zyncod

Don't you think it might be stochastic, to an extent? Or at least stochastic to the extent that we won't be able to influence it? Everybody (read: every psychologist in the world) that thinks that it's all nurture seems to feel that there is something that we can do about it - like playing Bach to unborn babies. But I tend to think that the variation in intelligence among normal humans is not that great, and may simply reflect the minor, chance-driven details of neuronal growth patterns during development.

It's possible. The 3-D structure of organs is the major stumbling block to growing organs. They'll still need to provide the intercellular signals in three dimensions, but this is a good way of starting. I work in an orthopedic hospital, and they were looking at buying this machine that can make replacement hips by "printing them out." Essentially, the machine shines an electron beam at a layer of powdered metal, melting that layer into shape. It moves the platform up slightly, and "prints" out another layer. So you can make very complicated three-dimensional structures from, say, a CAD worksheet, without having to resort to casting the individual pieces (therefore, less breakage under heavy use and less places for biofilms to get a foothold).

You are still speaking statistically. People that have murdered in the past put others "at risk." People that drive drunk put others "at risk." As I have already proven, DUI drivers put many more people's lives in jeopardy than do locked up murderers. And there is no system that can stop DUI drivers, really, from driving cars other than locking them up. So, I think that, by your reasoning, a first DUI should really get you at least 5 years in jail and probably the rest of your life. That is, if it's acceptable to kill somebody due solely to the "risk" they pose to others.

This is an incredibly specious argument. You said not two sentences before : Only two of these people killed while still in prison. Therefore, the problem here is releasing people from prison, not inability to execute them. Many of these people on the list that you gave wouldn't have been subject to the death penalty anyway, as they committed manslaughter, not murder.

No. There's no way to prove that anything that supposedly happened in the past actually did happen. In any case, that's not how our legal system works. The principle here is "proof beyond a reasonable doubt." But plenty of things happen every day that are not at all reasonable or as obvious as they seem. Which is fine for most people wrongly convicted of a crime - you can set them free and they can sue you for the time that you locked them up unfairly. However, if you kill them, it's kind of a pointless apology in that case. So you're going to start killing people on the statistical likelihood that someone else will die as a result of their actions? Well, let's look at it this way: 4 murders happened out of every 100,000 inmates in 2002. I can't find it anywhere, but almost certainly this is overestimating the rate at which people on death row kill again, given the more stringent security. 1.5 million people were arrested for DUI in 1997. In 1998, 16,000 people died as a result of alcohol-related traffic fatalities. This is a rate of 1066 deaths per 100,000 arrested DUI drivers. Let's say that half of these were manslaughters, so a rate of 533 manslaughters per 100,000 arrested DUI drivers. To match the rate at which prisoners kill in prison, 200 million people would have to be driving drunk each year to cause this death rate (which is definitely higher than the actual drunk driving rate). So, statistically, DUI drivers are much more of a threat than locked-up murderers. Therefore, we should be locking up DUI drivers for the rest of their natural lives. Does that sound reasonable?

Ok, I didn't know that. I thought that they had shot him in an empty jetway - I guess this makes it a little better. But I will agree that the implications of both these scenarios are a little frightening. It's like cops going on high speed chases on highways that threaten many, many innocent motorists' lives in order to catch people that usually have only stolen a car or have drugs in their trunk. And then the worst part is that they broadcast these chases as entertainment on television. I don't really see a better solution to either of these types of situations (shooting "bombers" or chasing car thieves) - I just wish that it didn't have to be this way.

I tend to agree with the police actions in the Menezes case where he had been seen on police videotape near a terrorist-related hideout, he was running, and wouldn't stop. If he had gotten away, he might have been able to accomplish what he was trying to do (although he wound up not actually having a bomb). In this case, I think that they way overreacted. 1. Who announces that they have a bomb when the plane is still on the ground? He had already passed through security with that bag, and thus probably didn't have a bomb anyway. 2. He was running AWAY from the plane - who was he going to hurt in the jetway? All the marshals needed to do was get security to intercept him or catch him themselves. Basically, the only way that this should be considered OK is if you think that it's ok to shoot somebody dead who's running down the street saying "I have a bomb" - a case in which the person might actually *have* a bomb, seeing as how he didn't have to pass through security to get on the street.

They also "editorialize" against people like Thabo Mbeki when he says unscientific things like: "This HIV drug (which is the same thing as dry cleaning fluid) that South Africans invented should be used, and Western remedies should not, since it is a South African problem. Also, I'm not setting up a program to give antiretrovirals to pregnant women even though this has been proven to reduce the chances of transmission to their babies by 50%." <<Not a real quote>> It's a scientific magazine, and they realize that science does not operate outside the human sphere, including the political world. And when people (Bush) say unscientific things like "Intelligent design deserves equal time" or "Fishery salmon is a source of biodiversity; therefore, we don't need the Endangered Species Act to preserve wild salmon," SciAm calls them on it.

If you had a perfect protein folding predictor, you could model a prokaryote pretty accurately. Basically all you need from there are the relative abundances of proteins, the lipid composition of the membrane, some microarray data, and the diffusion constant of the cytosol. The intercellular signaling in eukaryotes makes it much more difficult, but there's no reason to think that you couldn't model a eukaryotic cell in culture. If you know exactly what signals are going into a cell, and you know how, for example, all the spliceosome proteins and ribozymes are folded, there's no reason you can't predict alternative splicing or more complex intracellular phenomena.

On the occasions this month when I go down to the Village during working hours, I've seen the giant inflatable rat that signals a strike. The grad students at NYU are striking for unionization, and an (undergraduate) friend of mine at NYU has told me that the undergrads are being told "not to cross the picket line." I don't have any strong feelings about the unionization (on one hand, workers have the right to collectively bargain, on the other hand, the students are getting a free education). However, I don't think that undergrads trying to go to class really count as scabs. Crossing a picket line before you've patronized the employer is one thing; but the undergrads have already paid NYU for an education. I know that if auto shop workers were striking, and they called me a scab for picking up my car after the repairs had been done, I'd be pretty pissed off. My friend is certainly not happy about this; especially, she doesn't like having to walk all over town to get to the "alternative class locations" that professors have picked to show solidarity with the grad students. Who's right here, the grad student or my friend?

I think that the ultimate goal is to make names that sound good to donors but mean absolutely nothing. Like "genomic medicine".

My boss at my old lab up in Ithaca flew a charter jet a few times each month - and he was president of the research institute. You can do both.

That doesn't seem possible. Even forgetting people's impact on the environment, we have an entire continent without any trees on it. It seems like Pangaea, being concentrated around the equator in a warmer climate, would have many more trees than exist today. But the carbon sink of North American forests (which is actually much more important than rainforests) is thought to be approaching depletion.

Well, if we are going to logical extremes, why should you have any right to privacy at all? I'm not simply speaking in legal terms, because the Constitution and other laws set out the limits of your privacy fairly well. I'm asking why shouldn't the government have the right to monitor you 24/7 a la 1984? Theoretically, it only becomes a problem when you commit a crime. Otherwise, nobody should be looking at you. But if you had cameras in people's houses, you could catch many, many more criminals. The reason why it's ok to put a policeman on every corner and not a video camera is because the policeman's memory is limited. Even with a policeman on every corner, the government will not be able to track you specifically, because the policeman's memory is fallible and limited. With the policeman, you're only visible while you're committing a crime or acting suspiciously. With a camera, there is a lasting concrete record, and the day is not far off when computer software will be able to search through the records and pretty much track you as you're walking or driving around during the day. I don't have a problem with video cameras per se. I think that we should, however, set strict access limits on the part of law enforcement agencies. Just as with wiretapping, I feel that the police should be required to obtain a warrant to have access to the video record, unless it's an emergency.

Yeah, but they deserve to be hurt. If you're blatantly going to cheat on homework, you deserve it when you know nothing for the test. Besides, some of the homework questions spark interesting discussions (not that the original poster will be reading that part).

Of course I did not mean to be literal in my statements. Even a nuclear holocaust would not cause evolution to speed up to the extent that new characteristics that IDers would consider to be "evolved" would appear on the human time scale. And yes, the data from global warming is not fully apparent yet, but there is every indication that anthropogenic processes are facilitating at least a gradual warming of the planet. As far as the Arctic vs Antarctic ice, perhaps by Arctic you meant Greenland? Because melting of the Arctic sheet would have no significant effect on sea level and thus, climate. Even if it turns out that the CO2 loading is not responsible for the warming trend (which would be odd since we should be in a cooling trend right now, were humans absent from the planet), drastically increasing greenhouse gases cannot be helping the environment. And I fully agree that much of the research ignores nitrogenous compounds; as a non-ethical vegetarian, I believe that the impact of animal-based agriculture is being understated at present. Anyway, my point was simply that Republicans are obviously the ones that are least concerned about global warming, which might in the long term, prove some of their other ideas wrong (like ID). I was being tongue-in-cheek.

No, probably not. The greatest consideration in virion formation is getting all the components to the right place at the right time. Additionally, the virus has a vested reason not to reinfect the same cell. Just as trees try to spread their seeds to prevent a bunch of trees competing for the same resources, viruses have a reason to try to spread preferentially to other cells and not reinfect the same cell. I'm not sure which virus it was (virology was a long time ago for me), but I know that some viruses cause cells to internalize the proteins that they use as their receptors. As far as antigens go, anything can be an antigen. A very simple chemical (like a single uridine molecule) or a very complicated protein.

Republicans are pursuing policies that will drastically change the global climate in the next century. (Some of) the Republicans are also the only real proponents of intelligent design. What's interesting is that, according to punctuated equilibrium, we should start seeing greatly speeded-up evolution of species very shortly as development and global warming drastically change these species' habitats. Now that's irony!

Just a niggling point - the recognition elements for viruses are not called "antigens." Antigens are molecules that antibodies recognize, and viruses don't have antibodies. Also, viruses can use the recognition molecules to further their survival. The proteins that HIV binds to when it is entering a T cell cause the T cell to release signals that bring other T cells into the vicinity. Therefore, just by binding to the T cell, HIV can bring other hosts for it to infect.

Apoptosis is an important part of neuron remodeling as well. Your ability to learn things hinges strongly on the ability of parts of your brain to die (and other parts to grow). Apoptosis is also used to prevent infections and cancers. What happens is a complex cascade but essentially, the cell releases proteases and DNAses that chew up proteins and the cell's genome, the nuclear membrane fragments, and the cell turns into little blebs of membranes that can be eaten by phagocytic cells.

That is possible, but what you get won't be that different than a traditional plasmid library where you just ligate everything into E coli plasmids at once. And once you do that, you still come up against the problem of how you find the B-lactamase gene in that library. Unless you chance to insert the gene exactly correctly into the plasmid, you won't get B-lactamase expression. So you either need at least a small sequence of the B-lactamase gene or you need to purify the protein.

The probe for the gene requires that you know something about the B-lactamase sequence, which you don't, apparently. The other method is to use chromatography techniques to purify out the B-lactamase protein (you could use X-gal hydrolysis as a test for the presence of the protein). Once you have a relatively pure sample of the B-lactamase protein, there are a number of ways to get the amino acid sequence (mass spec is the most common now). With the amino acid sequence, you can make degenerate probes for the gene.

First of all, if you run a genomic digest on a gel, it will just be a smear - there won't be separate bands. The only two ways I can think of to do this without taking years of time are to probe for the gene or purify the B-lactamase protein and sequence the amino acids.

That's probably (read: definitely) not going to work. You would have to insert into the plasmid an entire B-lactamase gene, in frame, right next to the promoter. The chances of picking a restriction enzyme that would do that are almost infinitesimal. The traditional way of doing this is to first run a Southern using E coli B-lactamase as a probe (or B-lactamase from a bacterium similar to yours). If there's enough homology for the probe to bind, you then create a plasmid library in E coli with your bacterial genomic DNA and then do a screen of the library with the probe. If you have a large enough library, you'll pick up the entire B-lactamase gene in one or more of the colonies.

Smoking must be good - I'm 3/4 a pack a day and I haven't had the flu in more years than I can remember and only about one cold a year. It's probably actually more of an overall health thing. Flu viruses are more difficult to come in contact with given that they're seasonal and fewer people are affected at any given time. For colds, though, there are over 20 different viruses that can cause that and they're around all the time. You can have an overactive immune system without having an autoimmune disease, but most likely you're more healthy overall than most of the people you know. Pretty much anything that affects any part of your health will affect your immune system; if you don't get any sleep two nights running, you're probably going to get sick.