Reporter Quinn Norton, who had a magnet implanted into her finger to allow her to ‘feel’ magnetic fields has finally had it removed – returning her to the normal world of the ‘five senses’.
(Via Hit and Run).
TagBiopunk
Radley Balko at Reason’s Hit and Run draws attention to this story and asks what should be done:
Behind the county hospital’s tall cinderblock walls, a 27-year-old tuberculosis patient sits in a jail cell equipped with a ventilation system that keeps germs from escaping.
Robert Daniels has been locked up indefinitely, perhaps for the rest of his life, since last July. But he has not been charged with a crime. Instead, he suffers from an extensively drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis, or XDR-TB. It is considered virtually untreatable.
County health authorities obtained a court order to lock him up as a danger to the public because he failed to take precautions to avoid infecting others. Specifically, he said he did not heed doctors’ instructions to wear a mask in public.
Any thoughts?
Michael Crichton follows up his foray into anti-evironmentalism with an exploration of the biopunk underground in his new novel Next, which actually sounds pretty interesting.
Early on in Next, a court similarly rules that Burnet does not own his own cells. Unfortunately, however, the cell lines derived from Burnet and now growing in BioGen’s labs have been contaminated. Investments worth billions will be lost unless the cells are replaced from the only known sources – Burnet, his daughter, and his grandson. Given that this is a Crichton novel, the corporation is not overly sensitive about how it replaces what its executives regard as its property.
Crichton similarly fictionalizes reality in a subplot in which shady characters in a pathology lab harvest and sell tissue and bones from cadavers without consent. This sordid activity came to light in real life in 2005, when police discovered that bones were taken from the cancerous cadaver of 95-year-old BBC broadcaster Alistair Cooke and sold.
Rural crime officials say vials of rBST are a favorite among thieves who resell the growth hormone for top dollar on the black market. Fewer dairy farmers use it these days due to concerns over its health effects, and thefts had declined in recent years, but the sophistication and overall worth of the December break-in have alarmed authorities over the possibility of a larger hormone-peddling syndicate.
The next step is to run clinical trials of DCA in people with cancer. These may have to be funded by charities, universities and governments: pharmaceutical companies are unlikely to pay because they can’t make money on unpatented medicines. The pay-off is that if DCA does work, it will be easy to manufacture and dirt cheap.
Click through to find out more, and find out how to you can donate to the cause. Let’s pass this one around.
(via Lupa).
via The Register
In a nutshell, I say that it’s impossible to manufacture an AI which will compete equally with human intelligence. The elusive quality which human thought possesses, and which an AI can’t possess, is something I call ‘irrational insight’. Note the modified noun ‘insight’. I’m not talking about irrationality per se. ‘Insight’ implies, and deliberately so, the qualities of pertinence and consistency.
And the cherry on the cake is this quote, aimed at Stephen Hawking’s advocacy of endowing AI with biological properties and ourselves with mechanical ones:
He [Hawking] deserved a severe rebuke for saying what he said. But if he actually believes it, then the little shit deserves to be hanged.
Counterfeit drugs, including fake, substandard, adulterated or falsely labeled (‘misbranded’) medicines, have become a real and growing threat to global health. Increasingly sophisticated counterfeiting rings, often involving organized crime, are slipping their fakes into the legitimate drug supply around the world. The problem is especially serious in developing countries, where hundreds of thousands die from ineffective medicines, and millions more from the drug-resistant strains of pathogens such as malaria, HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis that have been promoted by counterfeits’ suboptimal dosing of antibiotics and anti-viral agents.
It was revealed last week that 46 Australian patients received tissue implants from Biomedical Tissue Services (BTS), a company under investigation and now shut down by the United States Food and Drug Administration for illegally obtaining body parts from cadavers (many of which were diseased) and placing them in the stream of commerce.
A tragic scandal now has repercussions beyond the New Jersey shores where BTS is located. Patients who received body parts from BTS have filed lawsuits claiming to have contracted syphilis, hepatitis and other diseases from the bones and tissues they received from pillaged cadavers. The emptied corpses were sent to funeral homes in New York to prepare for burial. Yet, Michael Mastromarino, the CEO of BTS, and his colleagues had other macabre business objectives in mind, including looting the corpses for profit.
This brings us to the most perverse suspicion of all. Perhaps the Third-World city is more than simply the source of the things that will define the future, but actually is the future of the western city. Perhaps some of those tourists who look to the Third World for an image of their own past are reflecting uneasily on how all the basic realities of the Third-World city are already becoming more pronounced in their own cities: vast gulfs between sectors of the population across which almost no sympathetic intelligence can flow, gleaming gated communities, parallel economies and legal systems, growing numbers of people who have almost no desire or ability to participate in official systems, innovations in residential housing involving corrugated iron and tarpaulin. Is it going too far to suggest that our sudden interest in books and films about the Third-World city stems from the sense that they may provide effective preparation for our future survival in London, New York or Paris?
(via Abstract Dynamics).
I hadn’t really thought of it quite like this, but yes I think some of my own interest in 3rd world megalopolisis is in gaining some insight about what the future may look like for all of us.
See also: Feral Cities, Grim Meathook Future, Biopunk: the biotechnology black market, and Adam Greenfield’s Design Engaged 2005 presentation (does anyone have better notes for this?).
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