Monday, May 24, 2004

 
In memory of Leotardo, the Strain Gauge Guy...

I am sad to report that Dr. Edward Simmons passed away last Tuesday of prostate cancer at the age of 93. Although most of us at Caltech knew Dr. Simmons only as "Leotardo, the Strain Gauge Guy", everyone knew of him. Leotardo could hardly escape notice; he was an elderly man with skinny legs who always wore a lycra tutu, pantyhose, aqua booties and a turban. A constant presence on campus, he could often be observed sleeping in his station wagon on Wilson Avenue across from the Beckman Institute or in the library reading the latest journals. As a graduate student back in 1930's, Leotardo invented the strain gauge, which measures the amount of deformation that occurs in an object when a force is applied to it.

No disrespect intended, but Leotardo was a mascot for Caltech. He was a cautionary tale for prodigal physicists, a marginalized yet unrepentantly weird individual, and someone so drawn to academic life that one can't really imagine him living elsewhere.

He will be remembered fondly.
posted by Amy 8:22 AM

Monday, April 12, 2004

 
Happy birthday to me!

All in all, a nice birthday: I slept in, awoke to good results from an overnight experiment, spent a low-key day in lab, received flowers, and ate cake.

Also, I had dinner at Upstairs on the Square in Cambridge. The food and wine were very good, and the atmosphere and waitstaff were excellent. After a long, drab winter in Boston, it was nice to be somewhere colorful. The decorating is ebullient: zebra stripes, checks, dots, gilt furniture, mirrors, red walls. Even so, it felt homey. (and no, I didn't grow up in a bordello.) I thought the atmosphere struck a good compromise between modern-funky and serious-elegant without being at all retro, which has been done before (literally).

My only complaint is that the calimari which accompanied my halibut were not crispy. In my opinion, squids have every right to be squishy when they are alive, but once dead they should be fried up tout de suite.
posted by Amy 9:23 PM

Thursday, April 08, 2004

 
Being in the moment

A circulating questionnaire about the stuff of daily life. (via Pharyngula)

1: Grab the book nearest to you, turn to page 18, find line 4. Write down what it says:
"...epithelia with intercellular junctions that act to seal off this space. Another..." from Cells, Embryos, and Evolution, Gerhardt and Kirschner, 1997.

2: Stretch your left arm out as far as you can. What do you touch first?
The empty chair of my baymate, who, sadly, has left for Israel.

3: What is the last thing you watched on TV?
South Park

4: WITHOUT LOOKING, guess what the time is:
10:45

5: Now look at the clock; what is the actual time?
10:48

6: With the exception of the computer, what can you hear?
Recirculating water in the fish tank and the blower in the fume hood.

7: When did you last step outside? What were you doing?
3:30 pm, crossed the street to go to the mouse room.

8: Before you came to this website, what did you look at?
Radley Balko's The Agitator.

9: What are you wearing?
Blue jeans, knit shirt, sage green suede jacket, clogs.

10: Did you dream last night?
I dreamed I was having a normal day at lab, but that I had to stop to pee every five minutes. I found this worrisome, and considered whether it indicated a medical condition. Diabetes perhaps? A kidney disorder? Finally, I woke up, realized why I'd been having the dream, relieved myself, and went back to sleep.

11: When did you last laugh?
Yesterday at dinner.

12: What is on the walls of the room you are in?
Shelves that contain books, bottles of solutions, chemicals, and lab equipment. Posters of embryos, a calendar, notes, pictures of data, personal pictures and doodads.

13: Seen anything weird lately?
I saw a guy on the T who looked exactly like Ignatius J. Reilly, the protagonist from A Confederacy of Dunces. He was very fat and was wearing a hat with ear flaps, a wool shirt, and a huge mustache. Quite possibly he was drunk.

14: What do you think of this quiz?
It provides an excuse for people to reveal harmless and entertaining facts about themselves, which is something we all want to do anyway.

15: What is the last film you saw?
The City of Lost Children. It was very weird. And in French.

16: If you became a multi-millionaire overnight, what would you buy first?
A house.

17: Tell me something about you that I don't know.
When I was in the seventh grade, my friends and I would practice spitting at recess under the presumption that the girl who could spit the farthest would be most impressive to the boys.

18: If you could change one thing about the world, regardless of guilt or politics, what would you do?
Require classes in logic and reasoning for accreditation of all schools, beginning grade four and continuing through university.

19: Do you like to dance?
Sometimes.

20: George Bush: is he a power-crazy nutcase or some one who is finally doing something that has needed to be done for years?
All politicians are power-crazy nutcases. George Bush's problem is that most of his policies are ill-conceived, poorly executed, and vastly exceed what I believe should be the role of government.

21: Imagine your first child is a girl, what do you call her?
I couldn't possibly answer this without being faced with the situation.

22: Imagine your first child is a boy, what do you call him?
See answer to 21.

23: Would you ever consider living abroad?
No. I want to live in the W or SW, possibly SoCal.

posted by Amy 9:20 PM

Tuesday, April 06, 2004

 
zoom zoom!

I love microscopes, which is a lucky thing since microscope maintenance is my assigned lab job. Admittedly, though, I have been lax in my duties. For a long time I didn't really exert myself beyond changing the odd bulb or ordering parts when something broke. However, last summer my boss asked me to write a justification for a scope I'd been hinting we needed. (Ok, fine, it was more like desperate pestering, but that is NOT the same as begging.) And now, nine months later, after many bureaucratic hurdles, numerous meetings with sales reps, and reconstruction of the microscope room to control for vibration, temperature, static, and dust.... it finally arrived!!

It is so beautiful: a Zeiss 510 confocal microscope with a Meta detection system, a motorized stage, and an incubator! Very sexy! Like a Lamborghini for dorks, and just about as expensive.

Confocal microscopy is "a good thing", as Martha Stewart would say. Its advantage over other fluorescent methods is the precision with which a fluorescent sample is excited and the specificity by which the emitted light is detected. Basically, lasers are used to excite the sample, and then the resulting emitted light is passed through a tiny "pinhole" such that only a limited amount is collected by the detection system. This results in very thin, perfectly focused optical slices that are not messed up by any fluorescence above or below the plane of focus. Thus, it's wonderful for trying to determine whether two things are colocalized in the same cell. Also, by virtually stacking the thin optical slices, one can see the three dimensional nature of the tissue. And... it generates phenomenally gorgeous pictures.

The above image is from a section of late gestation embryonic mouse pancreas stained for insulin-producing cells in red, and ducts in green. Each blue blob is the nucleus of a cell. At this stage the insulin producing cells, also known as beta cells, are still scattered loosely in the middle area of the pancreas. A few weeks later they will have clustered tightly together into spheres called "islets of Langerhans". Although it has not been shown, this clustering is probably important for full function of the beta cells, which detect and regulate glucose levels in the bloodstream.
posted by Amy 9:13 PM

Friday, March 26, 2004

 
No, adult stem cells do not let us "get around" using embryonic stem cells, nor should they.

I found this appalling passage amidst an otherwise unremarkable (in every sense) pro-biotech article by Michael Fumento in TCS.

But it's often the case with biotechnology that new advances eliminate older problems. In the last two years, three different US labs have found evidence that three different types of non-embryonic stem cells -- those taken from adults, umbilical cords, or placentas -- appear to be able to mature into any cell in the body. Even if all three labs fail, so many different non-embryonic stem cells have been found that can be converted into so many different types of mature tissue that there should be no need for "one-size-fits-all" stem cells.

To be blunt, the evidence that adult stem cells can mature into any cell of the body has turned out to be crap. A genuine mistake, but a mistake nonetheless. It was later discovered that these cells are likely fusing with host cells....which is vastly different than being able to differentiate into lots of new cell types. This is old news.

Clearly, and for transparent reasons, Mr. Fumento wants to ignore the cell fusion observation. Perhaps he thinks it's just another impotent viewpoint that can be dismissed as a matter of opinion. Listen carefully... discovery of cell fusion invalidates the conclusions of those adult stem cell studies. Yes, it does. It doesn't prove that adult stem cells can't be plastic. It doesn't even prove that the original observations about adult stem cells were definitely due to fusion. But, by providing a very plausible alternate explanation, it makes it impossible to draw any conclusions from those studies. Thus, it invalidates the original conclusion that adult stem cells are plastic. We now know as much about adult stem cell plasticity as if we had never done the studies. Net information gained about adult stem cell plasticity? Zero.

Plus, the assertion that so many different types of adult stem cells have been discovered that we don't need embryonic stem cells is also ridiculous. We have no evidence that adult stem cells exist in many organs, and little means to differentiate the ones we do know about. The exception, of course, is the lovely and talented hematopoetic stem cell, renewable source of the blood and immune system. We understand this particular stem cell from decades of work, time enough to sort out the reproducible experiments from the artifacts (or wishful thinking.)

Don't get me wrong. I fully support the study of adult stem cells. They just haven't supplanted embryonic stem cells in terms of potential, and I mean that both scientifically and figuratively.
posted by Amy 10:12 PM

Thursday, March 11, 2004

 
Whereupon I reflect on the meaning of my existence and its supposed inverse relationship to technology....

I have just returned from a lecture by Leon Kass, head of the President's Council for Bioethics, on the topic of "Brave New Biology: the Challenge for Human Dignity." As ever, I am aggravated by his arguments and I find them completely without merit.

Personally, however, I thought Kass was disarming and eloquent. He is clearly well educated, well spoken, and thoughtful. Therefore, it is all the more disturbing that he did not do a better job of making a logical case for the supposed doom that awaits us....especially after he announced his intention to argue forcefully for a position he knew most of us did not accept.

In short, Kass' position is that some of the controversial biomedical advances being developed today will degrade our humanity and trivialize our lives. Even if we approach them with the best intentions, we will be less human if we embrace them.

In particular, he made examples of stem cell biology, therapeutic cloning, genetic enhancement, psychotropic drugs, steroids, and longevity research. For each technology he mentioned a few of the possible real dangers, and then claimed that worse than these, we would lose most by the fact that our thinking about our lives and identities would change.

It is precisely here where I dig in my heels. I am willing to admit that many good technologies have a bad side, perhaps even that every advance has a cost. If that was his message, I would agree with him. But it's not. Kass proposes that the consequence of getting what we desire: good health, longer lives, decreased suffering, will cause us to cross a line into triviality. He specifically says that our lives will be less rich, less meaningful, less heroic. We will be less human.

Wow. That's some thesis.

To support it though, Kass must define the supposed harm and then make a good case that a technology will cause it.

First of all, "loss of dignity", is an abstract concept. It may represent some sort of symbolic truth for Kass, but it's significantly harder to define than a quality like sadness, pain, or grief. It's also incredibly subjective. Is "loss of dignity" limited to the way I feel about myself, or does it also encompass what you think about me? Have I lost dignity when I lose my virginity? Refuse to duel? Kill someone in combat?

As far as I understand him, Kass acknowledges that he's talking about an abstract harm and then embraces it. Its like he's trying to assert that symbolic harm is the scariest kind. Why? Because he says it is. Moreover, by retreating to the abstract, the question of whether a particular technology might actually cause a loss of dignity can't be challenged by real life counter examples.

Tellingly, I think, Kass retreated when faced with any real life examples. Is contraception dehumanizing? Er, well, no but it can have a down side. How about IVF? Maybe that's not so bad either.

Markus Meister, a professor in the Molecular and Cellular Biology department, brought up a good example of a technology that has completely changed our lives: telecommunications. A hundred years ago one could have argued that it would be highly unnatural for us to be able to talk to people out of earshot, much less across the globe. Language is one of the real features that makes us human, so given that telephones have changed the way we speak to each other and even changed the way we think about speaking to each other, where did Kass stand on the issue of phones....were they dehumanizing?

Kass' answer: Well, phones have been around for 100 years but the quality of discussion hasn't improved at Harvard.

Well Dr. Kass, you know, it may not have. But it's probably better on average across the world. And when I call up my family and friends and tell them about your talk, I bet they won't find it convincing either.
posted by Amy 10:46 PM

Thursday, February 19, 2004

 
The uterus: a bright line in the cloning debate

Every advance in stem cell technology is a mixed blessing. On one hand, each discovery brings us closer to therapies for a number of terrible diseases and increases our knowledge of embryonic development. On the other hand, each step forward means we have to endure another swell of the "cloning debate", second in obnoxiousness only to the "abortion debate", and the repetition of the same hysterical rhetoric we heard the last time around.

Thus, the recent report that human stem cells have been generated from cloned embryos has provoked this sort of nonsense. I see. Legislation that would ban reproductive cloning, but protect therapeutic cloning, is really the duplicitous maneuvering of BigPharma to protect reproductive cloning for a "radical agenda." Um, yeah. Ok. I think they call that paranoia, but you can call it whatever you like.

I find this sort of thing extremely tedious and I do my best to ignore it. Subconsciously, though, it must be bothering me because I am wearing the enamel off my teeth when I sleep. So, in the interests of my orthodontia, please allow me to make an obvious point about reproductive biology.

First and for the record, scientists overwhelmingly oppose reproductive cloning based on evidence. That is, the majority of cloned animals appear to be abnormal, and it would be wrong to create babies that we have good reason to believe will be deformed or sick. However, the same cells that might make a disabled person could still make perfectly good neurons, pancreatic cells, or muscle fibers. Indeed, the whole is greater (and more complicated) than the sum of its parts.

Those who would like to ban all types of cloning argue that any advances in the therapeutic arena will make it easer to clone babies. I do not deny this is true. The advent of the steam engine was good for both automobiles and for war machinery. All technology can be used to do harm. Shall we be Luddites then? Luckily, most of us choose to face technological challenges with reason and compassion rather than bury our heads in the sand.

Cloning opponents, however, assert that the slope from therapeutic cloning toward baby cloning is steep and slippery, inevitable and uncontrollable. In essence, they think there is no way to stop cloned embryos from becoming babies.

Not so. There is a very real barrier to baby cloning, and its called "implantation." I can tell you from personal experience as a woman (guys, you're just going to have to trust me on this one) that babies don't get into one's uterus by accident. Nope. Never while taking a bath or swimming in the municipal pool have I conceived a child. Embryos at the blastocyst stage, like those implanted in IVF clinics, are round and immoble. They have no tail like those stealthy sperm. Getting pregnant by IVF doesn't "just happen" after a couple of glasses of wine. You need an appointment and a doctor, and to implant a cloned embryo would be to so with the knowledge that you are very likely going to create a sick baby.

It is not unreasonable or duplicitous then to make a distinction between therapeutic and reproductive cloning. The procedure of implantation can be criminalized. Will some people try it? Sure. Some people are cruel and selfish. And perhaps a maverick baby cloner might produce a normal baby, and nobody will be the wiser. More likely, though, the child will be abnormal, chronically sick, or die. Those responsible will be thrown in jail and everyone else will be forewarned.

The mere fact that a technology can be used for harm is not a reason to ban it, especially when a separate and premeditated action is required to subvert it toward a harmful purpose. Given the great good than can come of therapeutic cloning, we should let scientists play with embryos as much as they like. To avoid any harm, all we have to do is keep these embryos out of our uteruses. This is not as difficult as some people make it out to be.
posted by Amy 11:05 AM