Future Ben

Damn that previous post was starting to bug me. I just kept thinking of what it would be like to have one of those magnets implanted and then walk past the 5T line of the Magnet. Ouch!

I thought I might show off what has been keeping me from posting for a month. One of these brains is expressing my in vivo reporter gene in a mosaic pattern. The other is not. Can you tell the difference? It looks OK, and with further optimizing it could be really good. Anyway, look I invented something! Now that is a biological hack!

I try not to repost boing boing material, but sometimes it’s to topical to pass up. Wired contributer Quinn Norton has posted her slides from her talk on Body Hacking. Body Hacking is admittedly just a catchphase that doesn’t really capture the embryonic state of post humanism we live in, but I can’t think of anything better so OK. So what makes body hacking different from piercings and tattoos? Ms. Norton makes the point that body hacking goes beyond the aesthetic and into enhanced functionality.

Already Lasik and ligament replacement surgeries are being used for enhacement in sports, and drugs like Provigil Aderol and Xanex enjoy vivrant trade on the black market. So what is the future of body hacking?
I would guess that surgical enhancements will grow as quickly as creative drug use and biological theraputics like viral gene transfer. I am waiting for somebody to use the Adenoviral treatment for CF on themselves to enhance their breathing capacity. I doubt it would do anything, but I still hope they try.

This is actually old data, but I am showing it to illustrate that my MRI reporter gene I have been working on is ready to go in vivo. Sigh its also a .tiff and I’m too tired to change it tonight. I put the reporter in a retrovirus and injected it into the brains of developing mice I just started my first imaging run on these brains. By tomorrow I will have some idea as to whether this is going to work or not. If that is the case then I will be doing very well and I will definitely have something to brag about at the upcoming ISMRM conference in Berlin in May.

The pendulum of mental ability swings back towards science for a while. That’s how things work for me. I just wish I could make the transition more freely. All art projects are brutally dropped for my big breakthough, but I can’t just not show up to the lab on days when I’m not feeling it. Someday futureBen someday.

I have begun experimenting on animals. I didn’t plan on things working out like this, they just did. If I want to manipulate genes I have to use a model organism. Mice seem to be the most relevant and so…

To work with animals you have to be detached, calculating and, most importantly, merciless. I am none of these things, and so I am not very good at animal work. I can barely pick up the little creatures and yet I am going to have to do surgery on them. Lots of surgery.

Mostly I am just watching my advisor carve up mice and inject my viral particles into their embryos, but I am going to have to figure this out eventually. Today I sutured a dead mouse and practiced loading up needles. I felt a horror movie antagonist. Stitching up a dead animal filling tiny glass needles all for some senseless purpose no normal human mind could interpret. I may start opening up pregnant mice, imaging them and then stitching them back up again just to practice. Sacraficing mice for practice! Is this who I am? Apparently so.

Because I am always broke, I take whatever work I can get. Usually its standing in the Freezing cold on the roof of Rubulad bouncing the drunks, however once in a while I get to do something interesting. Twin A, who generally kicks ass in all things blinky has been assisting artist and head of Disorient, Leo Villareal. Despite being some of the most polished LED art I have ever seen, Leo’s projects continue to grow in complexity. In this case 2400 points of complexity. Somebody has to stick all those lights up in their housing. That someone is futureBen.

OK, it isn’t the most exciting work in the world to unscrew tiny little lightbulbs, but any opportunity to work for an artist of Leo’s caliber is a welcome one. And as always, I am always broke! Maybe I need to come to grips with my 100$/month Mcmaster-Carr addiction. But these extra gigs keep me going, and I can quit anytime I want.

Everybody knows that I am still nursing my heartache from Illegal Human Remains Girl, but maybe, just maybe lightning does strike twice. I got tired of online personals, maybe my standards were to high, but nobody seemed all that interesting. Then one day a friend, well more of an aquaintence that I had just met on the street, and by “met” I mean “I was suddenly accosted by,” gave me an interesting suggestion.

I thanked Sausagehead the raving street poet, but I still refused to buy his crudely drawn comic book. When I got home I remembered some of his more intelligible words and looked up www.feralchildren.com My life hasn’t been the same since. Her name is Ro Chom and she is one special lady. I don’t want to say she is a diamond in the rough, but it’s hard to think of any other metaphor. I have never met a girl so independant and free before, and while I am not usually one for petite girls, she is still pretty athletic. She even likes hiking and the outdoors, but she is still up for staying up all night and sleeping all day.

Sure, nobody is perfect. Ro Chom’s attention is elusive and she has been too on the go for relationships in the past. It’s also hard to communicate with her sometimes, but that is probably just because she lives so far away. Also, she occasionally flees back into the jungle. My friends think that trying to keep up a relationship like this is irresponsible, but I don’t care. I’ve got a crush on Jungle Girl!

After reading her profile I sent her a letter. I knew she couldn’t read or write, but I figured somebody would read it to her. I was really surprized that she responded quickly. The mail sure works fast these days. I guess since she had no other way of communicating she sent me this picture.

Wow she cleaned up really nice since they found her! She still isn’t much for clothing though. That could be a problem if she comes to visit before summer.

I know what you are thinking. “futureBen, we’ve read the news and Jungle Girl is not exactly relationship material.” That may be true. At first Jungle Girl was pretty shy. Even her own father was a little put off, but I knew there was potential.

Mr Ksor told the Associated Press news agency: “When I saw her, she was naked and walking in a bending-forward position like a monkey . . . she was bare-bones skinny. She was shaking and picking up grains of rice to eat. Her eyes were red like a tiger’s eyes.”

So maybe she needs to eat a bit more. Lots of girls have a negative self image when they are younger, or maybe it was just her highly active lifestyle. Still, tiger eyes…Mee-ow!

What really sealed the deal was the first letter I got from her.
She is so expressive!

People have suggested she might be a little inexperienced for me, but let’s be clear here. Jungle Girl is 27 and despite being feral she is not exactly untouched by man.

Sketchy reports from the remote area suggest that the woman lived wild and alone for years. But according to another report yesterday she had been with a naked male companion, who was armed with a machete when she was caught. She had marks on her arm from being bound, suggesting that she might have been kidnapped and kept for years as a slave.

I’m no one to judge her lifestyle choice. She would fit right in at Burning Man. Honestly, we have all had are share of crazy relationships, and maybe, just maybe together we can leave behind the heartaches of the past and share something real.

I have been appointed the task of naming my first foray into synthetic biology/ protein engineering. I have never invented anything substatial enough to name before so I am having some trouble.

The protein is a new reporter for MRI. It binds paramagnetic Manganese and it creates a brighter signal than background tissues when imaged properly. What the hell do you call something like that?

My coleague and friend Yousef had this to say.

your construct could
termed as MP’s standing for either “magnetic protein”, “manganese protein”,
“metal protein”, “MRI protein” (a lot to stand for) to parallel the FP field
(fluorescent protein). Since there is no color such as in GFP and RFP
etc….Your enhanced MP (EMP) are reduced to 2 tone: darkening (DMP)and
brightening (BMP)proteins. In DMPs Ferritin would be one of them and in BMPs
yours would fall in this category…

BMP? I’m not sure it has pizzaz. Although I agree that an acronym would be appropriate. How about Manganese Enhaced Magnetic Resonance Imaging Protein? MEMRIP. Maybe MRI can be collapsed and I could just call it MEMP. If I did and Iron one it would be FEMP.

I have to figure this out before starting the patent.

Dude I don’t even know where to start. On the surface it’s not really that much of a crackpot site, it just has the all the standard layman’s freaky science highlights. Nothing about Atlantis, but what the Brazillian Stonehenge has to do with the future I don’t know. Maybe the dude is right and Light Transformation is going to be the single most important scientific theory of our time. Although its not so much of a theory as a series of wandering “what if” statements based entirely on handwaving and misderstood generalizations. ( I knew the spite would kick in)

So why on pick on somebody else’s vanity site which is also based loosely on science and the future. It’s a matter of priciple! There is a real danger in presenting your assumptions along with a little data. This website is the result. What kind of reference is the fucking Book of Knowledge: The Keys of Enoch? Who peer reviewed that? Actually, I am noticing most of the citations are largely self referencing. Of the few links that acutally work my personal favorite is this statement on the martian pyramids.

Pyramid structures which range in dimensions of 3.0-base to 6.0 km mean diameter have been identified in the Elysium Quadrangle of Mars. Geologic processes that could result in such features have not produced a satisfactory scientific explanation for some of the pyramids. Thus we must keep in mind that what may appear to be a natural hill from an aerial view may be a pyramidal artifact.

Perhaps, instead of preparing for the contemporary scans of the Martian micro-intelligence, we might prepare ourselves for a close examination of pyramidal structures as blueprints for bio-magnetic analogs? The Martian and Egyptian pyramidal grids may be models preparing us to meet the superior architects in our immediate universe? Perhaps, the pyramid is a future artifact?

And all this is based on what data?

OK…So based on this image alone, not only does Mars have pyramids from the future, any hill on Mars could be actually be a pyramid in disguise that might “hold the keys to man’s existence.” This dude comes right out and says that we should beleive that a bunch of piles of sand are magical because it would be awesome if they really were. Get over yourself!

Everybody wants to believe there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and that all of our questions will be answered if we can just get over the horizon. And let us not forget that old chestnut. Everything you know is wrong, but I have got it all figured out, so come join my clique of people who know what’s really up. I would like to make through at least one Burning Man without having to hear a variation on that one.

But what if they really were pyramids? That would in fact be awesome.

What the hell am I supposed to do with that? I have spent a large chunk of my day trying to figure out another of these little puzzles and it has left me rather cross. In fact I have spent at least a dozen hours over the past few days trying to pick apart other people’s cryptic little maps. This is the promoter/enhancer of Flk1, some receptor that does I don’t know what. The point is that this sequence will cause expression in developing vascualture. The key word here is SEQUENCE. Why am I looking at a crude line drawing when they could just post a text file? No, instead I have to Genbank and BLAST my way through the mouse genome looking for the right piece of DNA then take my best guess at what they cut out. Did they not know the sequence? I guess this stuff came out in 1995 so it wouldn’t be surprizing.

I remember an a review paper about Genomics being, “too much information” to be useful. Give us our bright and shining gel bands of approximate size! Luddites! I dig through notebooks of paper notes, pictures, crude maps all for one text file worth of information. And the actual DNA is nowhere to be found. Its a wonder anything ever got done that way.

So here I am, doing reverse bioinformatics to digitize what has already been published. Compiling my sequences in VectorNTI and creating dynamic maps that have more information that I am going to use, which is just about enough.

Well that wasn’t so bad. I can’t get back futureben.org yet, but thanks to the find and replace feature of text edit I pretty easily converted the old database to futureben.net. Interestingly enough the only thing that didn’t back up was the look of the site. Another vestige of the past is shed. I feel so clean. Now how do I get my google standing up for futureben.net?

Before I worry about that I am trying to get another site up genosynthesis.org. This one won’t be a blog. There aren’t enough resources for synthetic biology. The point of me doing this isn’t to entertain anybody its a mental focus and it certainly not to be a web designer. I can barely use Wordpress! Futureben is about me. What is the future as I see it? It has been a real help to me. Genosynthesis will be about what I do. Synthesizing genes. I just have to figure out this Joomla thing now.