Category Archives: science and technology

Fractured Fairytales

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Kudos to Joe Carter for doing his part to spread the truth about the “Galileo
Affair“.

This is a story about Galileo Galilei. It’s not the story about an enlightened scientist being persecuted by a narrow-minded Catholic Church because that story is (mostly) a myth. It’s not a story about a great scientific genius either, though he was that (mainly). It’s also not a story about someone being reincarnated with the soul of the old astronomer like the song by the Indigo Girls that, for a few weeks in ’92, I thought was (almost) profound. (And I should point out that it not an original story but one that cribbed together from other sources.)

But like all good stories this one provides a (mostly) valuable lesson.

Deafening Silence

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You know of Christopher Reeve's determination to walk again, right? Well, you'd think that if some paraplegics began walking again, Mr. Reeve and his supporters would be pretty excited–Mr. Reeve is a quadriplegic, and therefore has a more severe injury, but this is still an immense leap!

This is not the case, because those two young women began to walk thanks to their own adult stem cells. And since politics does trump science (and ethics…), I have yet to see this article in the NY Times, Washington Post, Wired, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, or anywhere else but Zenit.org and Lifenews.com.

Had this been done with embryonic stem cells, which is the horse that Mr. Reeve bet on, I imagine there'd be quite a bit more hype.

If adult stem cells provided a cure to quadriplegia, and if Mr. Reeve accepts that treatment, will we learn of it? Will the media continue to spin it so that we really should keep pushing for embryonic research against all ethics and evidence? It won't fail to be interesting, I'm sure. Stay tuned!

Scientific Censorship

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Assuming this study has merit, censoring it unconscionable.

Researchers boycott journal
Contributors cry foul play after the publisher refuses to include a controversial article
By Alison McCook

"Researchers slated to contribute to a November issue of an occupational medicine journal have withdrawn their submissions in a boycott stemming from the publication's refusal to include a study in the same issue claiming that IBM employees at semiconductor plants have higher-than-expected cancer death rates."

Refreshing Honesty in the Stem Cell Debates

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Generally I have found the media pretty servile in their coverage of stem cells:
they cannot mention adult stem cells without saying that some people do not think
them as versatile as embryonic stem cells, even though adult stem cells have treated
patients successfully and embryonic stem cells have yet to do so anywhere. There
is also the fact that you see people like Christopher Reeve and Michael J. Fox pressing
hard to get funding for embryonic research, implying
that wondrous cures are just around the corner if only obstructive politicians would
get out of the way. This is despite the fact that this technology is, well,
pretty embryonic itself, and candid scientists will admit that we’re decades from
any real treatment from embryonic cells.

Well, in the wake of Mr. Reagan’s passing, Wired
and the Washington
Post have more honest appraisals of what embryonic cells could really do for
Alzheimer’s disease. The Post is particularly valuable in that they bring attention
to the fact that Alzheimer’s destroys the architecture of the brain–how can one
unscramble an egg, and even if you do replace the tissue with normal brain tissue,
will the patient still have his or her own personality and memories? Perhaps even
more importantly, the Post shows how scientists and celebrities have manipulated
the public in order to get more funding–for this and other examples of journalistic
objectivity that I rarely see in papers like the NY Times, I am becoming quite a
fan of the Washington Post!

I just read an excellent story (“Presence”, by Maureen F. McHugh) about
a near-future family, where a wife watches her husband change after an experimental
Alzheimer’s treatment, and it deals with just this question, how regenerating someone’s
brain will inevitably alter their personality. You can read “Presence”
and a number of other excellent stories in Gardner Dozois’ Twentieth Annual The
Year’s Best Science Fiction. It is a very sensitive story about a woman’s
courage and love in dealing with a horrible illness that took her husband.