Future Ben

Continuing our dismemberment madness:

In china a man: 1. loses his penis in an accident. 2. gets a BRAND NEW penis from a brain dead man 22 years younger than him. 3. After no complications or tissue rejection demands to have his new penis removed because of psychological trauma and its… (are you ready?) swollen shape. Clearly this man is not ready for the post human era.

It gets me thinking though. What are they doing with the dismembered penis? Can I have it? Despite turning 30 I still have functioning genitalia. (At least I’d like to think so.) But why limit yourself? If there is a spare swollen 22 year old’s penis just floating around why should it go to waste? If that poor bastard would rather go through life without a penis just because he didn’t grow it himself then I will gladly go double barrell. It would take me a step beyond post human artist Orlan and make me the poster child for post humaninsm! I don’t know where you could hang that particular poster though.

Yeah, so apparently a huge problem in Africa is that women aren’t producing enough babies for their husbands. You see in many parts of Africa a woman’s entire worth is based on her ability to produce children for men. A woman who reproduce “is worse than a dog.” What could be the answer to this grave social ill? In Vitro Fertilization of course! God forbid we address the issue of the blatant sexism that lets men think its OK to throw their wives onto the street for not producing children. Or maybe the rampant venereal diseases that are left untreated and cause infertilty. Unfortunatel nobody ever made any money promoting social elightenment or public health so the answer is of course to provide affordable IVF for the third world.

How can a world be so ass backward? Where a woman is mutilated at birth, has no access to or knowledge of contraceptives, no treatment for subsequent diseases, and after all of that, despite being the infertile member of a couple only 60% of the time is driven into the street when no babies come from the indentured rape that so often is marriage.

When I grow up I’m moving to Africa to marry a bunch of beautiful but recently divorced ladies and open a university for women. It will be a school with only three majors. Public Health, In Vitro Fertilization and Lesbian Studies.

I have been getting buried under my project lately, but I wanted to quickly present Caltec’s Biological Imaging Center. The center, headed by Scott Fraser. The imaging part is interesting enough, but what fascinates me is how this group pioneers new ways of seeing.

I first learned of the center at a ASCII meeting here in New York. David Kremers is (or was) an artist in residence there. He presented several projects the center was working on. Namely showing more than 3 dimensions of data in a single image. At the time it made less sense to me, but now that I am working with MRI I understand much better the need to present a huge amount of information in a single image. Take the time to check out the center website, and Scott Fraser’s labpage.

Rollover to turn the light off

The Nagy lab has been making very impressive GFP mice for years. They focus on using transgenic mice and embryonic stem cells to better understand development and genetic disease. Check out the massive library of flurorescent mice made by the Nagy Lab and their colleagues. Each one uses an inducible promoter to permanently activate the fluorescent marker. Very handy. If you have library access, pull Dr. Nagy’s latest review article in Development 2005 Dec;132(23):5130-2.

I don’t like Edwardo Kac’s work. I don’t even respect what he does. His art preys upon an audiences ignorance about biotechnology. I couldn’t stop laughing at one ASCI meeting when artist Joe Davis started shouting out “Alba was photoshopped! The emperor has no clothes!” I don’t know if that is really true, but it caused the speaker to retreat into stammering artistic doublespeak for the rest of the presentation. Alba, the GFP bunny is not really Edwardo Kac’s creation. He credits several scientists for providing “assistence.” Ha! Sure, it’s his rabbbit, but there is no mention of the process of creating the animal. Why is that? He doesn’t want you to know. Look up the process of making a transgenic it is dull and arduous and involves the sacrafice of dozens of animals. Most people today simply hand their gene over to a facility where a technitions do all of the work. “Genesis” is another great example. There are bacteria on a plate. There are all these G’s and C’s and A’s and T’s. There is even a bible quote. Whoopdie freakin doo! The weakness of Kac’s work, and what totally pisses me off, is that he could say just about anything and people would buy it. I understand the pop art aspect of it, but this isn’t a can of tomato soup. The science as mysticism mentality he inspires in an audience is the most dangerous form of sensationalism and is ultimately meaningless. Anyway, he wrote a book. Go thumb through it at the bookstore.

Genetic Savings and Clone offers to clone your prized cats for $32,000. Instead of transfering the nucleus from the donor to an egg this company tranfers over the packaged DNA. The idea behind Chromatin Transfer, I presume, is that the epigenetic milleu of the egg nucleus properly regulates the donor DNA to develop properly.

What is interesting about this company isn’t so much the technology, or even if its a good idea to clone a cat when there are so many up for adoption. What interests me is that its a biotech company that deals in a luxury item. At what point will geneticly modified animals become affordable?(If you call $32,000 affordable.) The initial overhead would be much higher, but once a new line was developed it could be bred normaly. Yeah, right. The company that did that would be legislated right out of existence.