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trinityvixenIs today really the day to just piss me off left and right? Must be a Thursday...
Item the first that pisses me off: the reportage in this NYT article about the skin cell-to-stem cell process
If you want to send a monkey with only limited mastery of typing skills to do your science reporting for you, couldn't you send ME? I could fake it really good. Basically, the hoopla over this technique is being splashed on the front page and getting everyone excited--especially those opposed to stem cell research--and there are so many drawbacks and plain gaps in the information that are just brushed over so we can celebrate "WOO! WE FIGURED OUT THE STEM CELL ETHICAL PROBLEM!" Fuck you, there wasn't a problem--for the people using stem cells in research. And fuck you morer, no you haven't!
Short list of what's wrong with this "miracle solution":
1) Transfection is, at least for now, hardly ever a perfect process. Inserting genes, even when you target them to specific locations, is chancey. And the success rates vary wildly.
2) The paper admits that the mouse cells--NOTE THAT THIS HASN'T BEEN TRIED ON HUMAN CELLS--come from inbred mice. Anyone want to try to find analogous volunteers in our own species? Good luck. Also: ew.
3) 20% of the mice treated died of cancer. Great.
That last one is a doooooozy. So, basically, we're starting one MAJOR step back from starting to build tissues using stem cells and then this step, if it can be made, might also cause a disease we can't cure in 1/5 of the cases (if the numbers translate between species). Instead of starting with cells that we know actually are stem cells and working out fifteen million complications between having cells and creating new tissue, we're going to throw in thirty billion more complications just to arrive at where we could have started? NO THANK YOU.
Look, there are good things here, I don't deny it. Discovering that only four genes could initiate a phenotypic switch from skin to stem cell is major news. This could teach us so much about pleuropotency, you have no idea. But I don't enjoy the blanket encouragement that passes for reporting in The New York Times' "Science" section. Because all it did was jump up and down and screech about how this might solve the stem cell problem and devoted half the article to that and a few paragraphs to the real drawbacks and hurdles this technique creates as a potential therapeutic avenue. If you're going to report on science, report on the goddamn science. Save the ethical questions for that guy. The one with the column. You know the one I mean.
Oh, and pissy thing #2: Paris Hilton is already out of jail.
Supposedly, TMZ says, this length of stay--5 days--is normal for people with her conviction. I'd like to see some stats on that, personally. I wonder if that applies to people sentenced to 45 days or to the 23 days she was eventually given--would she have had to stay a full week, say, if she'd kept the 45-day sentence?
The police, of course, stress that she's not "out"--she's just been "reassigned" to house arrest. While I approve of keeping Paris Hilton on a permanent lo-jack thing (and equipping the rest of humanity with trackers so that we might avoid her for all time), who are you kidding? House arrest? Where she could, easily, grab more drugs and drinks and keep herself medicated (since she was apparently released "for medical reasons"--i.e. sobriety)? Right. Justice. Let's hope she has to like do thirty billion hours of community service or something. Oh, that's right, she does that just by "bringing joy into our mundane lives" with her ugly-ass, skank-bitch face.
That's not very feminist of me, perhaps, but I'd as soon apply the skank label to any guy who rose to fame for being rich and having sex on camera. A lack of reporting on that front shows the bias of the media, methinks. Whatever. Women don't want Paris in our clubhouse any way.
Item the first that pisses me off: the reportage in this NYT article about the skin cell-to-stem cell process
If you want to send a monkey with only limited mastery of typing skills to do your science reporting for you, couldn't you send ME? I could fake it really good. Basically, the hoopla over this technique is being splashed on the front page and getting everyone excited--especially those opposed to stem cell research--and there are so many drawbacks and plain gaps in the information that are just brushed over so we can celebrate "WOO! WE FIGURED OUT THE STEM CELL ETHICAL PROBLEM!" Fuck you, there wasn't a problem--for the people using stem cells in research. And fuck you morer, no you haven't!
Short list of what's wrong with this "miracle solution":
1) Transfection is, at least for now, hardly ever a perfect process. Inserting genes, even when you target them to specific locations, is chancey. And the success rates vary wildly.
2) The paper admits that the mouse cells--NOTE THAT THIS HASN'T BEEN TRIED ON HUMAN CELLS--come from inbred mice. Anyone want to try to find analogous volunteers in our own species? Good luck. Also: ew.
3) 20% of the mice treated died of cancer. Great.
That last one is a doooooozy. So, basically, we're starting one MAJOR step back from starting to build tissues using stem cells and then this step, if it can be made, might also cause a disease we can't cure in 1/5 of the cases (if the numbers translate between species). Instead of starting with cells that we know actually are stem cells and working out fifteen million complications between having cells and creating new tissue, we're going to throw in thirty billion more complications just to arrive at where we could have started? NO THANK YOU.
Look, there are good things here, I don't deny it. Discovering that only four genes could initiate a phenotypic switch from skin to stem cell is major news. This could teach us so much about pleuropotency, you have no idea. But I don't enjoy the blanket encouragement that passes for reporting in The New York Times' "Science" section. Because all it did was jump up and down and screech about how this might solve the stem cell problem and devoted half the article to that and a few paragraphs to the real drawbacks and hurdles this technique creates as a potential therapeutic avenue. If you're going to report on science, report on the goddamn science. Save the ethical questions for that guy. The one with the column. You know the one I mean.
Oh, and pissy thing #2: Paris Hilton is already out of jail.
Supposedly, TMZ says, this length of stay--5 days--is normal for people with her conviction. I'd like to see some stats on that, personally. I wonder if that applies to people sentenced to 45 days or to the 23 days she was eventually given--would she have had to stay a full week, say, if she'd kept the 45-day sentence?
The police, of course, stress that she's not "out"--she's just been "reassigned" to house arrest. While I approve of keeping Paris Hilton on a permanent lo-jack thing (and equipping the rest of humanity with trackers so that we might avoid her for all time), who are you kidding? House arrest? Where she could, easily, grab more drugs and drinks and keep herself medicated (since she was apparently released "for medical reasons"--i.e. sobriety)? Right. Justice. Let's hope she has to like do thirty billion hours of community service or something. Oh, that's right, she does that just by "bringing joy into our mundane lives" with her ugly-ass, skank-bitch face.
That's not very feminist of me, perhaps, but I'd as soon apply the skank label to any guy who rose to fame for being rich and having sex on camera. A lack of reporting on that front shows the bias of the media, methinks. Whatever. Women don't want Paris in our clubhouse any way.
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no subject
Date: 2007-06-07 04:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-06-08 04:45 am (UTC)Never mind that the "problem" with stem cell research right now is America's squickiness when macro-level moral concepts are applied in places where they really just don't fit... bah. Thing is, of course I don't expect the news media to be set up as the moral arbiter of the universe, but I'd look for more honest reporting about this, rather than yet another headline that convinces Joe and Jane Anytown that there's no reason to support the (16-cell-)baby-killers now that everything's squared away on that front.
I normally just roll my eyes at this kind of disinformation, but when it's disinformation that supports a political agenda, I get especially irritated.
no subject
Date: 2007-06-08 05:13 am (UTC)Being someone who despairs enough for the future of understanding of science in this country, I get annoyed on both counts. Hence the frothing-at-the-mouth posting. Argh. This like shouldn't even be that hard to recognize as a bad thing--you can start the enormously complicated task at point A and work towards your eventual goal of being at point Z...or you can throw in the hugely difficult steps Alpha-through-Omego and hope that, when you get through that alphabet of problems, you reach the A you might have started at from the outset. It SEEMS like people should just UNDERSTAND that, just from a management position. Alas not.