Top-Down Genetics versus Mashup Genetics

'Must confess.

We never did like the term 'Horizontal Gene Transfer' , aka HGT ( sometimes otherwise known as LGT ,for Lateral Gene

Transfer).

In particular we always hated that 'transfer' bit.

The denotation is accurate enough, but its connotations conjure up entirely the wrong impression.

We'd bow in the direction of Dawson and call it HGT , Horizontal Gene Transformation.

For in fact the incoming bits of DNA disrupt - creatively - the existing fat and comfortable set of genes in the organism being invaded and the end result isn't some tidy orderly transfer of assets from one bank account to another, but more in the order of a micro-scale catastrophe.

There said it.

Catastrophe, cat-as-tro-phe - not neo-catastrophism, because we don't think it ever really went away - not out there in the real world and not out there in the real minds of many.

Only scientists and their fellow travelers consigned the word to a sudden death.

They said catastrophes rarely happen and when they do they are only local and short term - and soon we will be able to predict and prevent even these rare local events.

Catastrophes at the level of cells and microbes simply never happened.

But they do - we multi-celled creatures are the result of one such genetic mashup - when one sort of bacteria survived inside another type of bacteria to the point where it became part of the bacteria, inside its own cell walls and created the first multi-celled being .

Nine months later,more or less, you and us emerged.

There is no intellectual crime lower than seeking support for some or other human theory by claiming it merely reflects the laws of nature.

But...

But it is interesting to tease out the parallels for human creativity in the current moves to mashup old boring top down controlled copyrights to see what crawls out of the shell and the tremendous effects HGT has had in the past in mashing up stale boring old top down Vertical genetics to see what happens.

Penicillin , after all, was the result when a bacteria and a yeast decided to mashup their quite different DNAs....

The 1940 Peace Bomb joins the 1800 Peace Mine...

In any other circumstances, pacifist Leo Szilard might have been best remembered as the inventor (along with fellow pacifist Albert Einstein) of the modern fridge.

Instead he joined some others (sometimes pacifist others) in working on a super weapon that would so frighten the planet's militarists that they would instantly sue for permanent world peace.

Unfortunately, it was agreed that the backward militarist mind would require a convincing demonstration project, before being convinced.

So in the end a few hundred thousand people ended up dead in radiation and fire, all for 'the greatest good of the greatest number' ---but universal peace still did not break out - far from it.

So poor Szilard is today primarily remembered for instigating the Manhattan Project rather than inventing the perfect fridge ....or the perfect peace.

By contrast, Robert Fulton, a fellow New York City area resident like Szilard, (albeit from a hundred and fifty years earlier ), is best known today for building the first commercial steam boat service in the world, between New York City and Albany.

But as H. Bruce Franklin points out in his ground-breaking book "War Stars" , Fulton had had his utopian pacifist weapon scheme as well.

This submarine and sea-mine system was designed to destroy the British navy, freeing the high seas for universal free trade and commerce and thus introducing an era of permanent world peace.

This was/is standard centuries-old Liberal dogma, still much spouted today.

Fulton's willingness to sink a few real ships (along with their real crews) is also right on par with all the many Liberal peace bomb efforts: in the utilitarianism-driven willingness to see a 'few' die (unwillingly and unasked) for the greater good of the greater number.

Between Fulton and Szilard, New York has thrown up a number of Liberal pacifist and their peace weapons - perhaps most notably that shy pacifist Carl Norden.... and his precision WW II bombsight of the same name.

All these plans start off as efforts to design a totally new advance on weapon systems.

But these superweapons are not for profitably continuing sales in continuous wars.

Rather they are to 'demonstrate' their horrific effects just once and then usher in world peace forever.

All of them have a scope and gravitas and a vision about them that seems perfectly cut to fit Manhattan's taste in grandness-for-the-sake-of-grandness, thus becoming 'the Empire State Building of New York intellectual conceits'.....

Oswald Avery : unknown and famous for the wrong things...

It is the tragedy of Halifax Nova Scotia born Oswald Avery that he is famous for a study he didn't really believe in (and opposed for years) and he is unknown for his lifework, which today saves millions of childrens' lives around the world each year.

Oswald Avery is today known as 'The Father of Molecular Biology' , which should tip us off right from the start.

Scientists are never more manipulative and intellectually dishonest than when they are fabricating the history of the "Father" (never the "Mother" or "parents") of their particular branch of science.

Avery is no exception. In this case, we know this to be so, because the person who created the myth of Avery (Joshua Lederberg) said so: he intended to 'do a Mendel on Avery'.

Gregor Medel did wonderful pioneering work , but his credentials for being considered the father of any science are widely regarded today as spurious - and he would be the first to say so loudly if he came back today.

As would Avery regarding his alleged founding role in molecular biology - to his credit, he never claimed much for his work in this field while he was alive - and he lived for 10 years after his 'big' discovery.

But in the saving-the-lives-of-millions-of-innocent-baby-children world, the world of conjugate vaccines, Avery is a GIANT - or should be.

He certainly is to the researchers in that field.

But he is merely 'the key individual' in an effort that spanned a century and included every continent,thousands of researchers and hundreds of millions of dollars.

It is a story far too vast and far too complicated for popular science reporting to credit to any one medical super hero and one shining experimental result: no Pasteur or Jonas Salk here.

Instead Avery is praised for one 'seminal-paper-that-was-ignored-at-the-time' --- which rather implies an intellectual oxymoron and suggests the difficulty in crediting him as the Father of anything .

That paper was published in February 1944 but had its formal beginnings with experiments that began on October 22nd 1940 on Manhattan Island, that tiny island not far off the American coast.

Ah yes ! October 1940 : menses mirabilis indeed.

It is almost as if May 1940, certainly one of the most 'menses horribilis' in all of Western Civilization, (followed by the August to September 1940 aborted invasion of England : half horribilis half mirabilis), seemed to have drawn out extraordinary efforts from various North American scientists deeply emotionally affected by the events in Europe but too old to be called to actively take up a rifle.

Because one of the things those three extraordinary laboratory efforts in October 1940 have in common is their sheer physicality - scaled up to pilot plant size before table top work had even started; dirty, tiring, dangerous work.

Literally, not just figuratively, fighting for results in the trenches of science.

So, if in October 2010, we mark the 70th anniversary of the start of the financial recognition for (a) George Laurence's efforts to build an atomic pile, and (b) Henry Dawson's start in his efforts to cure SBE with natural penicillin injections, we might as well add (c) the formal start of Oswald Avery and Colin MacLeod's efforts to determine the chemical nature of Henry Dawson's Transforming Principle - proving it to be DNA.

Did we say 'North American scientists' ??

Let it stand.

We all know that we here at the Arcadian Recorder also mean 'Nova Scotian-born scientists', but let that remain our little secret.....

The Manhattan Pilot : Harlem Shuffled

What could seem more innocent than a project initiated by pacifists and an airplane named after someone's mother?

And what could seem more threatening than a project invigorated by a group of veterans of the frontline trenches and a heavy bomber ominously named 'The B-a-a-d Penny' ?

The cliches of innocence and harm align neatly enough in Hollywood movies but in the real world, events often show themselves to be a great deal more paradoxical.

In 1999, a survey by Newseum and USA Weekend of 36,000 American men and women revealed that they thought the top news story of the entire twentieth century involved a little boy and a baby girl and took place in an eighty acre area on a tiny island not far off the American coast.

In that tiny eighty acre area, the pacifists and the frontline vets worked on their projects almost within sight of each other, albeit while existing in totally different moral universes.

And as every good eighty acres should, this story involved a mule.

His name was Henry Dawson.

This is not his biography, but it is his story....

VEGEMITE also had its hour ; one far fierce hour and sweet

Yellow Snow Bad; Yellow Uisce Beatha Good

It is no secret that Irishmen like their drink, even ( or perhaps, particularly) in wartime.

For a real Irishman likes nothing better than defying straitlaced authorites who think sugar and alcohol has higher uses in wartime than to just use in beverages - such as using them to make more and stronger explosive materials.

So in November 1943, it probably won't seem that unusual to see a feisty Irish-Australian named Jim Duhig sprinkle some yeast-like material over a vat of water and molasses and put it in a cool dark place for ten days.

We say yeast-like because yeast extract was unavailable in wartime Brisbane (Queensland) Australia.

Jim did what any quick thinking Aussie would do - he reached for that all purpose substitute, Vegemite in .3% solution, because after all, he did come from the land down under, where beer flows and strong men chunder.

Also not unusual was his decision to strain the resulting golden colored liquid at the bottom of the vat through a piece of cheesecloth and put it into bottles.

But what he did next might surprise you : he drew some of that golden liquor out in a big needle and stuck it - again and again - into a dying woman.

He saved her life with this golden uisce beatha and saved four other dying patients' lives with it as well, in addition to successfully treating another two dozen less severe infections with his brew.

Duhig's technique, as crude as it seems, is about as high tech as antibiotic science & industry ever has to get, if its only interest is in saving lives.

But it isn't and Jim Duhig's heroic actions came 15 years after Penicillin's initial discovery.

Millions would have lived ( longer - for we all must die at some time) if Alexander Fleming had felt in 1928 as Dr Duhig felt in 1943.

But he didn't and neither would have Dr Duhig in 1928.

It took someone else, someone far bolder than Fleming or Dunhig or Florey, to kickstart the radical-at-the-time idea that injecting natural penicillin into a patient's bloodstream was the best possible treatment of most life-threatening systemic bacterial infections.

That bold idea was first enacted upon on a tiny island, not far off the American coast, a few years earlier.....

Jim Duhig was indeed very Irish - his uncle was the archbishop of Queensland - but in real life he didn't brew liquor - or even drink - he was the head of a prohibitionist society.

But he did brew penicillin---- rather than see some patients die needlessly while waiting for Big Pharma to get its act together to do in decades what Jim had done in weeks !

Life is much stranger than fiction.

70th Anniversary of 'the little $6,000 that grew'

In February 2010, most of the world will not celebrate the 70th anniversary of the start of the Manhattan Project.

Nor should they.

But they should mark it, and pause to reflect on its continuing consequences for us here today.

For 1940 was truly an Annus Mirabillis , and only partly because it marked the start of the development of the world's biggest life-taker.

Because 1940 was also crucial in the development of the world's smallest life-saver .

And aren't these two things the Alpha and the Omega of a continuing human existence in this universe?

During that February almost seventy years ago, two lead investigators at Columbia University in Manhattan were given $6,000 in federal tax dollars to look into the possibility of developing an atomic 'boiler' - which is to say, given money to develop an engine, not a bomb.

But the money came from orders of the president himself and FDR knew the project, if fully successful, would lead to investigating the building of an atomic bomb, to be held in reserve against the possibility the Nazis were already trying to build - and use - one.

Seventy years on, the six thousand dollars has become, for the American taxpayers alone, six trillion dollars and counting.

Laying blame for the current American debt crisis ? February 1940 is as good a place as any to start - that six trillion dollars would sure erase a lot of America's public and private debt worries.

If the American nuclear bomb arsenal of today ever gets used in a shooting match, the cost in lives would be six billion plus - and probably no one left to do the counting.

The costs of this the best known of Manhattan's wartime projects, in terms of the tarnishing of America's image abroad, is impossible to calculate.

"THE BUCK STARTS HERE"

The desk of the president is famously thought of as the place where the sign reads "the buck stops here".

But this project was highly unusual, in that it can be more truly said of the Manhattan Project, that "the buck started here", right at the president's desk.

As its political and financial father, FDR 'knew' about the start of the building of the world's biggest life-taker long before almost anyone else on the planet.

Not so with the start of the other Manhattan-based project , the one to finally start saving lives with the world's smallest life-saver, twelve years after its initial discovery.

FDR first learned of this life-saving substance at the exact same time that the rest of the world did , by opening his paper and reading a highly dramatic news story, one morning in mid-August 1943, almost three years after the life-saving project's obscure beginnings.

Perhaps the delay in the president learning of this life-saver is best explained by the fact that this project's lead investigator, also at Columbia University, never asked for any federal government grant or presidential 'seal of approval' - and in fact never sought a grant from anyone.

Still , his work never added a cent to the federal debt and his legacy continues to add lustre to the American image abroad.

Few people around the world, including those terrorists who harbor nothing but ill will towards Manhattan Island, do not have a family member or friend whose life was spared, thanks to the kick-starting efforts of this Manhattan Island life saver.

His project's 70th anniversary also comes up next year, in September 2010.

Perhaps this other Manhattan Project also needs a moment from us, to reflect on the changes it has brought into our world.

In this case, changes much for the better....

the Oxymoronic 'doomed' Megalopolis

It is always painful , here at the Arcadian Recorder anyway, to see authors writing of a 'doomed' Megalopolis.

This is akin to hearing people talk about the 'dumb version' of George W Bush.

Blame the Japanese - manga, anime and all.

Inherent in the history of, and hence in the connotations of , the original Megalopolis is the fact that the glorious future foreseen for it by its founders all came to not.

Once expected to be the biggest city on earth, it relatively quickly ended up as a deserted and unpopulated dot on a rural backroad.

It is hard to imagine a failure more total than that.

A 'Mega' flop in fact.

In the days when knowing Latin and Greek history was part of every educated person's upbringing, this fact was well known.

This perhaps is the reason we didn't see any past city fathers, even those with the most oversized egos, daring to call their large cities 'megacities' or speaking of the residents of their surrounding suburbs as living in 'megaland' .

The more modest, but more neutral, term 'metro' ( meaning 'mother' !) suits these 'fathers' just fine !