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The other day, while scanning the back pages of Nature:Biotechnology, I came across the above ad for a nitrogen source for bacterial cultivation - basically a 'food medium' for bugs. I was surprised to see this substrate marketed as Kosher, and it got me wondering how this ancient system of dietary laws has kept track with the biotech revolution. After all, since we can now transplant genes from shellfish into, say, mammals, when do the resulting creatures become 'unclean'?

As it turns out, there's a thriving dialogue proceeding on these issues in both the Jewish and Islamic (Halal) communities. Joe M. Regenstein, of Cornell University, has published several interesting papers on the subject. (See also here.) The short answer is that today, Jewish religious leaders accept all gene transfers regardless of the source of the gene, believing that the resulting creaturetakes on the identity of the end product. (So, put a bovine gene into a dill pickle, and you're still not eating pork.) Muslim religious leaders are currently reviewing issues related to the use of synthetic genes and genes obtained from non-halal animals.

A related article on Rabbi Avram Reisner, a Jewish authority on emerging technologies, provides some context:

One way of looking at the question is this: could a swine gene, inserted into a tomato, make the whole tomato non-kosher? On at least one level, no it can't, says Reisner. That's because an earlier Rabbinical decision made in the 1890's states that the non-kosher part of a kosher food must be visible to the naked eye. This is known as the kashrut issue in Jewish law.

A more relevant question regards what's called kilayim, the biblical prohibition against mixing species. According to strict kilayim rules, one cannot mix seeds of different agricultural species and plant different species together in the same field. It is also against the rule to crossbreed animals or graft plants. It is even against the rule to yoke a donkey and ox to the same plow. Among the reasons given later for the kilayim prohibitions are that the intermixing of species could be seen as an affront to God's natural creation of species.

Other parts of kilayim, however, are more liberal, allowing, for instance, offspring of two different varieties of cattle to be considered kosher as long as those two varieties of cattle are "pure" and kosher. There are also cases where a Jew can encourage a Gentile (non-Jewish person) to crossbreed species in his or her possession, and then use the Gentile's products.

In short, Reisner concludes that between kashrut and kilayim, there is plenty of room for kosher GM foods. He's also confident that the Jewish community will continue its traditional willingness to accept technological changes like GM foods. "The Jewish community has as a whole been pretty supportive of forward-pushing science," says Reisner. "It kind of fits with the model of how the Jewish religion deals with the relation of humankind and nature."

Fascinating stuff.

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... Or at least in it. As a follow-up to the recent story on 'green' anti-munitions, the Christian Science Monitor reports that a New Zealand scientist named Christopher Anderson has devised a way to harvest gold from plants. The idea is to use common crops to soak up contaminants in soil from gold-mining sites and return the areas to productive agriculture. The gold harvested from the process pays for the cleanup - with money left over for training in sustainable agriculture.

Anderson's bio-remediation project, which has already been successfully field tested, is "aimed at small gold mines, which are especially troublesome for the environment. In the fragile Amazon River basin, for example, there are hundreds of artisanal mines where workers pour mercury, cyanide, and other chemicals onto gold-rich areas to extract the metal. Once the mine is exhausted, they abandon it and move on, leaving behind a toxic soup of contaminants". Anderson's plants act as a 'biosponge', soaking up the goal and the dangerous toxins.

Anderson's field trials have yielded an unexpected and potentially profitable byproduct: the plants he harvests contain gold nanoparticles, which are purple, not yellow. These nanoparticles melt at one tenth the temperature of regular gold - which makes them highly sought after for industrial processes, such as cleaning up carbon monoxide in fuel cells. Anyone with a hankering for the technical dimensions of this project should be sure to check out Massey's paper on gold phytomining.

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Grant McCracken, the Canadian anthropologist, critic and author of the extraordinarily insightful Culture by Commotion trilogy on popular culture, is a brilliant observer of the permissive (and innovative) fracturing of North American culture that, RIAA and MPAA lawyers be damned, is actually propelling our culture forward. In thoughtful and delightfully written essays, Grant expertly describes "consumers" who refuse to sit in their preordained spot at the end of a media foodchain, instead deciding to participate full throttle in the invention of new niches, new cultural products and new subcultures. Call it Rip, Mix, Culture.

To the chagrin of lefty/postmo critics, however, who see this sort of thing solely through the lens of hegemonic sabotage, cultural reappropriation, and complaint politics, Grant smartly identifies the role markets play in making remix culture work. Markets reward remixers with reputation, if not always financial reward, and act to validate new genres. And its this function of the Internet - as a participatory cultural market, rather than a delivery vehicle - that makes it so vital.

Anyone looking for this dynamic in action need look no further than Once More With Hobbits: A Lord of the Rings and Buffy The Vampire Slayer Musical Adventure. This extraordinary remixed piece of cultural property (complete with .MP3s!) is the kind of fabulous, absurdly detailed project that could only emerge from the minds of the most obsessed fans. And its attracted a rabid fanbase.

What's (sadly) most remarkable about OMWH is that it's been up for a calendar year without being sued out of existence.

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Finally, a major media network is using scenarios to promote general cultural dialogue on societal futures. The BBC's new show, "IF...", which begins airing tonight (March 10th, 2004) uses envisioned scenarios to explore issues such as income disparity, inter-generational issues, and the future of women in society. This is the most profound use of scenarios - to shape large-scale dialogue on a society's overall direction.

Even better, the BBC has been careful to contextualize scenario planning for the public. (Better, frankly, than some foresight people I know.) Anticipating public response, Peter Barron, IF's editor, has written a thoughtful prelude to the show which deals with issues like "why mix fact and fiction in exploring the future?" and "isn't this just scare-mongering?" The show looks terrific.

The extraordinary DANA Foundation (named after Charles A. Dana, a New York State legislator, industrialist, and philanthropist) takes a leadership role in promoting brain research from a variety of perspectives. They also publish the marvelous Cerebrum, a multi-disciplinary journal of brain research which belongs on every forecaster's bookshelf. Of particular interest is their 378-page book, "Neuroethics: Mapping The Field", (available here in full-length pdf) which provides the complete proceedings of a critically important 2002 conference of the same name. At the conference the term neuroethics was defined as "the study of the ethical, legal and social questions arising when scientific findings about the brain are carried into medical practice, legal interpretations, and health and social policy".

A community of scholars, pundits, scientists and journalists is starting to coalesce around this new field, with leadership organizations like the Center for Cognitive Liberty, and conferences like NBIC taking an activ(ist) role in shaping the discussion of just how we should embrace, resist, and conceive of neural repair, augmentation and enhancement. Neurotech gets limited airplay today, but it is going to play at least as significant a role in reshaping humanity in the 21st century as bio- and nanotech. Neuroethics is the first point of contact between the neurotech research community and other publics, and is therefore a vital dialogue to watch.

CODA: Anyone interested in neuroethics should be sure to read the thoughtful postings of Zack Lynch, who is razor smart on these issues and is writing a book about the coming neurotech century.

What do you get when you combine the Gift Economy, Sustainable Thinking, and Craigs List? You get Freecycle, a fantastic 'reverse eBay' for stuff you no longer want.

The premise is ridiculously simple: you join a freecycling email listserve for your local community, to which people (yourself included) proffer the kinds of things you might otherwise take to the dump, the Goodwill, or (in you're a New Yorker) simply leave on the curb. As a member, you also get to respond to offers from other list members, which are usually claimed on a first-come/first-served basis. (I myself have recently given away a box full of useful computer and electronics cables and an older set of computer speakers. Both were claimed in a matter of minutes.) At last count, there were hundreds of such lists set up, in communities large and small.

There is a simple logic underlying Freecycle: the Internet is terrific making markets more efficient, and there is indeed a market for many things we would otherwise throw away. Combine the two, and you get a fantastic means of leveraging self-interest to keep stuff from going to the landfill. Put another way, Freecycle makes a benefit from laziness and greed: sure, I could eBay that box of random computer cables currently in the closet, but my time is frankly more valuable spent doing other things. Given that fact, all I really care about is that those cables not end up in a landfill. If someone is willing to show up and take said cables away, and use just one, the result is still a reduction in waste - one less cable tossed away, and an increase in closet space for me! Furthermore, if they were to use just that one cable, and eBay the rest for a profit, all the better for them. Anything to keep the cables from the landfill. This is a stellar example of win-win thinking.

My experience with Freecycle has led me to one obvious question: why doesn't business do this? The answer is, they do - in Eco-Industrial parks, where organizations cluster around their complementary waste-streams. In such a park, the sawdust produced by, say, the lumber yard could be used as raw material for the adjoining paper mill. The lowered cost to all, in terms of cost of goods, acquisition of raw materials, and lowered liability for waste impact is significant. Presumably, these benefits get passed along to workers and the community at large.

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This plant may soon bedeployed
to detect landmines.

Aresa Biodetection, a small Danish biotech firm, has genetically modified Arabidopsis thaliana, or Thale Cress, so that the plant's leaves change color when its root system comes into contact with subterranean gasses evaporating from landmines buried underneath it.

Thale Cress is an excellent choice - it is fast growing, naturally occurring all over the world, and sterilized to prevent accidental 'genetic drift'. Aresa's variations on these plants turn an autumnal red in the presence of specifical chemicals, such as Nitrogen Dioxide gas or other heavy metals, which indicate a submerged landmine. Seeds of the modified Cress could be spread by low-flying aircraft or by an automated spreader, and 3-6 weeks later, the landscape would be 'pocked' with red plants indicating where the mines are.

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Ecologically-focused decomissioning of warheads at the Air Force Research Lab

The Army is thinking green, and not just in its uniforms. In what initially sounds like the Mother of All Oxymorons, military forces around the world are exploring "green" munitions programs, in which toxic military explosives will be systematically replaced with less-hazardous, but equally deadly variants. These "eco-friendly" chemical explosives contain less lead and other heavy metals than their traditional cousins, and are thus less hazardous to munitions handlers, less environmentally detrimental after detonation, and require less clean-up after hostilities have ceased. The entire research project suggests an increased thinking about reconstruction costs and other post-war liabilities, which are increasingly born by the winner, not the loser, of global conflicts.

A good example of this line of research can be found in the work of German researcher Thomas Klapotke, whose experimental "TNTA" explodes to produce harmless molecules of nitrogen and carbon dioxide, which, although greenhouse gasses, are not carcinogenic. (The more familiar TNT is itself classed as a carcinogen.) Such explosives are still more than a decade away from being fielded, but they suggest a seachange in how the military sees, and does, its job.

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Rich Gold (1950-2003) was many things: an artist, an illustrator, a philosopher, a designer of video games, and an researcher at Xerox Parc. Rich was a genius, in a way that instantly corrects our gratuitous and inflationary misapplication of that word. To spend even five minutes with him was to peek at something ineffable and rare - a joyful mind at play.

After his untimely passing last year, Rich's material on the Web all but disappeared. Now, however, RichGold.org has reemerged, providing at least a partial archive of this remarkable thinker's work and ideas. (Whomever did this - thank you!) Rich's ouvre should be explored, not explained, but one piece in particular should be read by every person who thinks about the social implications of technology: "How Smart Does Your Bed Have To Be Before You're Afraid To Go To Sleep At Night" is the best presentation I've ever seen about the issues raised by ambient intelligence, ubiquitous computing, and the like. Two elements of Rich's mastery are on display here: first, this piece discusses subtle and complex ideas without presenting a single chart, number, or graph -- the presentation is completely hand-drawn. Second, the presentation (which took at least 30 minutes to give) is made up entirely of questions -- there isn't a declarative sentence in the whole deck. "How Smart..." could be retitled "Zen and the Art of the Public Talk".

I was lucky enough to invite Rich to speak at an otherwise completely useless Internet conference back in the mid-1990s, and shocked when he showed up. His presentation was on the evolution of reading, and how PowerPoint was changing the power structures - not to mention the architecture - of modern corporate America. He gave the entire presentation, held in a schockly convention center, in a full top hat, black coat and tails. At first people were chortling and making jokes, but somehow, as his words began to draw in the audience, the jokes subsided, and the costume made more and more [self-referential] sense. That was the kind of man Rich was - the holy fool who makes you laugh even as he's pumping you full of truth.

Rich, we miss you.

Researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI) have just released an extraordinary report (available here in pdf) on the complex and potentially devastating impacts of abrupt climate change. The pamphlet outlines, in plain English, the role of oceans in regulating global climate, and details how a slowdown or collapse of the world's warm and cold water currents could transform the world in as quickly as a decade.

Worryingly, there is far less structural scrutiny of the deep ocean's dynamics than there is of the atmosphere, although the two systems are deeply intertwined. What data exists suggests that massive change is may already be underway: the salinity of the waters of the North Atlantic has been dropping rapidly since mid-1960's, and this suggests a possible slowdown in the currents of the global oceanic conveyor. This is, according to the report, " the largest and most dramatic oceanic change ever measured in the era of modern instruments".

The implications of a weakening or a collapse of this system would be a profound mixed bag - some areas (such as those along the Eastern Seaboard of the US) could see much colder temperatures for up to a century, even as, paradoxically, the rest of the planet warmed. Other areas of the world would see drought and famine, and every aspect of the current global system would be stressed. This recent article in Fortune provides a good overview of the national security implications of such rapid climate change for the US. (In short: not good.)

The sustainability movement often finds itself in a difficult free-market-derived paradox. On the one hand, a long-term market perspective positively demands sustainable thinking on behalf of companies, product manufacturers, architects, etc. That's because, all other factors being equal, companies (and products, and buildings) which make more efficient use of resources, and which produce less waste, are inherently more productive and profitable. If a textile mill, for example, can use half the electricity and produce less waste byproduct by using natural, biodegradeable dyes, those benefits accrue directly to the bottom line; putting them in place should be a no-brainer for the mill's owner.

On the other hand, there is a widespread perception in many modern western economies that the short-term capital costs of installing improved, sustainable systems (and the commensurate drop in near-term profits that such efforts entail) make taking a more sustainable path impossible for many corporate leaders. As one corporate CEO put it to me, "I'd love to tread more lightly on the Earth, but if it costs me two down quarters I'll be out the door, and my sustainability initiative will go with me."

Thus, much of the sustainability movement seems stuck in a local minima of 'now-ist' free market capitalism: a tight focus on the short term prevents companies from investing in longer-term sustainable (and cost reducing) measures, which in turn leads to a dearth of both implementations and case studies, which in turn fuels the mistaken perception that sustainable initiatives don't have big payoffs, or have at most cosmetic ones, which in turn fuels an even greater focus on the the short-term. Another byproduct of this cycle is that customers don't see the benefits of sustainability, and therefore don't know to demand them; companies can't afford them and therefore have no incentive to educate the market to demand higher standards. (There is a faint whiff of the prisoner's dilemma here.)

Of course, there are plenty of places where the dynamics of the market are different. Companies in the developing world, for example, often struggle with undependable and antiquated infrastructure, and (relatively) high commodity costs for things like electricity and lumber. For organizations in this context, there is a clear rationale for sustainable design. (In Manila, or Kinshasa, where the power can go out sometimes five times a day, it makes sense to require less electricity to operate.) Of course, there are other major impediments to sustainable solutions in the developing world, including the lack of training among the elites, the lack of environmental or market regulations, the aping of Western-style, lowest-common denominator free-market systems, and a lack of labor protections, to name just a few. But there are also some remarkable sustainable success stories that have much to teach us.

The extraordinary Eastgate Building in Harare, Zimbabwe, is just one example of sustainable architecture that uses dramatically less energy by copying the successful strategies of indigenous natural systems. The building - the country's largest commercial and shopping complex - uses the same heating and cooling principles as a local termite mound. Termites in Zimbabwe build gigantic mounds inside of which they farm a fungus which is their primary food source. The fungus must be kept at exactly 87 degrees, while the temperatures outside range from 35 degrees (f) at night to 104 degrees (f) during the day. The termites achieve this remarkable feat by constantly opening and closing a series of heating a cooling vents throughout the mound over the course of the day.

Architect Mick Pearce used precisely the same strategy when designing the Eastgate Building, which has no airconditioning and virtually no heating. The building uses less than 10 percent of the energy of a conventional building its size. These efficiencies translated directly to the bottom line: The Eastgate's owners saved $3.5 million on a $36 million building because an air-conditioning plant didn't have to be imported. These savings were also realized by tennants: rents are 20 percent lower than in a new building next door. More on the Eastgate story is available here and here^(.pdf). Images of the building are available here.

This is a terrific example of sustainable architecture that is biomimetic, indigenous, and economically viable on its face. Yet the Eastgate story also demonstrates an important aspect of the sustainability/biomimicry trend - that incrementally greater value may be found by studying solutions from those niches (ecological and economic) where resources are more constrained than the ones you inhabit. Don't study the oasis - study the desert.

Yves Pigneur and colleagues at the Université de Lausanne in Switzerland have been doing important, deep thinking on future applications, economics, theory and practice of ad-hoc mobile networks. Such networks are mobile, scaleable, completely decentralized and highly dynamic -- think "P2P meets WiFi" -- with nodes constantly 'moving around', appearing, disappearing, joining the network and then breaking away. The complexities surrounding creating, sustaining and routing information around such networks in a reliable way is incredibly daunting. But the potential applications, and economic implications of such networks are incredible, and suggest a brewing revolution in mobility that puts '3G' rhetoric to shame.

Pigneur's research into 'terminodes' (mobile network nodes that also act as servers, an important element of ad-hoc networks) is stunning in its scope - driven by a 10-year scenario planning process, (see also here and here) their research has touched on everything from emergent mobile applications to an in-depth framework for multi-issue actor analysis for mobile business. This page is a virtual treasure trove of important papers on all facets of ad-hoc networks - and makes for a fascinating read.

Welcoming the new year on positive note, here is a remarkable, if belated CSMonitor story from about a year ago, sent along by Joschka Fischer, on how a group of Nigerian women have used non-violent shaming tactics to become a significant force for social change in oil-rich Nigeria:

Observers say that protests by women are becoming the most effective tool to force social improvements by US multinational oil companies doing business in Africa.
The Escravos women, who ranged in age between 30 to 90, used a potent tactic: they threatened to take their clothes off.

Public nudity would have embarrassed the expatriates among the terminal's more than 1,000 workers and caused a deeper sense of shame for many Nigerian employees.

"By the time the women bare their chests and go around, people are really in trouble," says Bolanle Awe, one of the founders of the Women's Research and Documentation Centre at Nigeria's University of Ibadan. "It's a curse on whoever the ruler is."

The women successfully and non-violently persuade Chevron to send senior executives to negotiate concessions, including the employment of more local people, investment in electricity supply and other infrastructure projects, and assistance for the villagers in setting up poultry and fish farms to supply the terminal's cafeteria. This is in stark contrast to the men's much more violent, and far less-successful efforts.

Thanks to advances in genomics and taxonomy, the system of identifying and classifying species of living things is about to undergo a fundamental transformation that may remake the way we perceive and organize the living world around us.

For more than 250 years, biologists have been using variations of the system invented by the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus to classify living organisms. In the first few centuries of this grand taxonomic endeavor, individual species were identified largely by their morphology and geography - i.e. what shape they were, and where they were. By the 1940s and 50s, as people began to better understand genetics and breeding, a species was redefined as a group of organisms that could successfully breed with each other. Today, a "species" of plant, animal or other living thing today is defined as a distinct population of living things capable of reproducing and/or exchanging genes. (This definition unites single species like dogs, who can be as morphologically different as a poodle and a rotweiler, yet have the ability to interbreed, while it separates geographically distinct variants of east and west African monkeys, which, while capable of exchanging genes in theory, can't do so in practice.)

Like any large, distributed human project, the Linnean system is hazy in patches, and not without its insider debates. Yet on the outside, the resulting tree of life has retained a fairly cohesive structure, with its dusty-but-stable Latin separations of Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Group and Species familiar to anyone who visits a natural history museum.

Internally, however, the entire taxonomic endeavor is rife with debate and innovation. Critics of the Linnean system, which originated even before Darwin, say that it isn't up to the needs of modern biological science, in two respects.

First, even today the taxonomic system relies far too heavily on "apparent", or morphological, differences between supposed species. Distinguishing between the differences that matter and the differences that don't is a subjective and notoriously flawed process: not only do we misconstrue apparent differences that don't really exist, we miss differences that do, because they are frequently invisible to the naked eye. Second, the Linnean system was originally designed to articulate differences in current species, not articulate their common origins in the past, and this is where much of the taxonomic 'action' is in biology today. Modern evolutionary biology gives us the tools to talk about phylogeny (i.e.species' origins), but the taxonomic system doesn't adequately address this.

Now, major work is underway in two very different areas to address these (perceived) taxonomic deficiencies.

First is the development of PhyloCode, a new formal set of rules governing phylogenetic nomenclature for botany and zoology. PhyloCode claims to apply the idea of common ancestry to biological nomenclature, so as to complete the Darwinian Revolution. It exists as a draft document on the Internet, (a little like an RFC) and is already spurring fascinating and intense debate. (Contemporary Linneans counter that there are too many holes in our understanding to build a phlyogenetic view of all living things, that it doesn't add and may in fact diminish the informational content of the overall taxonomic scheme, that the Linnean system either works already or can be made to work.) The first international meeting on phylogenetic nomenclature is scheduled for July 6-9, 2004 in Paris.

Second is the development of so-called Barcodes of Life. Championed by Professor Paul Hebert at the University of Guelph in Canada, Mark Stoeckle at Rockefeller University, and others, this approach would identify short strands of DNA which uniquely identify a specific species, much like UPC codes on consumer products. Importantly, it would take human judgement completely out of the picture - these researchers envision a system where a field biologist could pick a leaf, clip a tuft of fur, or otherwise collect a small DNA sample from a single organism, put it into an Internet-enabled gene sequencer wirelessly connected to a "Google for Lifeforms", and identify the organism instantaneously.

Of course, there are significant challenges to overcome before such a system could be developed, including identifying precisely which segments of DNA can be used for identification. But unlike PhyloCode, which is philosophically contentious and would require massive change to implement, Hebert has already demonstrated that DNA barcoding can work to augment the work of human taxonomists. He recently examined 1,000 species of insects -- ants, bees, dragonflies, mayflies, moths and butterflies -- and found he could tell all but a few apart. In a box filled with legs of 50 Central American butterflies thought to be from a single species, he found at least 10 genetically distinct species. More information on DNA barcoding can be found in this recent MercuryNews article, at the Rockefeller University site of the recent Barcoding Conference, and in this recent BioScience article by Stoeckle.

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