Friday, June 6, 2008

RepRap replicates itself


http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080605211522.htm

RepRap, the prototype for a autoreplicating (but not self assembling) machine finally is able to build all of its parts.

This is thrilling and possibly a milestone in a future Agalmics history. It is quite reassuring to see these bottom-up efforts to bloom and spread, to be the heralds of a better, decentralized tomorrow, where, as the RepRap motto says, there will be "wealth without money".

Hopefully some day with future versions RepRap or something similar, and with distributed biotech and Open Source protocols for culturing meat and other protein sources, we will be freer from the tyranny of having to sell ourselves in order to survive.

Stumble Delicious Technorati Twitter Facebook

Monday, May 5, 2008

In need of a new Green Revolution

http://news. yahoo.com/ s/livescience/ radicalscienceai mstosolvefoodcri sis

Some of us have been asking for public policies for supporting Biotech and educating the people better about the promises and risks of Genetically Modified Organism (GM) crops.

Maybe this crisis will prove to be the factor that triggers better acceptance of GM food. Hopefully this support will promote the growth of GM projects from small teams, with a set of OS tools, with non-profit purposes instead of the current system, where only the big players can afford to create new crops tailored to their commercial interest, as they are the only ones who can afford the expensive trials and the huge lobbying needed to get these crops approved.

Paradoxically, by insisting on moratoriums and strict bans, consumer activists and ecologists reduce the possible GM diversity and concentrate the power of determining the course of research in agriculture in a few corporate hands. Their actions lead to a future that many of us deem as undesirable. We cannot let those few companies determine the fate of the new crops according to commercial interests, we must fight for more diversity in the food chain and tailor crops to local growing needs.

Stumble Delicious Technorati Twitter Facebook

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Well, maybe we do learn

The Zambian president, Levy Mwanawasa, asked other African countries to boycott the arms ship heading to Zimbabwe.

According to the BBC, Mwanawasa said: "We don't want a situation which will escalate the [tension] in Zimbabwe more than what it is,".

Finally some common sense coming from a top politician in Africa about Zimbabwe. But, to be fair, his mild words are complemented by others government's decisions of not allowing the cargo in and the position of the International Transport Workers Federation.

Stumble Delicious Technorati Twitter Facebook

Thursday, April 17, 2008

We never learn, do we?

No, it seems we never, ever, learn.

No matter how hard the lesson has been. No matter how much we have suffered, no matter how others need our support and empathy, we never fucking learn.

I wish I could express my outrage concerning the South African policy to Zimbabwe. The SA government does not only support Mugabe's atrocities, but also they allow to go through their territory new arms for Mugabe's government, even when they know the episodes of political violence and the tyranny of the current government of Zimbabwe.

It seems that Thabo Mbeki and his allies have forgotten how the UN enforced an arms embargo against the Apartheid supporting regime of their nation. It seems they have forgotten what happened in Rwanda not long ago, when we chose to look elsewhere. It seems they lack not only memory, but also compassion and common sense.

And now, in this age of political correctness, we must be cheerful, nod and say yes, the Emperor's new clothes are beautiful. We must be soft, we cannot say "You are awful", we must not offend and agree politely that genocide and oppression are cultural peculiarities. The age of irony, sarcasm and dissent seems gone.

I dream of those times, when you could tell truths without being accused of bigotry.

We need to be blunt and shocking, we need to change.

Here, a memory of a past long gone, when calling an asshole an asshole was not frowned at:



Disclaimer:

I KNOW that all white South Africans were not racists. I know that there was a lot of pain and struggle before black people were granted equality, it did not happen out of the blue. I know that much of the arms embargo was nothing but lip service. I know the fact that the UN decided to not support the apartheid government was not magical. But even knowing all this I just cannot avoid to think that the acts of the South African govt. are not very different from supporting the old apartheid system.

Fortunately there are people who stand up and refuse to go on the macabre parade of indifference. According to the BBC, the South African Transport and Allied Workers Union (Satawu) said it would be grossly irresponsible to transport the lethal cargo and the high court in Durban ruled the transport inland as illegal. It is Mbeki and his ministers the ones that refuse to do the right thing, on the excuse of sovereignty. But, we have known for long time that Mbeki has impaired judgment, after all, what can we expect of a guy who kept an AIDS denier as minister of health?

Stumble Delicious Technorati Twitter Facebook

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Chinese student targeted by patriotic assholes

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/04/16/net-bullies-target-c.html

According to BoingBoing:

A Chinese student at Duke who participated in pro-Tibet protests on campus -- after befriending her Tibetan dorm-mate -- has become the target of brutal online and offline attacks. Thousands of nationalist Chinese thugs (some claiming to be Duke students) see her actions as "traitorous," and have threatened her with personal attacks in comment threads and, apparently, in person.

Online, the bullies have posted her photograph, her US phone number, Chinese identity card number, her parents' address and home number in China. Offline, her parents' home in Qingdao is said to have been attacked with rocks, and her parents are now in hiding.


Another example of how silly, irrational, evil and dangerous can patriotism be.

Stumble Delicious Technorati Twitter Facebook

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

2007: The Transmurine year

It seems that 2007 was a good year to be a lab mouse.

Some outstanding developments in cell biology, genetics, evo-devo, and several other branches of Biology, have improved the murine condition and given more lifespan, strength or stamina to mice. Exactly what we, transhumanists hope to achieve for our own kind. These mice, as the Betterhumans motto says, are “better than well”.

We were used to seeing mice with impaired functions, some of them extremely dysfunctional and with shocking phenotypes. Often they died before long, destroyed by its own conditions, after a painful life. Now, after understanding better the mechanisms of several body systems, after gaining a better viewpoint of genetic regulatory circuits, we have begun to tinker more delicately and exquisitely with the genes of these mice, now with superb results that give us hope and further enthusiasm for the promise of enhancing human capacities. This new generation of mice is only the beginning of a new era of improved mammals that will beat their natural counterparts in several aspects and aren't impaired in any sense, compared to them.

The first of these mice is only a mouse with scientific and aesthetic value, as its phenotype is not visible and not useful for itself, but to us, human experimenters. The Brainbow mice express genes for Green, Yellow, Red and Cyan. Fluorescent Proteins are coupled to the Cre/lox recombination systems. A probabilistic recombination event renders these genes functional and the combined expression of several (but not all at the same time, as the recombination is an stochastic event, different in every cell) different genes create as many as 90 possible shades of colors for each neuron (or any other cell). The differential gene expression and coloring of each cell allow experimenters to keep track of individual cells, which have the same color across all their lengths. Yes, this modification is not helpful to its bearers, but surely is interesting, beautiful and offers interesting body modification perspectives if it were possible to achieve in adult individuals rather than only in embryos. Coupling the expression of Cre to a Turing Pattern-like expression system would lead to extremely interesting skin color patterns, similar in shape to tigers or leopards, but with many different colors in a random way. Maybe we could even figure how to tweak cell receptors and gene expression to create fractal patterns on skin. Maybe in the future tattoos will be induced spreading different substances over the skin, one for each color, and maybe this gene expression could be turned off and return skin to its normal state. In any case, this is good news for Morphological Freedom fans.

I already commented on another post about one of the star mice from this year, the myostatin deficient mice that develop four times more muscle than regular mice. In this case, possibly we could mimic the effects of the alterations using drugs that modulate the activity of these proteins and therefore we would not need any gene modification to have the effect in humans. Possibly these drugs will be heavily regulated and their use for other than medical conditions as muscular dystrophy, deemed illegal, however, they are going to be used for other purposes, whether we like it or not. Again, I would say that the honest thing to do would be to end the hypocrisy and allow this kind of modification to be used in professional sports, but only limited to a league of enhanced athletes, separated from regular athletes, as pairing unaided persons with the ones who use this kind of tech would be unfair. What will happen with public attention to both leagues? Would it lead to a mass approval and support of transhumanist points of views, once the people realize that their beloved sport heroes are de facto transhumans? I do not have the slightest idea, but certainly that is going to be very interesting.

The overexpression of the SAC domain of the prostate apoptosis response-4 gene causes resistance to tumors in mice, both spontaneous and induced by oncogenes. The SAC domain seems to induce apoptosis when the cell machine gets out of control, not in normal or immortalized cells, where proliferation is out of control. This apoptosis is independent of p53 and other tumor supressor genes. The specificity of the action is conferred by Protein Kinase A, an enzyme that has increased activity in tumoral cells. The overexpression of SAC does not affect the growth, development or lifespan of mice, that stay tumor free and normal in every other sense.

Maybe the most impressive performance of the year is the one from PEPCK-mus mice. These mice overexpress the enzyme PEPCK in muscle, that converts Phosphoenol Pyruvate to Oxalacetate, generating ATP from ADP in the process and bypassing lactic acid production. This might sound dull and uninteresting, but the effects are simply breathtaking. PEPCK-mus mice can run more than ten times the normal distance that regular mice can run, at higher speeds. The levels of lactic acid in the cells of these mice remain the same during heavy exercise as during rest. Here's the video of the comparison between both mice:



Simply impressive. I barely have words to describe what I feel when I see this. These mice also remain fertile for a longer time and live longer than normal mice. These are truly transmice, improved, enchanced. However, there are problems, as they eat more food (but they stay fit) and have slightly more agressive behaviour. These drawbacks must be studied in depth before we can port the mechanism to humans (And it might be not possible due to physiological differences), but overall, the sole fact that it is possible to achieve such effects overexpressing a single gene is tremendously encouraging.

I think that the experiment that will beat the current M Prize holder is already on its course or will begin in 2008 and that even more interesting mice will show up this year at an even faster pace. Maybe we are at the point where we need a metric that accounts for the number of modified genes in a mouse, the number of ways in that it differs from regular mice and how different it is. Maybe a better option is some ratio between the number of genes modified and the number of pathways that are affected by these genes, multiplied by some measure of longevity. Maybe this hypothetical number is impossible to calculate, as we would have to assign values to staying cancer-free, running for longer, seeing in the ultraviolet region, or being able to photosynthetize and digest cellulose. This is utterly absurd, but maybe we could find a measure other than the lifespan of the enhanced mice, maybe the resistance of cultured cells to carcinogenic agents, its behavior concerning fasting or radiation poisoning. It is a complex issue but I still think it would be worthy to acknowledge the fact that as a result of several extensive modifications these new mice show improved phenotypes. The crux of the problem, I guess, is that we would be trying to assign values to what we think that ultimately would lead to improved humans themselves, and there is no single concept of what it means to be “better” when options, situations and viewpoints are almost endless. But even for something as widely adopted as Moore's law, measuring the speed of the processor alone, without accounting for software requirements is not a reliable way to predict end-user experience, as a relatively new processor with Windows Vista can do much worse than an older one running an older version of Windows or a lightweight distro of Linux, so maybe sticking to a number as a guide of what's inside the mouse is not as crazy as it sounds.

When will the Transhuman Year arrive? Hard to say. All these developments have been used to create new animals, not applied to an existing mouse that then changed its phenotype. Before we can benefit form this research we still have to develop safe ways of transfecting genes into existing animals and triggering their expression in a controlled fashion. Current viral vectors are unreliable and dangerous, however, even if safer methods are developed, they still will have to go through a regulatory nightmare before we are able to use them, unless unethical paradises and biotech havens arise, probably in developing countries. A way to get funding for clinical tests and support a successful industry before human application of the tech is ready could be use the technology in pets: life extension, rejuvenation, enhancing of beloved pets, selling colorful kittens, extra fast greyhounds for racing, developing dogs and cats that will live for longer but that won't reproduce unless given a pill, avoiding the need of neutering processes. This temporary and selective sterilization would be fairly easy to develop given that we have safe transfection vectors. Then it could be applied to existing animals, inoculating the vector on them and maybe help to solve the problem of urban canine overpopulation. I think that a lot of people would buy these treatments for their pets, if the alternative is death or hurting them with unnecessary organ removals, and that revenue could be used to fund further research in humans.

It has been a good year for H+ ideas, a good year for scientific research and a good year for mice. There are a lot of unsolved issues and a lot of problems that require not tech solutions but political and social ones. Sadly we cannot do much about it, other than keep trying to give education and critical thinking tools to as many people as possible. Expose people to other world views and experiences, so they realize that life can be different, can be improved. That leaders should be accountable for their actions and that the real wealth of nations lies not on the land, the industry or even on computers, but on human ingenuity and love for knowledge.

Stumble Delicious Technorati Twitter Facebook

Sunday, March 2, 2008

Chagas outbreak in Caracas proves WHO wrong

According to a report released by the World Health Organization in 2006, it would be feasible to eradicate Chagas’ disease by 2010, using only programs for vector control and existing drugs. These would be good news if their expectations were grounded on sound facts, which they aren’t, as we will see.

Eradicating Chagas’ disease will be an extremely difficult effort which will take a lot of time and indeed, might be impossible. Humans are not the only mammalian host for Trypanosoma cruzi, the parasite that causes the disease. Opossums, rodents, dogs and monkeys can carry the parasite and often do. They live deep in the wild where vector control programs are not applied and roam around areas where humans live too, acting as reservoirs for the parasite. Of course, if there are no vectors it is unlikely that people will get infected and infection rates will be reduced. However, Chagas is foodborne, can be transmitted from an infected mother to her child during pregnancy and through blood transfusions. Testing for Chagas at blood banks is not mandatory in some endemic areas and sometimes, even if mandatory, tests are not enforced in blood banks due to lack of resources.

Eradicating a disease is something completely different than controlling it and the WHO should know better than this over optimistic release. Eradicating is to wipe out completely from the Earth the causing agent of the disease, as happened with smallpox (except for the frozen samples stored in Russia and the US) and probably will happen with Polio (again, except for the stored samples) in a few years, if fundamentalist Muslims does not oppose again to immunization efforts in Africa. As long there are forests, jungles and wild mammals Chagas won’t be eradicated, even if we can apply programs for minimizing new infections and we could work harder on new drugs and a vaccine.

Chagas disease is often linked to misery, filthiness and decay in rural regions. Close contact with animals and primitive housing where the kissing bugs, the vectors, can live comfortably make a deadly combination. The following picture shows an example of such conditions, in San Miguel, a village in the Urdaneta municipality, in Lara State, western Venezuela.

However, with high population mobility, people are not confined anymore to places like this and often emigrate. This has lead to the spread of Chagas disease to countries where it was unknown and vectors do not exist, like Japan, where cases has been reported due to blood transfusions. On the other hand, the change of climate patterns has made possible for the kissing bug and other vectors to move to the North and colonize the southern areas of the US, where there are not only cases of Chagas between immigrants, but also native fauna infected. Screening in blood banks can stop this way of transmission to humans, however, but the infection between animals is a completely different issue.

An example of what the future might bring happened last year in Caracas, in the Chacao municipality, the wealthiest of Venezuela. An outbreak of foodborne Chagas disease affected tenths of persons, in the middle of Caracas, among the richest and most powerful, T. cruzi is alive and well. A terrible tragedy that already has costed lives and mangled several others, with the awful side effects of current therapies, not specific and only effective in early stages of the disease, which often go unnoticed.

This is a lesson for all of us. Life is not a static system, it changes and adapts, it is dynamic, we cannot ignore that fact. To assume that we control all the variables concerning disease transmission is only a delusion and the WHO should be more realistic when making public statements. Declarations like that show that even in at the World Health organization there are widespread ignorance and unrealistic expectations about a health problem that affects to 20 million people, of mostly poor people, with no power or voice, even in the context of their countries. But slowly and surely, that situation is bound to change and Chagas sooner or later will affect more people. We need more funding and different strategies to cope with this problem, before more tragedies occur.

Stumble Delicious Technorati Twitter Facebook

Sunday, February 24, 2008

Bill of rights for scientists? No, thanks!

I just read the Scientists and Engineers for America's Bill of Rights for Scientists.

I really did not like the whole issue.

The proposed rights themselves are flawless. But I do not think that these should be special rights for scientists. Most of them should be standard citizen's rights, not tailored rights for an elite.

Here it is:

1. Public policy shall be made using the best available scientific, technical, and engineering knowledge.
2. No government organization shall knowingly distribute false or misleading information.
3. Government funding for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education shall only be used for evidence-based curricula.
4. No one should fear reprisals or intimidation because of the results of his or her research.
5. Scientists, technologists, and engineers conducting research or analysis with public funding shall be free of unreasonable restrictions in discussing and publishing their work, and the results of governmentally-funded research and analysis shall be made open to the public without unreasonable delay.
6. A clear, public, and transparent process shall be used to make decisions about restricting public access to information for reasons of national security. There shall be a process for challenging decisions, and remedial measures to correct mistakes and abuses of the classification system.
7. Employees exposing what they believe to be manipulation of research and analysis for political or ideological reasons shall be protected from intimidation, retribution, or adverse personnel action resulting from the decision to speak out.
8. Appointments to publicly funded advisory committees shall be based on professional and academic qualifications, not political affiliation or ideology.


1: Public policy affects us all, not only scientists and engineers. It must be a right of everybody that policy making is not affected by ideology and is ruled by fact and not by wishful thinking. Americans should know that this is not a Science-only issue.

2: Why should this be a right for scientists and engineers? This is a right of every person and those who act against this right deserve no place in any government.

3: This should be instead a children or student's right. A right to education based on facts, not on misconceptions.

4: Again, why only for scientists? What about journalists? Or bloggers, for that matter?

I won't keep commenting on each right by itself. I think that every single individual should have those basic rights. Not only scientists, but every government employee should have the right to speak about coercion and manipulation at their work caused by other officials or as a explicit government policy, as is needed here in Venezuela.

We need an educated and free society to keep building the future, we need boldness and creativity to beat the problems we face now. This is particularly important in these days when a skilled workforce is needed for further economic growth and social change. This is important, when issues like irrational fear of GMOs and/or creationism plague the policy making and the minds of the citizens of the most wealthy and developed countries on Earth. From another point of view, this is mere self-preservation. After all, if current technological giants stop developing Biotech or teaching evolution, others won't commit the same mistake. Having educated citizens (and not only scientists) is necessary for rationalism and democracy to succeed. Americans now are victims of their extremely dumb policy concerning university costs, forcing students to endure years of expenses and begin their working life in enormous debt, even though a skilled population is retiring and there are not enough personnel to replace them. They have also arrived at plain stupid situations, as debating whether to immunize school girls to prevent cancer, grounded on "moral" reasons. And now, thanks to paranoia and lousy health care, it is not such a good destination to live as it was decades before for skilled foreign people. So, policy making based on almost Libertarian and very conservative viewpoints, but not grounded in reality has contributed to the present day situation.

Is it really only a scientist's problem? I really do not think so, and the people of Sefora should know much better. These inquiry rights should be part of the rights for everybody, claiming them only for ourselves won't change a lot of things and will divorce us from reality.

Stumble Delicious Technorati Twitter Facebook

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

What are you hiding, Julius Baer?

The Bank Julius Baer has sued Wikileaks in California. Wikileaks is a website that publishes documents leaked by whistblowers of governments and corporations. BJB was successful in shutting down one domain of Wikileaks that was registered in the US, while leaving intact many more. They were also successful in alerting the world that they have many ugly secrets, including harassing people and attracting lots of undoubtedly unwanted attention.

It is funny to see the failure of all the pathetic efforts to hide and censor. It is great to see how many of the corporate people are still living in the 20th century and acting in that way, only to have it backfire through their lack of vision and intelligence. Hopefully, they will give us more moments of pleasure and joy in the future before they finally understand this strategy does not work in this era and will never work again. And hopefully, once they understand that, we will have new tools and tactics to fight secrecy, oppression, ignorance and injustice.

This is the Technoliberation age, folks.
We are not the Lernaean Hydra, no. We have even more heads, we are more resilient. Coercion and censorship are not the way to deal with modern transparency.
Money laundering and tax evasion cause hurt to a lot of people and deserve to be punished. The Swiss are smart enough to thrive in a world where corrupt bastards no longer store their money in Swiss banks. Maybe the ones who are scared are just the ones who are not creative or smart enough to make a living off intellectual effort and hard labor, rather than just hiding other people's money from the legitimate owners, as many times is the case.

Thank you very much, gentlemen of the BJB. Now, thanks to you, a lot more people know about your practices and about the things you are trying to hide.

Stumble Delicious Technorati Twitter Facebook

Sunday, February 17, 2008

Isn't Islam a religion of peace?



That is the claim of a lot of Muslims.
Others just try to silence dissent, claim "Blasphemy" and threaten people who depicts images of the prophet. Others do the latter while claiming that Islam is peaceful. And many of them want to keep us quiet. No. What is going to happen is that we are going to post even more of this type of image and we are going to use our creativity to make fun of you and of your beliefs. I am sorry if moderate Muslims are offended by it, but we are are offended by all the oppression that non-Muslim, women and many people endures under Muslim fundamentalists. And few people seems to care in the Muslim world. If you really care about Islam's image problem, then help to fight that kind of people and make noise when they hurt innocent people.

Misquoting Depeche Mode:

I do want to start fucking
blasphemous rumors
and I don't think that God
has any sense of humor

And if I die
I expect to find
damn nothing

Stumble Delicious Technorati Twitter Facebook

Friday, January 11, 2008

Martin Rees: We should take our posthuman future seriously

Edge Foundation`s World Question Center has a very interesting question this year: What have you changed your mind about?. Some of the answers are very interesting and a lot of interesting people are answering. Surprisingly, I have met quite a few of them at Scifoo 2007.

Martin Reese's answer
surprised me a lot, even if it should not:

We Should Take the 'Posthuman' Era Seriously

(...)

Human-induced changes are occurring with runaway speed. It's hard to predict a mere century from now, because what will happen depends on us — this is the first century where humans can collectively transform, or even ravage, the entire biosphere. Humanity will soon itself be malleable, to an extent that's qualitatively new in the history of our species.

(...)

We are custodians of a 'posthuman' future — here on Earth and perhaps beyond — that can't just be left to writers of science fiction.


Slowly, H+ is spreading among intellectuals and scientists, slowly we are getting to the point where our views of the future will get more attention and respect.

PS: Speaking about H+, I am running for the board of the WTA, even if I am very doubtful about my chances of winning, there are a lot of excellent candidates. Whether I get to the board or not, I want to contribute to build this future for all of us. I probably will post my candidacy statement once elections are over.

My thesis is going well, soon I hope to post a preliminary model.

Stumble Delicious Technorati Twitter Facebook

Wednesday, January 9, 2008

Allons enfants de la patrie, le chauvinisme et arriveè

It seems that people all around the world are yearning for earlier times of grandeur. Not only Iranians, but also French.

President Sarkozy wants the people to listen to France, all around the world. And how is he going to do it? Shutting down the English and Arabic broadcasting channels from France.

According to me, this is almost the stupidest PR move I have seen from a government, second only to the way America treats tourists. According to Sarkozy:

"Between Al Jazeera -- the Arab vision -- and CNN -- the Anglo-Saxon vision -- we would like to express a French vision, but to express a French vision, I would really prefer that we express it in the French language,"
French is not a predominant language anymore and broadcasting in French is going to be only preaching to the converted. I have to say that I can speak a little bit of French and I am interested in learning it well, so my position is not prejudiced against the language. I cannot understand TV in French now, and I doubt that billions of people around the world would learn the language just to know what France has to say. They will just skip France.

Sarkozy should learn from DWTV, one of my favorite news service, offered in several languages. I find DW programming very interesting, when I watch TV. By the way, Ich spreche kein Deustch, but I am more comfortable and familiar with German viewpoints than with French, even if I can read a little bit of the latter language.

I do not know in which world Sarkozy lives, but it's time for him to wake up.

Stumble Delicious Technorati Twitter Facebook

Sharing LSD via Bluetooth at the Oldest Place in the World

A friend from the US, involved in one of my current projects, wanted to go to Angel Falls, inside the Canaima National Park, this December. He invited me to come along and discuss our plans while we were there. I got a tour at a reasonable price, departing from Caracas, staying one night at Ciudad Bolivar and departing the next day for Canaima, where we stayed 3 days and 2 nights. The place was excellent and I really felt an interest in geology for the first time in my life. Knowing that the rocks where we were standing were almost as old as the whole planet made me realize the relative insignificance of every human and, at the same time, admire the fact that we are here and as ephemeral as we are, we are much more complex both in physiology and behavior than any inanimate structure. The feeling of humility to the universe that such structures impose is overwhelming.

In the boat ride (3 ass-numbing hours) to the falls, we learned the Transhumanist meaning of extreme sports: Whatever activity that implies risk, Alcor says they cannot retrieve your body if you die during it. Near the falls we took a very impressive shower with the mist that came down from them, clothes and all.

The guides were aboriginals, from the Pemon people. These guys spoke Spanish, a fairly good English and their own language. On the night previous on our excursion to the Falls, I was listening to music in a new phone-camera-MP3 player (Nokia 5200) that I got as Christmas gift from my father, when our Pemon guide asks me if I have music that he might like. He had a phone with Bluetooth capacity also and much more sophisticated than mine. There, at less than two miles from the Angel Falls, in the heart of the Jungle (with capital J), in the deep of the oldest geological formation in the world, the Macizo Guayanes, information wanted to be free. I showed him the playlist of the phone, not a lot of music, and my taste is somewhat strange. But something got his attention: Beatles-Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds (LSD). That was the almost the only thing he asked me to send him. And so did I, swapping files using modern high tech in that strange place, hostile to mankind, with a member of a people that have lived there since long ago, slowly mutating their ways to adapt the modern life, but still living from the jungle, albeit in a different sense today.



The Pemon people have been exposed to modern technology and they use it frequently. The above picture, albeit fuzzy, shows a Pemon on his traditional hammock, listening to his iPod (Hell, most of the people I know, and that includes me, do not own an iPod here), at the camp, less than two miles from the Falls. They have also DirecTV antennas and computers back in the town. The antennas are not for the tourists, it seems, since many of them are in particular households. They use e-mail and cellphones to coordinate with the tourists and get more profits, cutting out the middlemen from travel agencies and tour operators. The drawback of all this is that the village was very neglected, unpaved roads, very clean, but there were parasitic flies that attacked an otherwise beautiful dog that was there. iPods and DirecTV but bad roads and ectoparasites are not promising symptoms however, I can understand that paving the roads and establishing pest control programs are fairly expensive initiatives that need a huge local commitment or government's funding, but buying an iPod, a DirecTV receiver or a computer can be done with no other approval than self and is comparatively modest, these people get good money from tourism. I can see kids using XO laptops here, getting connected and contributing to the web. Maybe they will set up a live webcasting from the Angel Falls or put a webcam in a viewpoint, so people from all over the world can see its magnificent beauty and they will get even more tourists. Maybe they will request hybrid or totally solar off-shore engines for their boats, as these oil based engines depend on oil supply and pollute a lot the otherwise pristine rivers. But certainly it is a problem that all the use they have for the latest tech is entertainment while many of their needs are still unmet. They have solved their income problem using the Internet, now, what else can they solve by themselves if given the tools? This is a very interesting question that I hope to see answered in few years. At least it is obvious that they can use the Internet as a tool for getting a better life and network with people from all around the world (The camp was full with Australians, and I realized sadly that I cannot understand Australian accent, and sometimes, not even British). In these days the Pemon are also Globally Connected.

PS: The tour operator that prepared our trip was Osprey Tours:
This operator is ideal if you want to leave everything in their hands, arrive in Caracas and just leave for the Falls, no worries about cabs, airplane tickets or light aircraft (the scary Cessna single engine planes that we used to go to Canaima). They were extremely helpful and responsible, we didn't have any problem with them and all I can say is that if you want a headache free tour, they are the right people.
If you prefer to get your plane tickets from Caracas to Ciudad Bolivar and back, the taxis, and live the Venezuelan adventure with no assistance (As a Venezuelan, I would not recommend it to foreigners), but arrange better prices, you can contact directly to the Pemon operators here:
Excursiones Kavac:
excursioneskavac[at]gmail.com
excursioneskavac[at]yahoo.com
excursioneskavac[at]hotmail.com
m16_sapiens[at]hotmail.comm (Anthon Alex, one of the guides)

WARNING: The tour can be somewhat expensive depending on how you choose to pay. If you pay in dollars, using your credit cards, you'll get 2150 bolivares per each dollar. If you exchange your dollars in the black market, on the street, and then pay with bolivares, you can get a much better exchange rate (But I cannot say how much, it is illegal according to the Venezuelan law). What is legal, however, is to exchange your dollars at a border, for instance, in Colombia to Colombian Pesos and then exchange to Bolivares, you'll get a fairly good rate, but not as much as you could on the streets, however, in the streets you could be ripped off. Be aware of that and you are advised that it is illegal.
But, nobody really cares a lot about this law. Besides getting the bolivar at the right prices, you'll have to visit the banks and deposit money, you will also have to get the plane ticket and probably deal with people that cannot speak even the most basic English.

Stumble Delicious Technorati Twitter Facebook

Friday, January 4, 2008

2007: The Transmurine year

It seems that 2007 was a good year to be a lab mouse.

Some outstanding developments in cell biology, genetics, evo-devo, and several other branches of Biology, have improved the murine condition and given more lifespan, strength or stamina to mice. Exactly what we, transhumanists hope to achieve for our own kind. These mice, as the Betterhumans motto says, are “better than well”.

We were used to seeing mice with impaired functions, some of them extremely dysfunctional and with shocking phenotypes. Often they died before long, destroyed by its own conditions, after a painful life. Now, after understanding better the mechanisms of several body systems, after gaining a better viewpoint of genetic regulatory circuits, we have begun to tinker more delicately and exquisitely with the genes of these mice, now with superb results that give us hope and further enthusiasm for the promise of enhancing human capacities. This new generation of mice is only the beginning of a new era of improved mammals that will beat their natural counterparts in several aspects and aren't impaired in any sense, compared to them.

The first of these mice is only a mouse with scientific and aesthetic value, as its phenotype is not visible and not useful for itself, but to us, human experimenters. The Brainbow mice express genes for Green, Yellow, Red and Cyan. Fluorescent Proteins are coupled to the Cre/lox recombination systems. A probabilistic recombination event renders these genes functional and the combined expression of several (but not all at the same time, as the recombination is an stochastic event, different in every cell) different genes create as many as 90 possible shades of colors for each neuron (or any other cell). The differential gene expression and coloring of each cell allow experimenters to keep track of individual cells, which have the same color across all their lengths. Yes, this modification is not helpful to its bearers, but surely is interesting, beautiful and offers interesting body modification perspectives if it were possible to achieve in adult individuals rather than only in embryos. Coupling the expression of Cre to a Turing Pattern-like expression system would lead to extremely interesting skin color patterns, similar in shape to tigers or leopards, but with many different colors in a random way. Maybe we could even figure how to tweak cell receptors and gene expression to create fractal patterns on skin. Maybe in the future tattoos will be induced spreading different substances over the skin, one for each color, and maybe this gene expression could be turned off and return skin to its normal state. In any case, this is good news for Morphological Freedom fans.

I already commented on another post about one of the star mice from this year, the myostatin deficient mice that develop four times more muscle than regular mice. In this case, possibly we could mimic the effects of the alterations using drugs that modulate the activity of these proteins and therefore we would not need any gene modification to have the effect in humans. Possibly these drugs will be heavily regulated and their use for other than medical conditions as muscular dystrophy, deemed illegal, however, they are going to be used for other purposes, whether we like it or not. Again, I would say that the honest thing to do would be to end the hypocrisy and allow this kind of modification to be used in professional sports, but only limited to a league of enhanced athletes, separated from regular athletes, as pairing unaided persons with the ones who use this kind of tech would be unfair. What will happen with public attention to both leagues? Would it lead to a mass approval and support of transhumanist points of views, once the people realize that their beloved sport heroes are de facto transhumans? I do not have the slightest idea, but certainly that is going to be very interesting.

The overexpression of the SAC domain of the prostate apoptosis response-4 gene causes resistance to tumors in mice, both spontaneous and induced by oncogenes. The SAC domain seems to induce apoptosis when the cell machine gets out of control, not in normal or immortalized cells, where proliferation is out of control. This apoptosis is independent of p53 and other tumor supressor genes. The specificity of the action is conferred by Protein Kinase A, an enzyme that has increased activity in tumoral cells. The overexpression of SAC does not affect the growth, development or lifespan of mice, that stay tumor free and normal in every other sense.

Maybe the most impressive performance of the year is the one from PEPCK-mus mice. These mice overexpress the enzyme PEPCK in muscle, that converts Phosphoenol Pyruvate to Piruvate, generating ATP from ADP in the process. This might sound dull and uninteresting, but the effects are simply breathtaking. PEPCK-mus mice can run more than ten times the normal distance that regular mice can run, at higher speeds. The levels of lactic acid in the cells of these mice remain the same during heavy exercise as during rest. Here's the video of the comparison between both mice:



Simply impressive. I barely have words to describe what I feel when I see this. These mice also remain fertile for a longer time and live longer than normal mice. These are truly transmice, improved, enchanced. However, there are problems, as they eat more food (but they stay fit) and have slightly more agressive behaviour. These drawbacks must be studied in depth before we can port the mechanism to humans (And it might be not possible due to physiological differences), but overall, the sole fact that it is possible to achieve such effects overexpressing a single gene is tremendously encouraging.

I think that the experiment that will beat the current M Prize holder is already on its course or will begin in 2008 and that even more interesting mice will show up this year at an even faster pace. Maybe we are at the point where we need a metric that accounts for the number of modified genes in a mouse, the number of ways in that it differs from regular mice and how different it is. Maybe a better option is some ratio between the number of genes modified and the number of pathways that are affected by these genes, multiplied by some measure of longevity. Maybe this hypothetical number is impossible to calculate, as we would have to assign values to staying cancer-free, running for longer, seeing in the ultraviolet region, or being able to photosynthetize and digest cellulose. This is utterly absurd, but maybe we could find a measure other than the lifespan of the enhanced mice, maybe the resistance of cultured cells to carcinogenic agents, its behavior concerning fasting or radiation poisoning. It is a complex issue but I still think it would be worthy to acknowledge the fact that as a result of several extensive modifications these new mice show improved phenotypes. The crux of the problem, I guess, is that we would be trying to assign values to what we think that ultimately would lead to improved humans themselves, and there is no single concept of what it means to be “better” when options, situations and viewpoints are almost endless. But even for something as widely adopted as Moore's law, measuring the speed of the processor alone, without accounting for software requirements is not a reliable way to predict end-user experience, as a relatively new processor with Windows Vista can do much worse than an older one running an older version of Windows or a lightweight distro of Linux, so maybe sticking to a number as a guide of what's inside the mouse is not as crazy as it sounds.

When will the Transhuman Year arrive? Hard to say. All these developments have been used to create new animals, not applied to an existing mouse that then changed its phenotype. Before we can benefit form this research we still have to develop safe ways of transfecting genes into existing animals and triggering their expression in a controlled fashion. Current viral vectors are unreliable and dangerous, however, even if safer methods are developed, they still will have to go through a regulatory nightmare before we are able to use them, unless unethical paradises and biotech havens arise, probably in developing countries. A way to get funding for clinical tests and support a successful industry before human application of the tech is ready could be use the technology in pets: life extension, rejuvenation, enhancing of beloved pets, selling colorful kittens, extra fast greyhounds for racing, developing dogs and cats that will live for longer but that won't reproduce unless given a pill, avoiding the need of neutering processes. This temporary and selective sterilization would be fairly easy to develop given that we have safe transfection vectors. Then it could be applied to existing animals, inoculating the vector on them and maybe help to solve the problem of urban canine overpopulation. I think that a lot of people would buy these treatments for their pets, if the alternative is death or hurting them with unnecessary organ removals, and that revenue could be used to fund further research in humans.

It has been a good year for H+ ideas, a good year for scientific research and a good year for mice. There are a lot of unsolved issues and a lot of problems that require not tech solutions but political and social ones. Sadly we cannot do much about it, other than keep trying to give education and critical thinking tools to as many people as possible. Expose people to other world views and experiences, so they realize that life can be different, can be improved. That leaders should be accountable for their actions and that the real wealth of nations lies not on the land, the industry or even on computers, but on human ingenuity and love for knowledge.

Stumble Delicious Technorati Twitter Facebook