Hmmmmmm…

What is Plamegate/Treasongate?

In case you were wondering what’s got everyone all atwitter below the border, this article by Ariana Huffington is the Coles Notes version. Check it out. It about to get really, really big.

Wrong on Every Level

American Liberalism is completely out of control. If there is any area of research that begs - absolutely begs - to be publicly funded, it is genetic research. The promise of this area of medicine is unmatched. Yet, true to form, the US is letting the private sector run away with it. One fifth of all human genes have now been patented. This is not even in the ballpark of John Locke’s ideas, never mind in the spirit.

“It might come as a surprise to many people that in the U.S. patent system human DNA is treated like other natural chemical products,” said Fiona Murray, a business and science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, and a co-author of the study.

“An isolated DNA sequence can be patented in the same manner that a new medicine, purified from a plant, could be patented if an inventor identifies a [new] application.”

The argument in favor of patenting the exclusive use of genes is that it will spur investors and expose ideas to public scrutiny through the patent system. While this may be true in a society whose only fuel is greed, I feel a different approach is warranted. Even in such a society, the patenting of genes is simply absurd. It is based soley on the ability to “see” something. We can now identify genes in the same manner as we identify naturally occurring atoms, molecules, bacteria, viruses, etc. Atoms cannot be patented. They are fundamental building blocks. If we did not create them, we should not be able to patent them.

John Locke, the father of liberalism, postulated that adding labour to something gives you ownership. This is not the same as walking down a path, identifying an apple tree, and then claiming all apple trees, apples and apple seeds for your company simply by virtue of identifying them. That said, if you identify a process that can provide therapeutic benefit using a gene, fine. Patent the process. But I’m Canadian. Medicine is something I think should be public. So I have difficulty even with that.

Side-stepping the Hydrogen Economy

Why produce hydrogen for the hydrogen economy and create just as big a greenhouse problem in the process when you can avoid it all together by producing hydrogen on-site with no emmissions? These Israeli engineers have devised a way to derive hydrogen for combustion in a vehicle from coils of metal.

The metal is heated with steam, which causes it to turn into an oxide, which frees the hydrogen for combustion.

Beside the obvious advantages of the system, such as the inexpensive and abundant fuel, the production of Hydrogen on-the-go and the zero emission engine, the system is also more efficient than other Hydrogen solutions. The main reason for this is the improved usage of heat (steam) inside the system that brings that overall performance level of the vehicle to that of a conventional car. In an interview, Professor Yogev told IsraCast that a car based on Engineuity’s system will be able to travel about the same distance between refueling as an equivalent conventional car.

The question I would like answered is, how do you heat the steam in the first place? Sounds like a perpetual motion machine to me, but we’ll see. Also, you’ll need an awful lot of those metal coils…

Stem Cells Move Forward

There is a major advance today in the world of medicine. It doesn’t involve an actual groundbreaking technological advance per se, but it does mean that an ethical debate has changed. For those of us who have never seen an issue with embryonic stem cell research, nothing has chnaged. For those who saw an embryo as a human life, and could not agree to its destruction to extract stem cells, everything has changed, or so one would hope.

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