CharonY

No, Craig Venter claimed it twice and in both cases they essentially just created a pruned down a bacterial chromosome (using two different methods) and inserted it into a bacterium that got its chromosome removed. Moreover, the reduced reduced genome originated from the very same organism. Claiming that a synthetic cell is a huge stretch.

That is quite interesting, I had a student in my lab that sounded quite similarly. It was less in exam situations, but during working through protocol where the student would follow things very closely, except that it was not the correct protocol halfway through. It helped to write the protocols down, by hand, each time before an experiment was done (and inspected by me). But I really did not understand the issue. Interesting indeed.

While interesting the big issue is the integration of parts into a sustainable entity (i.e. cell). We have been quite successful in manipulating or recreating bits and pieces, embedding proteins in vesicles and so on. So far we still have to put the stuff into an actual living cell so that things work (unless we talk about a simple membrane system, for example).

I am not sure how pharmaceuticals could push for that. More likely is that they invest little into curing, unless there is a profit to be had. Health insurers on the other hand would love to have cures or support healthy life styles (though depending on system they offer various degrees to achieve this). I am not terribly sure how one could regulate that other than investing in research.

Your are quite ignoring relevant info given e.g. by iNow and Arete. The first paragraph could be true. However, the reverse is also true. If you take someone who scored well in IQ tests but do not provide sufficient support he/she inevitably will underperform. If anything that I have seen in college (and I think most of my colleagues will agree) is that academic achievement most strongly correlates with the willingness to learn, the ability to learn in an organized fashion and a strong personal interest in the subject matter. Oftentimes children that are labelled as "gifted" who are able to skip classes and get earlier college admission, eventually lose ground to their peers. Personal experience as well as studies showed that the advantage these kids have tend to diminish the more advanced they are in the academic curriculum. At PhD level there is rarely a notable difference (in some cases they underperform for a variety of reasons). Reducing everything to genes and neglecting the relevance and interaction with environmental parameters for intelligence is akin to claiming that obesity is solely the effect of genetics and has nothing to do with the quality and quantity of food intake.

I have been reviewing quite a bit and I think I would agree with most points. Some comments though: Timeliness is an issue but it is very tricky to resolve. One has the editorial process to consider (including finding reviewers in the first place and then reading the reviews and rendering a verdict) but as a reviewer the problem is often to find the time to do it properly. Ideally, you want to have a few hours to read the whole thing, read up on recent lit in case you (or the authors have missed something) etc. Practically, reviewers (and often also editors) are providing free service, but are busy themselves (between class, lab organizing, doing research, trying to get funding, mentoring students/postdocs, department work etc.). Finding the hours to do a proper review can be challenging at times. Especially in multidisciplinary areas or areas that are in a more applied direction but without a strong theoretical framework reviews are tricky. In biomedical sciences for example (which tend to be high risk high reward type of research) often precise mechanisms are not known or extrapolated in order to find associations of diagnostic value or to define new treatments (to give some random examples). Even if statistically sound it is not trivial to assess whether the study will ultimately be validated. And ideal panel that would able to assess every aspect of a study (analytic methods, cell types, statistical methods, expert on specific pathways etc.) would be very unwieldy and would need additional experts that have specialized in multidisciplinary studies to be able to pull together all the individual aspects into a bigger body. Obviously that amount of effort would not be sustainable and could delay further research significantly. In some cases it is easier to throw out all the good and bad stuff and let the community figure out what is which. Admittedly, with the ever increasing amount of publications it is getting harder and harder. Replicate findings: This is basically impossible in most of the bio field, but not necessarily due to lack of info. Conducting the experiments tend to be in the order of months, more for more complex studies (e.g. establishing a cell line alone can take up to half a year). In addition, no one would pay for the work in the first place (molecular biology is notoriously expensive). In the end, the validity of a study in these areas have to be assessed over time, and demonstrated by subsequent work and citations. Professional reviewers: Sounds like an interesting proposal on the surface, However, without doing active research it will be hard to do but the most superficial research. Of course, things like statistical validity can be relatively easily assessed (although without knowing the analytical approach they may have a hard time figuring out e.g. if the data sets are dependent or not, for example). But if you are not an expert in the area, you will miss the fact that e.g. the method only has a certain dynamic range and hence the presented data looks just too neat. Or that a particular cell line has the propensity to behave a certain way under the given experimental condition etc. These kinds of things are widely known within the given communities, but a professional reviewer who is not up date with current lab practices and techniques will have a hard time to do proper review. And in my assessment, the longer they are away from active research, the harder it gets. It will depend on the are of course, and the stronger the theoretical background is, the easier I presume it is. On the flip side, the more experimental/empirical the area is,the more it will rely on experience.

Yeah, I threatened the first student to say "duon" to indeterminate length of glass ware cleaning duty.

I would ask the doctor. Also to reinforce, Klebsiella including pneumoniae (which is a different Klebsiella species) and oxytoca are part of the normal human flora. Most people have it. Only under certain conditions do they cause problems (being opportunistic pathogens). Also, as jorge implied, having cold symptoms does not indicate a weakened immune system (often the opposite, in fact). Again, to know the right course for you personally you should consult medical specialists.

You should set the time of your camera

I do not use neuronal cells, but from what I have seen that it would be tricky indeed to get a somewhat stable transfection that would yield that result (as the transfections often do not result in well-controlled quantitative changes). That being said, I presume that it may be easier trying to knock down ion channels (such as Na/H exchanger) rather than trying metabolic control (which is arguably more feasible in certain immortalized cell lines, for example). But considering that your proposed experiment is even more complex as it appears you need only to manipulate one cell at the synaptic junction I am not sure whether that is feasible either.

To generate great movie plots. Such as "The squishing of disgusting bipeds". And of course "The Squishing II- there are more of them underground"

As a side note with regards to criticism, from the viewpoint of the one issuing them there are almost always perceived as justified and maybe even constructive (why else would they offer it?). On the receiving end almost always the opposite is true (oneself cannot be wrong, can one?). Often this devolves into an argument of how and whether criticism is justified rather than the subject at hand. This is obviously rather unproductive and if I got a dime for each time I have to steer lab discussions away from that ("it was not my fault, i did everything right!" I do not care I just need it done regardless whose fault it is) I would not need any external grants anymore. On the other hand (to give a connected example), in grant or paper reviews sometimes referees criticize a missing point that is clearly present in the manuscript. I could throw a hissy fit and attack the referees (which some do) or i just thank them for their insight and repeat the point a couple of times in the manuscript. While the criticism is objectively unjustified (it is clearly present) it did not appear so to the person that missed it. You cannot easily change another person's perception, but you can try to see it from their perspective and provide different contexts and solutions (which is an important skill to acquire).

I kind of doubt it. There is a dearth of statistics of child abuse data that allow the elucidation of religious influence.I will not derail this thread further but the result is almost inevitably based on anecdotal evidence (such as the sale number of a single book). Point is that child abuse is a complex matter and the way it is posited (and posted) makes it pretty clear that OP tried to push a specific narrative. As Phi mentioned, putting it into one of the more scientific threads would have made a much better place as discussion starter and also would have called for better statistical evaluation. Absolutely, I would also add that the way one treats criticism is usually much more telling than the criticism itself.

As a more general note (not exclusively to you but to everyone starting in bio or other sciences) it always helps to establish context when conversing with other people. For example if talking about cell cultures it would help to establish what types of cells you are talking about (bacteria, eukaryote? yeast, plant mammalian?). That being said intracellular pH is usually relatively tightly controlled as even relatively minor shifts affect protein activity. There are specialized cells that are able to cope better with extracellular pH shifts, but in many cases this is due to superior control of intracellular pH. That being said, depending on cells there are certain ways by either disrupting homeostasis pathways and/or overexpressig certain pathways that result in overproduction of acetic or basic metabolites. Often this can result in more or less extensive cell damage, however. Again, it will depend highly on the system as certain changes will be counteracted by the cell, if they can. But if inducible cell lines have been established successfully one could seed a mixed culture, of course.

I was giving you the benefit of doubt. Thanks for the clarification, though. Funny thing is that I followed the study somewhat (Seralini paper). You should know that retractions are not based on public pressure but generally from the research community (or authors themselves). While it is true that Monsanto lobbied against the paper, a move that I personally find despicable, actual scientists did the crucial evaluation. What you define as handwaving was a serious discussion on the methodology. I can easily point out one of many issues which is the famous use of 200 rats. If all of them had been used as a single population that would have been interesting, but instead the comparisons were done in smaller subsets, i.e. groups of ten each. For long-term analyses the short lifespan of rats have to be taken into account, especially with studies that involve carcinogenic actions (which are not part of the design but became part of the conclusion). For example, they only had one control group of ten males and ten females, of which 30 and 20% (i.e. 2 and 3) died spontaneously. So from the get-go this is a study with a tiny population size comparison (far from the large well-done study that you may have in mind). This is just one of several issues (other notable ones are lack of food intake data, for example). Note that obviously absence of an effect alone does not confirm with absolute certitude the safety of a product. At the same time it does not raise alarm if not indicated by further studies. Also as opposed to what you may thing, orthogonal lines of evidence tend to be better suited in finding and confirming rare effects. If blowing up the sample size and keeping everything the same, the effects tend to diminish rather than getting emphasized (I am getting bored at repeating myself at this point). And, as Ringer demonstrated, there are many more studies and ignoring them to conform to ones own bias is non-scientific and entirely counter-productive. At this point we move from the realm of science to that of ideology and I can safely say that this is the wrong place for it. Also I could point out further studies with Bt ingestion (due to biocontrol rather than GMO, but if it is in the body it is in the body), but hey, since there is no research being done on them I must be imagining papers.

I think you underestimate the ability of people to underestimate complexity of biological processes.

You are misunderstanding something here. The small-scale studies are those that find risks. Upscaled ones or longer running tests tend not to find it anymore. Obviously there are no large-scale human population studies as, well these GMOs are not in widespread use for human consumption. Both, small and large scale studies are being conducted on bacteria, rats (as mammalian model) and arthropods. The worrisome effects that were found associated with GMOs were mostly found in rat studies, but, to repeat myself, these effects were not reproducible in larger scale and subsequent studies. Note that statistically, effects are overestimated in small-scale studies rather than in large-scale ones. Just to provide some recent lit: Effects of Bt cotton on non-target pests (Sujii et al. Neotrop Entomol. 2013 Feb;42(1):102-11; Li et al. Insect Sci. 2013 May 27) Effects of Bt rice on mice: Wang et al Food Chem Toxicol. 2013 Dec;62:390-6. Schroder et al Food Chem Toxicol. 2007 Mar;45(3):339-49 Effects of Bt crop on bacterial communities Singh et al. Microb Ecol. 2013 Nov;66(4):927-39 Are these studies sufficient to assess safety? Well, this is the big question, and as usual, more research is always beneficial. But in context one should note that many chemicals that we freely release into the environment and that enter our food chain are much less regulated. Realistically I would be much more worried about persistent chemicals such as halogenated compounds (that are already found accumulated in food and wildlife) for example. The latter is a real current issue that tends to get ignored. For some reasons people find that less scary.

This is an interesting statement, considering that there are quite a few researchers out there that try to do proper risk evaluation. What the current literature shows is that Bt exposure by spraying are generally minimal, the major worry being allergenic responses (see e.g. Berstein et al env health persp 1999). Since then studies have been ongoing looking into health as well as environmental aspects. As I mentioned, effects that have been found were often subject to methodological errors or were not reproducible. As a result, a few papers (most recently by Seralini et al. on herbicide resistant GMO crop) were retracted. Not only are those studies no ignored, but in contrast, they are under high exposure (and related scrutiny). In contrast to that, based on what I have read, the potential allergenic responses to spray exposure were fairly convincing and reproducible (including a few human studies, which is quite remarkable) whereas the same was not found in GMOs. Though to be fair, there are still more studies underway and a few initial results could reveal something interesting should they be validated this time. In any case I fail to see how one can claim that there are no studies available.

And not available in the Americas.

With regards to Bt toxins, they appear to be less harmful when being expressed in tissue rather than simply being sprayed (which can also be done). The latter of course provides more sources of exposure. The general consensus in the literature appears to be that based on existing studies the effects are overall less harmful than the often unrestrained spraying with pesticides. Most studies that have shown effects e.g. on mice in limited studies tend not to replicate their findings in larger or meta-analyses.

Plasmids undergo mutations just like everything else. The rate and frequencies can vary somewhat from the chromosomal DNA because a) of different base composition and b) different replication apparatus. However, if anything plasmids tend to evolve faster as they usually do not carry essential functions (i.e. there is less selection to conserve sequences).

Horizontal gene transfer is probably the biggest contributor to spread of resistance genes. There is also evidence that sub-lethal antibiotics stress can lead to higher mutation rates that can result in the the rise of resistance. It should be noted that resistance mechanisms do not necessarily require new genetic material but a simple point mutations e.g. in the ribosomes can prevent antibiotic action (depending on the mechanisms, of course). But other than that as already pointed out it is mostly a selection of existing resistant strains.

Well, this is two years old and not really funny either, but still...

We all have certain heavy metals, some of which, as e.g. copper and iron are absolutely essential for our survival. Pretty much everyone will have some level of other heavy metal contamination. But as usual, as long as the concentration does not reach harmful levels we will never notice.

With regards to shared lab equipment, it should be fairly easy to coordinate use (i.e. after x o'clock please take sample out and put into fridge). Communication if important for an efficient lab.