Friday, November 23, 2007
If you have the uneasy feeling that we've been there before, you are not
alone. Two years ago the Woo Suk Hwang fraud began to unravel
(WN 16 Dec 05) . This week, two groups
of researchers reported the creation of "pluripotent" cells from human
skin cells: a team led by Shinya Yamanaka at the University of Kyoto and a
team led by James Thomson at the University of Wisconsin. Both groups used
four genes, introduced by viral vectors, to reprogram human foreskin
cells. Yamanaka's cells were able to form human cardiac muscle cells that
started beating after differentiating for 12 days. Perhaps the strongest
indication that the ethical battle over human embryonic stem cells may at
last be ending is a report in British newspapers that Ian Wilmut, the
University of Edinburgh biologist who cloned Dolly the sheep, has
announced that he is getting out of the cloning business in favor of
Yamanaka's reprogramming technique.
Recognizing that the only direction is up, WN has tried to stay clear of
the nomination battle. It was a jolt, however, to read in the Washington
Post today that the Democratic front runner supports key aspects of the
Bush space plan, hereafter referred to as the Lunacy Program. It calls
for a return to the Moon in the multibillion dollar Constellation
spacecraft to prepare for a vastly more expensive human mission to Mars to
do that which robots do better. Barack Obama would delay Constellation
for five years to provide funds for education. We're all in favor of
education, but there are vital science programs in space that are getting
squeezed out for this money sink. Let's consider climate change:
Solar radiation is partly absorbed by the Earth system and partly
reflected back into space. The reflectivity is called the albedo. In
addition, the planet radiates back into space in the infrared. Both the
albedo and Earth radiation must be known to determine the energy balance.
But as Francisco Valero at Scripps and Robert Charlson at U. of Washington
have pointed out, comparisons of satellite radiometers from CERES (Cloud
and Earth Radiant Energy System) and ISCCP (International Satellite Cloud
Climatology Program) do not agree. Data from DSCOVR (Deep Space Climate
Observatory) would provide a calibration to resolve the matter -
unfortunately DSCOVR, built and paid for, never got launched. There are
those who would rather not know.
Rachel Carson's 1962 book "Silent Spring" resulted in the environmental
movement and a decade later the Endangered Species Act. As the biologist
Paul Ehrlich argued, we don't understand ecology well enough to know which
genes are essential, so we tried to save them all. With the Earth facing
crisis, an article by Emma Marris the 8 Nov 07 issue of Nature has the
courage to finally ask out loud, "What to Let Go?".
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