zyncod

Why exactly would any species benefit from 'intelligence' per se? Humans making that statement is the equivalent of dinosaurs making the statement that "Freakishly large size would benefit every species." I would posit that the very fact that humanity has words for "suicide" and "nuclear weapon" invalidates the argument that intelligence is in any way beneficial for the long-term survival of any species.

Actually, I'm luckily in the position of having a password to the medical college library of the university that stole so many thousands of dollars from me as an undergrad. If you really, really promise not to disseminate the password, I'll email it to you - and that should give you access to Current Protocols in Molecular Biology.

Ummm... Why is a congressman insulting people on a webforum? Way to go get those votes, sorcerorston. And I have never met anybody that actually believes in God. I have, however, met a whole lot of people that believe what everybody else believes in the little corner of America where they grew up. Then again, most religious people I know are Catholic and it is literally impossible to be Catholic and believe in God.

It's really not so much about sentience as it is architectural and developmental experiments and the chance of creating a human-monkey is really vanishingly small. And anybody that has a problem with experimenting on sentient beings should have a problem with experimenting on chimpanzees to begin with.

The best has to be "Current Protocols in" blah-blah (Cytometry, etc). Nobody I know actually has a complete set, but your institution should have it online.

Eighteen million different ways. The most fun way, though, has to be shooting gold particles coated with DNA at plants/animals. My only regret is that I never got to do it the *really* old-school way: with a shotgun.

Facetiousness will get you everywhere, my friend. I was actually addressing ps2huang's statement that "There is no usage of stem-cell popularily for humen in hospitals." But you are correct in the promise of stem cells for forming new tissue/organs. In the light of the media coverage, people seem to forget that multipotent stem cells exist in addition to pluripotent stem cells.

They use stem cells in hospitals all the time. Ever heard of a bone marrow transplant?

Well, actually DNA is antigenic in one sense. When the process of tolerance (killing autoreactive T and B cells) breaks down, like in lupus, the body can mount an immune response to DNA. But, like the other people said, the two- and three-dimensional structure of DNA is too similar to cause an antigenic response under normal circumstances.

SV40 - a cancer-causing virus - was proven to be transmitted in a polio vaccine. I don't think that HIV was - at least to the extent that doctors recognized the transmitted HIV/AIDS for what it was.

It's actually probable that the virus made the jump before then. But, given the relative isolation of populations in Africa prior to the twentieth century, HIV never managed to develop into a full-blown epidemic until this century. Despite the fatality of the virus, it still is rather hard to transmit.

I know. I just meant the genetic out of Africa hypothesis. It would be my feeling, based upon my slight knowledge, that during the dispersal, humans had a rudimentary language, if any language at all. Although the aborigines that boated over to Australia ~40000 years ago were thought to have to have had some sort of language in order to plan a trip like that.

Yes - I do not pretend to be a linguist of any sort but it is very difficult to get the 'phylogenies' of language on the timescale you're talking about. Even trying to get a picture of the proto-Indo-European language is difficult, and that postdates the out of Africa dispersal by thousands of years. If you're interested in this kind of stuff, Science had a great issue sometime last summer about all this. But only cranks are really disputing the out of Africa hypothesis at this point.

Actually, mitochondrial systematics has found that more than likely, there was a "single" mother that gave birth to the line leading to every human living on Earth today - "Mitochondrial Eve." "She" could actually have been two or three people but not a hundred people.

No, not like B-Glucan from yeast cell walls. Not at all. No, plants do not have a circulating immune system but they have the ability to sense and respond to pathogens. And their "innate" immune system is related to ours - both animals and some plants use Toll-like receptors to recognize pathogens (one such receptor recognizes lipopolysaccharide). TLRs are actually so old that they were first recognized in fruit flies. So, yes, the immune system does predate the animal/plant split.

They're both pretty good but to really boost your immune system, you'll want something like unicornberries or sumfundu. Really, why would the bark of a chinese tree do anything to your immune system? If (*being serious now) you really want to boost your immune system, inject yourself with lipopolysaccharide (a bacterial cell wall component). It'll make you feel like crap and greatly increase your chances of heart disease, but it will also set up an inflammatory response that will make your immune system more aware of invaders. So you'll be less likely to get infected. The immune system is so old (probably predates the plant/animal divergence) and so complex that the chances of doing anything that "boosts" the entire system without other negative consequences is next to nil. And randomly eating herbs is not helping your chances.

What about Vonnegut's ice-nine? That might work.

I've never heard of that. Usually, it's called 'homeostasis.'

Right - so none of this means anything. It's like taking 2 or 3 tabs of acid and grooving on the resonance of a benzene ring ("Everything's connected - and they all, like, share electrons, man..."). It's the way the universe works. Since you can't define consciousness, you can quite logically say that a rock has consciousness (common sense, however, tells you something else entirely). If you want to give inanimate objects/molecules/whatever consciousness, just do it. You don't need these complicated "proofs."

Um... what?

It's because of our research that the entomologists/plant people don't have any money. I can go through $300 in antibodies and $300 in mice in a *single* experiment. When I used to work with fruit flies and algae it would take me weeks to do that. Our lab is actually on the low end of the scale in the area where I work - I know techs at Rockefeller that go through hundreds of Affymetrix chips in a week. Now that is serious money.

On the chicken topic, there was one thing that PETA did a little while back that I found hilarious - where they picketed KFC saying "Stop avian flu - go vegetarian!" First of all, unless you're getting your chicken from your friendly neighborhood chicken dealer over in Vietnam or Indonesia, you're not really contributing to avian flu. The avian flu needs to infect mammals and reassort its genes in order to become infective for us - and that really only happens in very unsanitary conditions where avians and swine are kept together, which doesn't happen in this country. Second of all, even if everybody was a vegetarian, we would still need chickens for their eggs for the flu vaccine! Upwards of a billion eggs a year are used in producing the vaccine. Another one of PETA's things about anti-vivisectionism is that cell culture can be used instead of the "more cruel" animal research. However, all cell cultures rely on serum, which can only feasibly be obtained using the "byproducts" of large-scale cattle farming - meaning that the cell culture research that PETA vaunts actually requires large numbers of meat-eating people in order to work. And the way you obtain the serum is cardiac puncture of fetal calves - which means taking late-term unborn calves out of their mothers and puncturing their still-beating hearts with a large needle. This sounds fairly cruel to me. If you try to get this serum any other way (ie, slow bleeding of happy organic cows) - it will be too expensive for anybody to use it. The serum is already $1000 per liter and I go through a liter every two weeks in my lab. It's one thing to believe in something and work wholeheartedly toward that cause, the way the ASPCA does. It's another thing altogether to start protesting something without knowing anything about it, accomplishing only the goal of annoying or seriously inconveniencing vast numbers of people, the way PETA does.

Actually, when I worked at an (ahem) Boy Scout camp, we burned a whole lot of flags that were around 80 years old - took about eight hours to do. You're supposed to burn the flag even if it just touches the ground. I, for one, applaud this amendment. We've allowed these hippy Boy Scouts to go around willy-nilly desecrating our flag and it's time for it to stop. Actually, it's more the waste of time than the free speech issue that concerns me. Our legislators are only in Washington the minority of the time that they're not out raising more money for their campaigns. And we're in the middle of a war. Two wars actually. This is what we pay them for? And, yes, if it passes the senate, it will pass all the state legislatures. Most, if not nearly all, of the legislatures have passed resolutions asking Congress to pass this amendment so that they can vote it right into law.

People gave up on the "What is life?" question about 50 years ago. Nobody would really call a prion (causative agent for mad cow disease) 'alive,' but viruses are considered by many people to be alive. There's no really distinctive line that you can draw between prions/viruses or even between crystals/life. The next question in line for people to stop asking is "What is consciousness?"

Don't do much pure chemical stuff, but.. I used to like ethanol in junior high, before I started drinking. In college, not so much. Now, meh. Even though it can't be possible, I swear I can tell the difference between ethanol from the molecular lab I used to work at and the immunology lab I work at now. Does anyone know if ACS/USP grade ethanol (the stuff from the molecular lab, which should be more pure) has those additives that keep 12 year-olds from drinking it. Still like isopropanol and ether, don't like formaldehyde and phenol. Loved banana oil - organic chem practical - even though everybody else hated it. Since I work in bio, it's kind of disturbing the things that strike your fancy. I was doing a big 2 liter E coli culture for competent cells while I was hungry one day. I thought "That smells exactly like chicken noodle soup! Mmmmm" - meanwhile, it was a big flask of bacteria. Mice (not their droppings) and algae smell good. Fruit flies don't.