Science

by Charles

Nicholas Kristof was right when he wrote the following:

The U.S. environmental movement is unable to win on even its very top priorities, even though it has the advantage of mostly being right. Oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge may be approved soon, and there’s been no progress whatsoever in the U.S. on what may be the single most important issue to Earth in the long run: climate change.

The fundamental problem, as I see it, is that environmental groups are too often alarmists. They have an awful track record, so they’ve lost credibility with the public. Some do great work, but others can be the left’s equivalents of the neocons: brimming with moral clarity and ideological zeal, but empty of nuance. (Industry has also hyped risks with wildly exaggerated warnings that environmental protections will entail a terrible economic cost.)

The basis for his op-ed is a lengthy article titled the The Death of Environmentalism, which attempts to analyze the root causes of the failures of the environmental movement’s quest to quell global warming.  The authors’ main thesis is that the movement is a victim of its own success, that it needs to define itself more broadly and that it needs to find new ways to achieve political success.  Personally, I think they’re long on identifying the problem but frustratingly short and vague on ways to solve it.  Heretofore my own disjointed and rambling thoughts on the problems of the environmental movement and what can be done.

Read more

Via bioethics.net comes news of a National Geographic News article called “Animal-Human Hybrids Spark Controversy”. The article is, in my judgment, really confused: confused in a way that makes it much more sensationalistic than it should be, and obscures the really interesting questions that human/non-human chimeras raise.

For instance, it says that “at Stanford University in California an experiment might be done later this year to create mice with human brains.” Now, I don’t know what, exactly, they are planning to do at Stanford, though I can guess. But it’s really unlikely that they are going to try to make mice with human brains. Why? Well, for starters, think of the size problems. You have a little mouse body a few inches long, weighing maybe an ounce, and then attached to it a mouse head big enough to house an entire human brain, weighing a couple of pounds. Leaving aside such questions as, how would it walk? How huge would its neck muscles have to be? and so forth, just ask yourself how, exactly, a human brain is supposed to fit inside a mouse cranium, even assuming that crania have some capacity to expand early in development.

You might at this point be thinking: silly hilzoy! Obviously, what the article means is that they will create a mouse with a mouse-sized human brain, just as, if someone said they were going to build a Matchbox car with a working automobile engine, they would mean a Matchbox-sized engine, not a regular one. But how would this work? A mouse-sized brain made of human neurons would not be (what we normally think of as) a human brain, any more than something small enough to fit into a Matchbox car chassis, but made of (a small number of) normal-sized engine parts, would count as a normal working engine. The obvious solution would be to make the engine, or the brain, out of tiny replica parts. But we don’t have tiny little replicas of human neurons. Nor is there any reason to think that it’s even possible to create a tiny version of the human neuron that works the way a human neuron works, so that if we arranged those tiny neurons the way normal neurons are arranged in the human brain, they would work (a) at all, or (b) the way a human brain does. So the idea of a mouse with a human brain, in anything like the normal sense of that phrase, is just a non-starter.

Likewise, the article raises this (im)possibility (quoting a bioethicist who should know better):

“an experiment that would raise concerns, he said, is genetically engineering mice to produce human sperm and eggs, then doing in vitro fertilization to produce a child whose parents are a pair of mice.”

Just try to imagine how the logistics of this might work. The two mice mate, and conceive a child. It begins to develop. Then what? Presumably, one of two things happen: the fetus dies, or the female mouse bursts. What could not possibly happen is that a female mouse could actually, literally, carry a human infant to term and then give birth to it. (Through a mouse pelvis? After spending the better part of the entire mouse lifespan pregnant with a child that would, at birth, weigh on the order of a hundred times as much as she does? Please.)

As I said, though, all this just serves to obscure some interesting questions, to which I will now turn. (Warning: it’s going to be one of my wonky posts. But it will be interesting to me to see whether anyone makes it through, and if so whether they think I’m right.)

Read more

At last, we seem to be on the trail of an effective vaccine for malaria. During a clinical trial in Mozambique, the vaccine lowered rates of malaria infection in children by 30%, and lowered rates of severe malaria episodes by 58%. Moreover, the vaccine seems to be safe. It still has to go through further testing, and will probably not be licensed until around 2010. However, the implications of this are, potentially, huge.

Read more

From CNN, a taste of things to come:

A Chinese court has ordered an online video game company to return hard-won virtual property, including a make-believe stockpile of bio-chemical weapons, to a player whose game account was looted by a hacker.

We’ve (probably) all heard of various virtual castles, equipment, and whatnot that have been auctioned for real dollars on E-bay. This, however, is the first time that I’ve heard of a Court awarding recompense for stolen virtual property. The line between the real and the virtual is getting cloudier. So is the line between the real and the imaginary.

Blogs are part of it. I’m convinced that I know Tacitus, Andrew Sullivan, David Neiwert, Kevin Drum, The Commissar, Charles Johnson, Glenn Reynolds, Paul Cella, Josh Marshall, the folks at Talk Left, the conspirators at Volokh, Misha and his imperial lackies, Jeanne D’Arc, Mr. DuToit, Lt. Smash, Kos, Matt Yglesias, Fafnir (and cohorts The Medium Lobster and Giblets), Ubaid, et al. I have opinions about them. I think that some of them are sharp, witty, and incisive. And I think that some are stupid, dull, and dangerous — and wonder how a few can sleep at night. (You may be surprised who I put into which category.)

At base, though, I’m reacting to a virtual persona that’s being put forth. People are different — more accommodating and friendlier, usually — in person. Words can’t convey the whole. They convey only a part, and only a chosen part at that, and only that chosen part poorly.

But we already know all that, right? Postmodernism, the confluence among technology, life, and the law — it’s all soooo Kool & the Gang (I hear you saying).

A Chinese Court case awarding virtual WMDs to an online gamer, however, is something new. What, I just don’t know. But, in the quiet of my office right now — with the door closed — I remember the conclusion of Salman Rushdie’s short story, “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers.” All manner of real and imaginary persons, creatures, and things are bidding on the very Ruby Slippers of yore in a Byzantian double-blind auction. Huge sums of money are being exchanged, but no one is sure if the slippers are real, or if they’ll perform as advertised.

Everyone, however, knows the slippers’ promise: They’ll take you home.

von

Read more