Engineering a lettuce, engineering a cure

Type 1 diabetes, the autoimmune disease that destroys the insulin producing cells of the pancreas, is a widespread life-threatening disease that requires daily injections of insulin to maintain the proper levels of blood sugar. A professor at University of Central Florida, Henry Daniell, believes he has found the cure in the form of a GMO.

Using genetically engineered lettuce containing the insulin gene, Daniell believes he is able to train the body to once again produce insulin. Using GMO lettuce freeze-dried, he forms a capsule. When the lettuce cells break down in the intestines exposing the insulin, the immune system responds by producing its own.

Thus far, on the experimental front, Daniell has succeeded in bringing diabetic mice to produce their own insulin after only eight weeks of treatment.

À bout de souffle by Jean Luc Godard (1960)

Сталкер by Andrei Tarkovsky (1979)

Eunoia

Eunoia is a word meaning "beautiful thinking." It also happens to be the shortest word in the English language to use all five vowels. By no coincidence, Canadian poet Christian Bök (pronounced "book") used the word as the title of a remarkable five chapter book that cycles through the vowels of the roman alphabet, devoting each chapter to the limited use of a single vowel to construct all words therein. The project took 7 years to actualize and if his often bizarre and humorous conceptual poetry wasn't enough, this staggering work has secured his place as one of the true innovators in the art of writing. The entire text can be found here.

2 things

On a returning flight from Guatemala last week, taking some time to contemplate some disparate wandering thoughts, I arrived at a couple ideas that might be characterize as scientific propositions.

1. The fundamental particles/fields of physics are not static. If particles are field quanta, energies at given momentum, that which differentiates one energy from another is not fixed. Energy may "flow" albeit not on a human but a cosmic time scale and collapses to some greater uniformity of energy.

2. All life-forms on Earth do not have a common origin. If conditions on Earth supported one biological genesis, then these conditions were such that a genesis could have been supported on multiple occasions.



I do not know (and most likely never will know) enough about physics or biology to go into this further, but hopefully more on this later.

Do you want to live forever?

Moving into the 21st century, the rise of hybrid brain-machine interfaces and other biotechnological breakthroughs are beginning to challenge our notions of personhood. Philosophical arguments often appeal with brain in a vat arguments, but Aubry de Gray wants to actualize some of these ideas. He works on what he calls "strategies for engineered negligible senescence." He thinks a fundamental human right is to live indefinitely insofar as we have the technology to do so. Thus, de Gray is challenging the scientific community to achieve this end. Here is a documentary chronicling the emerging figure and some controversey surrounding him. (Props to whomever decided to use Mahler's "Resurrection" in the film).

Waste = food

If you have not read Cradle to Cradle, this is a 50 minute documentary on Bill McDonough and Michael Braungart, a duo who is essentially the foremost impetus in actualizing the green movement for industrial design, production, architecture, and city planning.

Architectural smörgåsbord

Saturday Morning Science

In 2003, on board the International Space Station, Science Officer Don Pettit conducted several experiments regarding simple tasks in a microgravity environment. Here is a compilation of his demonstrations.

AIDS non-progressors

A new breakthrough in understanding the ability of HIV infected persons to control the disease is reported in the new issue of Immunity.

The natural course of Human Immunodeficiency Virus is such that it attacks essential cells in the human immune system such as T cells (CD4+ T helper lymphocytes) and the T cell generators of the thymus (thymocytes). The viral load eventually overruns the immune system leaving it susceptible to infection as AIDS. Current treatments with antiretroviral medication decrease the rate of mortality drastically, however, eluding scientific explanation, some immune systems have been found to naturally control HIV infection, duly dubbed "non-progressors."

It has previously been recorded that non-progressors have a higher count of CD8+ T cells, yet researchers did not understand the function of these cells until recently. CD8+ T cells were observed attacking HIV infected cells. A protein called perforin enable the CD8+ T cells to puncture the membrane of infected cells while molecules of the cytotoxic granzyme B rushed in to destroy the cells conjunctively like a poisoned dagger. These new findings provide hope in developing a vaccine and effective treatment for staying the disease.