Does not compute…
Tag: science
They would never…
Strange New Organ Transplant Methods Raise Urgent Questions
If you or a loved one has needed an organ transplant, you know the problem firsthand: There are not enough organs for those who need them and there is a long waiting period.
That desperate need, and potential profits, have fueled a Frankenstein-like effort to find or create organs to give recipients a longer lease on life.
The need for organs can be a matter of life or death. In the United States, more than 105,000 people sit on the national waiting list, and every nine minutes, a new name is added. Seventeen people die every day while waiting for an organ transplant in the United States, according to the government’s organ donor website.
The most common transplant operations are for hearts, kidneys, livers, pancreases, lungs, bone and bone marrow, skin, and intestines; some such transplants come from living donors, but most are obtained after a donor is deceased.
Different organs remain viable for different amounts of time after the patient has died, or after the organ has been taken from the deceased.
According to Donor Alliance, the liver can remain viable for transplant for up to 12 hours, and kidneys for up to 36 hours. But for other organs, such as the heart or lungs, that window is much shorter, in the range of 4 to 6 hours.
With so few organs available for so many in need, there’s tremendous pressure on scientists and industry to push the boundaries of medical ethics with products and procedures that can sound like mad science.
These vanguard developments raise fundamental questions about human life, the commodification of the human body, and the very definition of “human.”
Let’s put aside the obvious horrors of forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience in China, including Tibetans, Uyghurs, and, most notably, Falun Gong practitioners, “the primary victims of this cruel practice,” according to the U.S. Human Rights Commission.
Everyone can agree that this practice is abhorrent, but there are other new practices that raise more complex questions, including a new practice that some fear is being used to curb the dead donor rule.
That rule requires that a patient be dead, and often for several minutes, before their organs are taken. This ensures organs only come from the deceased.
Lab-grown blood given to people in world-first clinical trial
Blood that has been grown in a laboratory has been put into people in a world-first clinical trial, UK researchers say.
Tiny amounts – equivalent to a couple of spoonfuls – are being tested to see how it performs inside the body.
The bulk of blood transfusions will always rely on people regularly rolling up their sleeve to donate.
But the ultimate goal is to manufacture vital, but ultra-rare, blood groups that are hard to get hold of.
These are necessary for people who depend on regular blood transfusions for conditions such as sickle cell anaemia.
If the blood is not a precise match then the body starts to reject it and the treatment fails. This level of tissue-matching goes beyond the well-known A, B, AB and O blood groups.
Prof Ashley Toye, from the University of Bristol, said some groups were “really, really rare” and there “might only be 10 people in the country” able to donate.
At the moment, there are only three units of the “Bombay” blood group – first identified in India – in stock across the whole of the UK.
Important Peer-Reviewed Papers on Climate Change
I’m glad you’re interested in science. However, I don’t think peer review is the signal of scientific rigor you think it is. Simple statistical analysis shows that the majority of peer-reviewed findings are false or meaningless, and the press will take any paper and blow it up into a headline. But people often ask me for peer-reviewed papers refuting the standard dogma of climate alarm, and there are many. Keep in mind that all atmospheric data before 1980 is suspect, and all ocean measurements before 2005 are worthless. Everyone knows Antarctica is not warming, so I’ll focus on trying to figure out man’s role in the climate.
When I ask people who are sure that humans are having an alarming impact on the earth’s climate, I ask them to name one single paper that convinced them. So far, I have never gotten a paper.
No one reads papers, but I do. Some of them I don’t think are worth sharing, but a few are, and I present them here. I’ll write summaries, because I know people won’t click through. If you are convinced humans are causing climate change, you might want to understand the science a bit more; these summaries are designed to help you do that. There is much more at Climatecurious.com.
For starters, in 2009, a group called Popular Technology assembled a database of over 1350 peer-reviewed papers contrary to the anthropogenic global catastrophe narrative. There are others. I’ve chosen the papers below for their relevance and recency.
Is it Possible to Patent Genetically-Modified Humans?
“When we’re modifying the genome of an organism we can put our signature, our name, into the genome.” – “What is God? God creates. Well, we can create now.” – “We deserve to be credited for our work. We have lobbyists in politics and the courts to make sure the patenting and owning of parts of the human genome continues.”
Not word for word but, these are recollections by Dr. Carrie Madej of remarks made by Dr. Craig Venter of the Human Genome Project during a speech in 2014. Dr. Venter also talked about how vaccines could be useful to modify people’s genomes. Dr. Madej discussed this during an interview, watch HERE (starting at 45 mins).
In 2010, on creating the world’s first synthetic life form Dr. Venter said, “the achievement heralds the dawn of a new era in which new life is made to benefit humanity, starting with bacteria that churn out biofuels, soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and even manufacture vaccines.” Dr. Venter’s technology paved the way for designer organisms to be built rather than be allowed to naturally evolve, and he owns the patent.
Don’t Even Go There
A policy of deliberate ignorance has corrupted top scientific institutions in the West. It’s been an open secret for years that prestigious journals will often reject submissions that offend prevailing political orthodoxies—especially if they involve controversial aspects of human biology and behavior—no matter how scientifically sound the work might be. The leading journal Nature Human Behaviour recently made this practice official in an editorial effectively announcing that it will not publish studies that show the wrong kind of differences between human groups.
American geneticists now face an even more drastic form of censorship: exclusion from access to the data necessary to conduct analyses, let alone publish results. Case in point: the National Institutes of Health now withholds access to an important database if it thinks a scientist’s research may wander into forbidden territory. The source at issue, the Database of Genotypes and Phenotypes (dbGaP), is an exceptional tool, combining genome scans of several million individuals with extensive data about health, education, occupation, and income. It is indispensable for research on how genes and environments combine to affect human traits. No other widely accessible American database comes close in terms of scientific utility.
My colleagues at other universities and I have run into problems involving applications to study the relationships among intelligence, education, and health outcomes. Sometimes, NIH denies access to some of the attributes that I have just mentioned, on the grounds that studying their genetic basis is “stigmatizing.” Sometimes, it demands updates about ongoing research, with the implied threat that it could withdraw usage if it doesn’t receive satisfactory answers. In some cases, NIH has retroactively withdrawn access for research it had previously approved.
Note that none of the studies I am referring to include inquiries into race or sex differences. Apparently, NIH is clamping down on a broad range of attempts to explore the relationship between genetics and intelligence.
What is NIH’s justification? Studies of intelligence do not pose any greater threat to the dignity of their participants than research based on non-genetic factors. With the customary safeguards in place, research activities such as genetically predicting an individual’s academic performance need be no more “stigmatizing” than predicting academic performance based on an individual’s family structure during childhood.
The cost of this censorship is profound. On a practical level, many of the original data-generating studies were set up with the explicit goal of understanding risk factors for various diseases. Since intelligence and education are also risk factors for many of these diseases, denying researchers usage of these data stymies progress on the problems the studies were funded to address. Scientific research should not have to justify itself on those grounds, anyway. Perhaps the most elemental principle of science is that the search for truth is worthwhile, regardless of its practical benefits.
NIH’s responsibility is to protect the safety and privacy of research participants, not to enforce a party line. Indeed, no apparent legal basis exists for these restrictions. NIH enforces hundreds of regulations, but you will search in vain for any grounds on which to ban “stigmatizing” research—whatever that even means.
The restrictions appear to be invented to impede research on certain topics that anonymous bureaucrats with ideological motivations have decided are out of bounds. It’s impossible to know whether senior NIH officials have instigated the restrictions or merely accepted them tacitly. Perhaps they are unaware of the problem; officials far down the bureaucratic ladder are responsible for approving specific applications.
Sign of the End? Lab-Grown Human Brain Cells ‘Exhibit Sentience’ When Scientists Teach Them to Play Pong
According to the 1991 blockbuster “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” Skynet was supposed to have become self-aware 25 years ago, on August 29, 1997.
I know this because I took my wife to see “Terminator 2: Judgement Day” on our honeymoon … which shows you just how self-aware I was in 1991. It’s amazing she’s stuck with me for so long. But I digress.
Skynet, of course, was the huge national-defense artificial intelligence network that kept sending terminator androids back in time so that they could fail to kill Sarah Connor and her son, John. I thought of the film immediately when I saw that Australian scientists recently taught lab-grown brain cells to play Pong.
Now that I write that down, I can see how some might consider it a stretch. Stay with me, here.
According to this report, which does not appear to have been peer-reviewed prior to its publication yesterday, a culture of 800,000 stem-cell-derived human brain cells and embryo-derived mouse brain cells displayed limited “sentience,” in the sense that they were “responsive to sensory impressions.”
The researchers called their human-mouse-brain-hybrid “DishBrain” — and there’s a sentence I never thought I’d write.
“DishBrain offers a simpler approach to test how the brain works, and gain insights into debilitating conditions such as epilepsy and dementia,” Cortical Labs CEO Dr. Hon Weng Chong explained. KOAM described Cortical Labs as a biotech start-up.
Ratman: Human Brain Cells Grown In Rats
Scientists have transplanted human brain cells into the brains of baby rats, where the cells grew and formed connections.
It’s part of an effort to better study human brain development and diseases affecting this most complex of organs, which makes us who we are but has long been shrouded in mystery.
“Many disorders such as autism and schizophrenia are likely uniquely human” but “the human brain certainly has not been very accessible,” said said Dr. Sergiu Pasca, senior author of a study describing the work, published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
Approaches that don’t involve taking tissue out of the human brain are “promising avenues in trying to tackle these conditions.”
The research builds upon the team’s previous work creating brain “organoids,” tiny structures resembling human organs that have also been made to represent others such as livers, kidneys, prostates, or key parts of them.
To make the brain organoids, Stanford University scientists transformed human skin cells into stem cells and then coaxed them to become several types of brain cells. Those cells then multiplied to form organoids resembling the cerebral cortex, the human brain’s outermost layer, which plays a key role in things like memory, thinking, learning, reasoning and emotions.
Scientists transplanted those organoids into rat pups 2 to 3 days old, a stage when brain connections are still forming. The organoids grew so that they eventually occupied a third of the hemisphere of the rat’s brain where they were implanted. Neurons from the organoids formed working connections with circuits in the brain.
CIA Funding Wooly Mammoth De-Extinction Company
While the CIA is not generally known for dealing with ancient animals, the agency is one of the multiple entities financially backing Dallas-based biotechnology company Colossal Biosciences, which is trying to bring the wooly mammoth back from extinction.
Other individuals and groups with investments in the company include Peter Thiel, Tony Robbins, Paris Hilton and Winklevoss Capital.
“Biotechnology and the broader bioeconomy are critical for humanity to further develop. It is important for all facets of our government to develop them and have an understanding of what is possible,” Colossal co-founder Ben Lamm told The Intercept.
In-Q-Tel, Colossal’s new investor, is registered as a nonprofit venture capital firm funded by the CIA, according to The Intercept, which said that recently the firm had shown an interest in biotechnology and DNA sequencing.
In-Q-Tel published a blog post on September 22, which said: “Why the interest in a company like Colossal, which was founded with a mission to “de-extinct” the wooly mammoth and other species? Strategically, it’s less about the mammoths and more about the capability.”
It said that “leadership in biotechnology will allow the U.S. to help set the ethical, as well as the technological, standards for the use of this technology.”
Hellbound and Down 
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