Value in the Defective

One of the latest scientific discoveries that surprised me is that children with Down's Syndrome have genes that may help us to prevent the growth and spread of cancer.

Someone noticed that people with Down's Syndrome rarely get cancer. They started tracking which gene might be responsible, since Down's is genetic and well understood. They discovered that a gene that allows blood vessels to form is responsible for the inhibition of cancer. In cancer, one of the first things a tumor does after it forms is call to the body to supply it with blood. It sends out a "feed me" signal and the body obliges by sending new blood vessels into the tumor.

People with Down's Syndrome have a gene that surpresses this new blood vessel formation, so their whatever cancers they get tend to starve from lack of sustenance.

Here is an example of something that we thought was not valuable having a surprising benefit. Many people test for genetic abnormalities in children and may choose to abort the fetus if it has a serious genetic defect like Down's Syndrome. Why do some parents find it so compelling to keep these children, even knowing that they will have Down's Syndrome? They may have understood and hoped on some level that there would be benefits to going ahead and having the child. What I'm sure they didn't suspect was that there would be a benefit to humanity in having these children around.

This goes to show that you cannot discount the value of life, even when it seems to be flawed and therefore less valuable than "normal" specimens. You never know the value we'll see in something.

Destruction of the Fittest

In my ongoing self-education of Micro-Biology, I keep learning interesting things. I've been listening to Microbiology classes that cover cellular and sometimes genetic level functions within cells. I get them free from iTunes, through their iTunes U, mostly from the University of California at Bereley.

They were talking about apoptosis, which is cellular suicide. Many times, this type of cell death is initiated by a cell because some part of the immune system is telling the cell to do it. In an ideally functioning system, this happens when the cell is not functioning properly or out of control - like when it is cancerous. This leads researchers to consider inducing the body to crank up the apototic response to prevent the spread of cancer.

This seems to me to be a perfect analogy to errant humans in society. If we could only get the people that will never serve a useful purpose, that divert resources and energy that were better spent elsewhere, and whose presence eventually actively harms society to kill themselves, society would be healthier - would benefit. There is a bit of that going on, violent crime tends to self-limit a person's life.

We actively resist this "cleansing" function when it comes to care of elderly. I know that sounds horrible, and it is. But in a more primitive society, when someone ages and becomes sick or chronically ill, if there is no level of care for them, they eventually die. Some in the medical community are starting to argue about a system to figure out when a person's chances of recovery are non-existence and how to determine this point and withdraw aggressive care. There would still be pain relief, feeding, and bodily care, but the point is to pick a point where medicine stops postponing the inevitable. A body disposes of the aged cells that are no longer functioning, changing elder care is in some ways a proposal to treat them the same way an organism treats it's aged and failing components. I am sure many people reading this would be recoiling in horror. If you're picturing your beloved grandmother or father, the idea that you would not do whatever is possible is repellent. That is precisely why changes in how we approach elder care does not change. Familial affection for their elders prevents us from letting go and considering allowing nature to take its course. There is no easy way to let go. I'm sure that the person that is dying is struggling with the same dilemma. If someone is told bluntly that they will never recover and that they will never feel better, perhaps never again experience a day free of pain or with any hope of self sufficiency, that would change the way they look at it. In fact, many people now sign "do not resuscitate" orders, wanting to stop the prolonging of their suffering.

On the other end of the scale, look at what we do with soldiers in wars. We send the youngest, fittest, and most dedicated members of society out to die in battle. These are the very people that humanity needs the most. They are usually the best physical specimens, usually of an age that they could have expected to have and raise children for the next several years. These are also the most civic minded of society, the very people that value society the highest, the ones you want most to build and nurture life. I remember hearing one time that the number of men that France lost in World War I, picked out of the finest physical specimens, caused the average height of the French man to drop 3 or 4 inches.

However, equating portions of humanity with cancer is not a very good analogy. I'm not proposing some Hitlerian "final solution" to the aged, or a callous new medical policy. I'm just thinking about analogies and parallels. Humanity is not a superorganism. We're all individuals with our own values and our own value to society as a whole.

Convergence of Genius

My wife mentioned during a recent trip that our country's Founding Fathers were amazing. She found it incredible that our country had such a concentrated group of far thinking geniuses at the same time in our Founding Fathers.

I agree that it was a unique combination. They were living in a primitive colony, without all the industry, luxuries, or wealth of their mother country. Yet, they were the educated elite. They were mostly well read, in an era when that meant expensive private education that was heavy in Greek and Roman history. They (particularly Ben Franklin) were interested in spreading knowledge. Franklin's advocacy of public education and libraries, as well as his active printing press business, were all aimed at elevating the general public. The privileged and educated elite that our founders came from knew about classic literature, they were well read on subjects from Plato to the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. Knowing the classics, they knew what had worked in history and what didn't work.

When looking at the way they were being managed by their sovereign, they knew that this was the type of model that historically did not work, and they knew what kind of society they wanted, going back to the original models of democracy founded in Greece and Rome hundreds of years ago.

When you look at the different interested they had, it's a marvel that they were able to work together and compromise on so many levels. They had many distinct differences, but the largest was the issue of slavery. While they were opposed on some issues, they were pushed together in opposition to a common foe. If not for the sheer incompetency of King George and Parliament, they would not have been able to hold their coalition together long enough to craft a new country.

Our Founding Fathers really did made a thing of beauty. In looking at why the things England was doing were wrong, they had to craft ideals of what is fair. They had to decide what basic principles were right and would always be right and craft a functioning government true to those principles. They tried to do what was right and what would be right far into the future, not what was expedient and would help them in the short run.

Will circumstance ever bring such a strong concentration of brilliant thinkers and leaders with a zeal to overturn stale entrenched power again? Perhaps, given the right conditions. Let's hope it's not necessary.

Complexity of Life

The other day I was listening to some microbiology classes via podcast that I got from iTunes U.

They were talking proteins, their structure and how they fold into compact shapes. Scientists used to study x-ray crystallography of proteins to understand their physical and chemical structure and now they don't look directly at proteins any more. They look at the DNA to figure out what kind of protein is made. The way this works is that DNA transcribes, or writes RNA or proteins, and RNA transcribes proteins. You've probably heard about how DNA is both a structure and a code. When you unravel DNA, it makes a template to produce all kinds of chemicals. This is called transcription.

Our technological advance, abandoning an old technique because of new knowledge makes me wonder if we might be missing something. What if transcription "shudders" and does not make a protein corresponding to the exact DNA sequence? It's possible that transcription is more complex than making a copy of a fragment of a gene, it could be that there is a cut and paste sequence in there somewhere. By only using DNA sequencing, are we sometimes misunderstanding protein sequence and shape?

If the DNA in a single cell in your body was unraveled, it would be 2 meters long. And only a few atoms across. This structure folds back on itself in an intricate way to fit into the nucleus of a cell. The were talking about primary, secondary, tertiary, and quatranary folds of proteins, and DNA has similar folds and it's called supercoiling.

Genetic Microbiologists already know about "chaperones". These are auxiliary chemical that help proteins fold properly. They are like little chemical jigs that hold or twist a protein while more chemicals are being added to the end of the protein chain. Partly because they need this special assistance, the complexity is enormous. Proteins, which consist of 50 to 100 base amino acids don't work properly if they are not folded properly. Prions, responsible for mad cow disease in cattle, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, and chronic wasting in deer, are no more than a misfolded protein. One little error and the whole protein transforms from a useful building block to a deadly toxin.

We are still, in some ways, in the early phases of understanding all the complex machinations of the chemicals of life. Many discoveries in science are made by fortuitous accidents. By the same token, how many missteps have led us astray? How many times has "something better" come along and caused us to abandon a line of research? The tree of knowledge is sometimes just that, a growing and branching of direction build on past achievements. It makes you wonder if why have not missed magic or ESP or some other whole branch of untapped science because our history lead us away from that field.

You can't miss what you never had, but you can go back and look at some of the things that weren't tried, and in light of future knowledge, see if there were treasures to be had along the paths not taken.

Cambrian Explosion explanation

One of the mysteries of palaeontology is the flipside of the mass extinctions, or an evolutionary explosion. The famous Cambrian Explosion is an interesting period. In a relatively brief period of time, the number of species on Earth multiplied to a degree they have not seen before or since.

It's not hard to understand mass extinction. It's easy to kill things. What's hard to explain is how evolution seems to work at a plodding deliberate pace, and then suddenly leaps forward.

There are many theories, some discarded, some still considered, about how this occurred.

I wonder if these bursts of evolution and diversity correspond to magnetic pole reversals? We know mutations occur more often in high radiation periods. They have found that the magnetic poles of Earth reverse from time to time. Without the proper configuration of the magnetic field, Earth would be without shielding from cosmic radiation that the field provides. Perhaps when this field was temporarily down, the increased radiation caused increased mutation?

Some believe that there was nothing special about the Cambrian Explosion, it was just a developmental threshold that was passed when conditions were ripe for life to expand into all the niches that Earth provided it.

If that is true, is it possible for this to happen again?

Guantanamo Idol

While Americans were dismayed about the way the Bush Administration created a new moral dead zone in setting up the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, they are now balking at solving the problem. Even though many are in favor of erasing the stain of this black chapter in our history, Obama's moves to fix the problem are being thwarted by Congress and many state officials that do not want to hold the detainees or release them into the United States if their home countries do not want them.

I have a novel solution. Let's bring them to the U.S. and put them on television. We'll have a combination of America's Most Wanted, Frontline investigations, and American Idol. In this show, each detainee gets outlined by government officials, gets to tell his story, gets to have witnesses tell stories, then the audience votes what to do with them. No doubt some will get book and movie deals, and others will be voted into Maximum Security Prison. With enough hype, the advertisement revenues for the story will pay for the whole detention and release process as we work our way through the backlog of prisoners. If we actually have serious cases with the prisoners, we actually send them through real courtrooms, but if we don't we just employ some American Ingenuity to solve the problem. After all, American Ingenuity was used in creating the problem in the first place. We bank on the public's love of reality television to make the scheme work. We allow the world to vote on it, since the overseas long distance will automatically keep the Arab world from being able to rig the voting (I assume we can protect against repeat robo-call-votes).

This idea is sort of an adaptation to an older idea of mine, where prisoners on death row or in prison for life could be given the chance to fight to the death in gladiatorial battles in exchange for some posh living arrangements while in incarceration leading up to the fights. I'm sure many of them would appreciate the opportunity to make something of their time, in any case, it would be voluntary. If they win 10 fights, you give them a couple of million dollars and let them go free. They have to pay back any victims first, but you assume that if they are a rich celebrity that there is no reason or ability to go back to a life of crime. Maybe you assign a reverse body guard to them, a guy whose job is to tranq them if they get out of line, and voila, they are recycled back into the arena and have to fight their way back out again.

The reason I don't propose the gladiatorial scheme for the Guantanamo detainees is that they haven't been convicted of anything and anybody that could fight their way out of that mess in this case was probably trained to kill by the terrorists at some point in their past.

All I'm saying here is that if we aren't going to follow the rule of law, then we aren't going to take responsibility for it and fix it, we might as well turn a profit on it and make a spectacle out of it. Who knows, maybe this will be a way to finally get Americans to vote for something that's important.