Category: Uncategorized
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This week we play with ideas from Brain Plague, whose microbial “characters” tumble through the spinal fluid looking something like these colored brainbow cells invented by Harvard scientists. Many fans find Brain Plague my most enjoyable read; one wrote, “I had to read it four times before I could move to another book.” It helps…
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Continuing from mouse-humans (below): Let’s clarify our terminology. The cow-human “hybrid embryos” are actually chimeras. A chimera contains cell lines that descend from two different zygotes, two different eggs fertilized separately. For instance a person can be born as a chimera combining two sibling embryos. In the cow-human experiments, the two embryos were from a…
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As we speak, the state of Mississippi is deciding whether a human embryo is legally a “person.” Meanwhile, the European Union has ruled that embryonic stem cells cannot be patented, because they have the potential for personhood. At least, I think that’s what they said; in the embryo business, words become slippery objects. What I…
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“It was when his lapdog, Tory, got eaten by a wolf that Horace Walpole began to have serious reservations about Mont Cenis.” Walpole climbed the mountain carried by four porters; and as Schama describes in Landscape and Memory, the 18th century British writer constructed his own view as artfully as a painter at a canvas.…
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A theme of The Highest Frontier is “invasion” by non-native species, like kudzu, cane toads, and space aliens. But are non-native species always harmful? In the northeastern USA, the dominant earthworms arose from non-native species in the nineteenth century; they have enriched the soil. Other non-natives with positive benefits include honeybees, plants that feed butterflies,…
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In both A Door into Ocean and The Highest Frontier, humans have to manage wildlife. But how should we do that? Should private ownership be allowed? How do we prevent what happened in Zanesville, Ohio? My friend Frank Branchini,* with much experience of animal welfare, says: “There are two huge issues regarding private ownership of…
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Sharers uses plants and animals only as they are used in return. So, because Sharers consume plants and animals as food, they accept that they in turn will become food for other life forms; that predators will ultimately consume them. A unique expression of the Sharer worldview is their language, in which subject and object…
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Last week we had a post on how the Iroquois used to kidnap colonists to join their tribe. That time is long gone–but today, in the USA, our own state governments kidnap native American children. The children, supposedly from bad situations, are sent to foster care with strangers instead of their own family members. But…
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As Max pointed out (no doubt with help from tabby friends), “Adapting ourselves would be expensive enough, but there’s no way we could afford to adapt all the species that would be wiped out by catastrophic climate change.” Humans depend on all kinds of organisms out there that we don’t even know about. For instance,…
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To live on a planet with no dry land, the Sharers “lifeshaped” their own genes. Webbed fingers and toes, and symbiotic “breathmicrobes” adapted them to a water world. Should we do the same? Our own coasts will be flooding soon; maybe Floridians could use webbed feet. Our own Earth is inexorably becoming “alien,” an overheated…
Joan Slonczewski 