Category Archives: Science And Society

Science And Society, Space, Technology and Society

Faster, Please

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Researchers at Scripps have converted skin cells directly to heart muscle:

“This work represents a new paradigm in stem cell reprogramming,” said Scripps Research Associate Professor Sheng Ding, Ph.D., who led the study. “We hope it helps overcome major safety and other technical hurdles currently associated with some types of stem cell therapies.”

I found this an interesting (and flawed) analogy, though:

“In 11 days, we went from skin cells to beating heart cells in a dish,” said Ding. “It was phenomenal to see.”

Ding points out the protocol is fundamentally different from what has been done by other scientists in the past and notes that giving the cells a different kind of signal could turn them into brain cells or pancreatic cells.

“It is like launching a rocket,” he said. “Until now, people thought you needed to first land the rocket on the moon and then from there you could go to other planets. But here we show that just after the launch you can redirect the rocket to another planet without having to first go to the moon. This is a totally new paradigm.”

Actually, I don’t know anyone who thought that except for people who were promulgating a straw-man argument against the Vision for Space Exploration. For instance, some claimed that Bush’s plan was foolish because it proposed “building a Kennedy Space Center on the moon.” But the plan was never to land on the moon, and then depart from there for other planets. It was to utilize the resources of the moon to provide propellants and other consumables to interplanetary ships already in orbit, and save the expense of launching them all from earth. It may well be that this is equally economically impractical in the near term, but it’s not what the critics (and the Scripps researcher) seem to think it is.

By the way, the article says that these researchers are scientists, but I think they’re engineers. Or perhaps some blend of both.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

The Wrong Solution

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We might be able to save the planet via artificial meat, but for some reason…

In a typical Malthusian-panic green response, one group recommends going vegan to save the planet. But Dr. Mironov has another approach: grow the stuff in labs without all the methane. I have no idea whether this will work at all or whether the meat produced that way will taste more like Kobe beef than like the anonymous gray ‘mystery meat’ they used to feed us when I was a promising young sprout back in pundit school. But if Dr. Mironov is even partly right, the dynamics of the world’s food supply, energy use and atmospheric composition are very, very different from what the greens say.

You would think that smart greens genuinely interested in saving the planet would be all over Dr. Mironov’s work like white on rice. You would think that the vast and well organized enviro-agricultural lobbies like the ones that brought us ethanol and the enviro-industrial lobbies like the ones bringing us bad electric cars and expensively subsidized alternative energy sources would be pumping billions or at least hundreds of millions into a relatively simple scientific concept that, if successful, would make the world cleaner while dramatically raising the living standards of much of the world’s population by making a high protein diet more accessible and sustainable.

It’s almost as though they had a different agenda than the one they claim.

Philosophy, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary

Libertarian Morality

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Some interesting new research. I found this particularly salient:

Libertarians scored lower than both liberals and (especially) conservatives on sensitivity to disgust. The authors suggest this tendency “could help explain why they disagree with conservatives on so many social issues, particularly those related to sexuality. Libertarians may not experience the flash of revulsion that drives moral condemnation in many cases of victimless offenses.”

I’m not sure what they mean by “sensitivity to disgust.” If they mean that we don’t get disgusted, it doesn’t apply to me. But if they mean that, unlike some people, we don’t use it as the basis for morality, and especially for lawmaking, I think that’s right. I am quite repulsed by male homosex, but that doesn’t mean that I think that makes it immoral or subject to criminal sanctions, because I recognize that my reaction is a natural one for a heterosexual, and that many people are disgusted by different things. The fact that some are disgusted by the thought of eating bugs doesn’t make it immoral, and shouldn’t be, even to them.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Real Health Care

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Some thoughts from Jim Pinkerton:

…every billionaire eventually discovers that vast wealth is little better than health insurance when it comes to securing good health. Wealth and health insurance are both forms of finance, and whether the plan is deluxe or bare-bones, finance is retrospective — after you get sick, people get paid to treat you. And yet what plutocrats — and all of us — really need is prospective, even preemptive, medical science, the kind that produces not just wellness plans, but actual vaccines and cures. The rich can afford the best doctors, and the plushest hospital suites, but if that scientific spadework isn’t done in advance, if the right cure doesn’t exist when it’s needed, it can’t be bought on short notice at any price. The polio vaccine, for example, took 17 years; genuinely effective treatments for AIDS took 15 years. Cures cannot be impulse purchases. They can’t be bid for on eBay, or even at Sotheby’s.

And the Democrats’ preferred policies will only make things worse. It’s mass murder, really. Or at least manslaughter. If I can be so uncivil.

Political Commentary, Science And Society

Thoughts On The Vaccine-Autism Fraud

51 Comments

Pointing out the war on science by the politically correct:

It was this F-word—feels—that left Mr. Mnookin justifiably gobsmacked, and it serves as the departure point for The Panic Virus, an attempt to explain how thousands of otherwise sophisticated Americans could make a fatuous decision to opt out of what is arguably modernity’s greatest medical achievement. Most children “exempted” from vaccines (a fittingly ridiculous term, as if the kids place out via AP exam) are not low-information progeny. They are being raised in college towns, in wealthy suburbs and in tony urban enclaves like Park Slope, by the sorts of parents who are otherwise given to grave tut-tutting about the anti-science stances of others—the climate-change know-nothings, say, or the ovine devotees of the garish Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky.

This part really grates, though:

How do we handle Mr. Mnookin’s fatuous friend? The Panic Virus aims to engage him or, failing that, to explain him; and yet a better choice still is to spurn him. Surely this same man, at this same party, could not have denied the existence of climate change without provoking spit-takes of wheat beer or dropped forkfuls of braised ramps. And the two claims are analogous, for both deny science in the service of what is, at base, an ideology: the magical faith that sacrifice is never required—at least not by you!

As a firm believer that evolution is the best, if not only theory to explain the diversity of life and the fossil record, and that there is no credible evidence that vaccines cause autism, I get outraged at such comparisons. It is neither “anti-science” or “denying science” to be skeptical about the claims of those who have been fudging data and don’t know how to do basic programming, let alone model complex and chaotic phenomena, while demanding that we pauperize millions in the future in the name of their claims. Skepticism lies at the heart of science. And this is an oversimplistic characterization. No one I know of “denies climate change.” Anyone with a lick of sense knows that the climate has never been static. The issues are whether or not it is changing as a result of our actions in a predictable way, if such changes (if they’re occurring) will be net good or bad, and if bad, what the best means of dealing with the problem are. And we are a long way from knowing the answers to any of those questions. That many of the people who claim certainty on the matter have been shown to be hacks and frauds doesn’t increase confidence in anyone making such claims. If anyone is “anti-science,” it is those who betray it with such unscientific behavior.

[Update Monday morning]

Left-wing creationism.