Slashdot Mirror

I just found the paper online here: http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/1756-0500-2-174.pdf . The article did not mention a control group (how I hate stupid science reporting), but there was one. This is almost certainly not normally occurring growth that was observed.

So when you said

There was no control group in this experiment.

and then you got modded +5 insightful, you were ... what? Just pulling that out of your ass?

Then you're going to have the hilarious possibility that they were merely observing natural growth of the cortex over time.

I just found the paper online here: http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/1756-0500-2-174.pdf . The article did not mention a control group (how I hate stupid science reporting), but there was one. This is almost certainly not normally occurring growth that was observed.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12914564/ re Iceland gene pool less heterogenous than other European populations.

http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2156/9/14/ re status of Ashkenazi Jews as genetic isolates.

Perhaps it may not be feasible for something like Google or Yahoo to implement, but you can implement your own regex search. Via a perl script (or other language) you conduct a broad keyword search and then process the results returned by that search with a regex found in your script to further refine your results. For example, http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6947/7/32.

just in case you missed my diatribe against those who answer pretty legitamate posts posting as Anonymous Coward. Here's one article for you. If your little Anonymous ass starts bleeding from reading it, shove a tampon in it.

http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/2/9/

Next time, please comment under your login name. People are more friendly towards you then (at least I would be). Your halfwit comments about "opening my flap" are unnecessary, asking for sources is perfectly legit. Just ask next time, instead of being a jerk.

Nono, gfxguy, I agree with how this legislation creep is being abused. I'm just saying that rules regarding things that harm others can be more strict than regarding those things that harm only yourself.

I have no doubt in my mind that the weasels trying to pass this warning label silliness through have no clue what they're talking about and probably also believe that the earth is 6000 years old.
I also find it likely that this is a reaction to some stupid pressure group where noone is literate enough to read the psychological studies which all indicate that there is no established causal link suggesting that gaming makes you more violent (and yes, I can get real peer review articles on the matter, "Anonymous Coward" who posted above, I can also explain the long words).
There is also statistical evidence which shows that you (and I) are less likely to die by violence now than at any other point in human history(this is easy enough to find, have fun Mr."AC"). Which goes to show how wrong that legislative moron is.


Oh, and "Anonymous Coward" up above, here is a link for you to read. It has long and complicated words. If you have problems reading it onscreen you could print it out and shove it up your urethra
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/2/9/

That is just one of the interesting articles on this matter, what I stated in the earlier post was a really big simplification.

Sorry to offend anyone with foul language, (except of course Mr. AnonymousCoward, fucking sign in and comment under your login name or get shat upon) just need to vent, and what better venue than slashdot ;)

Mistaken Identifiers: Gene name errors can be introduced inadvertently when using Excel in bioinformatics

Apple better start investing heavy in Clone technology or Robotics..... Here is a couple links to get you started Apple! http://robots.net/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotics/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_cloning/ http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6939/5/9/ This may be an exercise in ethics and law, but at least the company will still be around!

Actually, there is NO absolute proof of the so called "second hand smoking" (passive smoking). Everything said about it is based on a single, very questionable report release way back (70s ? 80s ?).

Would you like to hear some more recent studies? No? Too bad.

A study examining the method by which SHS triggers allergy attacks.
Demonstration of how SHS promotes the growth of existing lung cancers.
How SHS impedes the ability of fibrolasts to respond to a wound.

The last one in particular contains a great number of references by which you can better educate yourself. Penn & Teller can go to hell for all I care; the data is out there for people who don't get all their scientific information from comedians.

Try spending 5 minutes on scholar.google.com before blathering about "no studies" and "no research."

> I agree that Excel isn't enough, but don't dismiss Excel as a tool.

I think it is pretty well documented why Excel should not be used as a serious scientific tool - it will corrupt data, it is incorrect, and inconsistent (pdf) - all bad for science. I am surprised accountants are allowed to use it.

And it does not seem to be getting better either. So why should scientists be encouraged to use such an incorrect tool? Because it is easier?!?

"And I've always thought Applets were underrated and under-utilized."

I agree. We deploy all of our code as applets AND applications, which is not extra effort at all really. We mainly do this so that people can try it out with installing it. The only pain is maintaining a Verisign certificate, so people can actually trust us. Self-signed certificates just don't cut it, really.

I'm not talking trivial applets either, we've implemented a Semantic Web browser for scientists with some pretty fancy interface controls as an applet, and although you might be able to do the equivalent with AJAX/etc., I know I'd spend a lot more time maintaining the code, ensuring it works in different browsers, etc. with the non-Java approach. And it couldn't be used outside the browser, like our applets can.

While it's certainly very nice that the big journals like Nature take steps towards offering Open Access to (some of) their material, it has already been a growing trend in certain research areas for the past, say, five years or so. I do research in the field of Bioinformatics/Molecular Biology and except for high-profile stuff that could go into Science or Nature, I simply will not publish anything in a journal that is not Open Access.

The journal being Open Access is of tremendous importance to the researcher as it makes it _much_ more likely, that your paper will actually be found and read by other scientists. I know this from my own literature searches: hits found the PubMed database links to the journal webpage, and if no Open Access version is available, it really have to look like a promising paper, before I spend my time ordering through the University Library.

Also, it should be noted that an ever increasing number of Open Access journal exists in the areas of Life Science in general - for example all the BMC journals, the PLoS journals and even journals from "old school" publishers such as Oxford University Press (e.g. Nucleic Acids Research) have gone Open Access. Also an increasing number of traditional journal now offer an Open Access option, where your pay to make your specific paper availably under Open Access.

That's not the most disturbing problem with it in my opinion. T. gondii's life cycle basically involves inhabiting cats and mice. In mice, it causes reckless behavior and poorer reflexes to encourage predation of its hosts by cats. Similarly, in humans, it also seems to encourage the same sort of problems. This results in a doubling or tripling in the likelihood that a T. gondii infected human will get into a traffic accident. Note that current estimates are that 30-60% of the populace has latent Toxoplasmosis.

(Incidentally, T. gondii isn't a worm. It's a protozoa.)

Original Carnegie Mellon press release: http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2007/April/april17 _genes.shtml
The actual journal article: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2202/8/20

This is not simply a proposal, though you have to go to the actual journal article to determine that. The press release is so hyped up though that it's hard to see that basically all they're doing is applying two well-known bioinformatics techniques to the problem of finding previously unknown/unstudied genes related to learning and memory.

The first technique is simply to see what interacts with known genes (CREB and zif268); since proteins function by interacting with each other, you'd expect that most - not all - of the proteins that CREB and zif268 interact with will be related to memory and learning. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_interaction

The second technique is just an application of the fact that similar proteins from different organisms (i.e. homologs) usually have the same function. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homology_modeling

These computational techniques can be very useful in hypothesizing which genes may be involved, so that you can then go to the lab and either confirm or reject your hypothesis. The authors did not do so, but they did do a search of the experimental literature, which gives a partial confirmation. But the fact remains that this work is simply the application of known computational techniques. In all, I'd say it's a nice bit of work and worth my time (as a PhD student with an emphasis in bioinformatics) ... but not worth a press release or getting excited about.

This is not experimental article. . This is 100% computational study. And again (I said it elsewhere several times already): it would be nice if submitters will make a little bit of extra effort and give a link to the original peer-revied publication.

Worth publishing in a scientific journal? May be. Worth the front page of /.? No.

Reconciliation analysis determines that there are two alternative explanations that account for the current distribution of anthropoid primate lice. The more parsimonious of the two solutions suggests that a Pthirus species switched from gorillas to humans. This analysis assumes that the divergence between Pediculus and Pthirus was contemporaneous with the split (i.e., a node of cospeciation) between gorillas and the lineage leading to chimpanzees and humans. Divergence date estimates, however, show that the nodes in the host and parasite trees are not contemporaneous. Rather, the shared coevolutionary history of the anthropoid primates and their lice contains a mixture of evolutionary events including cospeciation, parasite duplication, parasite extinction, and host switching. Based on these data, the coevolutionary history of primates and their lice has been anything but parsimonious.

However, in the last 3-5 years,some very respectable and highly cited open access journals have come up - check out www.plos.org or Biomedcentral http://www.biomedcentral.com/ - they are open access publishers who don't charge for access - instead, they charge the authors for the publication costs.

For Physics, Mathematics, CS and Quantitative Biology:

Arxiv

If you have a cat, sooner or later you're going to get toxoplasmosis. Toxoplasmosis (even the non-acute or "latent" form) affects reaction time. Time to ban cat-owners from driving cars. http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2334/2/11

In short, you may be right that second hand smoke is bad for you, but if you don't do the research to actually find out whether and how much of an effect it has, then you are just as bad as creationists.

Here you go:
Epidemological study on the correlations between exposure to SHS and severe childhood asthma attacks.
A study showing the increased risk of developing heart disease from SHS.
An analysis of 37 studies on SHS and lung cancer.

Is that evidence enough for you? If not, you can play for days on Google's Scholar search putting in "second hand smoke" and various diseases caused by it. You will find next to no studies claiming that SHS is harmless. Much like global warming, you have to step outside the realm of experts on the subject to find "debunkers." I'm not sure what sort of logical process would invoke such a strong skepticism over the idea that the same chemical stew that kills smokers might also have effects on the people not holding the cigarette without questioning the effect on smokers themselves. Skepticism's healthy, but there's a limit.

In the few minutes he talked about it he seemed to be taking a reactionary stance against people like you who attack and namecall based on your unsupported assumptions. If you want to sway the middle-of-the-roaders like me, you need to provide scientific evidence rather than conjecture blown way out of proportion by people with extreme views.

Hrm. It seems interesting that a "middle of the roader" will hold me to standards of intellectual integrity that you won't hold Crichton to. I mean, nowhere do I see him making any support for his assertions (which is the bulk of what I actually wrote about, if you go back and actually read my post). Also, I do provide links to articles thoroughly debunking the assertions he makes in his books (even though there's nothing directly refutable in his empty statements of "they're just wrong" in his speeches). The best he ever gets is, "Scientists were wrong on this other completely unrelated subject material, so why trust them on this?" But, hey, I'm the one not backing myself up, right?

If you are simply asking for supporting evidence of global warming, then please go and read the many articles in RealClimate's archive. For a more layman's approach, go see the documentary "An Inconvenient Truth." There is no lack of consensus within the climate research community.

If you're actually attacking my assertions on SHS and not global warming, then fine. I did not back them up initially because I thought it was freaking obvious and because my post was excessively long at that point anyway. It was pretty rushed and had some nasty grammar errors because of cutting and pasting sentences into a more cohesive whole. (That's also how I lost the bit about DDT being banned because of effects on wildlife.) In my experience, the only people who seriously question SHS's effects on others are smokers in denial. Why bother trying to reach them? They've built up a lifetime of mental and emotional defenses against the ramifications of their actions, and no amount of truth will reach them.

(not a reply intended for the original poster, who likely knows all this already)

Since the advent of the internet/WWW and high-quality desktop printing have made mailed-out paper journals less necessary, a number of free "open access journals" have recently arisen. A number of others are making content free a couple of months after publication.

The idea is that cost should not prohibit anyone from accessing scientific information, whether that person is an undergraduate in London or a professor in Nairobi.

http://www.biomedcentral.com/openaccess/

http://www.wsis-si.org/oa-facts.html

http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/node3302.html

There are numerous studies which indicate that latest T. gondii cyst infection produces a noticeable drop in motor skills and intelligence. I wrote an article on this over at K5 a couple weeks ago. One of the comments linked to a study which showed a significant increase in risk of traffic accidents for those with latent T. gondii infection.

However, the notion that this is a "mind control" parasite in humans is completely off base. A previous study showed that mice infected with T. gondii had increased risk of cat predation. Researchers believe that may be caused by increased dopamine levels in mouse brains as a result. But that is still speculative.

I could add that I submitted this story to /. almost three weeks ago and was rejected within an hour... but that would be off topic.

Actually, there is another hypothesized threat from Toxoplasma gondii that is a deadly risk even for people with just a dormant infection. (Toxoplamsa doesn't get eliminated by the immune system; it just goes dormant in cysts in the muscle tissue and brain and continues to effect its host for life.)

Latent toxoplasmosis seems to give people a significantly higher risk of getting in a car accident than people who do not have it. People with latent toxoplasmosis have slower reaction times and a tendency towards more risk-seeking behavior than people without, just like rats with the disease.

Half the worlds population is infected with a mind controlling parasite which causes a 2.65 times increase in traffic accidents. This could be one of the most underestimated killers on the planet.

See the results of the study here:

http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2334/2/11

"Increased risk of traffic accidents in subjects with latent toxoplasmosis: a retrospective case-control study

Human latent toxoplasmosis leads to prolongation of reaction times [11] and changes in personality profiles [12,13]. These changes are probably side effects either of the rodent-aimed manipulative activity of Toxoplasma or of some pathogenic activity of the parasites in the brain. The changes cannot influence the risk of predation in modern humans; nevertheless, prolongation of reaction times could increase the risk of other incidents such as traffic accidents. If this is true then the prevalence of toxoplasmosis in participants in traffic accidents should be higher than in the general population living in the same area.

Here we report the results of retrospective case-control study that compares the seroprevalence of toxoplasmosis in persons injured in traffic accidents with the seroprevalence of toxoplasmosis in general population living in the same area. ....

The value of the odds ratio (OR) suggests that subjects with latent toxoplasmosis had a 2.65 (C.I.95= 1.76-4.01) times higher risk of a traffic accident than the toxoplasmosis-negative subjects. "

Quibble #1: This is not "nuclear medicine", it is "structural biochemistry."
The field of nuclear medicine is concerned with things like radiation therapy and PET scanning.

          http://science.howstuffworks.com/nuclear-medicine. htm
          http://jnm.snmjournals.org/
          http://www.biomedcentral.com/bmcnuclmed/

Quibble #2: Your second link is very outdated. Structures for several prion proteins were determined several years ago, using both X-ray diffraction and NMR methods. Science moves on, but many webpages are never updated.

The governemnt has alot of stuff that falls inot the catagory of IP wich isn't released to the general public.

...and many people, including myself, believe that should not be the case. In fact, copyright law explicitly denies protection to those whose work is done directly for the government, and there have been attempts to extend that to cover grant-funded research. Patents are, unfortunately, not subject to the same requirements for open access. Obviously there are reasons to keep certain information from becoming public, but granting patent/copyright protection to the fruits of government work so that the government can make a profit from them is wrong. If my tax dollars paid for research I should be able to apply it, and whoever proves to be the best competitor in bringing it to market - not whoever has the best access to the halls of power - should profit most.

I'm inclined to agree. IAAcomputational biologist doing bioinformatics-y algorithm things, and I am skeptical of automated grammar discovery. Automatic motif discovery with HMMs is one thing --- that works well, and I suspect that's basically what their bioinformatics results are yielding here (since SCFGs are a superset of HMMs). CFG-related algorithms are great for RNA analysis (I've written a few of them). I haven't read the article in detail, but CFGs aren't overwhelmingly well suited to proteins (which lack the nested-clause structure typical of RNA, for example (and programming languages too, as it happens)). One question I might ask is "how well does this perform when applied to a particular task?" --- the authors mention (in the context of proteins) automated functional classification; I'd be curious to see if this is basically reproducing the results of HMM-like approaches.

I'm inclined to agree. IAAcomputational biologist doing bioinformatics-y algorithm things, and I am skeptical of automated grammar discovery. Automatic motif discovery with HMMs is one thing --- that works well, and I suspect that's basically what their bioinformatics results are yielding here (since SCFGs are a superset of HMMs). CFG-related algorithms are great for RNA analysis (I've written a few of them). I haven't read the article in detail, but CFGs aren't overwhelmingly well suited to proteins (which lack the nested-clause structure typical of RNA, for example (and programming languages too, as it happens)). One question I might ask is "how well does this perform when applied to a particular task?" --- the authors mention (in the context of proteins) automated functional classification; I'd be curious to see if this is basically reproducing the results of HMM-like approaches.

In case none of you are actually involved in science -- and since this "IS" slashdot that odds of that are pretty high (yes that was an insult), here's another open access research publication site.

http://www.biomedcentral.com/

It's a clearinghouse for peer reviewed science and they have journals covering various topics from reproduction to evolutionary biology to genomics. Plus, you can subscribe to an RSS feed for everything.

I was thinking more along the lines of this.

Obviously you have no clue what it is to
be a 'person of interest' in post 9-11
US. Perhaps you would like to
catch up on this man's story and see
how his career is going....

http://www.biomedcentral.com/news/20020910/06

http://www.cnn.com/2003/LAW/08/26/lawsuit.hatfill/

Early molecular comparisons between humans and chimpanzees suggested that the species are very similar to each other at the nucleotide sequence level--a difference of between 1.23% and 5%, Sakaki said. The results reported this week showed that "83% of the genes have changed between the human and the chimpanzee--only 17% are identical--so that means that the impression that comes from the 1.2% [sequence] difference is [misleading]. In the case of protein structures, it has a big effect," Sakaki said.

BMC has waivers for those who cannot pay (and also, authors whose institutions are members needn't pay, and institutional membership is inexpensive -- far cheaper than journal subscriptions). Meanwhile, PLoS says that fees are waived for those who say they can't pay, no questions asked. These are the two biggest and most high-profile open-access publishers; I think others will have similar answers.

BMC has waivers for those who cannot pay (and also, authors whose institutions are members needn't pay, and institutional membership is inexpensive -- far cheaper than journal subscriptions). Meanwhile, PLoS says that fees are waived for those who say they can't pay, no questions asked. These are the two biggest and most high-profile open-access publishers; I think others will have similar answers.

On the contrary recent studies show that most Linux users don't shower enough and are indeed infected with worms.

---Unlike most online newspapers and magazines, almost all the scientific journals I know of require a paid subscription to access.---

Actually, many journals these days allow open access for all articles after a certain amount of time, 12 months in some cases, 6 months in others.

---The exception are the couple of new bioscience journals in the Public Library of Science and the physics pre-print server (not peer-reviewed). But even that the author must pay $1500 for the cost of review and webification. ---

Note that the PLOS journals are all being financed by heavy endowments, and the author pays method of publishing a journal has so far not been proven to be economically viable.

---However, the greedy for-profit academic publishers and professional societies know this wall. They have the academic community by the b*lls with their high subscription and publication page charges----

Do you really think that most scientific societies are out to make a profit? Most that I've been involved with do a great deal for their communities. Most are almost entirely funded through proceeds from the journals they publish. Take these away, and you lose all of the good deeds that societies do for scientists. Remove their ability to publish, and societies vanish, and then all of the journals are in the hands of the greedy for-profit publishers. Is this what you want?

---Hopefully Google Scholar will do an end-run around these and provide a more accessable search service.---

Nope. You can search all you like on Google, but unless you subscribe to the journal, or the paper is open access, you can't read the full text.

This all may change with the proposed new NIH guidelines.

Call me when you have something more than hysteria from the veggie crew

The Public Patent Foundation (which recently got Microsoft's FAT filesystem patent rejected) has gotten the patent office to agree to re-examine the most recent, presumably illegitimate Axel patents.

Of course this work has almost nothing to do with the work for which he was awarded the Nobel prize...

The US House of Representatives' Committee on Government Reform has compiled a list of the W. Bush Administration's attacks on the scientific community on their Politics and Science website.

In addition, the social psychological community has been feeling the government burn recently because the US House of Representatives passed a vocal vote on 9/9/04 to block future funding of two currently approved NIH and NIMH grants (Click here for that article). This creates an unsettling precedent allowing governing bodies to trump the peer review process. [Sigh ...]

Yes, they are looking into it.

The use of Fluorescently labeled nanoparticles to determine the effect of particle size on translocation from the lung
NanoParticles Shown to Cause Brain Damage
etc. etc. etc.

>Anyways, what the NIH now seem to be doing (and very
>rightly so) is to force the scientists to use different
>journals to publish in. In other words, they are
>trying to do away with a completely artificial
monopoly.

NIH has its own series of electronic publications to push: those at the BioMedCentral that start with BMC. Such journals are based on the open access model, which means the Authors pay for publishing, and then the articles can be freely read by anyone. This allows to effectively free results, but of course the publication model is very different.

Actually, there was a recent article that discussed the fact that the symbiotic bacteria that made up corals was changing. So, though there's widespread bleaching of corals, it doesn't necessarily mean doom. The newer symbionts are much better adapted to warmer temperatures, so they should do better with the overall warming of the oceans.

What's probably happening with this artificial corals is that they're being colonized by the "clade D" symbionts right off the bat, which makes it look like they're thriving.

That's not to say that corals don't face other issues - pollution and disease most notably - but the situation may not be as dire as suspected.

This is brilliant, if the US does it then maybe the UK and EU will follow ... Biomedcentral is the formost open publisher in the natural sciences. Take a look at the site - how easy it is to start your own journal for example... an example of how it should/could be.

Remember the recent incident at LANL with the missing disks and the work being halted and the employees getting suspended?

Well, apparently, the disks never existed. Somebody doing a project thought he would need 4 disks, and so put the paperwork through for clearance to create 4 disks, but he only ended up needing 2 disks. So, when the inventory check went through, the paperwork indicated that 2 disks were missing, even though they never existed.

This news hasn't hit the press yet, but I got it from a trusted source working on the investigation at LANL. (He works at the lab I work at as well)

Sorry. I have a patent on that. Pay up, then blow up.

So this is your doing then? Right, I'm sueing.

If you visit the story at The Scientist, they have a much better article and a link to the PubMed, full text article.

I did a bit of research about schizophrenia a few years ago, and one thing that I read stands out in my memory more than anything else. One very common symptom of schizophrenia is hallucination, and I was a bit surprised (although I immediately realized that I shouldn't have been) when I read that hallucinations can involve any of the five senses, or combinations of them. Tactile hallucinations are quite common.

Anyway, the thing that stands out in my memory was a schematic diagram of the brain that had two boxes, each with arrows pointing to a third box in the center. The two boxes were labeled "SENSATION" and "THOUGHT" and the third box in the center was labeled "INTEGRATION". The narrative on the opposite page explained that you can think of the brain as an integrator of thoughts and sensations, and that hallucination represents a "crossed wire" in the integration center so that the brain perceives a thought as a sensation. For example, a person may think of spiders crawling on their skin, but the brain interprets that thought as the actual sensation.

This simplified schematic model made good sense to me, and helped me to understand the phenomenon in a more analytical way, rather than just being scared of the unknown.

I've never seen the movie, but I have seen a PBS documentary about John Nash called A Beautiful Madness. It was quite interesting and talked about his condition in some depth.

Also, check out the Wikipedia article on the disease. (There's probably a good article about John Nash as well, while you're at it.)

It's been my experience (I've just been accepted to medical school) that medical conditions or procedures that are initially "scary", "disturbing" or "gross" become easier to cope with after a bit of education. Science can do wonders to calm the soul, if the condition is one that is well understood. You're correct that our current understanding of schizophrenia is relatively incomplete, but it is much better than it was in Nash's day. Where the answers are not available (or are not satisfying), you can always find comfort in some good, old-fashioned prayer or meditation.

The way things are going in our culture, when you are old and suffering from Parkinson's you won't be cured, rather you'll be harvested for parts. The thinking at that time will be that you aren't human anymore, or that you are too much of a burden for society. I hope I'm wrong, but I fear not

I doubt this will be a valid concern. Young fresh parts are desireable. Why would you want old parts from someone with a debilitating sickness?

I call B.S. Care to offer some evidence for this sweeping statement? I have no problem with medical advancement, just with "advancement" that is conducted at the expense of someone who has no say in the matter.

Lab rats? Clinical trials on Chimpanzees? These types of tests go on every day and I would certainly say some percentage of them are to the detrimant of those being used for the tests. I'm pretty sure they have no say in the matter as well. Of course that's ok cause they aren't human right? Most human trials are done wiht volunteers, but what about in the past like when MIT did radiation research at a home for the mentally challenged or the Army releasing chemicals into the air on certain populations to test the effects without bothering to tell anyone. There are plenty of sites keeping track of this type of secret studies. Such as above top secret. If you don't find that a credible source you could always look at the CDC pages for the Tuskegee Syphilis Study which was certainly done inappropriatly.

I should probably clarify that I don't think a fertilized embryo is a human yet and that I'm ok with stem cell research etc. I also think that if we are going to ban it then our own government shouldn't be offshoring the research to get around our laws. Besides.. who's to say that with more research we won't work out a method for cloning specific parts and not whole people from whom parts will be harvested. This makes the most sense to me. Like the recent announcment that stem cells may be used to regrow teeth. We might just figure out how to grow just kidneys, livers, hearts, or whatever we need. Then we won't have issues with people dieing while waiting on transplant need lists and can potentially guarantee successful acceptance of new organs by the body.

Something that most of the articles about this place have pointed out, but /. predictably failed to, is that this is largely designed for political purposes. The goal is to get lobbyists and senators to show up at this place, since they haven't the slightest idea what the hell these dnas are that everybody keeps talking about.

"This is not an artifact-based museum," Peter Schultz, the museum's exhibits and public programs director, told The Scientist. "It's focused on how science can better inform decision making."

It's not really aimed at the average joe, it's aimed at the guy that gets presentations on whether or not to fund some kind of genetic disease research project, or whatever. All the exibits are geared towards the sort of things beaurocrats have to deal with these days, but don't really understand. The exhibits rotate, but they all have a goal in mind. The first three are, respectively, to keep congress from going all knee-jerk on genetic engineering/promote the FBI DNA database, to get politicians to quit pretending global warming is imaginary, and to show off cool shit like dark matter so the NSF can get better funding next year.

What you're saying is true--that both breeding and inserting genes into an organism other ways both modify the genome, but that doesn't mean they have "the same end." We don't know nearly enough about genetics to say that. Look at the differences between cloned sheep and naturally-born sheep. They are genetically identical, yet the clones end up having all sorts of health problems. Now the health of the modified plant is unimportant with respect to human health, but it could be the tip of the iceberg. What if some of these modified foods produce poison, but only under stress? We wouldn't find out until there was a drought/freeze and suddenly a whole field of poisonous corn makes its way into the food supply.

Breeding takes longer and cannot be controlled to the same extent.

True. And all other concerns aside, this is a very good argument for genetically modified organisms.

And don't start about the dangers of vectors, unwanted integration and crap like that. Nature does that every single minute (ever heard of transposons?) and nobody is complaining about that. So, "Frankenfood"? I think not.

All right, I'm sorry, but this last part is utter bullshit. No one is complaining about vectors or unwanted integration? What about all those antibiotic-resistant bacteria that spread around their genes for beta-lactamases? Ever heard of methicillin-resistant-S.-aureus (MRSA)? It's fast becoming the major pathogen people get while in the hospital, and it's a bitch to cure. This is the "flesh-eating bacteria" you see on tv. And the dangers of vectors? There is a slim (but not nil) chance of vectors sticking around, and later integrating into the human genome. In the future that might be beneficial, but right now human gene therapy has had no successes. One prominent failure was the gene therapy for immunodeficient children who ended up contracting leukemia. I'd sure complain if my food gave me cancer.

How do the Salmon fertilize the forests? ... then mostly get washed back to sea.

The relation between salmon and nitrogen is the favorite new story that eco-jabbering meadow muffins like me enjoy. Googling "salmon nitrogen" gets quite a few hits. Here is a research paper with big words Salmon Derived Nitrogen in terrestrial invertebrates). They have the same propaganda on all the PBS stations.

Nitrogen seems to also explain while the soil in drainages with salmon runs tends to be a lot more fertile than those without salmon runs.

Considering the shear bio mass of salmon swimming upstream, it only takes a small portion of the biomass to change the soil. BTW, have you seen the large number of critters that feed on the salmon harvest.

Think of the salmon that swims 1000 miles in land. How much of that biomass really is going to get washed out to sea? It is going to be eaten by all the little critters and bugs in the water. The story seems plausible to me. But so did the relation between the ozone hole and CFCs.