Monday, July 21, 2003

Discovery in North Carolina Timothy Wilken, MD writes: Independent of me, another synergic scientist N. Arthur Coulter, Jr., MD had been seeking to develop an ideal system of organization for human beings. He defined ideal as that system that would maximize both freedom, and quality of life for all within the system. He was the author of SYNERGETICS: An Adventure in Human Development. I discovered him by purchasing his book based on its title from a science catalog. I was so impressed with his book that I took a chance and wrote him. We soon developed a long distance friendship. Coulter was also searching for a better world. He had realized that with the dropping of the Atomic bomb on Japan, humanity had reached a crossroad. That our weapons were now of such power that they threatened us all with extinction. He concluded: “What is needed is nothing less than a major evolution of the human mind, which would give the rational, humane part of the mind a much greater control over the emotional part.” In 1983, we would meet and work together. By co-Operating, we would discovery the organizational tensegrity. This is the story of that meeting.  (07/21/02) Why Deficits Matter Washington Post Editorial: WHEN BUSH ADMINISTRATION officials discuss the deficit, they make it sound like a problem on the scale of a particularly persistent case of fiscal dandruff. "Manageable," Office of Management and Budget Director Joshua B. Bolten told a House hearing. "A concern," the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, N. Gregory Mankiw, wrote in The Post. Treasury Secretary John W. Snow ventured about as far out as any administration official, but he left the country to do it, telling a London audience that the new deficit numbers were "worrisome." And so, let's depart from our usual style on rendering numbers to consider exactly what "manageable" looks like. This year's deficit is projected to be $455 billion. That's $455,000,000,000. Over the next five years, the administration estimates, the cumulative deficits will total $1.9 trillion. That's $1,900,000,000,000. Deficits such as these matter because the increased government borrowing creates a drag on the economy; it reduces the amount of capital available for private investment and consequently the increased national income that would result from greater investment. (07/21/03) Early Pregnancy Common in Fatherless Science News -- Teenage girls in the United States and New Zealand show a particularly strong tendency to engage in sexual activity and to get pregnant if they grew up in families without a father present, a new long-term study finds. "These findings may support social policies that encourage fathers to form and remain in families with their children, unless the marriage is highly [conflicted] or violent," conclude psychologist Bruce J. Ellis of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and his coworkers in the May/June Child Development. Prior studies have shown early sexual activity and teenage pregnancy among girls who grow up from infancy without a father. However, scientists have generally assumed that precocious sexuality results from a mix of adverse influences, including a father's absence, divorce, poverty, and the lack of parental guidance. For their new analysis, the investigators studied 242 girls living in one of three U.S. cities and 520 girls living in Christchurch, New Zealand. Participants were interviewed annually from age 5 to 18, and their mothers were interviewed each year. Among the U.S. girls, a father's absence was associated with his daughter's sexual activity before age 16 and teenage pregnancy regardless of other adversities, Ellis' group reports. In New Zealand, additional problems showed a modest correlation with the girls' sexual activity. In both countries, rates of teenage pregnancy were highest among girls who had lived in single-parent homes the longest. The teen pregnancy rate was nearly 8 times as high among girls who were no more than 5 years old when their fathers departed as among girls in two-parent families. The pregnancy rate among girls who were between 6 and 13 years old when their fathers left was about 3 times that of two-parent teens. (07/21/03) GM Protects Potatoes from Blight Science News -- It has been more than 150 years since the Irish potato famine, when the funguslike disease called blight annihilated the staple food for millions of people. But blight is still the most serious potato disease in Europe, the United States, and the rest of the world. Farmers spend billions of dollars annually on fungicides to keep blight at bay. Now, genetic engineering may give potato crops built-in resistance to the pathogen. By placing a gene from a naturally blight-resistant wild potato into a farmed variety, researchers from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of California, Davis have made plants that are invulnerable to a range of blight strains. The scientists suspected that a four-gene cluster in the wild potato species Solanum bulbocastanum was responsible for its resistance to blight. They cloned the genes and spliced one gene into each of four batches of potato plants. When they exposed these new cultivars to blight, one group stayed healthy, suggesting that the gene it received was conferring resistance. The scientists named the gene RB, for resistance from bulbocastanum. (07/21/03) Yes, We'll Have No Bananas Robert Alison writes: The banana is about to disappear from store shelves around the globe. Experts say the world's favourite fruit will pass into oblivion within a decade. No more fresh bananas. No more banana bread. No more banana muffins or banana cream pie. Why? Because the banana is the victim of centuries of genetic tampering. Scientists say they will be unable to prevent the extirpation of the banana as an edible commercial crop. And its demise may be one more powerful argument in the hands of those who are concerned about genetic modification of foods. The banana's main problem is that it has become sterile and seedless as a result of 10,000 years of selective breeding. It has, over time, become a plant with unvarying genetic sameness. The genetic diversity needed to cope with environmental stresses, such as diseases and crop pests, has long ago been bred out of the banana. Consequently, the banana plantations of the world are completely vulnerable to devastating environmental pressures. (07/21/03) West Nile Virus in British Birds BBC Science -- Evidence of the potentially deadly West Nile virus has been found in a high proportion of British birds, scientists have revealed. The virus is transmitted by mosquitoes and the researchers have warned that the risk of the virus spreading to humans is increasing with the impact of climate change. It can cause fatal inflammation of the brain in humans. There have been no cases of the virus in the UK but it killed more than 270 people in the US last year. Scientists at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Oxford tested birds mainly in Cambridgeshire, but also in Dorset and South Wales. They found evidence of the virus in more than half the birds tested - an "unexpectedly high" proportion, BBC science correspondent Christine McGourty said. It was found in more than 20 species in all, including crows, magpies, swallows, chickens, turkeys and ducks. (07/21/03) Brain Stem Cells Invisable to Immune System The New Scientist -- Stem cells from the brain do not provoke an immune response when transplanted to different parts of another individual's body, suggests a study in mice. The finding could help overcome immune rejection, one of the most difficult obstacles to developing therapies to treat people with central nervous system problems such as spinal cord injuries and Parkinson's disease. Michael Young, at the Schepens Eye Research Institute, Harvard, and US and Japanese colleagues have shown that stem cells from the brain have a special "immune privilege" even when they are transplanted to places outside their normal location in the central nervous system. The team found that stem cells transplanted from the brains of mice to the kidney capsules of mice of a different strain not only survived, but developed into mature tissue. "These findings are very exciting," says Young. "Though we suspected brain stem cells might be protected in this way, this is the first documented evidence." The study is "encouraging" says Douglas Kerr, a neurobiologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, who is researching applications of embryonic stem cells in spinal cord injury. If the results are reproducible "it would certainly make a human application more likely". (07/21/03)  5:52:26 AM

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