emergency rooms.
I realize that most people would think I am unqualified to sit on such a committee because I am not a doctor, I have never worked in an emergency room, and I have never treated a single patient. So what? Today I have listened to people who are not teachers, have never worked in a classroom, and have never taught a single student tell me how to teach.
My students are also blogging here:
You know I teach the 8am courses every term, right? Every semester for years I get my oddball classes that weren’t present in the curriculum 13 years ago (when I started here) stuffed into the cracks of the schedule. I’m slowly getting to be a little pushier and am gradually making my way into wakier hours with other classes, but so far, developmental biology is still in the darkness. Fortunately, this talk was so jam-packed with excitement and action that they couldn’t possibly sleep through it! Right?
Just a word about the presentation slides: I’m a firm believer that less is more. My goal is not to display my lecture notes, or lists of bullet point slides that make my points for me, but to show complex and interesting illustrations that I talk about and explain — whoa, I know, how radical. I’ve sat through too many talks that flash 60-80 slides at me in an hour, and it’s too much. Take your time, people! That said, I used 18 slides in a 65 minute lecture today, which I felt was a little excessive — I aspire to someday do a lecture with half that number. But I am weak and need the crutch now.
Also, I returned exams today. People asked if I’d post their answers. No way in hell! These are exams and have the privilege of privacy. I will say that in general the students answered well. The goal of that kind of exam isn’t to confront students with a question that has a specific answer, but with a problem that they should explore, defend, or criticise.
So the subject today was maternal effect genes in Drosophila, specifically the prepatterning information that specifies the anterior-posterior and dorsal-ventral axes. Yes! I can tell you’re all excited!
So I gave them the precursor observations to the actual molecular biology, all this lovely modeling of gradients and information domains that was rich with Turing elegance, and then I dashed their optimism with the cold water of reality: molecular biology has shown that instead of beautifully designed systems, we’ve got bits and pieces cobbled together in a functional kludge. Any pretty patterns we do see are the product of brute force coding.
So they got the overall picture of A/P patterning in flies: a gradient of the Bicoid protein, high in front and low in back, is read by cells to determine their location — its the GPS signal of the early fly. The Nanos protein, also found in a gradient but from back to front, is a hack: it’s only purpose is to clear away a leaky remnant of another gene, Hunchback, which isn’t supposed to be expressed yet (although Nanos may be the diminished rump of a more elaborate ancestral posterior patterning scheme). And the Torso related genes are specifically involved in ‘capping’ the front and back ends of the fly.
The main point of interest about the terminal genes like Torso is their mechanism: we sometimes talk about maternal genes as like a paint-by-number system in which Mom lays out the lines for different areas of differentiation in Baby, and then the embryo fills in the details. The terminal genes are like a perfect example of that: in the follicle, cells literally paint the vitelline membrane of the fly with different informational molecules during the construction of the egg, and then as the embryo develops, these molecules trickle across the perivitelline space (a gap between the outer membrane and embryo proper) to bind receptors and trigger regional differentiation.
It’s also a nice segue into the dorsal/ventral patterning genes, because flies do something similar there: proteins imbedded in discrete regions of the vitelline membrane diffuse to Toll receptors, where they selective activate the Dorsal protein by freeing it from the Cactus inhibitor. We go from a paint-by-number kit to a restored gradient from back to belly side of localization of free Dorsal protein to the cell nucleus. By the way, in case they were getting bored with flies, Dorsal is homologous to NF-κB in us vertebrates, using the same nuclear exclusion/inclusion mechanism, and NF-κB is a hot molecule in biomedicine and cancer research right now.
That was my hour. I closed by threatening them with talk of zygotic genes, specifically the gap genes, next week.
Also, Wednesday we’re going to try something a little different. We’ve finished chapter 5 of Carroll’s book Endless Forms Most Beautiful so they should be ready to weigh the importance of various mechanisms, so I split the class in two and told half of them to read Wray’s article on the importance of cis-regulatory mutations in evolution, and Hoekstra and Coyne’s article that argues for a more balanced emphasis. I’d love to have a fight break out in the room.
Miri is ruining everyone’s fun again, telling stories about being bullied in school, and showing this fierce video.
I was lucky. I wasn’t really bullied; my fate was to be neglected and marginalized. I was the dirt poor kid who wasn’t a jock or popular, so I was mostly uncategorizable and overlooked. An example to illustrate the weird social limbo I was in: I was only one of four kids at the school to be a national merit finalist; I’d gotten a near-perfect score on the SATs. We all got invited to the principal’s office when this was announced, and he sat us down: the basketball star, the doctor’s kid, the straight A student (and no resentment against any of those three — all were good people), and me. The principal knew all the others well, they had a good reputation, and he was joking around with them, and then he turned and gave me this look…’whothehellisthis and whyshouldItalkto him’, sniffed and turned back to the others, without saying a word to me.
We got the honor of a few minutes announcement at a school assembly, and it was similarly weird. Each of us four were announced, the teachers and principal said a few lovely things about them, and then they came to me, last, and just said my name, nothing more, before moving on. It was nice to be mentioned, but man, I was clearly regarded as the aberrant weirdo who was only there by mistake. I was the outlier, the person from the wrong class (make no mistake, classism thrives in America), the nobody who didn’t fit.
Again, I wasn’t bullied much in high school. I wasn’t angry at that treatment. What it did instead was make me someone who never felt a lot of self-worth and just kind of generally alone and miserable. But fortunately another thing I lacked was the serious depression that many people experience, even when they aren’t neglected, and so I’ve managed to cope.
I do sometimes wonder what it would have been like to actually have a teacher take an interest in me and encourage me, but at least I never had one make my life difficult. I was too invisible for that.
Everyone is always complaining that the drama and controversy is ‘all about the traffic’ — that the only reason people take controversial stands on the internet is to stir up noise and get lots and lots of attention. I’ve been saying for years that it’s not true; you can get brief flurries of traffic by highlighting some infuriating topic, but it doesn’t really build an audience.
And now I learn the true recipe, and that I’ve clearly been doing it all wrong. Michael Nugent did a rough experiment to evaluate the popularity of sexist jokes, assessing the popularity of two pages with the same joke, but different photos.
…the joke with the sexist photo has received more than 43,000 likes and 24,000 shares.
But the exact same joke has also been posted on a different Facebook Page, without the sexist photo, and has received only 53 likes and 18 shares.
Taking into account that the first page has nearly four times the audience as the second page, that means that the joke is 200 times more popular when accompanied by the sexist photo.
Well, you can’t really make that kind of quantitative measure: traffic growth isn’t usually trivially linear. But clearly if I want more traffic, I have to stop promoting minority issues and begin pandering to social dogma, so I’m going to have to make a few changes around here.
The Monday Metazoan is going to become the Monday Meat Market, in which I post a photo of a bikini clad woman and encourage people to comment on her appearance (Send in your pictures! Or better yet, pictures of your ex-girlfriend!). The Wednesday Botanical will be the Wednesday Flower, where flower is a euphemism for female genitalia: we’ll be showing off gynecological closeups. We’ll still keep the squid around, sort of, for the Friday Cephalopod, but now it’ll be Tentacle Rape Friday, with nothing but hentai clips.
I know it will be tough on the regulars, and many of you might depart and never look back, but hey, 43000 ‘likes’ on one lousy joke? Think of the money! And all I’d have to do is throw away my self-respect and spend the next few years hanging out on the internet with assholes.
That’s how you get lots of hits on the internet. I’ve just been wasting my time calling out religious nonsense and sexism. (Hmmm…I could also suck up to religious people, there’s a big traffic base.)
This is the lounge. You can discuss anything you want, but you will do it kindly. Fish face!
Status: Heavily Moderated; Previous thread
I thought Canadians had more sense than this: an MP, Jeff Watson, would like to know if you’d like a complete ban on all abortions. Right now, 37% of his constituency seem to think that’s just fine and dandy. Maybe he needs some global input?
Which best describes your position:.
I support fully taxpayer-funded abortion, at any time in the pregnancy, for any reason at all; 41%
I support some legal restrictions on access to abortion, for example restricting full access to abortion to the first trimester of pregnancy; 11%
I support abortion for any reason but it shouldn’t be taxpayer-funded; 2%
I support creative policy options and supports that help women with unexpected pregnancies keep the baby; or 7%
I support a complete ban on abortion. 37%
Imagine if you lived in a town where the only hospital was owned by the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and you were in a car accident — you’ve got a ruptured spleen, you’re bleeding internally, and your life is at risk. The surgeon is going to go in and stitch up and cauterize everything, but you’re warned that they don’t keep any kind of blood supply in the hospital, and they refuse to do blood transfusions — they have an in-house professional ethicist (who is a Jehovah’s Witness, of course) who rejects the morality of exchanging sacred blood, and the administrators have signed an agreement with the church to never, under any circumstances, carry out blood transfusions.
If you need a blood transfusion, they say, don’t worry, the ambulance will take you to a different hospital…50 miles away. You, unfortunately, are in shock, you’ve got a gusher pouring blood into your body cavity, and this is not an option. You get to die.
We would not tolerate this situation. That hospital would have a change of ownership as fast as the public could drive it, and if anyone did die because of that kind of criminal neglect and refusal to follow standard medical procedure, a malpractice suit would be the least of their worries. Someone would be going to jail.
So why are Catholics allowed to buy up and impose Catholic dogma on hospitals? Is it because their ignorant dogma does the greatest harm to women (especially those slutty ones who have sex) and bizarre rules about reproduction don’t directly harm men?
But Catholics are buying up hospitals all over the country. They’ve got declining attendance, they’re closing churches, they’re having trouble recruiting priests, but they’ve still got buckets of money, and they’re using that money to impose control in another way — by taking over your health care.
Catholic institutions across the nation are merging with secular hospitals, clinics, and even small private practices at an unprecedented rate. Optimists explain that the consolidation and shared infrastructure help reduce costs. Pessimists point out that the aggressive mergers come at a time when Catholic bishops are exerting and expanding their authority. “I see it as a conscious effort to achieve through the private market what they failed to achieve through the courts or at the ballot box,” says Monica Harrington, a San Juan Island resident who’s spent the last year fighting a Catholic hospital in her town.
Three of the largest health-care systems in the Northwest—PeaceHealth, Providence Health & Services, and Franciscan Health System—are Catholic entities, and they’re busy making new deals in our state. According to MergerWatch, a nonprofit that tracks Catholic hospital mergers across the nation, there was a record-breaking 10 mergers announced in Washington State in 2012.
It’s a chilling story. Catholics can’t get their way in popular opinion, so they’ve followed another path, buying up and limiting health care options so that you have no choice but to follow their ancient biblical rules. The linked article is an examination of the growing move to limit your medicine to Catholic medicine in the Pacific Northwest, but it applies everywhere. They interviewed doctors who reported on their constraints.
Three physicians working in Whatcom County eventually agreed to speak with me. PeaceHealth bought out the secular hospital in 2008. Since then, PeaceHealth has systematically bought up nearly every specialty clinic in the area, from cardiologists to pediatricians, hospice to oncology. The physicians who agreed to meet me for coffee talked about the mindfuck of being raised Catholic, turning to atheism, and excelling in medicine—only to wake up one day with the church as your boss. The first physician joked grimly about the religious directives being “medieval torture porn.” He talked about the struggle of trying to balance his duty to patients with the edicts of a Catholic hospital.
These religious directives are nightmarish. They aren’t always followed — these really are rules laid down by religious fanatics who have no experience or connection to the actual practice of medicine, and conscientious doctors try to find workarounds — but what limits them now is competition. If Catholics get a monopoly on health care in an area, then the trouble really begins.
To understand Catholic health care, it’s important to know the rules that guide Catholic hospitals, otherwise known as Ethical and Religious Directives (ERDs). These directives are drafted and tweaked by the rotating cast of mostly white, mostly celibate bishops couch-surfing at the Vatican. ERDs operate like a code of conduct that medical staff in Catholic hospitals agree to abide by, regardless of whether or not a particular staffer is Catholic. For the most part, the directives aren’t suggestions—they’re prescriptive.
“Any partnership… must respect church teaching and discipline,” one directive states. The church monitors the implementation of these directives through hospital ethic committees overseen by regional bishops like our very own Archbishop Peter Sartain.
Sure, in 43 pages of Ethical and Religious Directives, there’s some common-sense guidance to be found. But they’re also flush with horrifying detail. As you’d expect, the directives pertaining to women’s fertility read like a misogynist romance novel or found art from the Middle Ages: “Catholic health institutions may not promote or condone contraceptive practices.” Emergency contraception can only be given to rape victims, and even then only “if, after appropriate testing, there is no evidence that conception has occurred already.” Vasectomies and tubal ligations are also prohibited. Egg and sperm donors are deemed “contrary to the covenant of marriage,” surrogate motherhood is prohibited because it denigrates “the dignity of the child and marriage,” and doctors at Catholic hospitals can’t help infertile couples conceive artificially—using their own eggs and sperm—because test-tube babies “separate procreation from the marital act in its unitive significance.”
Then there’s this: “Abortion… is never permitted.”
Not even when the egg attaches outside the uterus and puts a mother’s life in danger: “In case of extrauterine pregnancy, no intervention is morally licit which constitutes a direct abortion.”
The short-sighted and selfish male readers out there (and we know we have no shortage of those assholes in the atheist community) aren’t possibly quite as outraged as they should be. These rules affect women, right? I got mine, let them worry over it, it’s not my fight.
Unfortunately, Catholics also have some weird ideas about LGBT relationships. Another set of people who are going to be hurt by this Catholic takeover are those who are in any kind of relationship that doesn’t fit their narrow definition of one man, one woman…and give them the power to flex their ideological muscle, and you might find yourself snubbed if you’re divorced.
So maybe you aren’t gay and your sexual relationships are conservative and conventional. The other big problem is death, which all of us will do someday. Washington state passed a death with dignity law a few years ago, allowing physician-assisted suicide in terminal cases. Guess which hospitals ignore the law and will prolong your suffering indefinitely?
Don’t let Catholics control your hospitals. Keep the church out of your health care decisions. Make Catholic Ethical and Religious Directives (ERDs) illegal — individuals may follow them at their personal discretion, but no health care facility gets to impose them on their patients, especially when they defy the law.
Having reviewed my schedule for my Bay Area visit, including the fact that Tuesday evening will likely be mainly consumed with helping my Dear Old Mom celebrate her 40th birthday,* I have concluded that I will be having a beer at the Jupiter in Berkeley starting at approximately 5:30 on Wednesday the 27th. The Jupiter is close to the Downtown Berkeley BART station. As the bearded hippie, I will be easy to spot. Hope to see you there.
In other news, I gave my old growth desert lecture a couple weeks back here in town, and a report on that lecture has just shown up in the local press. The reporter, a lovely person, got a couple minor details wrong but I’m always glad for a sympathetic story on desert plants showing up in desert newspapers.
* for approximately the 30th time
