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It’s the ultimate vision of a dystopia: Parents can choose their child’s characteristics before they are born. Only the richest parents can afford this, so the rich children are always the smartest, best looking, and most charismatic. Schools cater to these students, and they grow up to be better in every possible way. They then make more money than their naturally produced counterparts, and the cycle continues. Feudalism has been revived; ones birth now determines ones future.

Many people worry that this is where genetic engineering, the relatively new (around 40 years old) technology that allows novel genes to be inserted into organisms, will eventually lead humanity. However, those people are wrong. Without further ado, here are the reasons why designer babies will never become a reality.

1.      Most of the traits parents would seek to influence, such as intelligence and height, are polygenic. That means that they are the result of multiple (and in the case of intelligence and height: many, many) genes interacting in an extremely complex fashion. Thus there are many genes that would need to be changed in a very precise manner to have any chance of affecting an embryo’s eventual height, intelligence, or any other desired characteristic.

2.      Genes have multiple effects in the body, and a positive effect in one way often elicits a negative effect in another. For instance, the human genome contains a gene that may cause a 10 point boost in IQ if it is present. However, this same gene also increases ones risk of developing a terrible disease, known as torsion dystonia, by 10%. As torsion dystonia confines its victims to wheelchairs and causes uncontrollable muscle spasms, the risk of inserting this intelligence gene is probably not worth the potential benefit. Also, in a more general sense, the data suggests that the greater ones intelligence, the more likely one is to suffer mental illness or cancer, and shorter people definitely live longer.

3.      Certain traits are often valued because of their novelty. Beauty for instance, is often extremely socially relative. Suppose all parents started to design their daughters to be naturally thin. Being slightly overweight would then likely become attractive, as all other young girls would be naturally skinny.

4.      Nurture/the environment. This isn’t the post where I want to get into the whole nature/nurture debate, but obviously ones environment has an effect on any of the traits one would seek to influence with genetic enhancement.

For a similar arguement and slightly different perspective on this, see this article by Steven Pinker:

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2003/jun/05/research.highereducation

Thoughts?

Brad Rybinski

I’ve had this emailed to me and seen it lots of different places, so I’m not sure exactly who wrote it. Still, I felt like sharing it before the holidays were over, so here it is…

A Politically Correct Holiday Greeting

Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low-stress, non-addictive, gender-neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasion and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all. I also wish you a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2009, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make America great. Not to imply that America is necessarily greater than any other country nor the only America in the Western Hemisphere . Also, this wish is made without regard to the race, creed, color, age, physical ability, religious faith or sexual preference of the wishee.

I don’t usually read “Discover” magazine, but I saw a copy of it today and found that the latest issue claimed to list the “100 Top Science Stories of 2008”. Here are some of my favorites:

·         The Mars Phoenix Rover strikes ice on Mars

·         Invisibility has been created (But alas.. only for subatomic particles)

·         Human genome sequencing has supposedly come down to $200,000

·         Using a transplant of bone marrow cells, doctors have been able to get some kidney transplant patients off of immunosuppressive drugs

·         Red blood cells have been created from stem cells

·         Artificial photosynthesis

·         Partial Cure for Blindness through gene therapy

·         A virus has been discovered that infects other viruses

·         A synthetic genome has been built from scratch

·         Life’s precursors have been identified in a meteorite

·         A way to increase IQ

·         A single electron has been captured on film

·         A battery has been made from a virus

Proving… Once again… That science is cool.

Brad Rybinski

When most people think of terrifying illnesses, HIV is high on their list. It’s incurable, causes the immune system to break down, and eventually leads to a terrible death. Or does it?

The truth is, thanks to the current cocktail of drugs (known as HAART therapy; check out this article from the FDA http://www.fda.gov/FDAC/features/1999/499_aids.html or this:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiretroviral_drug Wikipedia article for more information), it is now possible to lead an almost normal life and delay the onset of AIDS for a long time after one is infected with HIV.

Also, the truth is that HIV has been cured. This has happened only once that I know of ,and the approach that was taken is not scalable to the millions currently infected with the virus; however it has been done none the less. The cure, done by a Berlin hematologist on a 42 year old American man who also had leukemia, relies on the following three facts:

1.      HIV infects the body’s immune system cells

2.      Some people’s immune system cells, due to a genetic mutation in the gene that codes for the cellular receptor CCR5, cannot be infected with HIV

3.      Immune system cells are generated from the bone marrow

Knowing these facts, the hematologist gave his patient a bone marrow transplant, which is the accepted treatment for leukemia, from a donor who was genetically immune to HIV infection. The patient, as a result of the new bone marrow, then began making immune system cells that HIV could not infect. He has now lived over 20 months since the treatment, and shows no detectable levels of HIV in his blood. Though 20 months is not, in my opinion, long enough to call this therapy a cure for HIV (cancer patients must wait 5 years after a bone marrow transplant to be considered cured, so he is not even technically cured from his leukemia), this technique does look extremely promising.

Regrettably however, this approach to “curing HIV” has significant limitations and dangers. First, bone marrow transplants themselves are not perfect, as it is possible to get a severe case of “graft-versus host” disease from them. In graft versus host disease, the bone marrow generates an immune system that does not recongize the patient’s body, and thus it begins to attack it. Graft versus host disease can be life threatening. (This is not to downplay the bone marrow transplants though; they have saved thousands of lives, can be perfectly successful, and often do result in no complications.) Also, only an estimated 1% of Europeans carry the mutation that causes immunity to HIV, and this, combined with the fact that a patient can only receive bone marrow from certain donors (the patient and donor must “match”, see this article from the Mayo Clinic: http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/bone-marrow/CA00047 ) means that the chances that an individual infected with HIV will find a donor capable of curing them are slim. And finally, many of the people infected with HIV are living in poor parts of the world, and thus could never receive a procedure as delicate and complicated as a bone marrow transplant.

Still, the curing of HIV has been done, and a lot of research is underway to create less dangerous and more applicable cures (see http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081205171007.htm for an example). In my opinion, the future for people with HIV is brighter than ever before. Thoughts?

Brad Rybinski

Wikipedia…  Everybody knows about it.  Millions of people use it every day.  If you search for nearly anything on Google or any of the other large search engines, a Wikipedia article is bound to be included within the first few pages of results.  At first glance, these articles appear to be reliable and easy to understand. However, thousands of people are outspokenly against this online encyclopedia.  As a high school student, my teachers are constantly reminding me of the “terror” of Wikipedia, and how it “destroys all the credibility of research”. But is Wikipedia really that unreliable?  And honestly, can’t people make practical use of Wikipedia?  I’ve done a little exploring, and I’ve come to a few conclusions of my own on these matters…

When arguing against Wikipedia’s reliability, the first thing people bring up is that “you can change anything in any article.”  The idea is to try to convince you that the sources are erratic or untrustworthy because random people might be filling the pages with crazy ranting, opinions, or otherwise nonsensical vandalism.  The truth is that this really can’t happen that often.  Honestly, how many people spend their free time parading around the millions of Wikipedia articles, sinisterly typing in their insane ramblings and cackling over their genius plans to destroy Wikipedia?  Not many.  I’m not saying that there aren’t people that do this, but I personally would much rather spend my Saturday nights doing something a little more fun.  Still, let’s assume that someone really did concoct a villainous scheme to destroy Wikipedia.  I decided to attempt this very act, and proceeded to create a Wikipedia account to enable editing of articles from my computer.  The first thing I did was try big, obvious changes to the more visited articles.  I wrote in things like, “the Nazis won WWII”, “Bob Dylan was the 40^th president”, and other random and wrong information.  As I expected, these additions were immediately reverted back to their original statements.  I also quickly discovered that there were indeed nut-jobs that perused the multitude of Wikipedia articles to make changes.  They were, however, devotees to the upholding of Wikipedia’s accuracy.  My changes were detected so rapidly, it was as if there a sacred order of Wikipedia Watchmen, ready to pounce on a false entry.  It is a mystery to me as to why so many people are hell-bent on making sure that I won’t change their dearest facts, but they clearly are.  I looked a little more into the process of editing and learned that the website automatically makes a record of all changes, no matter how minor, that are made.  Also, the editor must state a reason for their revision.  The better the description of the revision, the less likely it is that someone will flag the revision, resulting in a reversion to its original form (or at least, I found, a better reason will buy a little more time until the faulty revision’s eventual demise).

I had expected to be unable to make the obvious changes so I decided to make more subtle ones.  I looked up my hometown in the Wikipedia search and there was (of course) an article.  Who could care about a little article on a town of fewer than 6,000 people?  I changed one word.  One little date that was interjected into the article’s jumble of facts.  Sure enough, the date had been changed back to its correct form by the end of the day.  This is relatively solid evidence (at least to me) against Wikipedia’s publicized ineptitude toward countering vandalism.  After all, I had only changed the said date by 1 year, fully documented believable reasons for the change, and had made the change with a “fresh” Wikipedia account (as Wikipedia catches you for vandalism, it revokes your privileges rather quickly).  Surprisingly, my mischievous actions were discovered not by a person, but by a computer.  Anti-vandalism programs are the unsung heroes of Wikipedia maintenance.  They act somewhat as a Guardian of Wikipedia, crushing any stray defacement unable to be found by human eyes.  All in all, if you set out to destroy Wikipedia’s basic accuracy, you will (and I mean will) eventually be stopped.

So why, you might ask, does it seem so hard to make revisions to Wikipedia? Isn’t that one of its advertised “bonuses”?  The truth is that I hadn’t been making revisions at all.  All my “editing” had been petty vandalism.  I undertook a third task and tried to find something wrong in Wikipedia and correct it.  This was very difficult to accomplish.  A hidden truth about the encyclopedia is that almost all incorrect information either becomes flagged (labeled as incorrect) or changed within about a month.  A lot of this has to with how well the source information for each fact is cited.  That’s another good thing about Wikipedia.  You need to match every paragraph to another credible online source for it to stay on the site.  Whether or not the source is credible is a whole other argument, but we shall stick to Wikipedia’s own credibility for now.  It took me about an hour to find something wrong with Wikipedia.  I ended up changing the term “Indians” to the more accepted term “Native Americans”.  This seemed a meager effort, but it proved the best I could do to help Wikipedia.

As of December 2, 2008, there were 2,643,922 articles in English on Wikipedia.  That seems like a big number.  Do we really need all those articles?  Is it too easy to make an article?  To answer these I tried to write an article.  I gave up within minutes.  It is more of an undertaking than you might think, and is just like writing a research paper with an overly detailed bibliography.  You can’t just start writing.  As I mentioned earlier, every single statement, picture, or statistic you put in an article needs to be connected to another online source for your article to be even considered (by computer sorting) for insertion into the encyclopedia.  If you don’t cite your sources, your facts will (again, will) be flagged as untrustworthy.

The previous thought leads to another one:  Can we use Wikipedia for practical purposes?  My conclusion is that yes; we can.  Not only do Wikipedia articles offer a basic understanding of (usually) notable facts, they offer organized links to other sources.  These are often “acceptable” sources that can be used to formulate a good paper or project.  If you need to write about something about which you know nothing at all, start with Wikipedia.  After you read their concise version of the topic, click on some of the sources.  You never know.  They could be perfect for your needs.

After my research, I have become a proponent of Wikipedia, and its place in our ever-expanding world of information.  That is perfectly fine if you disagree.  I would love to hear your insight on this issue.  Keep in mind that I found all of the “facts” in this article somewhere in Wikipedia, and with only an afternoon of research. If you find anything in here that is blatantly wrong, make like Wikipedia and tell me!  Also, feel free to try the little experiments described.  As I did, you might find that Wikipedia is a lot different than the institutionalized world makes it out to be.

For more info, go to en.wikipedia.org .  If you dislike Wikipedia, you will pleased to know that there is an article on “Criticism of Wikipedia” (it is, ironically, four times larger than the Wikipedia article on “Wikipedia”)

        (The above article was graciously contributed by)    -GTW

People are truly are fascinating. Think of a number between 1 and 10. Did you pick 7? If not, did you pick 3? If you picked another number, congratulations, as most people will have picked either 7 or 3. No one knows why this is so, but it has held up in study after study.

There are lots of little facts like that about human psychology. For instance, ask someone to pick an item of clothing from a table, and most people will always pick the one farthest to the right. Yet if you ask a person why they picked their item, they will most likely tell you how good it will look on them, how soft it feels, or that they like its color. They will certainly not say that they chose it because it is the one farthest on the right.

The facts above happen to be trivial subtleties of human psychology. However, one can easily imagine a fact like these that may not be trivial. For instance, would you believe that people are more likely to be lenient and forgiving after they have washed their hands? Recent research suggests that we are. (For more information, go to http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081201081915.htm .) Imagine the consequences this could have. What if jury members were required to wash their hands before court? What if a judge washed his hands before sentencing?

Thoughts?

Brad Rybinski