Juan Cole lists ten things we learn from Mitt Romney’s insults to Spain. He leaves one off: isn’t it obvious that Romney is preparing to invade, or at least send drones to buzz the country?
I keep telling you guys this, but some of you non-developmental biologists dare to disagree — but it’s true, I’ma gonna tell you, developmental biology is the greatest scientific discipline of all time. We have confirmation, too: The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 2012 has been announced, and it goes to two developmental biologists, John Gurdon (about time) and Shinya Yamanaka. It also goes for research in stem cells.
Gurdon carried out the initial crucial experiment years ago. He sucked the nucleus out of an adult frog skin cell and injected it into an enucleated frog egg. What happened next was that in some cases, the nucleus was reprogrammed into a pluripotent state — instead of being a skin cell with its specific suite of active and inactive genes, it was transformed into an egg cell equivalent, and went on to divide and dutifully create a genetic copy of the donor frog…a clone. This was the precursor to all the animal cloning experiments that have gone on since.
Gurdon’s experiment worked, but we didn’t know how — we knew that the environment of the cytoplasm of the egg cell somehow reset the epigenetic state of the skin cell nucleus, but we were blind to what was actually doing the work.
Enter Yamanaka and his colleagues. What they did was figure out what genes constituted the reset button of the cell, and by expressing them could force adult cells to revert to a pluripotent state. Their approach is a kind of brute force global activation of the four genes identified as key triggers in mammalian cells, but it works: adult mouse cells have been transformed, and then go on to develop into clones of the donor, and it also works on human cells, although no full human clones have been produced — just tissue collections in a dish, or teratomas in mouse hosts.
These are important steps in developing tools to allow us to sculpt adult cells into tissues and organs and whole organisms. Notice that the work was done at Cambridge and Kyoto which, for the geographically challenged, are not American universities. There is good stem cell work being done in the US, but it’s hampered by regulations and restrictions that European and Asian universities do not suffer from. Unleash all the developmental biologists, because we must rule all the things everywhere!
Because there’s no other rational, thinking choice.
Barbara Eckstein
One of the things that bugs me most about some of my fellow environmentalists, aside from the patchouli, is the near-religious adherence — even among those enviros who eschew religion — to the notion that natural ecological systems have an innate and emergent self-repairing property. It’s a dangerous idea that breeds complacency, and it’s really widespread.
Yesterday, I made the long drive from Morris to Duluth, made longer because I took a back-country route through the north country forest. I was a few days too late for the peak of the fall foliage; there was an occasional burst of brilliant yellow-gold, but for the most part the yellows had faded to parchment and the reds had clotted to a dull brown. Many of the birch trees were naked, pale, and skeletal, clawing bleakly at the cloudy sky. I’d missed the splendor and driven straight into Ray Bradbury time, where the atmosphere was all about the fading of the light and the dread of the dark.
And I was thinking all the way…man, but I love Halloween. It’s my favorite time of the year, and it’s also a great atheist holiday.
A letter from Einstein is going up for auction (got $3 million), and it’s revealing about his actual attitude towards religion.
The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. These subtilised interpretations are highly manifold according to their nature and have almost nothing to do with the original text.
Just remember that next time someone tries to cite Einstein as a believer.
Early last month I threatened all of you that I might be moving some of my old posts from Creek Running North / Coyote Crossing to this joint, assuming they’re appropriate for the venue. I see it’s been a month since I did so. Somewhat coincidentally, I’ve been a little mopey for the last couple weeks over the sixmonthiversary of having to say goodbye to my friend Thistle, and a post I wrote six months ago last week seemed very much appropriate for Pharyngulizing. So here is is, slightly edited, with special bonus photo.
You probably did, but I’ve been so swamped with outrageous amounts of work I didn’t notice. But I had a little quiet time yesterday, and I remembered! So here we are!
The way this works is that in the comment thread to this post you will put links and quotes and effusive praise for great comments that were left in the month of September. In a few days, I’ll review them and pick a few that I agree were pretty darned great, and then I’ll let you vote on the best comment of September 2012 from my winnowed list.
So remind us all: who said good things last month?
