New Zealand Doesn't Want Fat People

Richie Trezise emigrated to New Zealand when he got a job there, so naturally he wanted his wife Rowan to come over. But the New Zealand immigration department rejected her request because she was too fat! (They were afraid that she’d be a burden to the country’s healthcare system):

Robyn Toomath, a spokesman for Fight the Obesity Epidemic and an endocrinologist, said the BMI limit was valid in the vast majority of people.

She said she was opposed to obese people being stigmatised.

"However, the immigration department’s focus is different," she said. "It cannot afford to import people into the country who are going to be a significant drain on our health resources.

"You can see the logic in assessing if there is a significant health cost associated with this individual and that would be a reason for them not coming in."

Organ Generation from Autologous Cells

Seven patients who needed new bladders received transplants of organs grown from their own cells. Dr. Anthony Atala, a pioneer in engineered organ research, and his colleagues at Wake Forest University in North Carolina conducted the operation on the patients who range in age from toddlers to teenagers and all suffer from spina bifida, a congenital birth defect. Normally, a hunk of intestine is modified to replace a faulty bladder, common in people who have the disease, but that procedure can lead to other problems. From CNN:

In the new procedure, doctors extract muscle and bladder cells from a small piece of the patient's own bladder. The cells are grown in a Petri dish, then layered onto a three-dimensional mold shaped like a bladder.

In a few weeks, the cells produce a new bladder, which is implanted into the patient. Within a few more weeks, the new bladder has grown to normal size and has started functioning.

Atala is working to grow 20 different tissues and organs, including blood vessels and hearts, in the laboratory, according to the university.

"We're not using any type of stem cell population or cloning techniques, but mainly the patient's own cells that we're using to create these organs and put them back into the patient," Atala told CNN.

Because the bladders are grown from a patient's own cells, there is no risk of rejection, as in a traditional transplant.

God: It's All in Your Head

Following up on research that identified the portions of the brain that are responsible for mystical, religious experiences, a researcher at Laurentian University has built a mystical helmet that stimulates the mysticism center, invoking religious experience. Of course, he called on Richard Dawkins to put one on and get into God.

The experiment is based on the recent finding that some sufferers from temporal lobe epilepsy, a neurological disorder caused by chaotic electrical discharges in the temporal lobes of the brain, seem to experience devout hallucinations that bear a striking resemblance to the mystical experiences of holy figures such as St Paul and Moses.

This theory received a recent boost from Prof Gregory Holmes, a paediatric neurologist at Dartmouth Medical School, who claims that one of the principal founders of the Seventh Day Adventist Movement, Ellen White, in fact suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy...

Unfortunately, during the experiment, while Prof Dawkins had some strange experiences and tinglings, none of them prompted him to take up any new faith. "It was a great disappointment," he said. "Though I joked about the possibility, I of course never expected to end up believing in anything supernatural. But I did hope to share some of the feelings experienced by religious mystics when contemplating the mysteries of life and the cosmos.

Baby Teeth Banked for Stem Cells

Austin-based start-up BioEden has opened America’s first baby tooth bank, hoping to harvest and freeze stem cells from the tooth’s pulp. Scientists are skeptical:

Austin-based start-up company BioEden has opened the nation’s first baby tooth bank, which harvests and freezes stem cells from a tooth’s pulp. The hope is that the cells may someday be useful to treat disease or heal paralyzing spinal cord injuries.

Currently, it’s not clear whether such cells could do anything more than help grow the dentin that could be used to reconstruct a broken tooth. Scientists say it will take at least five to 10 years to find out.

But for a $595 processing fee and $89 a year for storage, BioEden will harvest and cryogenically preserve the cells until scientists find a use for them.

Artificial Life Created

Craig Venter, the controversial DNA researcher who once tried to map the human genome for commercial purpose, claims that he has created artificial life by constructing a man-made chromosome:

The Guardian can reveal that a team of 20 top scientists assembled by Mr Venter, led by the Nobel laureate Hamilton Smith, has already constructed a synthetic chromosome, a feat of virtuoso bio-engineering never previously achieved. Using lab-made chemicals, they have painstakingly stitched together a chromosome that is 381 genes long and contains 580,000 base pairs of genetic code.

The DNA sequence is based on the bacterium Mycoplasma genitalium which the team pared down to the bare essentials needed to support life, removing a fifth of its genetic make-up. The wholly synthetically reconstructed chromosome, which the team have christened Mycoplasma laboratorium, has been watermarked with inks for easy recognition.

It is then transplanted into a living bacterial cell and in the final stage of the process it is expected to take control of the cell and in effect become a new life form. The team of scientists has already successfully transplanted the genome of one type of bacterium into the cell of another, effectively changing the cell’s species. Mr Venter said he was "100% confident" the same technique would work for the artificially created chromosome.

Amoebic Morality

In times of stress, some single-celled organisms band together to create an entity that resembles a multicellular animal. And some of members of the colony will sacrifice their lives to ensure the survival of others.

Reproduction and Technology

From a religious point of view we see absolutes and abstractions, without exceptions.
From the point of view of politics we see accommodations and compromises.
From the point of view of ethics we see gradations, reservations, and qualifications.
From the point of view of law we see case by case adjustments, idealisitic principles and applications of them to well defined facts and a uncertainty with regard to the application of those principles to new facts.

Should you be able to conceive a child naturally, through surrogacy, or through in vitro fertilization if that baby is going to be used for a specific purpose later (e.g. cord blood for bone marrow transplant for another child)?

What if the embryo is going to be destroyed before implantation (or after transplantation) to be used for the specific purpose?

Should you be able to have a child if you use drugs or drink during pregnancy?

Should you be able to choose not to have a baby? Why, what reasons?

Should you be able to choose not to have a baby for any reason (i.e. gender, retardation, money)?

How should you be able to choose not to have a baby? By contraception? By morning after pill? By termination of the pregnancy?

Should you be able to choose not to have a baby by the selective reduction of implanted fertilized eggs?

Should you be able to refuse to have all of the fertilized embryos implanted?

Should you then be able to choose not to have a baby who is genetically related to you, by directing the clinic to destroy those fertilized embryos?

Should you be able to refuse to have a cesarean to save the life of the baby?

Should society be able to say "you must have this baby" or "you should not have this baby"?

Should society be able to say that you cannot have a posthumously implanted embryo?

Who Has the Oil?

The map above shows what the world would look like if each country’s size was proportional to their proven oil reserves. Definitely makes you think about how increasing oil prices and the lack of any meaningful reduction in demand for oil could (is?) shifting the balance of power in the world.

Maps of Globalization

Princeton's searchable collection of historical maps and present-day analysis, including Artists' Travels in the Renaissance, an 1891 ethnographic chart, Telegraph Lines in 1869, Global Terrorism c. 1983, Oil reserves vs. consumption, a visualization of world development since 1960.

Globalization as Westernization

My position:
Previously the world was dominated by a geographic, state based system. Globalization is driving the world to a market based, corporate based system. Early in the formation of the state based system there was little incentive for concern about the rights and lives of individuals in the pursuit of political and geographic power. The same is true now in the global economy; there is little concern about the rights and lives of individuals in the pursuit of economic success. Perhaps the corporation in some form may become the dominant form of organization in the modern world.

A user in Second Life has created a virtual ecosystem within the game!

While taking a break from the UK game industry to raise her child, a programmer created a self-contained ecology on a Second Life island, with numerous species and natural phenomenon that must work together to keep the system function: clouds rain on the land, nourishing the plants (which also respond to sunlight), bees spread pollen to help the plants reproduce, birds eat seeds to keep the plants from growing out of control, and so on.

Virtual Tour Operator

Synthtravels is a tour operator that arranges for guided visits to virtual worlds like World of Warcraft and Second Life, providing "native guides" for people who want to get the lay of the land. Synthravels is the first organization to offer a complete guide service to all the people who want to make a tour in virtual worlds without knowing these new realities, even if they have never put their feet in these strange, synthetic grounds. The tours and the destinations are chosen by the staff of Synthravels, composed by programmers, architects, experienced video gamers.

The West and the Rest

Culture is our biggest most general term for everything there is.

It is an artifact, a framework which varies from culture to culture.

What constitutes culture?

The way people reason and even perceive can vary across cultures. The whole way of organizing reality can vary from culture to culture.

The perceived fundamental rights of people vary across cultures.

What is normal varies from culture to culture.

Causes and origins are seen as different from culture to culture. Are they under human control, human influence, divine control, etc.

If society were structured based on the mother-child relationship, rather than the concept of the independent male, what would the resulting society look like? Would men feel inherently discriminated against because they were less essential to the mother child relationship than women, just as women feel inherently discriminated against in a male oriented society because of their lack of choice in the mother-child relationship?

Western assumptions: the male is the norm, and nature is there to be exploited.

Second Life Documentary

Filmmaker, television producer, and multimedia artist Douglas Gayeton shot and produced this made-for-TV series online within Second Life:

In January 2007, a man named Molotov Alva disappeared from his California home. Recently, a series of seven video dispatches by a Traveler of the same name have appeared inside Second Life. In these dispatches Molotov Alva encounters everything from Furries to Cyberpunks to Neo-Luddites to Sex Slaves to the King of the Hobos, Orhalla Zander, who becomes Molotov's guide as he searches for the creator of their brave new world.Video link to the first episode. Link to documentary project home page, and more on Molotov's "first" life here.

It turns out that HBO has bought the rights from the creator (Second Life users retain the underlying intellectual property rights to content they create in-world).

Beyond The Horizon of Everything

No matter what you think about the world today, law is at the center of it.

Assumptions:

There is a set of core beliefs: Western, legal, liberal, democratic, and capitalistic.

This tradition is coming to an end.

New schools of thought appear with increasing frequency.

The process of learning is one of self-discovery.

The process of learning law is one of discovering where one stands in relation to social order and its values.

We think of law as rules, systems, norms, and processes.

Two big questions:

To what extent is there a global culture emerging driven by a set of global values because of English as a common language, the universality of certain products, etc.?

Is there a real or uniform human nature?

8,000,000 pages are added to the Internet each day...this blog is one of them. It was created today to capture the interesting content and my reactions to a class called Issues of Law, Policy, and Ethics in Global Technology at Suffolk University Law School.

What is consciousness?

The brain knows what is happening before the conscious mind knows it something has happened.

/Isn't this just an effect of the distance traveled along nerves?/

The brain constructs what the eye sees about half a second after the mind registers what it sees.

Web 2.0

User generated content, games and things like Second Life.

A hacker created virus in World of Warcraft killed 4,000,000 users and was studied by scientists to understand real epidemics.

How are legal disputes settled in the virtual world of Second Life?

How different is a conference call in real life to a meeting conducted in Second Life?