According to the latest Pew Internet & American Life Project report, The State of Blogging, 8 million American adults say they have created blogs, and 27%—a 58% increase over last year—of all internet users read the online publications. Nevertheless, 62% of internet users say they don’t know what a blog is. Perhaps, most interestingly, 5% of all internet users say they use"RSS aggregators or XML readers to get the news and other information….”
Three years ago this spring, Dan Gillmor experienced the future by playing a lead role in it. He wrote about the experience himself in We the Media, on which I’ve gotten a start only this week.
At the time Bruggeman, Gillmor, and Searls virtually pantsed Joe Nacchio, I caught merely a glimpse of a sliver of what’s possible when ubiquitous networking and easy-to-use publishing tools caught hold in the culture. While Tom Wolfe provided the framework for the narrative voice in literary journalism, it’s time for the rest of us to raise the barn.
Dan Gillmor has officially left the Knight-Ridder building and has set up what appears to be his intergalactic citizen-based media headquarters.
Three years ago this spring I wrote this was going to get good. Indeed, it is.
LA Weekly has published Michael Hoinsky Hoinski’s wonderful retrospective of of Ken Kesey’s adventures in Los Angeles, on this, the 40th anniversary of the first acid test, including this quote from long-time Kesey collaborator, Rev. Paul Sawyer:
“Their [Kesey and the Merry Pranksters] goal and interest was really making life not just fun, but good in the deepest moral sense. There’s a deep morality to it—to make heaven on Earth, as they say, and to be quite deep at that. Not at all just some playing around. And playing around was part of it. Not to be so highly serious but to have a deep purpose. I think that’s underrated around Kesey’s situation, and I don’t think it comes through in Tom Wolfe’s book [The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test]. He intimates that that’s what they were reaching for, but you don’t have the sense that they touch it.”
Coincidentally, or not, Barlow has news of youngest daughter Amelia’s recent skiing accident. She’s going to be okay, but it was close.
We’ve collectively assumed that the only way to harvest embryonic stem cells was through aborted human tissue or embryonic material (yeah, yeah I’m fully aware of the loaded terminology and I chose the words carefully). Turns out that assumption may be wrong; maybe we can grow them from a single harvested cell.
Wired News is reporting that researchers at Chicago-based Reproductive Genetics Institute believe they can extract a single cell—a blastomere—from an eight-celled organism called a morula and subsequently grow more embryonic stem cells from the harvested seed cell. Taking a single cell from a morula doesn’t harm it and there’s evidence that the embryonic stem cells produced from the balstomere are more powerful than cells harvested from organisms even a week older.
There are proposed techniques that side-step the moral controversy of destroying tissue that surrounds embryonic stem cell research, including the use of dead embryos from fertilization clinics (problem: there’s no way to tell if an embryo is dead) and using cloning technology to create an organism that has no potential to become a human being (problem: too blatant an attempt to end-run the moral issue).
Some believe California’s US$3 billion Stem Cell Research and Cures Initiative research fund makes all of this a waste of time and resoures. “The California funding decision has made the deliberation of the bioethics committee somewhere between irrelevant and unimportant,” Arthur Kaplan, director of Penn’s Center for Bioethics, told Wired News.
For the rest of us, hope springs eternal.
This morning’s New York Times has a well-done overview of the history of organ transplantation, while avoiding most of the ethical issues involved. In the span of five decades, surgeons have learned how to transplant virtually every organ in the human body. It’s amazing and more than a little frightening. And not just to the antivivisectionists.
The main problem related to organ transplantation has always been, and remains, rejection of the transplanted organ. The body perceives a transplanted organ as a foreign substance and sets about to get rid of it as quickly as possible. As a result, immunosuppressive drugs are required to artificially lower the immune system in order to prevent organ rejection. This, of course, brings on its own set of nasty problems. A human doesn’t stay well for long without a healthy immune system. The medical community discovered, quite accidentally, that they had been overprescribing immunosuppressants for years. Current leading edge research in the area of mixed chimerism—tolerance of the transplanted organ without immunosuppressive drugs—shows some promise, but at this point it’s still trial-and-error, with a small error resulting in a devastating rejection. The risks associated with long-term use of immunosuppressive drugs remains largely unknown.
Another serious problem with organ transplantation is chronic rejection. Nearly half of all cadaveric donor organs wear out and the medical community has so far failed to understand this phenomenon.
