Arrival of a Gattaca styled world.

The brilliant film "Gattaca" which was released in 1997 foretold a time when Genetic profiling will divide the human race into "Valids" and "invalids" at birth. This division is accomplished by analysing your genetic makeup and from the information gained, deciding on your eventual future and what "opportunities" will be open to you. It's a pretty scary vision of the near future and the sad thing is, it is actually happening before our eyes. People are being written off before they have the chance to prove themselves as a combination of not only what their genetic profile says about them, but also as a product of their upbringing and drive. You cannot separate these two variables. In fact, whenever someone suggests we "go to far" by using the term "Eugenics" to, say, only allow blonde haired, blue eyed offspring, there is a massive outcry. The study of heredity and it's use in selective breeding is condemned around the world as indeed it should be.

But wait.  We select "Valids" everyday (BBC News). The "Invalids" line the incinerator rooms of hospitals. Those that have been deemed to not be worthy of our love and affection and terminated just because they will need extra care or they don't conform to what "Society" suggests is acceptable. They won't make a massive contribution to our future. They will drain resources from an already overstretched social system.

Society has double standards. I've always suggested that Parents should have the right to choose to terminate if they think that their unborn child will need the love and attention that they are incapable of providing. But those parents spend more time deliberating what it will mean for their lives rather then what it will mean for the child's life in most cases. My life would not be complete without my Daughter who has Downs Syndrome. She gives me a reason to get up in the mornings and if the tests had been performed and the Doctors had been listened to before she was born, I would not have had the opportunity to know how much she enriches our society and how fulfilling her presence in my life would be.

So what gives parents the right to chose one area of Eugenics (because that is what testing a baby invitro is really about), is acceptable and another area is not. Maybe this is why Society sucks so much at caring for those that really need their help. What is the "Invalids" value to society? They drain resources and add nothing to the development of the human race after all, right? They'll never discover a cure for cancer or the common cold. They will never walk on another planet or formulate a theorem about extra dimensions or the existence of life on other planets.

What they do is to show us our humanity and sadly, the vast majority of us come up lacking.

An ode to Phoenix

Perhaps Mars Phoenix has been the most media savvy Mars lander ever.  Throughout the mission, Phoenix has been twittering to interested subscribers about the day to day goings on during its time on the “red planet. So successful has been this venture that the lander won a “Twitties” award as the Smartest tweet. Other missions are now following in Phoenix’s tracks (OK, Phoenix has no tracks but that shouldn’t stop the puns), such as Cassini and the Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity.

Phoenix has arguably been one of the most successful missions to Mars ever. It has far exceeded its original goal of operation for 90 days (Martian days that is). But as the environment on Mars steadily gets colder, the lander will spend more of it’s precious energy keeping its instruments warm. Well before the 3 month period next April when the sun will not riseat the poles on Mars, it will fall silent and the world will miss its day to day escapades.

Naked Scientist Rocks :)

I sent a question into the Naked Scientist Radio program on Sunday and they asked it on air :) There was a crowd of us listening in Secondlife and everyone cheered :) The program was about aging and the question was :

Q:

I heard that our cells replace themselves every 18 months which means our bodies are actually only 18 months old. How do the new cells carry the information about our real chronological age forward into the next generation of cells? Rebecca

It was answered by Steve Jackson of the Gurdon Institute at the University of Cambridge

A:

Steve - First of all, some cells in our body don’t divide such as nerve cells and so they really aren’t. They last our whole lives but even the cells that do turn over- a new cell is generated from the division of an existing cell. The age of an existing cell basically gets transferred. The new cell remembers how old the other cell was. One of the important things that is transferred are the chromosomes. The ends of the chromosomes called telomeres get shorter every time a cell divides. They are a very useful counting mechanism. These telomeres shortening is one of the important counting mechanisms that tells our cells how many times they’ve divided and how old they are.

Download a podcast and read a transcript of the show here