Stem Cells Quotes

Tomorrow you're all going to wake up in a brave new world, a world where the Constitution gets trampled by an army of terrorist clones, created in a stem-cell research lab run by homosexual doctors who sterilize their instruments over burning American flags. Where tax-and-spend Democrats take all your hard-earned money and use it to buy electric cars for National Public Radio, and teach evolution to illegal immigrants. Oh, and everybody's high!

And blood-black nothingness began to spin. A system of cells interlinked, within cells interlinked, within cells interlinked within one stem. And dreadfully distinct against the dark, a tall white fountain played.

Indeed, religion allows people to imagine that their concerns are moral when they are highly immoral - that is, when pressing these concerns inflicts unnecessary and appalling suffering on innocent human beings. This explains why Christians like yourself expend more "moral" energy opposing abortion than fighting genocide. It explains why you are more concerned about human embryos than about the lifesaving promise of stem-cell research. And it explains why you can preach against condom use in sub-Saharan Africa while millions die from AIDS there each year.

A three-day-old human embryo is a collection of 150 cells called a blastocyst. There are, for the sake of comparison, more than 100,000 cells in the brain of a fly. The human embryos that are destroyed in stem-cell research do not have brains, or even neurons. Consequently, there is no reason to believe they can suffer their destruction in any way at all. It is worth remembered, in this context, that when a person's brain has died, we currently deem it acceptable to harvest his organs (provided he has donated them for this purpose) and bury him in the ground. If it is acceptable to treat a person whose brain has died as something less than a human being, it should be acceptable to treat a blastocyst as such. If you are concerned about suffering in this universe, killing a fly should present you with greater moral difficulties than killing a human blastocyst. Perhaps you think that the crucial difference between a fly and a human blastocyst is to be found in the latter's potential to become a fully developed human being. But almost every cell in your body is a potential human being, given our recent advances in genetic engineering. Every time you scratch your nose, you have committed a Holocaust of potential human beings.

Faith drives a wedge between ethics and suffering. Where certain actions cause no suffering at all, religious dogmatists still maintain that they are evil and worth of punishment (sodomy, marijuana use, homosexuality, the killing of blastocysts, etc). And yet, where suffering and death are found in abundance their causes are often deemed to be good (withholding funds for family planning in the third world, prosecuting nonviolent drug offenders, preventing stem cell research, etc). This inversion of priorities not only victimizes innocent people and squanders scarce resources; it completely falsifies our ethics. It is time we found a more reasonable approach to answering questions of right and wrong.

The procedure, not yet approved in the United States or in Europe, was a form of stem cell therapy.

The politicized sponsors of this pseudoscientific nonsense should be ashamed to live, let alone die. If you want to take part in the “war” against cancer, and other terrible maladies, too, then join the battle against their lethal stupidity.

And speaking of options ,these kids [the ones who attend elite universities] have all been told that theirs are limitless. Once you commit to something, though, that ceases to be true. A former student sent me an essay he wrote, a few years after college, called "The Paradox of Potential." Yale students, he said, are like stem cells. They can be anything in the world, so they try to delay for as long as possible the moment when they have to become just one thing in particular. Possibility, paradoxically, becomes limitation.

I knew—but I did know that I had crossed 700  The border. Everything I loved was lost But no aorta could report regret. A sun of rubber was convulsed and set; And blood-black nothingness began to spin A system of cells interlinked within Cells interlinked within cells interlinked Within one stem. And dreadfully distinct Against the dark, a tall white fountain played. I

Nah, unless, of course, a hospital there is claiming to have some new magical stem-cell therapy to cure B. cepacia.

Say the planet is born at midnight and it runs for one day. First there is nothing. Two hours are lost to lava and meteors. Life doesn’t show up until three or four a.m. Even then, it’s just the barest self-copying bits and pieces. From dawn to late morning—a million million years of branching—nothing more exists than lean and simple cells. Then there is everything. Something wild happens, not long after noon. One kind of simple cell enslaves a couple of others. Nuclei get membranes. Cells evolve organelles. What was once a solo campsite grows into a town. The day is two-thirds done when animals and plants part ways. And still life is only single cells. Dusk falls before compound life takes hold. Every large living thing is a latecomer, showing up after dark. Nine p.m. brings jellyfish and worms. Later that hour comes the breakout—backbones, cartilage, an explosion of body forms. From one instant to the next, countless new stems and twigs in the spreading crown burst open and run. Plants make it up on land just before ten. Then insects, who instantly take to the air. Moments later, tetrapods crawl up from the tidal muck, carrying around on their skin and in their guts whole worlds of earlier creatures. By eleven, dinosaurs have shot their bolt, leaving the mammals and birds in charge for an hour. Somewhere in that last sixty minutes, high up in the phylogenetic canopy, life grows aware. Creatures start to speculate. Animals start teaching their children about the past and the future. Animals learn to hold rituals. Anatomically modern man shows up four seconds before midnight. The first cave paintings appear three seconds later. And in a thousandth of a click of the second hand, life solves the mystery of DNA and starts to map the tree of life itself. By midnight, most of the globe is converted to row crops for the care and feeding of one species. And that’s when the tree of life becomes something else again. That’s when the giant trunk starts to teeter.

The stakes involved in Washington policy debates are often so high-- whether we send our young men and women to war; whether we allow stem cell research to go forward-- that even small differences in perspective are magnified. The demands of party loyalty, the imperative of campaigns, and the amplification of conflict by the media all contribute to an atmosphere of suspicion. Moreover, most people who serve in Washington have been trained either as lawyers or as political operatives-- professions that tend to place a premium on winning arguments rather than solving problems. I can see how, after a certain amount of time in the capital, it becomes tempting to assume that those who disagree with you have fundamentally different values-- indeed, that they are motivated by bad faith, and perhaps are bad people.

A system of cells interlinked within Cells interlinked within cells interlinked Within one stem. And dreadfully distinct Against the dark, a tall white fountain played.

The Ticket-wallah, whose pimples bubbled as I watched, was as intractably dense as his counterpart in King's Cross. The Corporation breeds them from the same stem cell.

I can't tell you how I knew - but I did know that I had crossed The border. Everything I loved was lost But no aorta could report regret. A sun of rubber was convulsed and set; And blood-black nothingness began to spin A system of cells interlinked within Cells interlinked within cells interlinked Within one stem. And dreadfully distinct Against the dark, a tall white fountain played.

This is not (as you have charged) to paint religion with a broad brush. I am very quick to distinguish gradations of bad ideas; some clearly have no consequences at all (or at least not yet); some put civilization itself in peril. The problem with dogmatism, however, is that one can never quite predict how terrible its costs will be. To use one of my favorite examples, consider the Christian dogma that human life begins at the moment of conception: On its face, this belief seems likely to only improve our world. After all, it is the very quintessence of a life-affirming doctrine. Enter embryonic stem-cell research. Suddenly, this “life begins at the moment of conception” business becomes the chief impediment to medical progress. Who would have thought that such an innocuous idea could unnecessarily prolong the agony of tens of millions of people? This is the problem with dogmatism, no matter how seemingly benign: it is unresponsive to reality. Dogmatism is a failure of cognition (as well as a commitment to such failure); it is the state of being closed to new evidence and new arguments. And this frame of mind is rightly despised in every area of culture, on every subject, except where it goes by the name of “religious faith.” In this guise, parading its most grotesque faults as virtues, it is granted a special dispensation, even in the pages of Nature.

I check every can of Barbasol I buy for dinosaur embryos. I haven't found any yet, as evidenced by the lack of T-Rex screams in my apartment.

In the last month of the presidential campaign, I tuned in to conservative talk radio and listened as callers considered the unthinkable. One after another, they all threatened the same thing: “If McCain doesn’t win, I’m leaving the country.” “Oh, right,” I’d say. “You’re going to leave and go where? Right-wing Europe?” In the Netherlands now, I imagine it’s legal to marry your own children. Get them pregnant, and you can abort your unborn grandbabies in a free clinic that used to be a church. The doctor might be a woman who became a man and then became a woman again, all on taxpayers’ dollars, but as long as she saves the stem cells, she’ll have the nation’s blessing.

I saw, during the midterm campaign of 2006, how difficult it was for opponents of stem cell research to run against hope. And so it was in the 2008 presidential contest. This was hope in the collective, a definition that should always apply to the expression of a people's political will. Christopher Reeve had believed in a formula: optimism + information = hope. In this case, the informing agent was us. Granted, it may all look different in six months to a year, but it is hard not to be buoyed by the desire for positive change as articulated and advanced by Barack Obama. It is okay to hope. This time the aspiration of many will not be derided as desperation by a few, as it was during the stem cell debate of '06. By the time you read this book, President Obama and the 111th Congress will have established federal funding for stem cell research. The dam has broken. Just as I'd hoped.

It is, understandably, considered gauche to describe bisexuality as transitory, almost as gauche as the word “bisexual” itself. Perhaps it would be better to think of bisexuality as queerly universal—stem cells potent with potential. As long as compulsive heteronormativity exists, queer people will pass through bisexuality at some point, however briefly. Some tear through it on a speedboat, heading for a more monosexual harbor, others circle, content, drinking aperitifs in the sun.

Indeed, the scientific effort to improve performance in medicine—an effort that at present gets only a miniscule portion of scientific budgets—can arguably save more lives in the next decade than bench science, more lives than research on the genome, stem cell therapy, cancer vaccines, and all the other laboratory work we hear about in the news.

One thing I am certain of, however, is that cell therapy of some kind—it might involve stem cells or CAR T—will eventually overcome cancer and other diseases of the brain.

Starting in the third week of gestation, a strip of stem cells, called the neural plate, forms along the back of the embryo.

a stem cell factory on its banks begins kicking out baby brain cells at a rate of 250,000 per minute.

Our present policy on human stem cells has been shaped by beliefs that are divorced from every reasonable intuition we might form about the possible experience of living systems.

Or use their stem cells to lengthen his life.

The armament varies, from prayer to wealth to herbs to stem cells.

Your frequent claim that we must understand religious belief as a “social construct,” produced by “societal causes,” dependent upon “social and cultural institutions,” admitting of “sociological questions,” and the like, while it will warm the hearts of most anthropologists, is either trivially true or obscurantist. It is part and parcel of the double standard that so worries me—the demolition of which is the explicit aim of The Reason Project. Epidemiology is also a “social construct” with “societal causes,” etc.—but this doesn’t mean that the germ theory of disease isn’t true or that any rival “construct”—like one suggesting that child rape will cure AIDS—isn’t a dangerous, deplorable, and unnecessary eruption of primeval stupidity. We either have good reasons or bad reasons for what we believe; we can be open to evidence and argument, or we can be closed; we can tolerate (and even seek) criticism of our most cherished views, or we can hide behind authority, sanctity, and dogma. The main reason why children are still raised to think that the universe is 6,000 years old is not because religion as a “social institution” hasn’t been appropriately coddled and cajoled, but because polite people (and scientists terrified of losing their funding) haven’t laughed this belief off the face of the earth. We did not lose a decade of progress on stem-cell research in the United States because of religion as a “social construct”; we lost it because of the behavioural and emotional consequences of a specific belief. If there were a line in the book of Genesis that read – “The soul enters the womb on the hundredth day (you idiots)” – we wouldn’t have lost a step on stem-cell research, and there would not be a Christian or Jew anywhere who would worry about souls in Petri dishes suffering the torments of the damned. The beliefs currently rattling around in the heads of human beings are some of the most potent forces on earth; some of the craziest and most divisive of these are “religious,” and so-dubbed they are treated with absurd deference, even in the halls of science; this is a very bad combination—that is my point.

New Rule: America must stop bragging it's the greatest country on earth, and start acting like it. I know this is uncomfortable for the "faith over facts" crowd, but the greatness of a country can, to a large degree, be measured. Here are some numbers. Infant mortality rate: America ranks forty-eighth in the world. Overall health: seventy-second. Freedom of the press: forty-fourth. Literacy: fifty-fifth. Do you realize there are twelve-year old kids in this country who can't spell the name of the teacher they're having sex with? America has done many great things. Making the New World democratic. The Marshall Plan. Curing polio. Beating Hitler. The deep-fried Twinkie. But what have we done for us lately? We're not the freest country. That would be Holland, where you can smoke hash in church and Janet Jackson's nipple is on their flag. And sadly, we're no longer a country that can get things done. Not big things. Like building a tunnel under Boston, or running a war with competence. We had six years to fix the voting machines; couldn't get that done. The FBI is just now getting e-mail. Prop 87 out here in California is about lessening our dependence on oil by using alternative fuels, and Bill Clinton comes on at the end of the ad and says, "If Brazil can do it, America can, too!" Since when did America have to buck itself up by saying we could catch up to Brazil? We invented the airplane and the lightbulb, they invented the bikini wax, and now they're ahead? In most of the industrialized world, nearly everyone has health care and hardly anyone doubts evolution--and yes, having to live amid so many superstitious dimwits is also something that affects quality of life. It's why America isn't gonna be the country that gets the inevitable patents in stem cell cures, because Jesus thinks it's too close to cloning. Oh, and did I mention we owe China a trillion dollars? We owe everybody money. America is a debtor nation to Mexico. We're not a bridge to the twenty-first century, we're on a bus to Atlantic City with a roll of quarters. And this is why it bugs me that so many people talk like it's 1955 and we're still number one in everything. We're not, and I take no glee in saying that, because I love my country, and I wish we were, but when you're number fifty-five in this category, and ninety-two in that one, you look a little silly waving the big foam "number one" finger. As long as we believe being "the greatest country in the world" is a birthright, we'll keep coasting on the achievements of earlier generations, and we'll keep losing the moral high ground. Because we may not be the biggest, or the healthiest, or the best educated, but we always did have one thing no other place did: We knew soccer was bullshit. And also we had the Bill of Rights. A great nation doesn't torture people or make them disappear without a trial. Bush keeps saying the terrorist "hate us for our freedom,"" and he's working damn hard to see that pretty soon that won't be a problem.

mental activity such as directing attention, actually shape the structure of the brain?” As we’ve seen, experience means neural firing. When neurons fire together, the genes in their nuclei—their master control centers—become activated and “express” themselves. Gene expression means that certain proteins are produced. These proteins then enable the synaptic linkages to be constructed anew or to be strengthened. Experience also stimulates the production of myelin, the fatty sheath around axons, resulting in as much as a hundredfold increase in the speed of conduction down the neuron’s length. And as we now know, experience can also stimulate neural stem cells to differentiate into wholly new neurons in the brain. This neurogenesis, along with synapse formation and myelin growth, can take place in response to experience throughout our lives. As discussed before, the capacity of the brain to change is called neuroplasticity We are now discovering how the careful focus of attention amplifies neuroplasticity by stimulating the release of neurochemicals that enhance the structural growth of synaptic linkages among the activated neurons.

There is way too much to explain – my own blood seeping into my sister’s veins; the nurses holding me down to stick me for white cells Kate might borrow; the doctor saying they didn’t get enough the first time around. The bruises and the deep bone ache after I gave up my marrow; the shots that sparked more stem cells in me, so that there’d be extra for my sister. The fact that I’m not sick, but I might as well be. The fact that the only reason I was born was as a harvest crop for Kate. The fact that even now, a major decision about me is being made, and no one’s bothered to ask the one person who most deserves it to speak her opinion. There’s way too much to explain, and so I do the best I can. ‘It’s not God. Just my parents,’ I say. ‘I want to sue them for the rights to my own body.

If you think about placing genetically tweaked stem cells from one human into another, having nothing go wrong is in itself remarkable. Since cell therapy is in its infancy, this was an important result.

Blood-black nothingness began to spin. A system of cells interlinked, within cells interlinked, within cells interlinked within one stem. And dreadfully distinct against the dark, a tall white fountain played.

Family, in this social context, developed as man‘s small state. The family as an institution has been continuously perfected throughout the history of civilisation, solely because of the reinforcement it provides to power and state apparatus. Firstly, family is turned into a stem cell of state society by giving power to the family in the person of the male. Secondly, woman‘s unlimited and unpaid labour is secured. Thirdly, she raises children in order to meet population needs. Fourthly, as a role model she disseminates slavery and immorality to the whole society. Family, thus constituted, is the institution where dynastic ideology becomes functional.

Neural stem cells are not the only type of living cell therapy being used to treat brain cancer. I’m part of the team developing a kind of anti-tumor immune therapy using what’s called chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)–engineered T-cells.

Cancer is not the only brain disease being targeted for treatment with living cells. Cell therapy also has the potential to replace aging or injured tissue. In this hope for regenerative medicine, modified stem cells are being studied as a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease.

I recommend banking your stem cells right away if you can afford it so you’ll always have a supply of your own stem cells that are younger than you are. If you get one of the Four Killers or any big injury, those stem cells could save your life or maybe just keep you young.

we are much better at admitting that humans infect nature than we are at admitting that nonhumanity infects culture, for the latter entails the blasphemous idea that nonhumans—trash, bacteria, stem cells, food, metal, technologies, weather—are actants more than objects. Latour

A former student, in an essay called "The Paradox of Potential," writes, "Instead, we moved cautiously, in groups, plodding down a few well-worn trails so as to ensure that two or four years down the road, we could be stem cells again, still undifferentiated, still brimming with potential.

More importantly still, stem cell-derived gametes would allow multiple generations of selection to be compressed into less than a human maturation period, by enabling iterated embryo selection. This is a procedure that would consist of the following steps:48 1 Genotype and select a number of embryos that are higher in desired genetic characteristics. 2 Extract stem cells from those embryos and convert them to sperm and ova, maturing within six months or less.49 3 Cross the new sperm and ova to produce embryos. 4 Repeat until large genetic changes have been accumulated. In this manner, it would be possible to accomplish ten or more generations of selection in just a few years. (The procedure would be time-consuming and expensive; however, in principle, it would need to be done only once rather than repeated for each birth. The cell lines established at the end of the procedure could be used to generate very large numbers of enhanced embryos.)

Death begins before birth. I have always found this an odd notion, but were it not for the death of certain cells during our initial development, humans would be born with webbed toes. Death moulds our physical being from the very start of our existence. It sculpts us, determines how we begin, and where we end. The events in life that define us, that break us and remake us, all stem from death—the death of a place, a time, a relationship, of those we hold most dear, and finally ourselves. Death is the one inescapable aspect of life, the only immutable force, the single thing in this world that cannot and should not be changed. But death is never the end. It is the beginning.

Stem cells, as you probably know, are capable of turning into any mature cell. They are the progenitors of all the other cells in your body, whether bone, skin, brain, or muscle. Neural stem cells (NSCs) are just slightly more differentiated: they can become any type of cell found in the nervous system, including any variety of neuron in the brain.

1998, Fred “Rusty” Gage published a revolutionary paper in the journal Nature Medicine, showing that the hippocampus, where new memories form, generates new neurons on a daily basis from a small population of neural stem cells (NSCs). Until then, it had been believed for nearly a century that no new neurons are ever generated in the adult human brain.

the U.S. House of Representatives voted effectively to ban embryonic stem-cell research on February 27, 2003.

identify ways to eliminate aged components and periodically replace them with young ones.

awakening the body’s dormant ability to heal, protect, regenerate, and rejuvenate itself.

Our restaurant fostered a sense of camaraderie in a number of ways besides sharing the same nickname of 'chef.' Initially, we bonded through training. Once we opened, we worked in teams each night, meaning that we not only knew our colleagues well, we depended on them. Most importantly, we all had 'family meal' together every night, just like President Bush recommended to all families so that their children would have good values and grow up to be gun-toting, pro-life, pro-death, gas-guzzling, warmongering, monolingual, homophobic, wiretapped, Bible-thumping, genetically engineered, stem-cell harboring, abstinent creationists. Oops, I think I just lost all of my red state readers. To make up for it, I'll let you lose my ballot.

Cannabis affects the brain because brain cells themselves produce cannabis-like neurotransmitters. The first such compound to be identified was christened anandamide, ananda being Sanskrit for “bliss.” The proteins that transmit anandamide’s message to the brain, the receptors, are mainly located in the striatum (hence the blissful feeling) and in the cerebellum (hence the unsteady gait after taking marijuana), in the cerebral cortex (hence the problems with association, the fragmented thoughts and confusion), and in the hippocampus (hence the memory impairment). But there are no receptors in the brain stem areas that regulate blood pressure and breathing. That’s why it’s impossible to take an overdose of cannabis, as opposed to opiates.

The cure for HIV?” “In 2007, a man named Timothy Ray Brown, known later as the Berlin patient, was cured of HIV. Brown was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. His HIV-positive status complicated his treatment. During chemotherapy, he battled sepsis, and his physicians had to explore less traditional approaches. His hematologist, Dr. Gero Hutter, decided on a stem cell therapy: a full bone marrow transplant. Hutter actually passed over the matched bone marrow donor for a donor with a specific genetic mutation: CCR5-Delta 32. CCR5-Delta 32 makes cells immune to HIV.” “Incredible.” “Yes. At first, we thought the Delta 32 mutation must have arisen during the Black Death in Europe—about four to sixteen percent of Europeans have at least one copy. But we’ve traced it back further. We thought perhaps smallpox, but we’ve found Bronze Age DNA samples that carry it. The mutation’s origins are a mystery, but one thing is certain: the bone marrow transplant with CCR5-Delta 32 cured both Brown’s leukemia and HIV. After the transplant, he stopped taking his antiretrovirals and has never again tested positive for HIV.

understanding the effect of food composition on specific genes and pathways in the quest for therapeutic diets that are minimally disruptive yet have effects comparable or superior to drug therapy.

The injured brain cannot heal itself. Now we know that the brain has amazing powers of healing, unsuspected in the past. The brain’s hardwiring cannot be changed. In fact, the line between hard and soft wiring is shifting all the time, and our ability to rewire our brains remains intact from birth to the end of life. Aging in the brain is inevitable and irreversible. To counter this outmoded belief, new techniques for keeping the brain youthful and retaining mental acuity are arising every day. The brain loses millions of cells a day, and lost brain cells cannot be replaced. In fact, the brain contains stem cells that are capable of maturing into new brain cells throughout life. How we lose or gain brain cells is a complex issue. Most of the findings are good news for everyone who is afraid of losing mental capacity as they age.

But for reasons that genuinely escape me, it has also become spectacularly accommodating to stupidity. Where this thought most recently occurred to me was in a hotel coffee shop in Baltimore, where I was reading the local paper, the Sun, and I saw a news item noting that Congress had passed a law prohibiting the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services from funding research that might lead, directly or indirectly, to the introduction of gun controls. Let me repeat that but in slightly different words. The government of the United States refuses to let academics use federal money to study gun violence if there is a chance that they might find a way of reducing the violence. It isn’t possible to be more stupid than that. If you took all the commentators from FOX News and put them together in a room and told them to come up with an idea even more pointlessly idiotic, they couldn’t do it. Britain isn’t like that, and thank goodness. On tricky and emotive issues like gun control, abortion, capital punishment, the teaching of evolution in schools, the use of stem cells for research, and how much flag waving you have to do in order to be considered acceptably patriotic, Britain is calm and measured and quite grown up, and for me that counts for a great deal. —

Southern California showed that fasting cycles can be used to build a fresh immune system. Remarkably, they showed that fasting two to four days in a row forces the human body to go into a recycling mode, which gets rid of the older, worn-out immune cells. Then, when food is started again, it jump-starts the hematopoietic stem cells in your bone marrow to start regenerating fresh immune cells thus rebuilding the immune system.6

Nutrition is clearly the most important factor you can take control of to affect how long you live, whether you will be diagnosed with certain major diseases, and whether you will be active and strong or sedentary and frail in old age.

The tribal differences that erupt into public controversy typically concern sex (e.g., gay marriage, gays in the military, the sex lives of public officials) and death at the margins of life (e.g., abortion, physician-assisted suicide, the use of embryonic stem cells in research). That such issues are moral issues is surely not arbitrary. Sex and death are the gas pedals and brakes of tribal growth. (Gay sex and abortion, for example, are both alternatives to reproduction.)

Mr. Alexander," I say, "my sister has leukemia." "I'm sorry to hear that. But even if I were willing to litigate against God again, which I'm not, you can't bring a lawsuit on someone else's behalf." There is way too much to explain--my own blood seeping into my sister's veins; the nurses holding me down to stick me for white cells Kate might borrow; the doctor saying they didn't get enough the first time around. The bruises and the deep bone ache after I gave up my marrow; the shots that sparked more stem cells in me, so that there'd be extra for my sister. The fact that I'm not sick, but I might as well be. The fact that the only reason I was born was as a harvest crop for Kate. The fact that even now, a major decision about me is being made, and no one's bothered to ask the one person who most deserves it to speak her opinion. There's way too much to explain, and so I do the best I can. "It's not God. Just my parents," I say. "I want to sue them for the rights to my own body.

Via our left hemisphere language centers, our mind speaks to us constantly, a phenomenon I refer to as “brain chatter.” It is that voice reminding you to pick up bananas on your way home and that calculating intelligence that knows when you have to do your laundry. There is vast individual variation in the speed at which our minds function. For some, our dialogue of brain chatter runs so fast that we can barely keep up with what we are thinking. Others of us think in language so slowly that it takes a long time for us to comprehend. Still others of us have a problem retaining our focus and concentration long enough to act on our thoughts. These variations in normal processing stem back to our brain cells and how each brain is intrinsically wired.

New Rule: Conservatives have to stop rolling their eyes every time they hear the word "France." Like just calling something French is the ultimate argument winner. As if to say, "What can you say about a country that was too stupid to get on board with our wonderfully conceived and brilliantly executed war in Iraq?" And yet an American politician could not survive if he uttered the simple, true statement: "France has a better health-care system than we do, and we should steal it." Because here, simply dismissing an idea as French passes for an argument. John Kerry? Couldn't vote for him--he looked French. Yeah, as a opposed to the other guy, who just looked stupid. Last week, France had an election, and people over there approach an election differently. They vote. Eighty-five percent turned out. You couldn't get eighty-five percent of Americans to get off the couch if there was an election between tits and bigger tits and they were giving out free samples. Maybe the high turnout has something to do with the fact that the French candidates are never asked where they stand on evolution, prayer in school, abortion, stem cell research, or gay marriage. And if the candidate knows about a character in a book other than Jesus, it's not a drawback. The electorate doesn't vote for the guy they want to have a croissant with. Nor do they care about private lives. In the current race, Madame Royal has four kids, but she never got married. And she's a socialist. In America, if a Democrat even thinks you're calling him "liberal," he grabs an orange vest and a rifle and heads into the woods to kill something. Royal's opponent is married, but they live apart and lead separate lives. And the people are okay with that, for the same reason they're okay with nude beaches: because they're not a nation of six-year-olds who scream and giggle if they see pee-pee parts. They have weird ideas about privacy. They think it should be private. In France, even mistresses have mistresses. To not have a lady on the side says to the voters, "I'm no good at multitasking." Like any country, France has its faults, like all that ridiculous accordion music--but their health care is the best in the industrialized world, as is their poverty rate. And they're completely independent of Mid-East oil. And they're the greenest country. And they're not fat. They have public intellectuals in France. We have Dr. Phil. They invented sex during the day, lingerie, and the tongue. Can't we admit we could learn something from them?

I considered it an important step forward. Just the fact that the stem cells didn’t produce any bad side effects was a big deal. That they worked as predicted was, to me, impressive. And that they showed a hint of prolonging survival was amazing. We were treating a disease that has become the Mount Everest of challenges for oncologists. Every step upward gets us closer to our goal of better treatments for our patients. And the lessons learned along the way are relevant to the field of oncology as a whole.

Alone for hours, by the light of the lantern, Kya read how plants and animals change over time to adjust to the ever-shifting earth; how some cells divide and specialize into lungs or hearts, while others remain uncommitted as stem cells in case they’re needed later. Birds sing mostly at dawn because the cool, moist air of morning carries their songs and their meanings much farther. All her life, she’d seen these marvels at eye level, so nature’s ways came easily to her. Within all the worlds of biology, she searched for an explanation of why a mother would leave her offspring.

Spend more time in nature to boost your own natural killer cells and enhance your immune system; bonus points for frequently visiting a forest with lots of evergreen trees. Or at least use some forest-based essential oils like cypress. •​Consider boron supplements for stem cells, as well as the other listed stem cell enhancers. Calcium fructoborate or food-grade boron (tetraborate) work well. •​Make sure your sexual function is that of a young person. If it isn’t, get your hormone levels checked and look at any prescription meds that may be causing a problem. To improve sexual function, consider GAINSWave treatments or simply practice Kegel exercises on a daily basis.

Our dualist intuitions lead to beliefs that cloud important societal debates, such as abortion, stem-cell research, and the right to die with dignity. Our intuitive notion of justice, and therefore our entire criminal justice system, which is unusually harsh and biased in the United States, as we will discover, may also be premised on dualistic assumptions.

Was the iPhone a malevolent protean organism, the stem-cell phone, mocking him who had cameras with real physical shutters whose sound you couldn’t turn off? Promising to replace every other device on earth with its shape-shifting self – garage door openers, solar timers, television remotes, car keys, guitar tuners, GPS modules, light meters, spirit levels, you name it?

(3) The acceptance of psychological myths can impede our critical thinking in other areas. As astronomer Carl Sagan (1995) noted, our failure to distinguish myth from reality in one domain of scientific knowledge, such as psychology, can easily spill over to a failure to distinguish fact from fiction in other vitally important areas of modern society. These domains include genetic engineering, stem cell research, global warming, pollution, crime prevention, schooling, day care, and overpopulation, to name merely a few. As a consequence, we may find ourselves at the mercy of policy-makers who make unwise and even dangerous decisions about science and technology. As Sir Francis Bacon reminded us, knowledge is power. Ignorance is powerlessness.

Or was it a more sinister thing? Was the iPhone a malevolent protean organism, the stem-cell phone, mocking him who had cameras with real physical shutters whose sound you couldn’t turn off? Promising to replace every other device on earth with its shape-shifting self—garage door openers, solar timers, television remotes, car keys, guitar tuners, GPS modules, light meters, spirit levels, you name it?

On every trip to Kya's, Tate took school or library books, especially on marsh creatures and biology. Her progress was startling. She could read anything now, her said, and once you can read anything you can learn everything. It was up to her. "Nobody's come close to filling their brains," he said. "We're all like giraffes not using their necks to reach the higher leaves." Alone for hours, by the light of the lantern, Kya read how plants and animals change over time to adjust to the ever-shifting earth; how some cells divide and specialize into lungs or hearts, while others remain uncommitted as stem cells in case they're needed later. Birds sing mostly at dawn because the cool, moist air of morning carries their songs and their meanings much farther. All her life, she'd seen these marvels at eye level, so nature's ways came easily to her.

No stories were viral. No celebrity was trending. The world was still big. The country was still vast. You could just be a little person, with your own little life and your own little thoughts. You didn’t have to have an opinion, and nobody cared if you did or did not. You could be alone on purpose, even in a crowd. The New York Times was chucked on doorsteps the following morning. There were disparate stories on page A1—the supply of stem cells, a controversy over school dress codes, the competitive morning TV market, and five others. The physical newspapers arrived to subscribers around the same time nineteen men with box cutters passed through low-security checkpoints in four different airports and boarded four cross-country domestic flights. The flights were hijacked, the planes crashed into buildings, 2,977 people died, and the nineties collapsed with the skyscrapers.

a .22 shell is used to fire stainless-steel projectiles dipped in a DNA solution at a stem or leaf of the target plant. If all goes well, some of the DNA will pierce the wall of some of the cells’ nuclei and elbow its way into the double helix: a bully breaking into a line dance. If the new DNA happens to land in the right place—and no one yet knows what, or where, that place is—the plant grown from that cell will express the new gene. That’s it? That’s it.

It turns out that thousands of new hippocampus cells are born naturally each day, but most die soon afterward. However, it was shown that rats that learned new skills retained more of their new cells. A combination of exercise and mood-elevating chemicals can also boost the survival rate of new hippocampus cells. It turns out that stress, on the contrary, accelerates the death of new neurons. In 2007, a breakthrough occurred when scientists in Wisconsin and Japan were able to take ordinary human skin cells, reprogram their genes, and turn them into stem cells. The hope is that these stem cells, either found naturally or converted using genetic engineering, can one day be injected into the brains of Alzheimer’s patients to replace dying cells. (These new brain cells, because they do not yet have the proper connections, would not be integrated into the brain’s neural architecture. This means that a person would have to relearn certain skills to incorporate these fresh new neurons.)

In our own bodies, only the liver is capable of limited regeneration, but chop a limb off a starfish or a salamander, and it will grow a new one. We are starting to understand the molecular signals that are used by these species to regenerate limbs in adult life. Mammals seem to only use this signalling pathway during the growth of the early embryo but it is a pathway that may well have the potential to be reactivated. Following surgical removal, the wings can grow back in embryonic chickens when the production of a protein called wnt is switched on. Frog limb regeneration can also take place later in the life cycle when wnt protein is expressed. Tadpoles have this ability but it is normally lost when they metamorphose into frogs. The expression of wnt signalling protein around an injury is thought to cause a reprogramming or transdifferentiation of mature cells into stem cells capable of producing the cell types needed for the limb. Very young children have been known to re-grow severed fingertips, and so there are intriguing possibilities for human tissue regeneration.

What would fly researchers discover at the tips of the reproductive structures? In the immediate environment in which the GSC (germline stem cells) sit? Shangri-La. [...] The experimental biologist J.J. Trentin proposed in 1970 that within the bone marrow and other home locations, there exists 'hematopoietic inductice microenvironment' with the unique ability to serve as a home location for blood stem cells. In the later 1970s, another blood cell expert, R. Schofield, referred to this specialized microenvironment as a 'niche', introducing the term that would stick and eventually, become widely applied to describe the microenvironment surrounding any type of stem cell. Fly biologist H. Lin describes a stem cell niche as 'the Shangri-La, the idyllic hideaway' in which these cells reside. Nestled in the niche, Lin states, stem cells 'thrive to self-renew and to produce numerous daughter cells that will differentiate and age as they leave the paradise'. In other words, the niche is the place that a stem cell is granted its two wishes - allowing it both to remain and to become something else.

Faith drives a wedge between ethics and suffering. Where certain actions cause no suffering at all, religious dogmatists still maintain that they are evil and worthy of punishment (sodomy, marijuana use, homosexuality, the killing of blastocysts, etc.). And yet, where suffering and death are found in abundance their causes are often deemed to be good (withholding funds for family planning in the third world, prosecuting nonviolent drug offenders, preventing stem-cell research, etc). This inversion of priorities not only victimizes innocent people and squanders scarce resources; it completely falsifies our ethics.

Wes Sinclair tossed his cell phone onto his desk, dropped his head into his hands, and pressed the base of his palms against his eyes in a futile attempt to stem the sudden throbbing in his temples. “I can’t believe she fucking did it again,” he muttered irritably to himself. “Who did what again?” The amused voice of Connor Prescott, one of his business partners, only spiked Wes’s displeasure. So much for being alone and being able to vent his frustration. Instead, he lowered his hands and glared at his good friend, who was also directly related to the person Wes was currently annoyed with. He watched as Connor casually sauntered into the office, the dust on his jeans an

And under the cicadas, deeper down that the longest taproot, between and beneath the rounded black rocks and slanting slabs of sandstone in the earth, ground water is creeping. Ground water seeps and slides, across and down, across and down, leaking from here to there, minutely at a rate of a mile a year. What a tug of waters goes on! There are flings and pulls in every direction at every moment. The world is a wild wrestle under the grass; earth shall be moved. What else is going on right this minute while ground water creeps under my feet? The galaxy is careening in a slow, muffled widening. If a million solar systems are born every hour, then surely hundreds burst into being as I shift my weight to the other elbow. The sun’s surface is now exploding; other stars implode and vanish, heavy and black, out of sight. Meteorites are arcing to earth invisibly all day long. On the planet, the winds are blowing: the polar easterlies, the westerlies, the northeast and southeast trades. Somewhere, someone under full sail is becalmed, in the horse latitudes, in the doldrums; in the northland, a trapper is maddened, crazed, by the eerie scent of the chinook, the sweater, a wind that can melt two feet of snow in a day. The pampero blows, and the tramontane, and the Boro, sirocco, levanter, mistral. Lick a finger; feel the now. Spring is seeping north, towards me and away from me, at sixteen miles a day. Along estuary banks of tidal rivers all over the world, snails in black clusters like currants are gliding up and down the stems of reed and sedge, migrating every moment with the dip and swing of tides. Behind me, Tinker Mountain is eroding one thousandth of an inch a year. The sharks I saw are roving up and down the coast. If the sharks cease roving, if they still their twist and rest for a moment, they die. They need new water pushed into their gills; they need dance. Somewhere east of me, on another continent, it is sunset, and starlings in breathtaking bands are winding high in the sky to their evening roost. The mantis egg cases are tied to the mock-orange hedge; within each case, within each egg, cells elongate, narrow, and split; cells bubble and curve inward, align, harden or hollow or stretch. And where are you now?

Because the light of evolution is not instantaneous or blinding, it is difficult to visualize the immensely slow and gradual change that is brought about by mutation and natural selection. When you consider a protozoan cell or an amphibian, on the one hand, and dolphins or, say, commuters, on the other, there is no intuitive way to make sense of the line that runs from one form of life to the next. The popular cartoon of evolution, where the ape slowly unbends, straightens up, starts walking, and mutates into some form of modern-day human, is probably the easiest way to think about it. But [...] this caricature is misleading. Evolution does not follow the course of a single line. The tree of life bristles with stems, boughs, and branches. Most lines from one form to another are densely surrounded by branches leading to different species or dead ends.

However, there is one fundamental feature of the sexes which can be used to label males as males, and females as females, throughout animals and plants. This is that the sex cells or ‘gametes’ of males are much smaller and more numerous than the gametes of females. This is true whether we are dealing with animals or plants. One group of individuals has large sex cells, and it is convenient to use the word female for them. The other group, which it is convenient to call male, has small sex cells. The difference is especially pronounced in reptiles and in birds, where a single egg cell is big enough and nutritious enough to feed a developing baby for several weeks. Even in humans, where the egg is microscopic, it is still many times larger than the sperm. As we shall see, it is possible to interpret all the other differences between the sexes as stemming from this one basic difference.

The unsatisfying but honest answer is that I don’t know for sure, but probably not. The beast machine theory proposes that consciousness in humans and other animals arose in evolution, emerges in each of us during development, and operates from moment to moment in ways intimately connected with our status as living systems. All of our experiences and perceptions stem from our nature as self-sustaining living machines that care about their own persistence. My intuition – and again it’s only an intuition – is that the materiality of life will turn out to be important for all manifestations of consciousness. One reason for this is that the imperative for regulation and self-maintenance in living systems isn’t restricted to just one level, such as the integrity of the whole body. Self-maintenance for living systems goes all the way down, even down to the level of individual cells. Every cell in your body – in any body – is continually regenerating the conditions necessary for its own integrity over time. The same cannot be said for any current or near-future computer, and would not be true even for a silicon beast machine of the sort I just described.

Emotions also directly modulate the immune system. Studies at the U.S. National Cancer Institute found that natural killer (NK) cells, an important class of immune cells we have already met, are more active in breast cancer patients who are able to express anger, to adopt a fighting stance and who have more social support. NK cells mount an attack on malignant cells and are able to destroy them. These women had significantly less spread of their breast cancer, compared with those who exhibited a less assertive attitude or who had fewer nurturing social connections. The researchers found that emotional factors and social involvement were more important to survival than the degree of disease itself. Many studies, such as the one reported in The British Medical Journal article, fail to appreciate that stress is not only a question of external stimulus but also of individual response. It occurs in the real lives of real persons whose inborn temperament, life history, emotional patterns, physical and mental resources, and social and economic supports vary greatly. As already pointed out, there is no universal stressor. In most cases of breast cancer, the stresses are hidden and chronic. They stem from childhood experiences, early emotional programming and unconscious psychological coping styles. They accumulate over a lifetime to make someone susceptible to disease.

If the curtain is indeed about to drop on Sapiens history, we members of one of its final generations should devote some time to answering one last question: what do we want to become? This question, sometimes known as the Human Enhancement question, dwarfs the debates that currently preoccupy politicians, philosophers, scholars and ordinary people. After all, today's debate between today's religions, ideologies, nations and classes will in all likelihood disappear along with Homo sapiens. If our successors indeed function on a different level of consciousness (or perhaps possess something beyond consciousness that we cannot even conceive), it seems doubtful that Christianity or Islam will be of interest to them, that their social organizations could be Communist or capitalist or that their genders could be male or female. And yet the great debates of history are more important because at least the first generation of these gods would be shaped by the cultural ideas of their human designers. Would they be created in the image of capitalism, of Islam, or of feminism? The answer to this question might send them careening in entirely different directions. Most people prefer not to think about it. Even the field of bioethics prefers to address another question: 'What is it forbidden to do?' Is it acceptable to carry out genetic experiments on living human beings? On aborted fetuses? On stem cells? Is it ethical to clone sheep? And chimpanzees? And what about humans? All of these are important questions, but it is naive to imagine that we might simply hit the brakes and stop the scientific projects that are upgrading Homo sapiens into a different kind of being. For these projects are inextricably meshed together with the Gilgamesh Project. Ask scientists why they study the genome, or try to connect a brain to a computer, or try to create a mind inside a computer. Nine out of ten times you'll get the same standard answer: we are doing it to cure diseases and save human lives. Even though the implications of creating a mind inside a computer are far more dramatic than curing psychiatric illnesses, this is the standard justification given, because nobody can argue with it. This is why the Gilgamesh Project is the flagship of science. It serves to justify everything science does. Dr Frankenstein piggybacks on the shoulders of Gilgamesh. Since it is impossible to stop Gilgamesh, it is also impossible to stop Dr Frankenstein. The only thing we can try to do is to influence the direction scientists are taking. But since we might soon be able to engineer our desires too, the real question facing us is not 'What do we want to become?, but 'What do we want to want?' Those who are not spooked by this question probably haven't given it enough thought.

Say the planet is born at midnight and it runs for one day. First there is nothing. Two hours are lost to lava and meteors. Life doesn’t show up until three or four a.m. Even then, it’s just the barest self-copying bits and pieces. From dawn to late morning—a million million years of branching—nothing more exists than lean and simple cells. Then there is everything. Something wild happens, not long after noon. One kind of simple cell enslaves a couple of others. Nuclei get membranes. Cells evolve organelles. What was once a solo campsite grows into a town. The day is two-thirds done when animals and plants part ways. And still life is only single cells. Dusk falls before compound life takes hold. Every large living thing is a latecomer, showing up after dark. Nine p.m. brings jellyfish and worms. Later that hour comes the breakout—backbones, cartilage, an explosion of body forms. From one instant to the next, countless new stems and twigs in the spreading crown burst open and run. Plants make it up on land just before ten. Then insects, who instantly take to the air. Moments later, tetrapods crawl up from the tidal muck, carrying around on their skin and in their guts whole worlds of earlier creatures. By eleven, dinosaurs have shot their bolt, leaving the mammals and birds in charge for an hour. Somewhere in that last sixty minutes, high up in the phylogenetic canopy, life grows aware. Creatures start to speculate. Animals

Marcelina loved that miniscule, precise moment when the needle entered her face. It was silver; it was pure. It was the violence that healed, the violation that brought perfection. There was no pain, never any pain, only a sense of the most delicate of penetrations, like a mosquito exquisitely sipping blood, a precision piece of human technology slipping between the gross tissues and cells of her flesh. She could see the needle out of the corner of her eye; in the foreshortened reality of the ultra-close-up it was like the stem of a steel flower. The latex-gloved hand that held the syringe was as vast as the creating hand of God: Marcelina had watched it swim across her field of vision, seeking its spot, so close, so thrillingly, dangerously close to her naked eyeball. And then the gentle stab. Always she closed her eyes as the fingers applied pressure to the plunger. She wanted to feel the poison entering her flesh, imagine it whipping the bloated, slack, lazy cells into panic, the washes of immune response chemicals as they realized they were under toxic attack; the blessed inflammation, the swelling of the wrinkled, lined skin into smoothness, tightness, beauty, youth. Marcelina Hoffman was well on her way to becoming a Botox junkie. Such a simple treat; the beauty salon was on the same block as Canal Quatro. Marcelina had pioneered the lunch-hour face lift to such an extent that Lisandra had appropriated it as the premise for an entire series. Whore. But the joy began in the lobby with Luesa the receptionist in her high-collared white dress saying “Good afternoon, Senhora Hoffman,” and the smell of the beautiful chemicals and the scented candles, the lightness and smell of the beautiful chemicals and the scented candles, the lightness and brightness of the frosted glass panels and the bare wood floor and the cream-on-white cotton wall hangings, the New Age music that she scorned anywhere else (Tropicalismo hippy-shit) but here told her, “you’re wonderful, you’re special, you’re robed in light, the universe loves you, all you have to do is reach out your hand and take anything you desire.” Eyes closed, lying flat on the reclining chair, she felt her work-weary crow’s-feet smoothed away, the young, energizing tautness of her skin. Two years before she had been to New York on the Real Sex in the City production and had been struck by how the ianqui women styled themselves out of personal empowerment and not, as a carioca would have done, because it was her duty before a scrutinizing, judgmental city. An alien creed: thousand-dollar shoes but no pedicure. But she had brought back one mantra among her shopping bags, an enlightenment she had stolen from a Jennifer Aniston cosmetics ad. She whispered it to herself now, in the warm, jasmine-and vetiver-scented sanctuary as the botulin toxins diffused through her skin. Because I’m worth it.

In 2006, researchers Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler created fake newspaper articles about polarizing political issues. The articles were written in a way that would confirm a widespread misconception about certain ideas in American politics. As soon as a person read a fake article, experimenters then handed over a true article that corrected the first. For instance, one article suggested that the United States had found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The next article corrected the first and said that the United States had never found them, which was the truth. Those opposed to the war or who had strong liberal leanings tended to disagree with the original article and accept the second. Those who supported the war and leaned more toward the conservative camp tended to agree with the first article and strongly disagree with the second. These reactions shouldn’t surprise you. What should give you pause, though, is how conservatives felt about the correction. After reading that there were no WMDs, they reported being even more certain than before that there actually were WMDs and that their original beliefs were correct. The researchers repeated the experiment with other wedge issues, such as stem cell research and tax reform, and once again they found that corrections tended to increase the strength of the participants’ misconceptions if those corrections contradicted their ideologies. People on opposing sides of the political spectrum read the same articles and then the same corrections, and when new evidence was interpreted as threatening to their beliefs, they doubled down. The corrections backfired. Researchers Kelly Garrett and Brian Weeks expanded on this work in 2013. In their study, people already suspicious of electronic health records read factually incorrect articles about such technologies that supported those subjects’ beliefs. In those articles, the scientists had already identified any misinformation and placed it within brackets, highlighted it in red, and italicized the text. After they finished reading the articles, people who said beforehand that they opposed electronic health records reported no change in their opinions and felt even more strongly about the issue than before. The corrections had strengthened their biases instead of weakening them. Once something is added to your collection of beliefs, you protect it from harm. You do this instinctively and unconsciously when confronted with attitude-inconsistent information. Just as confirmation bias shields you when you actively seek information, the backfire effect defends you when the information seeks you, when it blindsides you. Coming or going, you stick to your beliefs instead of questioning them. When someone tries to correct you, tries to dilute your misconceptions, it backfires and strengthens those misconceptions instead. Over time, the backfire effect makes you less skeptical of those things that allow you to continue seeing your beliefs and attitudes as true and proper.

Dr. Hobson (with Dr. Robert McCarley) made history by proposing the first serious challenge to Freud’s theory of dreams, called the “activation synthesis theory.” In 1977, they proposed the idea that dreams originate from random neural firings in the brain stem, which travel up to the cortex, which then tries to make sense of these random signals. The key to dreams lies in nodes found in the brain stem, the oldest part of the brain, which squirts out special chemicals, called adrenergics, that keep us alert. As we go to sleep, the brain stem activates another system, the cholinergic, which emits chemicals that put us in a dream state. As we dream, cholinergic neurons in the brain stem begin to fire, setting off erratic pulses of electrical energy called PGO (pontine-geniculate-occipital) waves. These waves travel up the brain stem into the visual cortex, stimulating it to create dreams. Cells in the visual cortex begin to resonate hundreds of times per second in an irregular fashion, which is perhaps responsible for the sometimes incoherent nature of dreams. This system also emits chemicals that decouple parts of the brain involved with reason and logic. The lack of checks coming from the prefrontal and orbitofrontal cortices, along with the brain becoming extremely sensitive to stray thoughts, may account for the bizarre, erratic nature of dreams. Studies have shown that it is possible to enter the cholinergic state without sleep. Dr. Edgar Garcia-Rill of the University of Arkansas claims that meditation, worrying, or being placed in an isolation tank can induce this cholinergic state. Pilots and drivers facing the monotony of a blank windshield for many hours may also enter this state. In his research, he has found that schizophrenics have an unusually large number of cholinergic neurons in their brain stem, which may explain some of their hallucinations. To make his studies more efficient, Dr. Allan Hobson had his subjects put on a special nightcap that can automatically record data during a dream. One sensor connected to the nightcap registers the movements of a person’s head (because head movements usually occur when dreams end). Another sensor measures movements of the eyelids (because REM sleep causes eyelids to move). When his subjects wake up, they immediately record what they dreamed about, and the information from the nightcap is fed into a computer. In this way, Dr. Hobson has accumulated a vast amount of information about dreams. So what is the meaning of dreams? I asked him. He dismisses what he calls the “mystique of fortune-cookie dream interpretation.” He does not see any hidden message from the cosmos in dreams. Instead, he believes that after the PGO waves surge from the brain stem into the cortical areas, the cortex is trying to make sense of these erratic signals and winds up creating a narrative out of them: a dream.

How Aging Stems from Trade-Offs Aging occurs because our body must make a trade-off between reproducing and staying in good repair, according to the author’s “disposable soma” theory. Given a limited supply of energy, the amount that goes to making and protecting sperm and eggs tips the scale away from ensuring that “somatic” cells—skin, bone, muscle, and so on—remain in good condition. As a result, cells accumulate damage over time, which ultimately causes some organ or another to become diseased. If bodily functioning is sufficiently compromised, death ensues.

For better or worse, we live in a world where money can be acquired simply by attracting attention and by making promises.

In rich countries, there has been a trend to harvest cord-blood for stem-cells. Harvesting 100mls of blood from a newborn is equivalent to taking over a litre (2.5 pints) from an adult.67 Such theft can cause immediate problems and also jeopardise his long-term nutrition and health.

Science alone cannot justify the pro-life position, thought it can give us the facts we need to draw moral conclusions on a host of controversial issues, including abortion, embryonic stem cell research, and cloning.

The FDA will accept a certain level of risk for a new treatment that is to be applied to a group of very sick patients who would otherwise die in the near future, but not for a group who have a relatively long life expectancy on the basis of existing therapies.

As religion starts to mix with politics, we have a culture that allows us to fall behind what were previously third world nations, because we are now treating science the way we did sex in the 1950s, banning or burying evolution theories and research into promising lifesaving areas such as stem-cell research.

Terminology and classification Leukaemias are traditionally classified into four main groups: • acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) • acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) • chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL) • chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML). In acute leukaemia there is proliferation of primitive stem cells leading to an accumulation of blasts, predominantly in the bone marrow, which causes bone marrow failure. In chronic leukaemia the malignant clone is able to differentiate, resulting in an accumulation of more mature cells. Lymphocytic and lymphoblastic cells are those derived from the lymphoid stem cell (B cells and T cells). Myeloid refers to the other lineages, i.e. precursors of red cells, granulocytes, monocytes and platelets (see Fig. 24.2, p. 989). The diagnosis of leukaemia is usually suspected from an abnormal blood count, often a raised white count, and is confirmed by examination of the bone marrow. This includes the morphology of the abnormal cells, analysis of cell surface markers (immunophenotyping), clone-specific chromosome abnormalities and molecular changes. These results are incorporated in the World Health Organization (WHO) classification of tumours of haematopoietic and lymphoid tissues; the subclassification of acute leukaemias is shown in Box 24.47. The features in the bone marrow not only provide an accurate diagnosis but also give valuable prognostic information, allowing therapy to be tailored to the patient’s disease.

Earlier this month, the Vatican’s top bioethics official condemned as “reprehensible” the assisted suicide of an East Bay woman, Brittany Maynard, who was suffering terminal brain cancer and said she wanted to die with dignity. Francis didn’t refer to the Maynard case specifically. While denouncing euthanasia in general, he also condemned abortion, in vitro fertilization and embryonic stem cell research.

Beware those who will try to hijack your hope to make a dollar (glutathione therapy, chelation, fee for stem cell treatment, miracle cures).

The Catholic Church proclaims that human life is sacred and that the dignity of the human person is the foundation of a moral vision for society. This belief is the foundation of all the principles of our social teaching. In our society, human life is under direct attack from abortion and euthanasia. The value of human life is being threatened by cloning, embryonic stem cell research, and the use of the death penalty. The intentional targeting of civilians in war or terrorist attacks is always wrong. Catholic teaching also calls on us to work to avoid war. Nations must protect the right to life by finding increasingly effective ways to prevent conflicts and resolve them by peaceful means. We believe that every person is precious, that people are more important than things, and that the measure of every institution is whether it threatens or enhances the life and dignity of the human person.

In the Tel Aviv study, a group of formerly sedentary rats of varying ages ran on a treadmill for 20 minutes daily for 13 weeks. Another pack of rats was the control group. The control group was allowed to remain sedentary—that is, those rats’ muscles were mainly not used. As you might expect from everything you’ve read so far, the exercisers increased their number of stem muscle cells, with the total increase dependent on age—but not in the way you would expect. The younger rat runners saw an increase of 20 to 35 percent in their stem repair cells. The older rats, however, experienced an even greater proliferation—a 33 to 47 percent increase. That’s right: The percentage increase in stem muscle cells was greater in the older subjects than in the younger ones. On the other hand, the nonexercising rats lost stem cells by lying around, eating and sleeping as they aged.

There is increasing evidence that at least some of the targeting of epigenetic modifications can be explained by interactions with long ncRNAs. Jeannie Lee and her colleagues have recently investigated long ncRNAs that bind to a complex of proteins. The complex is called PRC2 and it generates repressive modifications on histones. PRC2 contains a number of proteins, and the one that interacts with the long ncRNAs is probably EZH2. The researchers found that the PRC2 complex bound to literally thousands of different long ncRNA molecules in embryonic stem cells from mice13. These long ncRNAs may act as bait. They can stay tethered to the specific region of the genome where they are produced, and then attract repressive enzymes to shut off gene expression. This happens because the repressive enzyme complexes contain proteins like EZH2 that are capable of binding to RNA.

Similar things happen in so many diseases – the insulin-secreting cells that are lost when teenagers develop type 1 diabetes, the brain cells that are lost in Alzheimer’s disease, the cartilage producing cells that disappear during osteoarthritis – the list goes on and on. It would be great if we could replace these with new cells, identical to our own. This way we wouldn’t have to deal with all the rejection issues that make organ transplants such a challenge, or with the lack of availability of donors. Using stem cells in this way is referred to as therapeutic cloning; creating cells identical to a specific individual in order to treat a disease.

zygotes by definition are rather limited in number and most scientists working in very early development use cells from a bit later, the famous embryonic stem (ES) cells.

The tribal differences that erupt into public controversy typically concern sex (e.g., gay marriage, gays in the military, the sex lives of public officials) and death at the margins of life (e.g., abortion, physician-assisted suicide, the use of embryonic stem cells in research).

Even single cells have astonishing regenerative abilities. Acetabularia, the mermaid’s wineglass, is a single-celled green alga about five centimeters long, with three main parts: root-like structures called rhizoids that attach it to a rock, a stem and a cap about a centimeter wide (Figure 5.2). This very large cell has a single nucleus in one of the rhizoids. As the plant grows, its stem lengthens, it forms a series of whorls of hairs that later drop off, and finally forms the cap. If the cap is cut off by snipping the stem in two, after the cut has healed, a new tip grows and the stem forms a series of whorls of hairs and then a new cap, in a similar way to the normal pattern of growth. This can happen over and over again if the cap is cut off repeatedly.2 As discussed in the following chapter, the usual assumption is that genes somehow control or “program” the development of form, as if the nucleus, containing the genes, is a kind of brain controlling the cell. But Acetabularia shows that morphogenesis can take place without genes. If the rhizoid containing the nucleus is cut off, the alga can stay alive for months, and if the cap is cut off, it can regenerate a new one. Even more remarkable, if a piece is cut out of the stem, after the cuts have healed, a new tip grows from the end where the cap used to be and makes a new cap (Figure 5.2).3 Morphogenesis is goal-directed, and moves toward a morphic attractor even in the absence of genes. FIGURE 5.2. Regeneration of the alga Acetabularia mediterranea, an unusually large single-celled organism, up to 5cm tall, containing a green cap at the top of a long stalk, anchored at the base by root-like rhizoids. There is a large nucleus (shown as a black oval) in the basal part of the cell. When the stalk is cut off near the bottom, the basal part of the cell regenerates a new stalk and cap (shown on the right). When a part of the upper stalk is cut out, it grows a new cap and more stalk, even though it contains no nucleus.

Genes are, in fact, classified by the type of stimulus that turns them on and off. For example, experience-dependent or activity-dependent genes are activated when we’re having novel experiences, learning new information, and healing. These genes generate protein synthesis and chemical messengers to instruct stem cells to morph into whatever types of cells are needed at the time for healing