Genetic Savings & Clone, a biotechnology company that sold cloned pets, sent letters to its customers last month informing them it will close at the end of the year because of little demand for cloned cats. The company had recently reduced the price from $50,000 to $32,000.
The article discusses some reasons why the company didn’t make it. One that isn’t mentioned, but I think is plausible, is slightly increased scientific literacy.
Back in 2000 when this company started up, whenever people talked about clones you got the impression they were imagining creepy “Attack of the Clones” scenarios. Obviously plenty of people still haven’t put any further thought into it, but in the past several years you’ve started to see people recognizing that clones are actually identical twins, as I noted in a Brainwash article awhile ago.
Perhaps once people realized that their $50,000 would get them not a carbon copy of dear departed Fluffy, but a completely different cat sharing Fluffy’s genes, they decided it wasn’t worth the money. Imagine that.
Now that I think of it, I wouldn’t be surprised if another issue was trouble getting qualified people to work for them - what scientist would want to work for a company whose entire business plan consists of taking advantage of people’s misconceptions about science?
Every time I meet a patient who’s an organ recipient, I am amazed at the accomplishment of organ transplantation. The way it extends people’s length and quality of life is just spectacular. Sadly, people die every day waiting for organs, while usable ones are buried. There needs to be a national effort to increase donation rates; the payoff is enormous.
I was excited to see today that the Washington Post gets it.
This suffering and waste could be alleviated if more people agreed to give organs posthumously. Currently only a little more than half of the 14,000 people annually who die in circumstances that would make them suitable donors give organs. All state governments and the District have tried to encourage donations by asking people to sign up when they apply for a driver’s license. But not enough people respond to this prompting, so it’s time to consider extra incentives.Three types of incentives merit attention. The decision to pledge organs could be linked to the chance of receiving one: People who check the box on the driver’s-license application when they are healthy would, if they later fell sick, get extra points in the system used to assign their position on the transplant waiting list (other factors include how long you have waited and how well an available organ would match your blood type and immune system). Another sort of incentive is financial: Georgia has experimented with a $9 discount on its driver’s-license fee. A final reform would shift from opt-in organ donations to an opt-out system: Unless you went out of your way to check a box on your driver’s license application to indicate that you did not want to give organs, you would be considered a potential donor.
These reforms don’t raise significant ethical issues. They would not allow people to buy and sell organs, and they would not allow patients to pay their way to the top of the organ-transplant queue. Each reform, or some combination of them, would save money and relieve suffering. The District and state governments shouldn’t wait.
Hear, hear.
Via Julian Sanchez, I find James Wolcott’s scathing review of Dinesh D’Souza’s upcoming book, The Enemy at Home. I love a no-holds-barred book review, especially of a book as dishonest and freedom-hating as this one seems to be.
This, though, made me do a double-take:
“I am saying that the cultural left and its allies in Congress, the media, Hollywood, the nonprofit sector [profiteers are always patriots, of course], and the universities are the primary cause of the volcano of anger toward America that is erupting from the Islamic world.”
[…]
“Thus without the cultural left, 9/11 would not have happened.”
I like that “Thus,” as if he’s actually proven something.
“I realize that this is a strong charge,” D’Souza writes, “one that no one has made before.”
But wait. That argument sounds awfully familiar. Didn’t somebody say that at the time? A quick google shows that yes, somebody did. Jerry Falwell in mid-September 2001:
“The ACLU has got to take a lot of blame for this. And I know I’ll hear from them for this, but throwing God…successfully with the help of the federal court system…throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools, the abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked and when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad…I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who try to secularize America…I point the thing in their face and say you helped this happen.”
So he’s not even original. On the other hand, even Falwell apologized.
I just got my computer back after almost two weeks without it. The ethernet port has been broken for months and I finally decided to try getting it fixed before the warranty expired. Unfortunately, IBM claimed that the problem is due to a liquid spill (which I don’t believe - I would think that if I’d spilled something on the computer and then stuff broke I would remember) so they wouldn’t fix it, and they sent it back just a bit too late for me to get it before leaving for Cleveland for Audra’s wedding. But the upshot is, now I finally have my computer back, ethernet port or not. (I don’t really need it anyway.) It’s so nice to have all my settings and documents and navigation keys and screen real estate. And be able to compute during class.
I went to see The Departed on Friday evening. It was really excellent. I agree with most of Matt Yglesias’s review; unlike many, I enjoyed Jack Nicholson’s hamminess, and I thought the final scene was perfectly plausible (at least, as plausible as anything else in the movie). The final shot (of the rat against the statehouse) was maybe a bit much.
I couldn’t figure out why I didn’t recognize the police shrink, since all the rest of the characters were very well-known actors. Turns out she is relatively new; great performance from her. The scenes where Matt Damon is wooing her are some of the most delightful parts of the movie.
Finally, I really appreciate movies that can manipulate my emotions without making me groan afterwards. This one has portions that honestly are sad or hilarious; not too much blatant manipulation.
Definitely recommended.
Over at Language Log, Mark Liberman has been on a roll debunking claims about gender differences found in the popular press. (That link goes to a post that has a list of all his posts on the subject at the bottom.)
Shockingly, it turns out that when you read a claim about gender differences (like “women say 20,000 words a day and men only say 7,000″) and decide to go check the research, most of the time the research says nothing of the sort. That particular claim appears to have been made up out of whole cloth; the available research is not totally conclusive but tends to show that men actually speak slightly more.
There are also many instances of actual studies being reported in so misleading a fashion as to make the news stories essentially lies. (Any time you hear somebody claim that men really do have trouble hearing women, don’t believe it.)
In a few cases, there are fairly-well-supported findings of gender differences, with the typical caveats that while the means are different, there’s a ton of overlap, and other traits besides sex are also good predictors of differences. Liberman concludes that post by stating:
But the most important lesson, in my opinion, is that the facts matter. Where the facts turn out to support consequential cognitive differences between human females and males, let’s try to look clearly at what those differences are, where they come from, and what individual, social and political conclusions we should draw. But let’s not let popularizers of brain-sex differences bring overgeneralizations and outright fallacies into the discussion as if they were scientific results.
Bravo.
For whatever reason, “scientific” findings about gender differences are more popular than just about anything else (except maybe diet claims). People find this stuff fascinating, and can’t seem to help projecting their prior commitments about gender onto the research, no matter what (if anything) it actually says. The chaff so greatly outweighs the wheat in this field that anyone committed to scientific accuracy really shouldn’t believe any claims without taking a look at the research.
Strangely enough, there are three words frequently encountered in medical school that feature the pronunciation n[?]-’mä-nik (where [?] signifies a sometimes-varying vowel sound) and contain a silent consonant. Though they are frequently confused, each word is different, as is each silent consonant. A quick guide, including a mnemonic to keep them straight:
mnemonic: a memory aid. M is for Memory.
pneumonic: relating to the lungs; e.g. pneumonic plague. P is for Pulmonary (or Plague).
pathognomonic: definitively characteristic of a particular disease. G is for Guess (what you don’t have to do if you see a pathognomonic sign).
(gnomonic: a kind of map projection; not likely to be found in medical school.)