Didn’t we just have one?
Department Of Empty Gestures
NASA administrator Michael Griffin regrets the dumb remarks on climate that spurred me to write this earlier post. MSNBC:
NASA administrator Michael Griffin said in the closed-door meeting Monday at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena that “unfortunately, this is an issue which has become far more political than technical, and it would have been well for me to have stayed out of it.”
“All I can really do is apologize to all you guys…. I feel badly that I caused this amount of controversy over something like this,” he said.
Two problems should jump out about Griffin’s “apology.” First, the NASA administrator isn not at all sorry about his harebrained idea that warming could be a good thing, he just regrets that he made the mistake of telling anyone about it. Griffin’s gaffe, as they usually do, came in the form of inadvertently telling the truth. Second, if Griffin really cared about the climate he would stop defunding climate research and he would not have changed NASA’s mission statement to remove any reference to monitoring and safeguarding the Earth.
Griffin is still a moron about climate and he still means to cut off research that might help us understand it better. Worse, he thinks his critics will settle for soothing words and a non-denial denial.
Job Well Done
The saga of disgraced Interior official Julie MacDonald takes another amusing turn in today’s Nature. Last seen altering documents, overruling scientists, openly collaborating with friends in regulated industries and generally violating departmental rules with almost comic abandon, MacDonald shows up again in a recent Endangered Species & Wetlands Report:
The latest chapter comes from Steve Davies, editor of the newsletter Endangered Species & Wetlands Report. Davies learned through a Freedom of Information Act request that MacDonald received a Special Thanks for Achieving Results award of $9,628 in March 2005, during the period covered by the investigation. The DOI will not detail the reasons for the award; it says the justification is included in her performance evaluation, which is private.
Meanwhile, Democrats in Congress are investigating MacDonald for her role in removing the Sacramento splittail fish from the endangered species list. MacDonald owns a farm in a floodplain that is a habitat for the fish, according to an investigation by the Contra Costa Times, a newspaper in California.
When you think about it, this is really a dog bites man story. Some administrations would fire a comically inept official whose flagrant rulebreaking disgraced the department. But you see, that is clearly pre-9/11 thinking. Julie MacDonald’s tenure at DOI is just another example of the bold, results-oriented leadership for which the Bush administration is well known. Of course Julie MacDonald was rewarded. If she stood her ground Stuart Bowen-like to uphold the Endangered Species Act, and then earned a bonus (or even kept her job), that would be news.
Stem Cells Without Embryos?
In the latest Nature, a group of scientists at Kyoto University claims to have made true embryonic stem cells out of ordinary adult cells by switching off four genes.
In theory, embryonic stem cells can propagate themselves indefinitely and are able to become any type of cell in the body. But so far, the only way to obtain embryonic stem cells involves destroying an embryo, and to get a genetic match for a patient would mean, in effect, cloning that person — all of which raise difficult ethical questions.
[…] Last year, [Shinya] Yamanaka introduced a system that uses mouse fibroblasts, a common cell type that can easily be harvested from skin, instead of eggs4. Four genes, which code for four specific proteins known as transcription factors, are transferred into the cells using retroviruses. The proteins trigger the expression of other genes that lead the cells to become pluripotent, meaning that they could potentially become any of the body’s cells. Yamanaka calls them induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells). “It’s easy. There’s no trick, no magic,” says Yamanaka.The results were met with amazement, along with a good dose of scepticism. Four factors seemed too simple. And although the cells had some characteristics of embryonic cells — they formed colonies, could propagate continuously and could form cancerous growths called teratomas — they lacked others. Introduction of iPS cells into a developing embryo, for example, did not produce a ‘chimaera’ — a mouse carrying a mix of DNA from both the original embryo and the iPS cells throughout its body. “I was not comfortable with the term ‘pluripotent’ last year,” says Hans Schöler, a stem-cell specialist at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biomedicine in Münster who is not involved with any of the three articles.
This week, Yamanaka presents a second generation of iPS cells1, which pass all these tests. In addition, a group led by Rudolf Jaenisch2 at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a collaborative effort3 between Konrad Hochedlinger of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and Kathrin Plath of the University of California, Los Angeles, used the same four factors and got strikingly similar results.
Assuming that the work translates to humans, which seems likely, the ethical logjam over stem cell research has been definitively broken. Drawing on my own relevant work I can say that the techniques used here are surprisingly simple and easy to translate into a therapy. If so, and plenty of hurdles always lie between proof-of-principle and usable applications, we can soon have a near-endless supply of stem cell lines that carry no more ethical taint than the thousands of ordinary cell lines in common use. Tissue-matching embryonic cells to a patient could prove as simple as a minor skin biopsy. It is not an exaggeration to say that many see the adult-to-stem cell conversion as the Grail of stem cell research.
***
Breaking the political logjam could prove as important as the technical advances, although it annoys me immensely that we had one in the first place. Neither scientists, doctors nor sick patients owe any thanks to religious hypocrites and craven politicians who attack stem cell research while giving IVF clinics a pass. More than that, the stem cell issue just helps illustrate the way that the christianist lobby sees human health as a pawn in their ideological agenda. The same activists fought a near-100% effective HPV vaccine because cancer discourages unmarried sex. They primarily support a pointless ban on an abortion procedure because more young women will die of complications. Frankly, pleasing people like that is near the last of my priorities. But if the adult-stem cell conversion technique will advance medical science and also make them go away then consider me doubly pleased.
***Update***
The New York Times report is now online.
At Least Our Priorities Are Straight
The Southern Baptists and the Evangelical community held a debate last night, and for balance they invited a Mormon. Some highlights:
But you’ve raised the question, so let me answer it. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth.” To me it’s pretty simple, a person either believes that God created this process or believes that it was an accident and that it just happened all on its own.
And the basic question was an unfair question because it simply asks us in a simplistic manner whether or not we believed — in my view — whether there’s a God or not. Well let me be very clear: I believe there is a God. I believe there is a God who was active in the creation process. Now, how did he do it, and when did he do it, and how long did he take? I don’t honestly know, and I don’t think knowing that would make me a better or a worse president.
***I’d be happy to. And it’s interesting that we’re doing this here, at St. Anselm’s, who this — that saint had a philosophy of faith seeking reason. And that’s the issue that’s missing here, if I could highlight that point, is that I believe that we are created in the image of God for a particular purpose. And I believe that with all my heart. And I’m somebody — I’ve had cancer in the past. I’ve had a season to really look at this and study it and think about the end of life. And I am fully convinced there’s a God of the universe that loves us very much and was involved in the process. How he did it, I don’t know.
***The point is that the time before time — there’s no doubt in my mind that the hand of God was in what we are today. And I do believe that we are unique, and I believe that God loves us. But I also believe that all of our children in school can be taught different views on different issues. But I leave the curricula up to the school boards.
***I believe in God, believe in the Bible, believe Jesus Christ is my savior. I believe that God created man in his image. I believe that the freedoms of man derive from inalienable rights that were given to us by God. And I also believe that there are some pundits out there that are hoping that I’ll distance myself from my church so that that’ll help me politically, and that’s not going to happen.
***I’d put it maybe in a slightly different way. We have great gifts in this country that come to us from God. We have a country in which we have freedom of religion, freedom of press, freedom for the individual, the right to elect our own officials. And the reality is that in some of the world, much of the world, that doesn’t exist.
***We have great resources in this country. And watching the strength of America when we believe in the essential ideals that we have, they’re not just American ideals, they come from God. And I think it’s our moral obligation to find the right way to share that with the rest of the world.
***And with that respect — and I have respect for my other colleagues — that’s why I don’t think we can nominate somebody that’s not pro-life in this party because it is at our core. We believe that every life is beautiful, is sacred, is a child of a loving God, from natural — from conception to natural death, and that applies not only here and in the womb, it applies to somebody that’s in poverty, it applies to the child in Darfur.
***So let’s from time to time remember that these are God’s children. They must come into country legally, but they have enriched our culture and our nation as every generation of immigrants before them.
***You know, Wolf, when my son returned from Fallujah, he wrote these words, he said, “Families lift our nation up. They provide us with fidelity, morality, faith in God, and raising the next generation of Americans.”
Oh. My bad. That was the Republican candidates debating, and not a religious revival.
I am damned glad this whole God issue is a sure thing, otherwise we might have to actually make informed choices or talk about issues that matter. I guess I will express my thanks to GOD that we won’t have to endure another one of these debates for a few weeks.
Turkish Forces Enter Iraq
Oy.
Several thousand Turkish troops crossed into northern Iraq early Wednesday to chase Kurdish guerrillas who operate from bases there, Turkish security officials told The Associated Press.
Two senior security officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media, said the raid was limited in scope and that it did not constitute the kind of large incursion that Turkish leaders have been discussing in recent weeks.
Call it a “cross-border excursion” or some other happy talk, this is an invasion of sovereign territory. Crossing Iraq’s borders will inflame Kurds from both countries so severely that escalation now seems inevitable. Turkey’s army is creating a situation where any option other than the one they want – a large scale invasion of northern Iraq – becomes practically impossible.
The political situation for Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki will quickly become untenable unless he can marshal the only credible security force in Iraq, the American army, against the invaders. We obviously cannot act against a NATO ally and Maliki cannot act without our help, so I have a hard time seeing how long his government can survive a shooting war with Turkey. The new Sadrist coalition may get its chance sooner than expected.
One other thought. Today’s incursion follows several days of shelling by both Turkey and Iran. The Iranians also own a chunk of Kurdistan and PKK rebels have terrorized both countries. If Turkey starts carving out pieces of Iraq for itself I wonder how long the healthy Iranian army will go on sitting on its hands.
***Update***
Both the Kurdish and American authorities deny that Turks have entered Iraq. Since those sources are willing to go on record, the AP’s sources are not and nobody has any pictures of Turks running around Iraq I think we have to put this story in the provisionally bogus category.
***Update 2***
What the hell? I saw this story come over DEBKAFile and thought screw this, wait until a real outlet picks it up. Then the AP jumped in and it seemed at least moderately safe to take the Turkish “invasion” seriously. Well the joke’s on me – the AP basically stitched together the DEBKAFile story with some source reporting that probably would not have merited a story on its own. Peckers. I could have told them that DEBKAFile has a signal-to-noise ratio that puts Doug Feith to shame.
Open Thread
Thank God It’s Wednesday.