Friday, November 16, 2007

1. DEATHBED CONVERSION: ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST.

The glee with which many of the faithful pounce on breathless tales of deathbed conversions by famous atheists, from Thomas Paine and George Washington to Charles Darwin, can be humorous. The just released, "There Is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind," by Anthony Flew with Roy Abraham Varghese (HarperCollins, 2007) breaks new ground in the deathbed conversion genre. Varghese composed Flew's conversion for him without waiting for the inevitable. In the New York Times Magazine, Mark Oppenheimer says Flew, 84, is suffering aphasia. His conversion to deism is attributed by Flew to new findings about DNA: He can't see where the first DNA came from. Neither can anybody else - yet. Who voted Flew "the world's most notorious atheist" anyway?

2. STEM CELLS: THERAPEUTIC CLONING ACHIEVED IN PRIMATES.

Nature magazine yesterday carried the report of an Oregon group that created the world's first cloned primate embryos from skin cells, allowing embryonic stem cells to be harvested. This had previously been achieved only in the mouse, and after years of failure, some thought it would not be possible in humans. There are practical problems, such as the need for human eggs, but it has increased optimism in the field. Since the stem cells can only replace tissue in the donor, it should not rouse ethical concerns, but of course it will - witness yesterday's defeat of the stem- cell initiative in New Jersey.

3. THE BRAIN: DOES THAT HURT? WHAT ABOUT THIS?

"Pain," hospital staffs are told, "is what the patient says it is." But the placebo effect and people faking it make the lack of a good metric a major obstacle in medical treatment and research. That may be about to change. According to Nature, researchers at the University of Oxford reported at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego last week that they've found a neural signal that correlates with pain. Low- frequency brainwaves picked up by electrodes positioned in the thalamus and the periaqueductal grey area seem to provide an objective measure of pain that correlates with subjective judgment.

4. CLIMATE: UH, MAYBE WE SHOULD FIND OUT WHAT THE PROBLEM IS.

Warming is caused by atmospheric contaminants that change the energy balance with the sun. Last week an "elite" group talked about sending up vast amounts of other contaminants to make it go the other way. Yes, they really did. Before we do that, maybe we should launch DSCOVR to measure the energy balance. Built and paid for, the Bush administration is hiding it in a Greenbelt, MD warehouse.

Bob Park can be reached via email at whatsnew@bobpark.org
THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND
Opinions are the author's and are not necessarily shared by the University, but they should be.