H5N1 Mutant.
Spoke to Michael Specter, author, "Denialism, How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives," re the future of synthetic biology, or virus-concocting, and he commented it it was possible, that all genetic engineering was credible including the sinister source. Biotechnology is more likely than not over the next century, and those who practice what they preach are able to glimpse improved human beings, superior skills and performance, and medical intervention that remakes the organisms in place. It is not irrational to fret about an accident. I mentioned the Outer Limits episode, "The Man Who Was Never Born," (1963), with Martin Landau, in which Landau is a freak mutant in the 22nd century who travels back to the 20th century to murder the mother of the man who invents a virus that wrecks humanity before she can give birth. Forty-six years later, the familiar sci-fi is not wrong-headed. Spoke to Henry Miller, Hoover, re H5N1 or avian flu, which remains the most likely mass-killer in this century. The status of H5N1 is that it is now global in birds and that we do not know when it will jump to human to human transmission. When it does, its mortality rate is 60%. The necessity is to maintain defenses, such as the ability to create and grow a vaccine quickly. The chronology is simple. It emerged in 1997 in Hong Kong. It went undergroung and remerged in 2003-04 in Hong Hong. Since then, nothing but isolated cases in which the afflicted had physical contact with birds. Waiting for Outer Limits and the mutation that makes the jump human to human..
In my view, the most significant threat to the human race is what it has always been: war. War is nature's way of saying, we have reached an impasse; there is no other way out. War is needed to clear the decks of lies, disinformation and the confusion that is choking off the natural processes, reason, conscience and common sense. Currently, we are poised precariously on that cusp. It could go either way. Science, the last bastion of anything resembling truth, has been co-opted by ideology. Government has fallen to corruption. Truth has become whatever anybody says it is. Policy is based solely on the most recent pronouncement.
Pronouncements are issued daily. Most are at odds with what has come before. Distrust of any source is at record levels. It's interesting to note that major media has refrained from reporting on the 'climate gate' scandal - as if, by not mentioning it, it can be made to go away. Common sense dictates that climate gate was never credible anyway. Neither is Keynesian economics; neither is socialism. All these work together in the building and maintaining the paradox that is (this new eco-based) religion and do not represent a practical (or secular) way foreword.
When functioning is restricted to swirling in the narrow part of the funnel, we find ourselves in what Camus referred to as the 'spitting cell', "a walled-up box in which the prisoner can stand without moving. The solid door that locks him into his cement shell stops a chin level. Hence only his face is visible, and every passing jailer spits copiously on it. The prisoner, wedged into his cell, cannot wipe his face, though he is allowed, it is true, to close his eyes. Well, that, mon cherie, is a human invention. They didn't need God for that little masterpiece."
http://peterkoelliker.blogspot.com/
Another overpaid middlebrow scribbler heard from. The best I can say for Specter is that he isn’t that other New Yorker contributor Malcolm Gladwell, more hairstyle than thinker, but who has nonetheless gotten rich off making conventional wisdom seem new and exciting. Such a reputation for foolishness has the author of "The Tipping Point" acquired that one wag suggests that a sound way to make money in today’s dismal economic climate is to find out which large companies shell out tens of thousands of dollars for *The Tipping Point*’s author to speak to their gullible managers, and then to short those corporations’ stock. I fear that he has hit on a winning strategy.
As for Specter, he embarrasses himself in his book by arguing that organic foods differ not at all from conventionally grown foods, and that vitamin pills such as the ones that two-time Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling advocated don’t work.
Here is but one counterexample among many to his baseless claims: Grapes raised without the use of fungicides contain vastly higher levels of resveratrol--a compound that the plant, left to its own devices, must form to protect itself from mold--than do grapes grown conventionally. (Unlike Jim Lagnese, a poster at this blog, Specter appears innocent of the concept of hormesis.) And researchers such as Harvard biologist David Sinclair have found that supplemental resveratrol’s gene-activing effects extent the maximum—not average--lifespan of our friend Mr. Lab Rat by around 15 percent, a not inconsiderable amount. Similar anti-aging results have been achieved in nematodes and fish also dosed with resveratrol.
I would go on to mention recent work on using vitamin D to prevent cancer and the flu, but that has already been discussed recently in the comments section of this blog.
At least the New Yorker’s editors haven’t been able to ruin its cartoons. That's something.
Re the mangled second sentence of my post: Some day I'll get the hang of this whole proofreading thing. Perhaps one of the New Yorker's soon-to-be-jobless copy editors can lend me a hand...
Mangled third sentence, I mean. Perhaps some assistance with counting would be in order, as well.