“There are wars going on in London to get the oil,” said Tom Lasica, who runs Pure Fuels, London’s largest refiner of vegetable oil. “Spanish and German companies are moving in to buy up British used vegetable oil. People are stealing it from each other and selling it abroad. We heard that one fish and chip shop in Southend was broken into just to steal the waste oil.”
TagBiopunk
In five to 10 years, supermarkets might have some new products in the meat counter: packs of vat-grown meat that are cheaper to produce than livestock and have less impact on the environment.
According to a new economic analysis (.pdf) presented at this week’s In Vitro Meat Symposium in As, Norway, meat grown in giant tanks known as bioreactors would cost between $5,200-$5,500 a ton (3,300 to 3,500 euros), which the analysis claims is cost competitive with European beef prices.
(via Grinding)
Combining animal and human genes provokes unease among some philosophers, theologians, and ordinary citizens. Currently, scientists want to inject the nuclei of human cells into animal eggs-generally from cows and rabbits–that have been stripped of their nuclei to create cell hybrids, or cybrids. Human eggs are hard to come by and expensive whereas animal eggs are plentiful and cheap. The aim is to produce embryonic stem cells for research.
No one knows if such cybrid embryos might grow into human babies if implanted in an appropriate womb. Would such cybrid babies suffer some physical or mental problems as a result of their animal genetic heritage? That heritage would basically be the energy producing mitochondria derived from the cytoplasm of the animal cells into which the human nuclei were inserted. Since cows and rabbits live much shorter lives than do humans it might be that any cybrid humans with cow or rabbit mitochondria would not live as long as normal humans. In addition, the operation of animal mitochondria in cybrids might mimic some mutational mitochondrial diseases that already afflict people. These real risks of creating physically and mentally diminished human beings mean that it would be immoral to grow human-animal cybrids into full-term babies.
But let’s flip the question-instead of diminishing humans, what about uplifting animals by boosting their intelligence and physical dexterity? Uplifting animals to human-like sapience has been explored by many speculative writers. For example, in H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), humanized animals are commanded to follow Moreau’s law: “Not to go on all-fours; Not to suck up Drink; Not to eat Fish or Flesh; Not to claw the Bark of Trees; Not to chase other Men; that is the Law. Are we not Men?” But they are not Men and they eventually revert to their beast natures and destroy their hubristic creator. Even worse is Pierre Boulle’s novel, The Planet of the Apes (1963), in which uplifted apes are now the masters of animal-like degenerate humans. On the other hand, in Cordwainer Smith’s Norstrilia (1975), the underpeople, humanlike beings created from animals, struggle for their rights and are morally superior in many respects to their human masters.
I scored as a Transhumanist: Biotech, but I wish there was more room for “maybe” or “unsure.”
I hate to admit it, but sometimes I do learn things from OldMedia. Take the the recent episode of the Australian 60 Minutes about body modification, ‘Freaking Out’. Sure, it had the same examples of body-moding we’ve all been seeing for years. But it also featured an interview with Steve Haworth, who I’m ashamed to admit, I’d previously been completely ignorant of. This part of the transcript introduces him:
“PETER OVERTON: If body modification is an art form, then Steve Haworth is a modern master. In a makeshift surgery at his home in Arizona he transforms thousands of individuals helping them find their inner freak. Remarkably, he has no formal medical qualifications, and is entirely self-taught.”
Pictured above: my friend Rex Church, who is one of Haworth’s clients.
Progress on the road to regenerating major body parts, salamander-style, could transform the treatment of amputations and major wounds
The gold standard for limb regeneration is the salamander, which can grow perfect replacements for lost body parts throughout its lifetime. Understanding how can provide a road map for human limb regeneration.
The early responses of tissues at an amputation site are not that different in salamanders and in humans, but eventually human tissues form a scar, whereas the salamander’s reactivate an embryonic development program to build a new limb.
Learning to control the human wound environment to trigger salamanderlike healing could make it possible to regenerate large body parts.
Full Story: Scientific American.
(via Grinding).
Thou shall not pollute the Earth. Thou shall beware genetic manipulation. Modern times bring with them modern sins. So the Vatican has told the faithful that they should be aware of “new” sins such as causing environmental blight.
The guidance came at the weekend when Archbishop Gianfranco Girotti, the Vatican’s number two man in the sometimes murky area of sins and penance, spoke of modern evils.
Asked what he believed were today’s “new sins,” he told the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano that the greatest danger zone for the modern soul was the largely uncharted world of bioethics.
(Thanks Bill).
Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge, born Jacqueline Breyer in 1969, passed away Tuesday 9th October 2007. Lady Jaye and her partner Genesis Breyer P-Orridge spent the past several years living an “art as life project” sometimes called “Breaking Sex.” The couple altered their own appearances to look more and more like each other, forming a third ” pandrogenous” entity they called Breyer P-Orridge.
Lady Jaye met Genesis in 1993 and the couple began to align their appearances. Eventually, Genesis had gone as far as he could in making himself more feminine without surgery. So for their tenth anniversary, on Valentines Day 2003, the couple got matching breast implants together.
Genesis underwent the most visible changes, but Lady Jaye went through surgeries as well. The plan was not to make one look like the other, but for them to look like each other: to meet in the middle. In an interview with John E. Mitchell Lady Jaye said:
“My nose was made to look somewhat more like Djin’s. My chin was made to look more like Djin’s. Djin had cheek implants that resemble mine. There’s only so much that can be done in that way. We made a decision not to try to go after a conventional idea of beauty. We both could have changed our faces to look like some kind of ideal, but we wanted to look like each other, that was the idea. We didn’t want to look pretty according to someone else’s standard or anything like that.”
“Breaking Sex” was simultaneously an assault on the tyranny of gender and DNA and a deep exploration of Lady Jaye and Genesis’s relationship. In an essay titled “Our Practice in Art” Breyer P-Orridge explained the inspiration for hir art:
The work of William S Burroughs and Brion Gysin has been highly influential to us, particularly in relation to the practice of the “cut-up”. To liberate the word from linearity, they began to cut-up and, incorporating random chance, re-assembled both their own and co-opted literature “…to see what it really says…” They referred to the phenomena of profound and poetic new collisions and meanings that resulted from their intimate collaborations as the “Third Mind”. This was produced with a willingness to sacrifice their own separate, previously inviolate works and artistic “ownership”. In many ways they saw the third mind as an entity in and of itself. Something “other”, closer to a purity of essence, and the origin and source of a magical or divine creativity that could only result from the unconditional integration of two sources.
Breyer P-Orridge created art installations featuring photographs, collages, sculptures and personal items to share the experience of living in pandrogeny. The installations have appeared in galleries in both the US and Europe.
Genesis P-Orridge has not yet, to my knowledge, publicly discussed the question of whether Breyer P-Orridge died along with Lady Jaye. Lady Jaye told Mitchell “We view Breyer P-Orridge as a separate person who is both of us. Neither of us take credit for the work, the work is a melding of both of our ideas which we would not have had singly,” and “Both of us are in all of our art. That third being, Breyer P-Orridge, is always present.”
The idea that Breyer P-Orridge can exist without Lady Jaye seems counter intuitive. But consider this passage from the first Breaking Sex Manifesto:
The common view of cosmetic surgery is the Pamela Anderson archetype. In fact it is incredible how her particular idealized look has spread to hundreds of thousands of women. Almost as if she has cloned herself. Apart from the group idealization of an image made flesh this also culturally engineers a shift in what is an acceptable or desirable way to look both in terms of physiological technique and perceptual aspiration for people across all social and economic boundaries . The drone may mimic the queen.
Lady Jaye Breyer P. Orridge is dead. But she lives on through Genesis, and through the body of work the two created together. I don’t know if this extreme body transformation will catch on. But I’m certain that the sacrifices she made for art were not in vein. Her dedication has raised the bar for everyone.
More information:
John A. Mitchell’s interview with Jady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge.
Mitchell’s article on Breaking Sex.
Breaking Sex section of Genesis P-Orridge’s site.
Sex TV documentary “Breaking Sex” about Breyer P-Orridge (includes excerpt).
(This article original appeared in Key 64)
“For those tired of going out with psychopaths dredged up on Craigslist, there’s a new dating service, ScientificMatch. Its goal is to narrow the margin of error when it comes to finding a mate. The service, currently only available in the Boston area (where everyone who tries the service will be matched with Ted Kennedy), requires participants to submit a DNA sample. Once it’s been analyzed, the ScientificMatch Web site helps you find the right genetic mate for you. Either that, or learn you’ll get brain cancer in six months.”
(via 23/6)
This is an old story. How did I not hear about this before?
Infant rats are being decapitated and their heads grafted onto the thighs of adults by researchers in Japan.
If kept cool while the blood flow is stopped, a transplanted brain can develop as normal for at least three weeks, and the mouth of the head will move, as if it is trying to drink milk, the team reports.
The grafted heads could be “excellent models” for investigating brain function in human babies after periods of no blood flow, known as ischemia, they claim.
“Our main purpose is to investigate how the transplanted brain can develop and maintain function after prolonged total brain ischemia,” researcher Nobufumi Kawai, at the Jichi Medical School in Tochigi, told New Scientist. “And we tried to investigate the effect of lowering the temperature of the brain during the grafting.”
(Thanks James).
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