Mathews et al in Nature:

The ease of use, accuracy and efficiency of the genome-editing tool CRISPR/Cas9 has led to its broad adoption in research, as well as to preliminary applications in agriculture and in gene therapies involving non-reproductive (somatic) cells. It is also possible in some jurisdictions to deploy CRISPR/Cas9, and related techniques¹, in human germline cells (sperm and eggs) as well as in early embryos². In September, a network of more than 30 scientists, ethicists, policymakers, journal editors and funders called the Hinxton Group gathered in Manchester, UK, to address the ethical and policy issues surrounding the editing of human genomes in the early stages of development and in germline cells (see go.nature.com/xikxv2). Similar meetings have been and are being held elsewhere in the world, and several position statements have been published (see, for instance, go.nature.com/enfxjz and go.nature.com/fes1wc).

…Establish a model regulatory framework that could be adopted internationally. Various groups, including ours, agree that numerous technical and safety issues need to be addressed before genome-editing technologies could feasibly be used in reproductive clinical applications. Many also share our strong conviction that basic research involving genome editing should not be halted or hampered. Such studies are likely to have tremendous value, including in human-reproduction applications that do not involve genome editing, and potentially in the development of treatments using somatic cells.

More here.

Tara Parker-Pope in The New York Times:

Once personal health technology meant little more than bathroom scales, thermometers and electric toothbrushes. Now, these devices and apps are everywhere: on our wrists, in our phones, the bedroom, the kitchen, even on our children and pets. In this special issue of Science Times, we explore the lives of newly wired consumers and the consequences, good and bad, that arise from our increasing reliance on trackers, monitors, guides and a vast array of other devices to better our health.

Fitness
­Health consumers are counting steps, measuring heart rates and tracking sleep. The Consumer Electronics Association estimates that device makers will sell more than 40 million personal health and wellness devices this year; sales may reach $8 billion by 2018.

• Apps to Improve Your Swing, Lift or Stride
• Assessing the Fitness of Wearable Tech
• Five Ways Your Smartphone Can Help Your Health

Food
Home meals are now high-tech affairs: a number of apps and devices aim to make cooking less complicated, helping users source healthful ingredients and stick to nutritious diets.

• Diary of a Food Tracker
• The Food Police in My Phone
• Mastering the Art of Dinner-on-Demand Services

More here.

“You cannot know the I of Me
unless you crack the I of thee”

The Three Christs

Waiting for the Norwegian poet to read
her poems, you delineated the differences
between you and her by pointing to Jesus.

Her version, you said, was radiating outwards,
wave and astral particle, revelatory energy
and blinding light, inherently metaphysical.

Your version, however, was dusty and dog-
tired, having walked too long too far in feet
that ached, in draggled robes, in desperate

need of a hot bath, bread, a goblet of wine,
something to take his mind of those carping
apostles, those omnipresent Roman soldiers.

Sitting here, alone, looking out at the play
of sun and shadow on crenellated ferns,
I’m conjuring a third Christ, neither weary

nor luminous, but one who lives nowhere
save within me, indwelling life illimitable
that I will remain estranged from so long

as I insist on insisting, on putting my own
pleasure, which is all I know deeply or well,
first. A Christ who wears my body’s garment.

Raise the stone, there thou shalt find me;
cleave the wood and there I am. Let not
him who seeks cease until he finds. When

he finds, he shall be astonished. Astonished,
he shall reach the Kingdom. Having reached
the Kingdom, he shall (shall he? shall I?) rest.

by Ravi Shankar
from Green Mountains Review,
Vol. XXIV, No. 1, 2011

Richard Holmes in the New York Review of Books:

There are many William Blakes, but mine arrived with the tigers in the 1960s. The first line I ever read by Blake was not in a book, but laid out in thick white paint (or should I say illuminated) along a brick wall in Silver Street, Cambridge, England, in 1968. It was not poetry, but prose: “The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.” It sent a strange shiver down my spine, as it did for thousands of other university students in England and America that year.

It turns out that, according to The New York Times of December 28, 1968, exactly the same line from Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell” appeared on big posters at the conference of the Modern Language Association in New York. According to the Times it signified that “Radical Agitation Among Scholars Grows,” and it led to several arrests.

This of course was the time of radical disturbances on university campuses across Europe, as well as Vietnam War and civil rights protests in America. Very quickly we all seemed to be reading Blake’s preface to Milton.

More here.

Bjorn Carey at the Stanford Website:

Even the best poker players have “tells” that give away when they're bluffing with a weak hand. Scientists who commit fraud have similar, but even more subtle, tells, and a pair of Stanford researchers have cracked the writing patterns of scientists who attempt to pass along falsified data.

The work, published in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology, could eventually help scientists identify falsified research before it is published.

There is a fair amount of research dedicated to understanding the ways liars lie. Studies have shown that liars generally tend to express more negative emotion terms and use fewer first-person pronouns. Fraudulent financial reports typically display higher levels of linguistic obfuscation – phrasing that is meant to distract from or conceal the fake data – than accurate reports.

To see if similar patterns exist in scientific academia, Jeff Hancock, a professor of communication at Stanford, and graduate student David Markowitz searched the archives of PubMed, a database of life sciences journals, from 1973 to 2013 for retracted papers. They identified 253, primarily from biomedical journals, that were retracted for documented fraud and compared the writing in these to unretracted papers from the same journals and publication years, and covering the same topics.

More here.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb in Politico:

Since 2001 our policy for fighting Islamic terrorists has been, to put it politely, missing the elephant in the room, sort of like treating symptoms and completely missing the disease.

Policymakers and slow-thinking bureaucrats stupidly let terrorism grow by ignoring the roots. So we lost a generation: Someone who went to grammar school in Saudi Arabia (our “ally”) after September 11 is now an adult, indoctrinated into believing and supporting Salafi violence, hence encouraged to finance it — while we got distracted by the use of complicated weapons and machinery.

Even worse, the Wahhabis have accelerated their brainwashing of East and West Asians with their madrassas, thanks to high oil revenues.

More here.

Ali Gharib in The Guardian:

The distended Republican presidential field’s response to the terror attacks in Paris is a conglomeration of policy proposals that look something like this: a ground invasion of Syria and Iraq that will explicitly be less careful about killing civilians, combined with a policy of relief for refugees only if they’re Christians. One can almost see the Islamic State’s top ideologues and propagandists celebrating. And why not? Muslims the world over, which Isis views (wrongly) as a sea of potential recruits, could be forgiven for viewing the Republican rhetoric as a declaration of holy war against their co-religionists. I wish my thumbnail descriptions of Republicans’ talking points were a joke, but they’re not. And the policies described by the candidates line up almost exactly with the image of America that Isis seeks to portray in its propaganda. The target for Isis’s messaging was made abundantly clear in a statement last month from the group: “Islamic youth everywhere, ignite jihad against the Russians and the Americans in their crusaders’ war against Muslims,” said Isis spokesman Abu Mohammad al-Adnani.

Florida senator and Republican presidential hopeful Marco Rubio might as well have had this very idea in mind when he said, repeatedly, of the fight against Isis: “This is a clash of civilizations.” Rubio relished in his identification of Isis as an “Islamic” group – a notion President Barack Obama disavowed yet again on Monday morning:

When I hear folks say that, well, maybe we should just admit the Christians, but not the Muslims … when I hear political leaders suggesting that there would be a religious test for which a person who’s fleeing from a war-torn country is admitted, when some of those folks themselves come from families who benefited from protection when they were fleeing political persecution, that’s shameful.

Florida governor Jeb Bush, who has otherwise taken to defending his brother’s legacy, however ahistorically, even disavowed George W Bush’s proclamations that the “global war on terror” wasn’t “against Islam, or against faith practiced by the Muslim people”.

More here.

From KurzweilAI:

Cornell biomedical engineers have developed specialized white blood cells they call “super natural killer cells” that seek out cancer cells in lymph nodes with only one purpose: to destroy them, halting the onset of cancer tumor cell metastasis. “We want to see lymph-node metastasis become a thing of the past,” said Michael R. King, the Daljit S. and Elaine Sarkaria Professor of Biomedical Engineering and senior author of a paper in the journal Biomaterials. For tumor cells, the lymph nodes are a staging area in the body and play a key role in advancing metastasis throughout the body. In the study with mice, the biomedical engineers killed cancerous tumor cells within days by injecting liposomes (spherical vesicles that can act as carriers) armed with TRAIL (Tumor necrosis factor Related Apoptosis-Inducing Ligand). The liposomes attached to “natural killer” cells — a type of white blood cell — residing in the lymph nodes.

Inducing cancer-cell suicide

King says these natural killer cells in the body became the “super natural killer cells,” which found the cancerous cells and induced apoptosis (cell suicide). The cancer cells self-destruct and disintegrate, preventing the lymphatic spread of cancer any further by “completely eliminating lymph node metastases in mice,” said King. In cancer progression, there are four stages. At stage I, the tumor is small and has yet to progress to the lymph nodes. In stages II and III, the tumors have grown and likely will have spread to the lymph nodes. At stage IV, the cancer has advanced from the lymph nodes to organs and other parts of the body. Between 29 and 37 percent of patients with breast, colorectal, and lung cancers are diagnosed with metastases in their tumor-draining lymph nodes — those lymph nodes that lie downstream from the tumor — and those patients are at a higher risk for distant-organ metastases and later-stage cancer diagnoses. In January 2014, King and his colleagues published research (see “Piggy-backing proteins ride white blood cells to destroy metastasizing cancer“) that demonstrated that by attaching the TRAIL protein to white blood cells, metastasizing cancer cells in the bloodstream were annihilated. “So, now we [also] have technology to eliminate lymph node metastases,” King said. He said human testing of the TRAIL drug could be done “short of a few years from now.”

More here.

The Tortoise

Wrinkled skin. Age? Must be three or four hundred
Like dark circles beneath the eyes, the western
Hemisphere engraved on the shell, so extraordinary
But absolutely silent now after all those wars
Won’t listen, won’t speak, won’t look either
We only gather in a crowd every evening
Eating small portions of that old story
Vanished phrases, broken words, missing letters
Still we eat the story, sharing it amongst ourselves
Thousands of years ago, in some race or the other,
Once, yes, once, I had defeated the hare.

by Srijato
from Chhotoder Chiriyakhana
Ananda Publishers, Kolkata, 2013
translation: 2015, Arunava Sinha

Nick Brandt. Elephant, 2008.

More here, here, and if you want to participate, check this.

My friend and 3QD colleague Ali Minai wrote this excellent piece almost a year ago in Brown Pundits but it is still very relevant and worth reading today in the wake of the Paris horror:

The word “takfīr” (pronounced “tuck – feer”) is one of the most fearsome words in the Islamic lexicon. Deriving from the same root as “kāfir” – infidel – it refers to the act of declaring someone who is nominally a Muslim to be an infidel. And, of course, as the whole world knows by now, a Muslim who has become an infidel is worthy of being killed as an apostate under strict Islamic law. The institution of takfir is not new in Muslim societies, but it has generally been a marginal one. Today, it is at the core of the jihadi extremism that has set the world on fire from Nigeria to India and from Peshawar to Paris. The extremists do not kill based only on takfir – the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo were not Muslims to begin with – but this idea is central to their ideology, which specifically targets Muslims who, in their opinion, have lost the right to live because of their infidelity. Among these are numbered the 136 innocent children gunned down in Peshawar and the soldiers of the largest army of any Muslim majority country in the world. More broadly, its remit extends to entire sects, such as the Shi’as and the Ahmadis, who have been targeted repeatedly in Pakistan.

However, another version of takfir is now afoot in the world. Call it “reverse takfir”. Unlike the militant version, it is well-intentioned and self-consciously humane, but it is also dangerous. This “benign” version of takfir is epitomized by the idea that the acts of violence being committed by self-proclaimed holier-than-thou Muslims are not the acts of “real Muslims” and do not represent “real Islam”. In effect, it declares the terrorists to be infidels! The idea is widespread, and is espoused in three different contexts: By well-meaning non-Muslims (such as Presidents Bush and Obama) seeking to avoid stereotyping and the implication of collective guilt; by ordinary Muslims wishing to dissociate themselves from the beheaders; by Muslim sectarians wishing to separate their brand of orthodoxy from that espoused by terrorists; and – most ironically – by Muslim governments and security forces seeking an “Islamic” justification for attacking extremist fellow Muslims, thus implicitly buying into the central jihadi argument of apostasy as a capital offense. The urge to do this reverse takfir is understandable and not without factual basis: Most Muslims are indeed not violent extremists who wish to kill infidels. And it does help protect innocent Muslims from backlash, which is rather important. The problem, however, is that it also feeds the narrative of denial and deniability that allows the militancy to thrive.

More here.

Ian McEwan in Edge:

The death cult chose its city well—Paris, secular capital of the world, as hospitable, diverse and charming a metropolis as was ever devised. And the death cult chose its targets in the city with ghoulish, self-damning accuracy—everything they loathed stood plainly before them on a happy Friday evening: men and women in easy association, wine, free-thinking, laughter, tolerance, music—wild and satirical rock and blues. The cultists came armed with savage nihilism and a hatred that lies beyond our understanding. Their protective armour was the suicide belt, their idea of the ultimate hiding place was the virtuous after-life, where the police cannot go. (The jihadist paradise is turning out to be one of humanity’s worst ever ideas; slash and burn in this life, eternal rest among kitsch in the next). Paris, dazed and subdued, woke this morning to reflect on its new circumstances. Those of us who were out on the town last night can only wonder at the vagaries of chance that lets us live and others die. As the slaughter began, my wife and I were in a venerable Paris institution, a cliché of the modest good life since 1845. In this charming restaurant in the sixieme, one shares crowded tables with good-willed strangers, visitors and locals in a friendly crush. With our Pouilly Fume and filets d’hareng, we were as good a target as any. The cult chose the onzieme, the dixieme, barely a mile away and we didn’t know a thing.

Now we do. What are those changed circumstances? Security will tighten and Paris must become a little less charming. The necessary tension between security and freedom will remain a challenge. The death-cult’s bullets and bombs will come again, here or somewhere else, we can be sure. The citizens of London, New York, Berlin are paying close and nervous attention. In January we were all CharlieHebdo. Now, we are all Parisians and that at least, in a dark time, is a matter of pride.

More here.

John Parrington in Aeon:

Imagine if living things were as easy to modify as computer software. In such a world, farm animals or plants could be engineered to produce leaner meat or juicier fruit, or to withstand extremes of climate. Medical research would be transformed: we could generate mutant animals to model human disease, or engineer plants to be a source of new drug molecules. In fact, medicine itself would look very different. Instead of suffering the terrible effects of genetic diseases such as cystic fibrosis or muscular dystrophy, clinicians could just eliminate the defects from affected cells. But why stop there? Such conditions themselves could become a thing of the past. IVF embryos might be screened for genetic defects and corrected, before being implanted into the womb. Such a vision might either excite or horrify, depending on your point of view. But if all this sounds like science fiction, it’s time to talk about the new technology of gene editing. As the Nobel laureate Craig Mello, of the University of Massachusetts, recently told me: ‘There truly is a revolution in genetics going on right now.’

…What has changed? In a word, we now have a specific new form of genetic engineering, called gene editing. It’s highly precise, very efficient, and far easier to use than previous methods. Most importantly, it can be applied to practically any cell type, including a fertilised egg. This means it’s possible to create genetically modified plants or animals of practically any species, as well as to modify the cells of adult organisms, including humans.

Let’s compare this situation with the earlier state of the art. Gene editing uses a type of ‘molecular scissors’ – basically a protein that cuts DNA in two. Previous versions of such scissors cut the genome in multiple places, which had a tendency to cause havoc in a living cell. However, they could be used to cut DNA in a test tube, allowing genetic engineers to create gene constructs that could be introduced into a cell on a petri dish, or even a living animal such as a mouse. But the method of introduction was pretty haphazard. The edited scrap of DNA would be injected into the cell, and then one would just have to keep one’s fingers crossed for it to integrate itself with the genome at some useful location. It was a bit like using a cannon to perform organ transplants.

The scissors make a single snip, and then one’s chosen chunk of DNA is slotted neatly into place

There’s a reason I mentioned mice in the previous paragraph, and a reason why mice have been used so pervasively in genetic engineering projects for the past couple of decades. The reason is this: stem cells isolated from a mouse embryo can be genetically modified in culture and used to make a new animal.

More here.

Roger Cohen in The New York Times:

MILAN — The Paris slaughter claimed by the Islamic State constitutes, as President François Hollande of France declared, an “act of war.” As such, it demands of all NATO states a collective response under Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty. This says that, “An armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.” Alliance leaders are already debating what that response should be. Hollande has spoken to President Obama. Other NATO countries, including Germany and Canada, have expressed solidarity. Indignation and outrage, while justified, are not enough. The only adequate measure, after the killing of at least 129 people in Paris, is military, and the only objective commensurate with the ongoing threat is the crushing of ISIS and the elimination of its stronghold in Syria and Iraq. The barbaric terrorists exulting on social media at the blood they have spilled cannot be allowed any longer to control territory on which they are able to organize, finance, direct and plan their savagery.

…To defeat ISIS in Syria and Iraq will require NATO forces on the ground. After the protracted and inconclusive Western interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is reasonable to ask if this would not be folly. It is also reasonable to demand – and many will – whether military action will only have the effect of winning more recruits for ISIS as more lives and treasure are squandered. Terrorism, the old nostrum has it, can never be completely defeated. Such arguments are seductive but must be resisted. An air war against ISIS will not get the job done; the Paris attacks occurred well into an unpersuasive bombing campaign. Major powers, including Russia and China, have vigorously condemned the Paris attacks. They should not stand in the way of a United Nations resolution authorizing military action to defeat and eliminate ISIS in Syria and Iraq. Regional powers, especially Saudi Arabia, have an interest in defeating the monster they helped create whose imagined Caliphate would destroy them.

More here.

Chorus of Cells

Every morning,
even being very old
(or perhaps because of it),
I like to make my bead.
In fact, the starting of each day
unhelplessly
is the biggest thing I ever do.
I smooth away the dreams disclosed by tangled sheets,
I smack the dented pillow’s revelation to oblivion,
I finish with the pattern of the spread exactly centered.
The night is won.
And now the day can open.

All this I like to do,
mastering the making of my bed
with hands that trust beginnings.
All this I need to do,
directed by the silent message
of the luxury of my breathing.

And every night,
I like to fold the covers back,
and get in bed,
and live the dark, wise poetry of the night’s dreaming,
dreading the extent of its improbabilities,
but surrendering to the truth it knows and I do not;
even though its technicolor cruelties,
or the music of its myths,
feels like someone else’s experience,
not mine.

I know that I could no more cease
to want to make my bead each morning
and fold the covers back at night,
than I could cease
to want to put one foot before the other.

Being very old and so because of it,
all this I am compelled to do
day after day,
night after night,
directed by the silent message
of the constancy of my breathing,
that bears the new I am alive.

by Peggy Freydberg
from Poems from the Pond
published by Hybrid Nation 2015