Tissue Culture Quotes

The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.

I hate being fat. I hate the way people look at me, or don't. I hate being a joke; I hate the disorienting limbo between too visible and invisible; I hate the way that complete strangers waste my life out of supposed concern for my death. I hate knowing that if I did die of a condition that correlates with weight, a certain subset of people would feel their prejudices validated, and some would outright celebrate. I also love being fat. The breadth of my shoulders makes me feel safe. I am unassailable. I intimidate. I am a polar icebreaker. I walk and climb and lift things, I can open your jar, I can absorb blows - literal and metaphorical - meant for other women, smaller woman, breakable women women who need me. My bones feel like iron - heavy, but strong. I used to say that being fat in our culture was like drowning (in hate, in blame, in your own tissue), but lately I think it's more like burning. After three decades in the fire, my iron bones are steel.

Until such time as duplications of individual nervous systems can be grown in tissue cultures (at this point no one knows "whose" consciousness they would have), our special identities will always be subject to being hit by a truck or dying in a plane crash. A sudden virus or heart seizure, even in the body's youth, may carry us off. Statistically, looking ahead thousands of years, the chances are that every human and even inanimate form will be broken sooner or later. But the distress felt by men and women today does not arise from the fear of such hazards. Rather, it comes from the certainty of aging and physical degeneration leading to death. It is the fear of losing our powers and being left alone, or in the hands of indifferent nurses, and knowing that the moment must come when we will not see the people we love any more, and everything will go black.

The anatomical specifications of rupture, of altered human tissue, take on the objective description of laboratory prose – eyes beaten out, arms, backs, skulls branded, a left jaw, a right ankle, punctured; teeth missing, as the calculated work of iron, whips, chains, knives, the canine patrol, the bullet. These undecipherable markings on the captive body render a kind of hieroglyphics of the flesh whose severe disjunctures come to be hidden to the cultural seeing by color.

We are each a product of our biological endowments, culture, and personal history. Culture ideology and cultural events along with transmitted cultural practices influences each of us. We are each the product of our collective interchanges. Our county’s domestic and interlinked international conflicts fuse us together. We are each a molecule in the helix of human consciousness joined in a physical world. We form a coil of connective tissue soldered together by cultural links.

First, there are the live vaccines which contain an attenuated strain of a microorganism. The hope with these vaccines is that they will produce a subclinical infection. Viral vaccines may contain attenuated strains of a virus or an inactivated virus. They are prepared in tissue culture, which may contain antibiotics, or in chick embryos. These vaccines are, therefore, unsuitable for patients who are allergic to the antibiotics concerned or to egg protein. (Sadly, many doctors do not bother to ask their patients if they have any allergies which might make vaccination especially hazardous. And so

A tissue is evidently an enduring thing. It's functional and structural conditions become modified from moment to moment. Time is really the fourth dimension of living organisms. It enters as part into the constitution of a tissue. Cell colonies, or organs, are events which progressively unfold themselves. They must be studied like history.

A LITTLE SONG AND A RECEIPT. Doe: a deer, a female deer— Often chased by sonneteers of old. Caught, and killed, and bathed in fear, turned to human blazons to be sold— Eyes—$twin models of the stars. Skin—$fine tissue wrought from gold. Lips—$your favorite kind of flower. Sex—$a secret still untold/ a Silk Road to unfold/ a thing for you to mold/ a source by you controlled. Total: $—————.—

At a pragmatic level, white churches served as connective tissue that brought together leaders from other social realms to coordinate a campaign of massive resistance to black equality. But at a deeper level, white churches were the institutions of ultimate legitimization, where white supremacy was divinely justified via a carefully cultivated Christian theology. White Christian churches composed the cultural score that made white supremacy sing.

Illness is a story we tell about ourselves. The narrative is the connective tissue that joins together the symptoms and perceptions and makes sense of them. It's how impenetrable concepts like death and life become something that can be incorporated comfortably into day-to-day existence. A serious illness is much easier to cope with if it can be slotted into a familiar structure with a beginning, middle, and end. It's also why metaphors of battle or struggle are so popular for describing sickness. It draws the line between them and us, good and evil.

Many factors other than your size, fat, and muscle tissue figure in resting metabolism. Some are genetic and immutable. You may have been born with the ability to burn a lot of energy quickly and effortlessly, while others have what’s called a “sluggish metabolism”and don’t use energy at a very fast rate. It’s interesting to consider the cultural value judgment in using the term “sluggish”; from a scientific perspective, the person with a slower metabolism is much more efficient, a trait that would have been highly prized in earlier times when food was harder to come by.

The gorgonians tend to grow in closely packed, branching masses, but they do not fuse to each other; if they did, their morphogenesis would doubtless become a shambles. Theodor, in a series of elegant experiments, has shown that when two individuals of the same species are placed in close contact, the smaller of the two will always begin to disintegrate. It is autodestruction due to lytic mechanisms entirely under the governance of the smaller partner. He is not thrown out, not outgamed, not outgunned; he simply chooses to bow out. It is not necessarily a comfort to know that such things go on in biology, but it is at least an agreeable surprise. The oxygen in the atmosphere is the exhalation of the chloroplasts living in plants (also, for our amazement, in the siphons of giant clams and lesser marine animals). It is a natural tendency for genetically unrelated cells in tissue culture to come together, ignoring species differences, and fuse to form hybrid cells. Inflammation and immunology must indeed be powerfully designed to keep us apart; without such mechanisms, involving considerable effort, we might have developed as a kind of flowing syncytium over the earth, without the morphogenesis of even a flower.

I have been sent many images by a Morgellons sufferer of extraordinary phenomena found in the bodies of those with the syndrome. Among them are hollow filaments, fibers, crystals, silica (often in hexagram form), even insect-like synthetic 'creature' remarkably similar to the one inserted into Neo's belly by agents in the Matrix movie.... Those tested who do not have visible symptoms of Morgellons have been found to be infested with fiber cultures grown from their saliva, body tissue, and urine.... Morgellons is proliferating because the takeover is proliferating and you will see this massive increase with the introduction of 5G which this body-invasion technology is designed to interact with.

Unfortunately, the critics of economics have had a tendency to discuss the whole structure as a tissue of misconceptions. It is a critique that fails. The strength of economics is its considerable, if far from complete, understanding of the flows and comparative advantages that underlie trade, jobs, capital and incomes, and the logic of optimising behaviour, all backed by glittering accomplishment in mathematics. That makes it a powerful analytical instrument, so that just a few misconceptions – such as a failure to understand the informal economy or resource depletion – have leverage: like a baby monkey at the controls of a Ferrari, they can turn it into an instrument with extraordinarily destructive potential. If it were a tissue of errors, it would not be dangerous: it is its 90 percent brilliance which makes it so.

A unified Iran is constituted not only politically but also affectively. Liberty and constitutional rule bring "Affection among us." The affective sentiment- that of bonding among differing brothers-produces political bonds of national unity and was associatively linked with other desires. Perhaps foremost was the desire to care for and defend the mother, in particular her bodily integrity. The same words were commonly used to discuss territory and the female body. Laura Mulvey calls these words keys "that could turn either way between the psychoanalytic and the social" (1980, 180). They are not "just words" that open up to either domain; they mediate between these domains, taking power of desire from one to the other. More appropriately, they should be considered cultural nodes of psyhosocial condensation. Tajavuz, literally meaning transgression, expresses both rape and the invasion of territory. Another effective expression, as already noted, was Khak-i pak-i vatan, the pure soil of the homeland. The word used for "pure," pak, is saturated with connotations of sexual purity. Linked to the idea of the purity of a female vatan was the metaphoric notion of the "skirt of chastity" (daman-i 'iffat) and its purity-whether it was stained or not. It was the duty of Iranian men to protect that skirt. The weak and sometimes dying figure of motherland pleaded t her dishonorable sons to arise and cut the hands of foreigners from her skirt. Expressing hope for the success of the new constitutional regime by recalling and wishing away the horrors of previous years, an article in Sur-o Israfil addressed Iran in the following terms: "O Iran! O our Mother! You who have given us milk from the blood of your veins for many long years, and who have fed us with the tissues of your own body! Will we ever live to see your unworthy children entrust your skirt of chastity to the hands of foreigners? Will our eyes ever see foreigners tear away the veil of your chastity?

Betrayed and abandoned, cut adrift or superannuated, coerced or manipulated, speeded up, cheated, living in the shadows—this is a recipe for acquiescence. Yet conditions of life and labor as bad as or even far worse than these once were instigators to social upheaval. Alongside the massing of enemies on the outside—employers, insulated and self-protective union leaders, government policy makers, the globalized sweatshop, and the globalized megabank—something in the tissue of working-class life had proved profoundly disempowering and also accounted for the silence. Work itself had lost its cultural gravitas. What in part qualified the American Revolution as a legitimate overturning of an ancien régime was its political emancipation of labor. Until that time, work was considered a disqualifying disability for participating in public life. It entailed a degree of deference to patrons and a narrow-minded preoccupation with day-to-day affairs that undermined the possibility of disinterested public service. By opening up the possibility of democracy, the Revolution removed, in theory, that crippling impairment and erased an immemorial chasm between those who worked and those who didn’t need to. And by inference this bestowed honor on laboring mankind, a recognition that was to infuse American political culture for generations. But in our new era, the nature of work, the abuse of work, exploitation at work, and all the prophecies and jeremiads, the condemnations and glorifications embedded in laboring humanity no longer occupied center stage in the theater of public life. The eclipse of the work ethic as a spiritual justification for labor may be liberating. But the spiritless work regimen left behind carries with it no higher justification. This disenchantment is also a disempowerment. The modern work ethic becomes, to cite one trenchant observation, “an ideology propagated by the middle class for the working classes with enough plausibility and truth to make it credible.

For example, when I observe something unusual in an experiment, it reverberates in my brain for a long while. Many circuits, especially the giant recurrent network of the hippocampus, can generate large numbers of neuronal trajectories without any signals from outside the brain. Even cultured brain tissue in a dish can induce a variety of spontaneous events. That is what neuronal circuits do.38 They do not just sit and wait to be stimulated. Based on these examples, now we may consider the possibility that learning is not an outside-in superimposition process where new neuronal sequences are built up with each novel experience. Instead, learning may be an inside-out matching process: when a spontaneously occurring neuronal trajectory, drawn from the available huge repertoire of trajectories, coincides with a useful action, that trajectory acquires meaning to the brain. The richer the experience, the higher the fraction of the meaningful trajectories, but there is always a large reservoir of available patterns.

In the outer layers of young stars life nearly always appears not only in the normal manner but also in the form of parasites, minute independent organisms of fire, often no bigger than a cloud in the terrestrial air, but sometimes as large as the Earth itself. These "salamanders" either feed upon the welling energies of the star in the same manner as the star's own organic tissues feed, or simply prey upon those tissues themselves. Here as elsewhere the laws of biological evolution come into force, and in time there may appear races of intelligent flame-like beings. Even when the salamandrian life does not reach this level, its effect on the star's tissues may become evident to the star as a disease of its skin and sense organs, or even of its deeper tissues. It then experiences emotions not wholly unlike human fright and shame, and anxiously and most humanly guards its secret from the telepathic reach of its fellows. The salamandrian races have never been able to gain mastery over their fiery worlds. Many of them succumb, soon or late, either to some natural disaster or to internecine strife or to the self-cleansing activities of their mighty host. Many others survive, but in a relatively harmless state, troubling their stars only with a mild irritation, and a faint shade of insincerity in all their dealings with one another. In the public culture of the stars the salamandrian pest was completely ignored. Each star believed itself to be the only sufferer and the only sinner in the galaxy. One indirect effect the pest did have on stellar thought. It introduced the idea of purity. Each star prized the perfection of the stellar community all the more by reason of its own secret experience of impurity.

With modern Western diets, the body must work hard to keep the blood from becoming overly acidic from the excess animal protein being eaten. To do this, it uses alkaline bone tissue substances such as bicarbonates and calcium. This can lead to the loss of bone density and helps explain the high rates of osteoporosis in cultures where people eat large quantities of acidifying animal foods. Osteoporosis rates among the Eskimo people, who eat an almost completely flesh-based diet, are among the highest in the world.18 Next are northern Europeans and North Americans, who eat high quantities of flesh, eggs, and dairy products.19 While there are other factors that may affect bone health, such as vitamin and mineral intake, levels of loadbearing exercise, and mental and emotional factors, there is evidence that brittle bones and osteoporosis are correlated with eating the large amounts of animal protein typical of our meals.

Fibroblasts are the main cells in connective tissue and are found in all sorts of organs including skin. They’re really easy to extract and they grow very easily in culture, so are a great source of cells for experiments.

For similarly unclear reasons, adult men did not take part in this. However, it does seem clear that by consuming the brain tissue of their relatives who had themselves died of kuru, the Fore had spread the disease through their female population. Thus, a culturally transmitted practice led to catastrophe, both for the Fore and for their genes.

One of the most widely distributed biological products that frequently involved mice or mouse tissue, at least up to recent years, are vaccines, especially vaccines against viruses . . . It is possible that XMRV particles were present in virus stocks cultured in mice or mouse cells for vaccine production, and that the virus was transferred to the human population by vaccination.

We are mixing animal and human tissue in laboratory cultures, then injecting them into human beings in a way that bypasses their traditional defenses, such as stomach acid breaking down pathogens. Antibiotics, which we give with alarming regularity, are known to dysregulate the bacteria in our digestive system, and there’s strong evidence of harm from many of the chemicals used in vaccines.

In my understanding diversity is not, as I had once thought, a characteristic of life. It is, instead, a condition necessary for life. To eliminate diversity would be like eliminating carbon and expecting like to go on. This, I believe, is why even a passing acquaintance with endangered languages or endangered species or endangered cultures, brings with it so much anxiety, so much sadness. We know in our tissues, that the fewer the differences we encounter, wherever it is we go, the more widespread the kingdom of death has become.

Despite the restriction of stem cells to just two regions of the mammalian central nervous system (CNS)—the lateral ventricle linings and the dentate gyrus—it is possible to grow neural stem cells in tissue culture from a much wider range of brain regions than this. The stem cells grow in a form called neurospheres. These are clumps of cells, up to 0.3 mm wide, that grow in suspension culture in a medium containing two specific growth factors (EGF and FGF). The cultures can be initiated from any part of the foetal CNS and often from parts of the adult CNS as well, even regions not thought to undergo continuous renewal. Neurospheres are thought each to contain a few neural stem cells, which are capable of self-renewal, plus a certain number of transit amplifying cells, that have finite division potential. When neurospheres are plated on an adhesive surface in the presence of serum, they will differentiate and form the three cell types normally generated by neuronal stem cells, which are neurons, and two types of glial cells: astrocytes and oligodendrocytes. If neurospheres are dissociated into single cells, a few per cent of these cells can establish new neurospheres, with similar properties to the original. Repeated cycles of dissociation and growth can provide substantial expansion capacity. The phenomenon of neurospheres is an example of the fact that cells may behave in a different manner in tissue culture from in vivo. Neurospheres have created enormous interest because, unlike haematopoietic stem cells, they are expandable in vitro, and because there is a hope that they might be used for cell therapy of the very intractable neurodegenerative diseases involving widespread neuronal death.

There are cells throughout the body in specialised tissues with the beautiful name syncytium. They have multiple nuclei, formed when cells fuse with each other, which happens in the development of some muscle tissue, bone and heart cells. Syncytium in the placenta make up a highly specialised and essential tissue with the even more beautiful name syncytiotrophoblast. These are the spindly fingers from the growing placenta that invade the wall of the uterus and provide the interface between the mother and embryo, where liquids, waste and nutrients are exchanged. It’s also a tissue that suppresses the immune system of the mother, to stop her body automatically rejecting the growing child as an alien presence. These cells are at the junction of human reproduction, where one life is giving rise to the next. The genes that drive those placental cells to form are not human at all. Primates acquired them from a virus around forty-five million years ago;

Many scientists and researchers themselves now advocate these methods, most prominently the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. There is no longer any rational basis, they tell us, for the Draize test, dripping chemicals and personal-care products into the eyes of immobilized rabbits. We can now test for eye irritancy by use of human tissue systems mimicking characteristics of the eye. We can stop pouring commercial and industrial chemicals into animals. Acute toxicity is determined more accurately by in vitro methods using human cell cultures obtained from cadavers. Damage to DNA can be studied in bacteria, as in the Ames assay developed thirty years ago, adopted slowly by the EPA and yet now internationally accepted. Further experiments on animals for diseases of the heart, nicotine addiction, obesity, and many other disorders are unwarranted because we have already identified their primary causes by studying human populations.

The sacred-fire experience taught me how critically important it is for cultural repair to reinvent such shared ceremonial containers. 'They're as old as time,' one white-haired woman told me as I sat next to her on the woven rug. 'We barely limp along without these places to connect with spirit.' The sacred fire holds this intention for four days, sorry business for three weeks. Death in these contexts is an opportunity for greater intimacy and reciprocity, for shedding and transformation. Grief is not something to 'get rid of' - the quicker the better so as to return to being a productive and functional member of society. Instead of a nuisance, it's actually revered for the connective tissue it provides a community. Rather than a private affair, grief is a collective experience, a shared responsibility, held with equal import to celebration rites, its inevitability and universality woven into the cultural fabric of a healthy culture.

I’m sympathetic to the idea of drug legalization as a response to this. We made a tragic mistake through the twentieth century in gradually criminalizing drugs that ought to have been dealt with—were being dealt with—medically. We created a profit center for mafias around the world. We stopped considering ways to reduce overdose deaths—studying, for example, how safe injection sites work elsewhere. Among other things, criminalization also prevented us from fully studying these drugs for their medicinal benefits and harms. The problem is, I don’t trust American capitalism to do drug legalization responsibly. The last fifty years are replete with examples of corporations turning addictive services and substances against us, fine-tuning their addictiveness, then marketing them aggressively. Remember when social media was going to be the great technological connective tissue, bringing people together, inaugurating a new era of understanding? Instead, it midwifed an era of virulent tribalism. The opioid epidemic began with legal drugs, irresponsibly marketed and prescribed. The Sacklers are only one example of a tendency that nestles into every corner of American capitalism when it is allowed to extract maximum profit from products and services that neuroscience shows our brains are vulnerable to. Meanwhile, alcohol and cigarettes kill more than any other drug by far, because they are legal and widely available. Alcohol also drives arrests and incarceration more than any other single drug. Our brains are no match for the consumer and marketing culture to emerge in the last few decades. They are certainly no match for the highly potent illegal street drugs now circulating.

Spoken language is a dance of talking and listening involving air, lungs, tissue, cartridge, mouths, ears, vibration, history of ancestors, and evolution of bodies and mind. It’s a balance of anatomy and phonics that express our interpretation of the way the world is.

The discipline-wide, broad-based intellectual framework necessary to have recognized the possibility that a virus could have contaminated tissue cultures and then have been spread through vaccines and have gained virulence after spreading almost certainly simply would not have existed

Beckett seemed to be working through what Roland Barthes in his seminal essay “The Death of the Author” described as “tissues of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture.

This is the cultural richness that brain–computer interfaces will enable for us. It will be a process of co-creation—evolving our minds to unlock deeper insight, and using those powers to produce transcendent new ideas for our future minds to explore. At last we will have access to our own source code, using AI capable of redesigning itself. Since this technology will let us merge with the superintelligence we are creating, we will be essentially remaking ourselves. Freed from the enclosure of our skulls, and processing on a substrate millions of times faster than biological tissue, our minds will be empowered to grow exponentially, ultimately expanding our intelligence millions-fold. This is the core of my definition of the Singularity.

Justineau doesn’t have any answer. She watches with an eerie sense of dislocation as Caldwell crosses to another part of the lab, comes back with a glass fish tank in which she’s set up one of her tissue cultures. It’s an older one, with several years of growth. The tank is about eighteen inches by twelve by ten inches high, and its interior is completely filled with a dense mass of fine, dark grey strands. Like plague-flavoured candy floss, Justineau thinks. It’s impossible even to tell what the original substrate was; it’s just lost in the toxic froth that has sprouted from it. “This

True Wellbriety occurs in the context of community.  The Red Road to Wellbriety teaches that healthy seeds cannot grow in diseased soil. It teaches that injured seeds need a “Healing Forest.”  The stories in the Red Road to Wellbriety make it clear that the sobriety and healing of the individual are inseparable from the sobriety and healing of the family and the tribe.  In these pages are found the connecting tissue between personal sobriety, cultural renewal, nationhood, and sovereignty. 

When, for example, I added inflammatory chemicals to the tissue culture, the cells rapidly became the equivalent of macrophages, the scavengers of the immune system. What was also exciting to me was that the cells transformed even when I destroyed their DNA with gamma rays. These endothelial cells were

She was part of a social network that included artists and activists who were always hatching what they called “disruptive strategies” aimed at undermining all forms of authority: cultural, economic, scientific. Mostly their disruptions involved artistic fashion shows full of uselessly beautiful GMOs and tissue mods that said something about global recolonization.

Luckily, human physiology offers one more pathway to power our brains. When food is no longer available, after about three days, the liver begins to use body fat to create those ketones. This is when beta-HBA serves as a highly efficient fuel source for the brain, allowing us to function cognitively for extended periods during food scarcity. Such an alternative fuel source helps reduce our dependence on gluconeogenesis and, therefore, preserves our muscle mass. But more than this, as Harvard Medical School professor George F. Cahill stated, “Recent studies have shown that beta-hydroxybutyrate, the principal ketone, is not just a fuel, but a superfuel, more efficiently producing ATP energy than glucose. It has also protected neuronal cells in tissue cultures against exposure to toxins associated with Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s.”2

Administered daily, Gleevec can “contain” cancer growth, which then ceases to be dangerous. We have reached the stage of “cancer without disease,” in the language of Judah Folkman, who discovered angiogenesis.59 It so happens that many herbs and spices act along some of the same lines as Gleevec. This is true of the labiate family, for example, which includes mint, thyme, marjoram, oregano, basil, and rosemary. They are rich in fatty acids of the terpene family, which makes them particularly fragrant. Terpenes have been shown to act on a wide variety of tumors by reducing the spread of cancer cells or by provoking their death. One of these terpenes—carnosol in rosemary—affects the capacity of cancer cells to invade neighboring tissues. When it is incapable of spreading, cancer loses its virulence. Moreover, researchers at the National Cancer Institute have demonstrated that rosemary extracts help chemotherapy penetrate cancer cells. In tissue cultures, they lower the resistance of breast cancer cells to chemotherapy.60 In Richard Béliveau’s experiments, apigenine—plentiful in parsley and celery—has demonstrated powerful inhibition of the creation of blood vessels, which tumors need to grow, and to a degree comparable to Gleevec. This effect occurs even with very small concentrations, similar to those observed in the blood after consumption of parsley.

I cannot stress this enough times; scientists need to stop making more and more artificial mouse models and tissue culture cell lines for cancer drug development. These resources can and should be invested in better pursuits. No one, however, willingly surrenders their pet projects, no matter how far they have drifted from the original intent, as long as they can maintain their grip on grants and power.

Here, organic towers, tall shapeless masses of tissue cultured from the plasm of ancient mammals, trumpeted and moaned across the abandoned wastes of another continent, their huge cynical voices modulating on the wind, now immensely distant, now close at hand.

more and more artificial mouse models and tissue culture cell lines for cancer drug development. These resources can and should be invested in better pursuits.

This premise can be applied to life on the planet today. The more oxygen life can consume, the more electron excitability it gains, the more animated it becomes. When living matter is bristling and able to absorb and transfer electrons in a controlled way, it remains healthy. When cells lose the ability to offload and absorb electrons, they begin to break down. “Taking out electrons irreversibly means killing,” wrote Szent-Györgyi. This breakdown of electron excitability is what causes metal to rust and leaves to turn brown and die. Humans “rust” as well. As the cells in our bodies lose the ability to attract oxygen, Szent-Györgyi wrote, electrons within them will slow and stop freely interchanging with other cells, resulting in unregulated and abnormal growth. Tissues will begin “rusting” in much the same way as other materials. But we don’t call this “tissue rust.” We call it cancer. And this helps explain why cancers develop and thrive in environments of low oxygen. The best way to keep tissues in the body healthy was to mimic the reactions that evolved in early aerobic life on Earth—specifically, to flood our bodies with a constant presence of that “strong electron acceptor”: oxygen. Breathing slow, less, and through the nose balances the levels of respiratory gases in the body and sends the maximum amount of oxygen to the maximum amount of tissues so that our cells have the maximum amount of electron reactivity. “In every culture and in every medical tradition before ours, healing was accomplished by moving energy,” said Szent-Györgyi. The moving energy of electrons allows living things to stay alive and healthy for as long as possible. The names may have changed—prana, orenda, ch’i, ruah—but the principle has remained the same. Szent-Györgyi apparently took that advice. He died in 1986, at the age of 93. •

The properties of the renewal tissues enabled the original definition of stem cell behaviour in terms of the ability to self-renew and to generate differentiated progeny. But the most famous stem cell of them all is now the embryonic stem cell (ES cell). In one sense, the ES cell is the iconic stem cell. It is the type of stem cell that has attracted all of the ethical controversy, and it is what lay people are thinking of when they refer to ‘stem cell research’. But ironically, the embryonic stem cell does not exist in nature. It is a creature that has been created by mankind and exists only in the world of tissue culture: the growth of cells in flasks in the laboratory, kept in temperature-controlled incubators, exposed to controlled concentrations of oxygen and carbon dioxide, and nourished by complex artificial media. Cells grown in culture are often referred to by the Latin phrase in vitro (in glass, since the relevant containers used to be made of glass) and distinguished from in vivo (inside the living body).

Stopping in the 1970s, "Hybridity" as the fifth and final chapter is less of an end point than a certain realization of the artifice, plasticity, and technology that Wells and Loeb envisioned as the future of the human relationship to living matter as well as of the "catastrophic" situation that Georges Canghuilhem (following Kurt Goldstein) saw in life subjected to the milieu of the laboratory.

My favorite idea to come out of the world of cultured meat is the 'pig in the backyard.' I say 'favorite' not because this scenario seems likely to materialize but because it speaks most directly to my own imagination. In a city, a neighborhood contains a yard, and in that yard there is a pig, and that pig is relatively happy. It receives visitors every day, including local children who bring it odds and ends to eat from their family kitchens. These children may have played with the pig when it was small. Each week a small and harmless biopsy of cells is taken from the pig and turned into cultured pork, perhaps hundreds of pounds of it. This becomes the community's meat. The pig lives out a natural porcine span, and I assume it enjoys the company of other pigs from time to time. This fantasy comes to us from Dutch bioethicists, and it is based on a very real project in which Dutch neighbourhoods raised pigs and then debated the question of their eventual slaughter. The fact that the pig lives in a city is important, for the city is the ancient topos of utopian thought. The 'pig in the backyard' might also be described as the recurrence of an image from late medieval Europe that has been recorded in literature and art history. This is the pig in the land of Cockaigne, the 'Big Rock Candy Mountain' of its time, was a fantasy for starving peasants across Europe. It was filled with foods of a magnificence that only the starving can imagine. In some depictions, you reached this land by eating through a wall of porridge, on the other side of which all manner of things to eat and drink came up from the ground and flowed in streams. Pigs walked around with forks sticking out of backs that were already roasted and sliced. Cockaigne is an image of appetites fullfilled, and cultured meat is Cockaigne's cornucopian echo. The great difference is that Cockaigne was an inversion of the experience of the peasants who imagined it: a land where sloth became a virtue rather than a vice, food and sex were easily had, and no one ever had to work. In Cockaigne, delicious birds would fly into our mouths, already cooked. Animals would want to be eaten. By gratifying the body's appetites rather than rewarding the performance of moral virtue, Cockaigne inverted heaven. The 'pig in the backyard' does not fully eliminate pigs, with their cleverness and their shit, from the getting of pork. It combines intimacy, community, and an encounter with two kinds of difference: the familiar but largely forgotten difference carried by the gaze between human animal and nonhuman animal, and the weirder difference of an animal's body extended by tissue culture techniques. Because that is literally what culturing animal cells does, extending the body both in time and space, creating a novel form of relation between an original, still living animal and its flesh that becomes meat. The 'pig in the backyard' tries to please both hippies and techno-utopians at once, and this is part of this vision of rus in urbe. But this doubled encounter with difference also promises (that word again!) to work on the moral imagination. The materials for this work are, first, the intact living body of another being, which appears to have something like a telos of its own beyond providing for our sustenance; and second, a new set of possibilities for what meat can become in the twenty-first century. The 'pig in the backyard' is only a scenario. Its outcomes are uncertain. It is not obvious that the neighbourhood will want to eat flesh, even the extended and 'harmless' flesh, of a being they know well, but the history of slaughter and carnivory on farms suggests that they very well might. The 'pig in the backyard' is an experiment in ethical futures. The pig points her snout at us and asks what kind of persons we might become.

hate being fat. I hate the way people look at me, or don’t. I hate being a joke; I hate the disorienting limbo between too visible and invisible; I hate the way that complete strangers waste my life out of supposed concern for my death. I hate knowing that if I did die of a condition that correlates with weight, a certain subset of people would feel their prejudices validated, and some would outright celebrate. I also love being fat. The breadth of my shoulders makes me feel safe. I am unassailable. I intimidate. I am a polar icebreaker. I walk and climb and lift things, I can open your jar, I can absorb blows—literal and metaphorical—meant for other women, smaller women, breakable women, women who need me. My bones feel like iron—heavy, but strong. I used to say that being fat in our culture was like drowning (in hate, in blame, in your own tissue), but lately I think it’s more like burning. After three decades in the fire, my iron bones are steel.

The twanging of life Thirteenth part : The essence of the beauty is unity in variety We are only able to contempt and treat people in a bad way, when we forget that the other person belongs to us and to the society as well as we too, when we only forget that in the form of doing the action, there is a strong relationship between the subject and the object so avarice, violence, egoism, sadness and looking at others as pawns of market's chess to get money arise from losing their unity, from forgetting their spirit of cooperation and collaboration and then starting perceiving others in terms of their individual differences. A humanitarian action that isn't intended to be done can make a huge storm of humanity, a single word can give people the feeling of unity, just like every time when a person passes by you and you say for him "السلام عليكم" both of you start to feel like there is a candle within both of you turning into clemency, the more love, the more mercy and the more salaam you show on your face the more light is reflected form that candle, you should start thinking that, greeting the people is proclamations of peace, every time you say "السلام عليكم" to a stranger your heart admits over and over again that we are all united, what I am trying to say is, in your heart's deepest place where the onus of your ego are fallen to pieces and the enigma of your soul is infiltrated, you find the awareness isn't different in any way from what all others may find, the mutuality of Sudanese people is appeared as the sun in the morning but only when our own humanness is surpassed our own dishumanness by accepting that we are all one in the fact that we are all made of diversified differences. We are all equal in the fact that our own society is made by different tribes, we are all the same in the fact that we will never have the same colour, life, thinking, dreams, feelings and luxury, we are united by the reality that Sudan is able to combine all colours, all cultures, all tribes and all of us in the fact that every one believes his tribe and culture are distinguished and individual, we are compatible in the reality that we are all recaptured to this country by the same history, the same conditions of living and the longest river in the world that all of them together give us a light to shine the darkness that covers the sky to allow for us to walk as one hand in the right direction, we don't share the colours but we share the blood, we aren't equal in existence of happiness but we drink River Nile's water that keeps us alive, we are different in existence of tribes but we share the same air that is blended by our breath, so I am you as much as I am me and you are me as much as I am you. Finally swingeing internal ructions and overmuch narcissism of a society devastate the tissue of its unity, not the differences of that society, Lord Robin said that unity begins at home within family is the strength to survive and win the fight of life.

Our complex, infinitely rich minds are, as is so often the case in the long history of life, the result of cooperative combinations of simple elements. In the case of minds, it is not a matter of cells assembled to form tissues and organs or of genes instructing amino acids to assemble myriad proteins. The basic unit for minds is the image, the image of a thing or of what a thing does, or what the thing causes you to feel; or the image of what you think of the thing; or the images of the words that translate any and all of the above.

As their expanded name suggests, EMI wasn’t only a record label. In the 1960s the company was as interesting for its electrical activities as for its musical ones. In 1959 it had launched a commercial computer called the EMIDEC 1100; it also made color TV cameras, recording equipment, guided missiles, and kettles. The piles of cash brought in by Beatlemania helped create a culture of investment at EMI. One of the things they invested in was medical equipment research. Godfrey Hounsfield, the researcher behind the EMIDEC, began work on the first commercially viable medical scanner. As the project developed, he was significantly supported by the UK government, which provided over £600,000 of support or £7 million at 2016 prices (Maizlin and Vos 2012). Over four years, he and his team invented and built the first computed tomography scanner (CT or “CAT scanner”—the A stands for “axial”). This was a remarkable feat of science and engineering. For the first time, it allowed doctors to make accurate, 3D representations of patients’ soft tissues. This was a real medical breakthrough, transforming everything from brain surgery to cancer treatment. Hounsfield was piled with honors: he received a Nobel prize and a knighthood and was made a Fellow of the Royal Society. But from a commercial point of view, it was something of a failure for EMI.

Effect On Culture Organizations are made up of people. Those people work and “live” there with other people at least 40 hours per week. Like the connective tissue that begins to form when we are injured or when we are healing and becomes a part of who we are, team members are a part of the connective tissue of the organization. What happens when we remove or tear out a piece of that tissue? Not only does it hurt a lot, it causes heavy bleeding. If it doesn’t heal properly, there are complications. We may never regain our function in that area. When good productive people leave, we feel the pain and so does the culture of the team. The only way to mend the tissue permanently is to do the right things to engage and retain them. Spillover Effect We don’t talk about this much, but there is a psychological impact on other productive and engaged employees when they are forced to work with disengaged employees. Whether it is during water cooler talk or just in combined work spaces, the negative energy that disengaged employees pass to the entire team and organization can be toxic. Oftentimes, the disengaged employees are the scapegoats to deeper organizational issues. When we do not look at what is causing them to be disengaged, we enable the spillover effect to continue. Organizations that want a thriving workplace must rid themselves of disengaged employees, not necessarily by termination, but by living by the Laws found in this book. Negative Word Of Mouth Remember that unhappy employees don’t make for good promoters of your brand. In fact, disengaged employees are likely to tell more people and blurt it out all over social media and at every party. Reputationally, this negative word of mouth works against your brand promise. Who are you out in the world to your customers? Whatever that is, it must match who you are to your employees. Loss Of Organizational Stability Stop for a minute and think about what it says to your customers, partners, and investors when your employees keep walking out the door. Potentially, they could be in the middle of a complex project implementation and having a consistent point of contact through that process is key.