Decoding and Making Life

I listened to a podcast of WNYC's show Radiolab called (So Called) Life recently. You can see it at http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2008/03/14

It was all about splicing together genes in unique new ways that don't occur in nature to make new life. I was taking a very long and enjoyable early morning walk in Wamego Kansas when I listened to this show the first time.

The show starts out talking about mash-ups from the natural world. These are mythological beasts like lions with eagle heads. Whether it's Pegasus or a Unicorn, people are fascinated with the improbable mixes of various creatures. The display of fantasy creatures at the Museum of Natural History was very popular.

The desire to play god and reinvent life is something that is of great interest to people. There have been examples of mixtures of two beings in a form called a chimera. The original Chimera was a creature of Greek myth that was a combination of various animals. DNA testing has made us realize that we have humans walking among us that are actual chimeras. What happens is you have two twins (not identical) that merge together in the womb and create a single person. The odd thing about this is that different organs or parts of the body would yield different DNA results. Somehow, the body makes one of each part correctly from the mash-up of two original organisms.

Some scientists have messed around and created artificial chimeras from dissimilar animals. They talked about Geeps, a mash-up of a sheep and a goat. You can see various attributes of the input animals expressed in various attributes, a sheep head and goat fur, for example.

The interesting part of the show talked about how early life was supposedly able to exchange genetic information from one organism to another. Genetic swapping caused a rapid increase in diversity. At some point in evolutionary history, this swapping stopped. They talked about the modern stage being human directed evolution.

The story talked about changes in bacteria and other simple forms, but there is also a counter movement that believes this could end up being a very bad idea. This is expressed in the movie "I Am Legend" where genetic manipulation to cure cancer mutates into a plague that almost wipes out all human life. The question is "Do we really understand the consequences of what we are doing?"

I've often thought that as I got older, there would be a opportunities to restore or enhance my senses. I figured medical technology would be developed to repair damage or aging that would also unlock the way these senses worked, making it easy to alter those senses. Imagine being able to see better in the dark, hear like a bat, see like a hawk, or smell like a dog. Imagine being able to breath water or run without tiring. I'm not the only one imagining it. The TV series Dark Angel was the forerunner of this speculation. In that show, Jessica Alba and her cohorts were genetically engineered/enhanced humans, made to be soldiers. Of course, there are massive problems with this, as they have to be kept under tight control or they will overcome "normal" humans. This was also addressed in the original Star Trek and one of the Star Trek movies about the Kahn character played by Ricardo Montebon. He was an enhanced human tried to take over the world and had to be exiled. Still, I would like to be able to see like a hawk.

Other issues that touch upon this way of thinking is the glut of DNA testing. Medical research has a strong desire to test, learn from, and study DNA for potential problems like human disease. They could just as easily search for people that are more enhanced than the baseline and figure out which genes provide these enhancements. The technology is not that great right now. It is much cheaper to analyze nowadays. My brother is a veterinarian and offers DNA tests for dogs for $80to figure out what their lineage is. We are not that far from being able to quickly and inexpensively read the genetic codes of people or whatever animals they want. The problem here is that you have 25,000 genes, each one with multiple functions and expressions, and all interacting with each other. Our chances of getting it right the first time are surely slim. They also bring up the potential for abuse, for deliberately inventing harmful agents and releasing them into the world. That is another question.

Religion and Rhetoric

I got into a short exchange of emails with a coworker recently. He sent me a link to a report on National Geographic from a Russian scientist (actually, the head of the Russian space program, and not necessarily an expert on solar cycles or climatology) that said that there was no human induced global warming, it was just the sun putting out more heat. The proof was that the Martian polar ice caps were shrinking as observed by new Martian satellites, like Earth's polar ice caps. I quickly found another report from about 6 months later by a panel of climatologists. This report went in more depth and said that the sun did indeed have cycles, but that the current warming was greater than the sun cycle alone could account for. It specifically cited the other report and said that it was wrong. The Russian was only looking at the last 3 years, in any case. I knew that any good experiment or research about a theory would account for baseline conditions (how much solar energy is coming in to the planet) and adjust their findings, so in my mind, the later study had more weight, seemed to be more professional, and seemed more thorough. I copied the link to my coworker with a short comment about how the first study was discredited. My coworker, who must be a global warming skeptic, replied to me that he read the second article and found it to be full of rhetoric and opinion.

My initial reaction was that I now knew that he was a global warming denier, and that any evidence or study supporting global warming would simply be disbelieved by him. The second reaction that I had was an emotional distaste of the word rhetoric. In the battle between science and religion, I like to believe that scientists dispassionately cite facts while religionists emotionally cite beliefs without any proof or support. And here someone was calling a scientific report "rhetoric". My reaction was one of taking offense to the statement.

When I realized how irritated I was about this minor issue, I had to figure out why. First, I looked up rhetoric. There are many meanings to the word. The first one says "the undue use of exaggeration or display; bombast". I think that the connotation he was after. That the content was empty and the language was deceptive. If you read more, you see that rhetoric is also considered to be a highly studied method of speaking, usually to try to persuade, sometimes to deceive.

This reminds me of the Dover Pennsylvania Intelligent Design trial. The trial details were very interesting. They said it was like attending an evolutionary science class. One of my favorite parts was when they discussed scientific theory. Anti-Evolutionists like to say that evolution is only a theory. They are using the layman's definition of theory, as in "harebrained idea". Akin to something you dream up in the middle of the night after drinking too much tequila. Scientific Theory is when you propose an explanation for something many observers have witnessed and studied, and the results are reviewed by peers, tested, and torn apart if found to be weak. A mature scientific theory is something that is generally accepted and is used to help understand the world better. Gravity, electricity, magnetism, and germ behavior are all theories. People aren't going to start floating away and you aren't going to get sick from failing to forward that email your Aunt Nelly sent you just because gravity and germ theory are just theories and therefore not valid. Scientific Theory is like bedrock. You can count on it enough to build something to last on it.

Biblical literalists don't know what else to do. The first big famous crisis between church and science was when Copernicus used science and careful observation to put the sun in the center of the solar system. The church did not like the thought that man was not at the center of all things. There have been many other conflicts since, and when people started using geology to date the age of the earth, and started realizing how old fossils actually were, religious scholars that had been telling everyone that the world was 6,000 years old were seriously threatened by this. Darwin studied under one of the most famous geologists of the day, and was influenced to come up with his theory of evolution by learning about the extreme age of the world through geology.

Religious fundamentalists probably feel threatened by this because they think that if people start finding that things in the bible and things we've been told by religious authorities are not correct, then the whole bible is in question. They fear the house of cards effect.

I don't think all global warming denialists are also religious fundamentalists, but they follow the same pattern. The conservatives are under the influence and sway of religious fundamentalists in this country, and pick up on their attitudes and talking points, even when they don't mean to. Conservatives - with their heavy influence of capitalism and it's basic tenet that glorifies conspicuous consumption, fear what will happen if society peeks behind the curtain and actually starts to understand what is going on and what is at stake. And our divided political climate plays into that fear. Those at the pinnacle of society, in regards to wealth and influence, fear the restless masses. What if they rise up and take away all that is dear and precious to them? Scratch the surface of most denialists, and I believe you'll find someone that shares these fears.