zyncod

It's a very good tracer for cell lineage. We use GFP+ mice - it's very weird. All their organs have a greenish tint, and they of course glow under UV light.

Then it's probably too late to wonder if you left the gas on at home or not. What if monkeys could fly?

This is typical. Like the "ticking time bomb" situation in torture, it is completely unrealistic and an untenable argument. If Bin Laden was in a house in Pakistan, Pakistani police would be falling over themselves to get to him, and to allow US agents in. You'll find that in most situations where there is significant collateral damage, the target was not that important in the first place. Nearly all important targets have more value alive than dead.

Maybe we can still be realistic and disagree on the level of force that should be used. What it really comes down to is that some people believe that the lives of Westerners are worth more than that of people who live in third-world countries. The reason that bombs are used rather than ground troops is that soldiers' lives are apparently valuable. Fine. But we better make damn sure that killing these people is worth the collateral cost. Is it? Is it really? I take offense at the implication that I am a 'silly liberal' who doesn't understand the threat these people pose. But do you remember the hue and outcry over Waco? Apparently, such force is almost never acceptable in ours and other industrialized countries. And it's all too acceptable in third-world countries. I don't doubt that they didn't mean to kill those children, but this type of thing happens far too often, and there is never going to be any accountability on the part of the people responsible.

So not only do the women of Pakistan get subjugated and stoned as a direct result of their government's policies, it's also ok for the US to collaterally kill them as a result of same's policies. What a wonderful force for good are we. We're allied to their (horrible) government in the "War on Terror," and we also apparently think very little of causing innocent deaths, as long as it happens in Asia. We wouldn't do the same were the seventeen-millionth Al Qaida "number two" hiding out in London.

Well, yes, that was the subtly ironic point. Ok. Sorry. I just assumed (oops) that your use of the term fetus rather than embryo meant that you thought that termination was acceptable through birth. I know, I know, "fetus" applies after the first 2 months, but the popular conception of fetus is much later. And I don't think that causing suffering is so much the point as extinguishing nascent consciousness. Otherwise, why not just kill everybody at birth with a quick, painless injection?

Oh, bullshit. I know that you're going to hate this, IMM, but my boss made a mistake once with a cage of mice for an experiment. A female was put in with a cage of males, and lo and behold, she got pregnant (very pregnant). The endpoint of the experiment was euthanization by CO2, but neonates are very resistant to oxygen deprivation. So I had to kill 10 fetuses by cardiac puncture, which made that a bad day. Anyway, the point is, these 'fetuses' really, really, did not want to die. The fact is, at a certain point in development in the womb, people become people and mice become mice. It really does not happen at birth, and partial birth abortion proponents really hurt the case of all us thinking people.

1. I am an avowed liberal. Pretty much a communist. And somebody whose life's work is in biology. 2. No human life should be taken past the third trimester. Ever. Even in rape situations. What makes us human is our unique minds, not the unique combination of DNA that results from fertilization. When people become capable of thinking, they become human. 3. Before then, and, especially in the first trimester, it's ok. To be honest, after many hours spent observing mammalian stem cells, there is obviously no evidence of sentience. And that's why Alito sucks. This issue is fundamental to so many Americans - on both sides of the coin. And, like his nominator, Alito simply does not have the courage to come out and say what he believes to be really true.

Sounds like mol bio. "Protocols in:" whatever whatever is good for actually learning about how the expts work. Gene Cloning by Brown is probably decent for whatever you need to know.

Making anthrax for al Qaida? But seriously, folks, no. No there isn't.

Wow. An opinion issued by an aide to John Ashcroft - and we all know how passionate he is about protecting Americans' civil liberties. Nobody is saying that the government shouldn't listen to terrorists' conversations. I think the resentment comes from not getting a warrant, which is borne out by the following poll: AP-Ipsos Poll You should read the Times magazine this week to see who the dangerous terrorist is that's going on trial first. A chauffeur for Bin Laden. If Bush is going to push the limits of the legal envelope, he better be damn sure that he's doing it for a good reason. And so far, it really doesn't look like he is, which is what concerns me. The preponderance of the evidence suggests that he cares less about terrorism than about increasing the power of his office.

It's usually done in the context of neighboring cell types (eg, via integrin stimulation of signal transduction pathways) or by hormones/cytokines. I differentiate mouse stem cells into dendritic cells using a cytokine called GM-CSF (granulocyte-macrophage colony stimulating factor).

I suppose you could patch clamp something like a mitochondrion to inject electrons. I don't know much about fullerene muscles, but with the traditional myosin system you could control contraction by electrically-mediated release of calcium. It just seems like it would be surpassingly difficult to do, for not that much benefit over just a mechanical suit.

What would you do with the ATP once you got it? (I'm reserving my other objections until I hear what you have in mind)

We'd still be fighting ID vs evolution, but 100,000 Iraqis would be alive. What if it wasn't so friggin cold outside? oops - I posted after you, Silk, but I'm gonna go with Richard Pryor resurrecting the Iraqis by saying "Get up, m*ther****er!"

Well, they said it was going to happen when the anti-sodomy laws were repealed....

Oh, it's pretty much an acknowledged double standard. See, the deal we made was that we would basically try to keep all black people in poverty, jail, or death row. In return, black people would get to call white people 'honkies.' But not the reverse. It might be difficult for us white people to keep our mouths shut sometimes, but, hey, that's the way the cookie crumbles.

Odd that you would pick white blood cells, since these cells are the only ones in the body to undergo targeted recombination. The DNA in white blood cells (well, the lymphocytes anyway) is unlike that of any other cell in the body due to genomic shuffling involved in antibody production. If you had picked muscle cells, or pancreatic islet cells, or basically any other cell type in the body, you might have had a point. But if you cloned someone from a lymphocyte, you would have somebody with a severe immune deficiency.

You tend to list them, I guess, by how important they are to you. In terms of my cousins, I list the oldest first, since I've known them the longest. My aunts and uncles I list by who I'm related to. As far as Mom and Dad, for most people their mother is more important than their father.

Skated the eight miles to work and back home. My back is killing me after 3 days of doing that - but it was actually faster than taking the train. But the strike was entirely pointless - I mean, they're going back to the table with the same 6% they were talking about before. All the strike accomplished was to inconvenience millions of people.

I never thought that I would actually be happy about that.

I, in turn, suspect that a large number of people think that consciousness is anything but an accident of evolution.

Except that AIDS patients tend to die of cancers that other patients don't get. Like Kaposi's sarcoma, and other usually virally-mediated cancers. AZT is not really used any more, and the drugs of today are far less dangerous. Given the complex etiology of immune disorders, the HIV-AIDS concordance was a cause for concern in the early 90s. Now, with the "experimental" situation we have in Africa, no real scientists continue to doubt this. And it's actually kind of callous and insulting to these millions of people that people like Duesberg continue to put this stuff out there, considering that they obviously are not up to date on the literature. It gives people like Thabo Mbeki a reason not to give pregnant women antiretrovirals, and therefore many more babies are born with AIDS than need be. It would be fine if Duesberg was questioning this within the scientific community and wasn't a publicity hound. But politicians will use any connection with the scientific community to legitimize their preconceived notions. Like using Michael Crichton as an "expert" on global warming.

They're mistaken and unwilling to let go of a pet hypothesis. Duesberg is not even a virologist. There was a time in the early 90s when the concordance of HIV with AIDS was questionable, and there was a chance that the drugs of that time (AZT, etc) were seriously hurting people. As our understanding of the virus has evolved, almost no educated person still questions the HIV-AIDS link. With the cocktail drugs of today, AIDS is more of a chronic disease than a death knell.

No you wouldn't. There's a sane level of fuel usage among NASCAR and motocross racing and all those other things (that, by the way, most environmentalists would see to be among the more knuckle-dragging of hobbies), because those things happen rarely. Chastising SUV usage, when millions of SUVs are being driven hundreds or thousands of miles each week, is not a sane amount of fuel usage given that there are much more fuel-efficient cars. It's like this: you can play music in your house alone at an acceptable volume (minimal noise pollution). If hundreds of people come over and you crank the stereo up and start smashing windows (maximal noise pollution), somebody's going to call the cops. There's a difference between you alone maybe polluting somebody's environment a little bit, and hundreds or millions of people gratuitously polluting the environment. Individual SUV drivers are not the problem; it's the herd mentality that got them to buy the stupid things in the first place.