Imagining Science Exhibit

Imagining Science is an art exhibition assembled for the Edmonton Festival of Ideas, which celebrates the Centenary of the University of Alberta. It's meant to bring together a number of different perspectives on biotechnology:

Organized by Professors Tim Caulfield and Sean Caulfield, Canada Research Chairs in the fields of Health Law and Policy, and Printmaking respectively, in conjunction with Catherine Crowston at the Art Gallery of Alberta, the exhibition addresses the impact of the rapidly changing world of genetics, bio-technologies and human engineering, and the many significant breakthroughs, challenges and controversies that have arisen in the last decade with advancements made in new life science technologies: stem cell research, cloning, genetic testing. The works in the exhibition explore the complex and interrelated legal, ethical and social issues associated with advancements made in the life sciences over the past 100 years.

The exhibit, which is sponsored in part by Genome Alberta, features works by ten artists or teams of artists:

• Christine Borland, a Scottish artist who works often have medical themes. Some of her previous exhibitions: Paradise Now: Picturing the Genetic Revolution, Simulated Patient, Anatomy Acts.
  
• Sean Caulfield (painter) and Royden Mills (sculptor) have collaborated on an installation "looking at hope and fear in science - particularly areas that raise bioethical questions"
  
• Christine Davis's works include scientific images projected on the wings of butterflies
  
• Liz Ingram (printmaker) and Bernd Hildebrandt (designer) have collaborated on a large fabrig print
  
• Eduardo Kac makes living art, including a transgenic green flurescent rabbit and "biotopes" - art made of earth, nutrients and microorganisms that are constantly changing.
  
• The collaborative work of Jason Knight and Fiona Annis is called CorpsCellule|6616. "It is an ongoing cycle of work that explores the intersections of the sublime and the grotesque. Unraveling the peripheries of revelation and concealment, employing the body variously as material, site and agent."
• Lyndal Osborne's Endless Forms Most Beautiful depicts a laboratory with colorful "enlarged seedpods in the process of genetically modification."
• Catherine Richards' work "explores the volatile sense of ourselves as we are shifting our boundaries - a process in which new information technologies play a staring role."
• Jennifer Willet is a founding member of the collaborative artist group BIOTEKNICA. Her installation represents a "laboratory ecology", complete with lawn.
  
• Adam Zaretsky is a "Vivoartist" who uses the latest biotechnology in his art. "His focus is on artistic uses and the social implications of molecular biology, tissue culture, genomics and developmental biology."

There is also a related blog, Imagining Science: Genes and Art. It was apparently meant to be an active forum for discussion of the project, but so far there is only one post. It asks for discussion of the following issue:

Should genes be used as an artistic medium? What responsibility do artists and scientists have towards the new organisms that they create through genetic modification?

If you have an opinion on the topic, you should head over there a leave a comment.

There are also several upcoming public events at the Alberta Gallery of Art meant to foster discussion about biological art and bioethics.

• December 18:
  Art for Lunch "Seeing Science: Exploring the Intersections of Art and Science" with Catherine Crowston, AGA Deputy Director/Chief Curator.
• December 18 and January 15:
  Imagining Science Idea Exchange with a representative from the Health Law Institute, Law Centre, U of A. "The Health Law Institute provides public legal education and undertakes research on current issues in health law. The institute was intimately involved in the Imagining Science project from the start."
• January 15:
  Imagining Science Artists Forum. "Edmonton artists who were part of Imagining Science reflect on some of the ideas and trends presented in the exhibition."
• January 22:
  Imagining Science Idea Exchange with Mike Spear, Director of Communications, Genome Alberta.
  
• January 29:
  Imagining Science Idea Exchange with Dr. Willi Braun, Program Director, U of A, Religious Studies Program
  

The exhibit runs through February 1st.

(via The Filter)
Top Image: "Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue", 2008 Slide projection on Morpho Butterfly by Christine Davis
Bottom Image: Detail from "Endless Forms" Installation by Lyndal Osborne
Tags:art, Imagining Science, biotechnology

Biology in Science Fiction Roundup: December 13 edition

It's been a while since I did a round up, so there are lots of links!

General SF

SF Signal has video of a 1997 discussion between Harlan Ellison, J. Michael Straczynski, Herb Solow and Yvonne Fern about the meaning of the terms "science fiction" and "SciFi". Be sure to read the comments too.

Livemint.com has an extensive article about the state of science fiction in India with a number of video interviews with Indian SF writers, including Indian Science Fiction Writers Association secretary (and frequent commenter here) Arvind Mishra, Mohan Sanjeevan, Nellai Muthu, YH Deshpande, and GS Unnikrishnan.

John Scalzi points out that Technology Changes, People Not So Much

Ursula LeGuin and George RR Martin appeared on the public radio show To The Best of Our Knowlege, and discussed the future of science fiction and the genre boundaries between fantasy and science fiction (via io9)

Written Word

There's a great post at Metafilter about John Wyndham (author of Day of the Triffids), including links to the BBC Four documentary "The Invisible Man of Science Fiction".

The 2009 One Book - One Edinburgh reading campaign will feature Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World.

In 2009 it will also be 200 years ago that Charles Darwin was born, who also has ties to our city. It was during his study at the University of Edinburgh that he developed a keen interest in natural history, and it was here and around the Forth that the foundations for his theory of evolution were developed.

To mark this double celebration, it seems only natural that the 2009 reading campaign - The Lost World Read 2009 - will focus on Conan Doyle's classic adventure story, The Lost World, in which a group of explorers set out on an expedition to South America to prove that deep in the jungle there is a forgotten world where dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals still survive.

They will be distributing thousands of free copies of The Lost World with a special cover by Aardman Animations, as well as a comic book biography of the life of Charles Darwin.

Moira Gunn at ITConversations has posted her 2003 interview with Michael Crichton about his novel Prey.


Movies

Annalee Newitz at io9 has a detailed review of The Day The Earth Stood Still

BioethicsBytes has a discussion of the 2004 DeNiro cloning movie Godsend.

Chris Mooney writes about the new science-Hollywood venture, The Science and Entertainment Exchange.

At io9 Lauren Davis rounds up Science Fiction's Deadliest Plants

There will not, as rumored, be a sequel to I Am Legend, but plans for a prequel apparently are real.

Jennifer Ouellette at Cocktail Party Physics writes about The Blob, slime molds and endocytosis

Rich Handley has recently published Timeline of the Planet of the Apes: The Definitive Chronology. It sounds like it provides the background information on how the apes came into power on Earth, including a bunch of biology:

• How the apes acquired sentience and the power of speech—while man descended into mute savagery
• Where the plague that ravaged the planet originated, and the effects it had not only on man and ape, but on other creatures
• The many unique simian and human cultures that spawned around the globe in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust—and how the Statue of Liberty ended up in pieces on a desolate beach

Television

Science Not Fiction looks at the Stargate Atlantis episode "Remnants" and speculates on colonizing the galaxy by sending out pods with our DNA.

Science Not Fiction also discusses Skynet's bioweapon in this week's episode of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

Armchair Commentary has an interview with Primeval cast members Hannah Spearritt and Andrew Lee Potts.

About Eleventh Hour:

• Science Not Fiction: Eleventh Hour: Super Soldiers and Beyond
  
• Genevieve Valentine @ Tor.com: Eleventh Hour: Surge
  
• Genevieve Valentine @ Tor.com: Eleventh Hour: Frozen
• Genevieve Valentine @ Tor.com: Eleventh Hour: Titans
• Science Not fiction: Eleveth Hour and Decompression Chambers
• Genevieve Valentine @ Tor.com: Eleventh Hour: Flesh
  

About Fringe:

• Kate Schweitzer @ Popular Mechanics: Episode 7: Scientist Say Fringe Parasites are Far From Realistic
  
• Kate Schweitzer @ Popular Mechanics: Episode 9: How Fringe Gets Memory Science Wrong
  

Cool Bioscience

Mike Brotherton explains how to build a giant monster

Seed Magazine profiles Mac Cowell, the cofounder of DIYbio and "the biohacking hobbyist"

Invitrogen is sponsoring a new ScienceBlogs biotech blog, "What's new in life science research". A few interesting recent posts: "Genetically Modified Humans? No Thanks." and "Bizarre cloners and serious questions" by Marcy Darnovsky; "10 Things You Should Know About Cloning" by Hsien-Hsien Lei; and "Short, Euphonious, and Different: Clone is Born, 1903" by Alexandra Stern.

Japanese scientists were able to create clones from the nuclei of cells isolated from dead mice that had been frozen for 16 years. What made this particular experiment unique is that the mice had not been frozen using chemicals to protect cells from damage. That suggests that extinct animals for which frozen samples exist could be resurrected by cloning.

A virus carrying the DNA encoding a light-sensitive protein was introduced into the spinal chord of nerve-damaged rats. The infected cells produced the protein which allowed the scientists to restore the function of the neurons by pulsing them with light.

Jonah Lehrer at The Frontal Cortex explains that "Hell is a Perfect Memory"

Scientific American has an in-depth article about Peptide Nucleic Acids (PNAs), which "combines the information-storage properties of DNA with the chemical stability of a proteinlike backbone"

"The Big Picture" at Boston.com has a fantastic collection of micrograph images. The very very small is like an alien world. (via Hoyden About Town)

WebEcoist has pictures of 20 Strange and Exotic Endangered Species (via BoingBoing)

Zooillogix has video of spiders spinning webs in the microgravity environment of the space shuttle.

Ask Metafilter tackles the question of whether virulent microbes can survive in crypts.

Sequencing of the Neanderthal genome is about 50% complete, and the first draft should be completed "by year's end" the NewScientist reports. So far there is no evidence that prehistoric European humans regularly interbred with Neanderthals. Meanwhile,William Saletan at Slate asks "Should we resurrect the Neanderthals?"

The J. Craig Venter Institute has made the news again. This time they successfully manufactured the first synthetic yeast organism in a single step. Meanwhile, scientists have created a virus from scratch based on SARS.

Virginia Hughes posts about "Genes & Jazz", a collaboration between virologist Harold Varmus and his musician son Jacob.

A new type of giant squid with "elbows" has been caught on video.

The IRAM radio telescope has discovered a sugar molecule - glycolaldehyde - in a star-forming region of space where planets that can support life as we know it might exist.

Wired Science has the Top 10 Amazing Biology Videos

io9 looks at the winners of the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition

Tags:science fiction, biology

Klaatu, evolution and mainstream cloning

Tomorrow the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still will open at theaters across the US. In this version, the alien evaluator Klaatu wearing a human body (played by Keanu Reeves) has been sent to earth to assess whether the environmental damage man has inflicted on the Earth can be reversed, or whether we should all be eliminated to save the planet. Klaatu's home planet apparently also went through a period of severe climate change, and his race "went through drastic evolution" to survive.

Interestingly, it seems that a big part of the publicity push has been to talk about the science of the movie. Last Friday Fox arranged a panel discussion at CalTech that included Reeves and director Scott Derrickson, along with astrophysicist Sean Carroll and robotic engineer Joel Burdick. According to the LA Times Hero Complex blog, Derrickson and Reeves weren't quite ready for the tough questions from the audience. Here's a video clip:


Derrickson told Science Not Fiction that the scientific accuracy of the movie was important to him.

My feeling about it is that it’s science fiction, and because it’s science fiction, you got to be really respectful to the science element of it. I’m married to a nurse, and she is really, really ardent that in screenplays or movies that I’ve worked on, that all the medical aspects be properly presented. I think that filmmakers ought to be respectful of all fields and not just be lazy and put nonsense in movies because most people won’t know the difference. It’s disrespectful to the people in those professions, it doesn’t respect the significance or the import of what they do.

In this movie, our main character is a serious scientist in a real field. We felt it was critical to have some root of legitimacy –- if not complete legitimacy – in all of the dialogue and all of the science that’s presented. There are people who are going to see this movie who will know.

He also was interviewed for Scientific American's Science Talk podcast. He talked about updating elements of the film for modern audiences, the role science advisor astronomer Seth Shostak, and the importance of accurate science in the story. One of the points he makes is that some advanced theoretical science has entered the mainstream to the extent that it doesn't have to be explained in detail to the movie going public.

The example he uses is actually part of the plot that's based on biotechnology: Keanu Reeves initially plays a human whose skin is sampled by the aliens, who use the DNA to create an identical-looking Klaatu. According to Derrickson, creating a clone from a sample of DNA so mainstream that "everybody gets it" without explanation. He even thinks that providing a detailed explanation could be insulting to the audience. It will be interesting to see whether it's as clear in the movie as he thinks it is.

The main scientist character is an astrobiologist played by Jennifer Connelly. She worked closely with Shostak, who is involved in the search for extraterrestrial life at the SETI Institute, to get the character right. As Shostak wrote in his report on the film for LiveScience:

Among my biggest responsibilities was to advise Jennifer Connelly on believable jargon and interests for her character Helen, the astrobiologist. Connelly was, like Reeves, remarkably serious about her role, wanting to understand her real-world counterparts as well as possible. She did everything short of writing a NASA grant application.

He also "tried to wean the filmmakers from the cliche image of scientists as clipboard-carrying, labcoat-wearing ciphers." Sounds great, as long as they didn't instead turn Connelly into that other movie scientist cliche: the totally hot woman scientist who can barely keep her shirt buttoned, but doesn't seem to be too sure of the actual science business.

Of course the accurate portrayal of science - and scientists - is no substitute for an interesting script and good acting. Based on the initial reviews, that unfortunately doesn't seem to be the case. And I suppose I should note that one of critic Roger Ebert's (many) criticisms is that the movie is based bad biology:

The aliens are advanced enough to zip through the galaxy, yet have never discovered evolution, which should have reassured them life on earth would survive the death of mankind. Their space spheres have landed all over the planet, and a multitude of species have raced up and thrown themselves inside, and a Department of Defense expert intuits: "They're arks! What comes next?" Defense Secretary Kathy Bates intones: "A flood." So this is the first sci-fi movie based on Intelligent Design, except the aliens plan to save all forms of life except the intelligent one.

Maybe I'll wait to see this one until it comes out on DVD.

Tags:science fiction, cloning, evolution, The Day The Earth Stood Still

Should The Mammoth Return?

The mammoth hair used for sequencing was not found in the wreckage of a small town ravaged by a rampaging Mammoth.

The latest science story that has taken the fancy of the popular press is the news that a small team of scientists at Penn State University have sequenced the woolly mammoth genome using DNA recovered from the hair of two mammoths. The sequence revealed that woolly mammoths were more genetically similar to modern elephants than previously thought. The mammoths also appears to have low genetic diversity, which may have made the species "especially susceptible to being wiped out by a disease, by a change in the climate, or by humans."

I think that's pretty interesting news, but of course that isn't what what is making it burn up the airwaves and internet tubes. What's captured the public imagination is a comment by one of the lead scientists on the project, Stephan C. Schuster, that elephant DNA could be modified at the 400,000 or so positions where it differs from the mammoth, then used to create an embryo that would be carried by an elephant. The result: a baby woolly mammoth brought back from extinction. And all for the low, low price of $10 million!

I think tedious and expensive are relatively easy barriers to overcome, since even in these difficult economic times there are wealthy people who are looking for projects to spend their money on. A single cloned woolly mammoth wouldn't exactly be enough to create a Pleistocene Park, but it could be a step in that direction.

But would it be the right thing to do? Kelly Hills at Women's Bioethics Blog notes that there are some ethical issues we should consider before taking that step:

And more in my own areas of interest: do we really have the right to bring something back from the dead? Can we assume that it died for a reason, and we might really be mucking with things to undo that? If we regenerated a mammoth today, would it have the right foods to eat? How would its immune system handle common viruses? Would the climate be right? Where would it live? Are they herd animals, or can they be solitary?

It's already controversial to keep elephants in zoos. Would it be cruel to resurrect a lone mammoth for a life of possibly very uncomfortable captivity? And what would science gain by the experiment?

Professor Schuster doesn't think it would add much to our current understanding of mammoth biology:

"From a scientific perspective, I think we would learn very little from doing this. A lot of what you want to learn about body plan and tissues we can get just by studying the carcasses," said Schuster. "I would file it under the category of boutique science. The public is very curious. But you'd just generate a few specimens, a freak creature that you could put on display."

Given that, it's a bit surprising that the Times got Harvard geneticist George Church to speculate on methods of cloning Neanderthals that would skirt ethical and religious objections to generating clones with modified human DNA:

Dr. Church said there might be an alternative approach that would “alarm a minimal number of people.” The workaround would be to modify not a human genome but that of the chimpanzee, which is some 98 percent similar to that of people. The chimp’s genome would be progressively modified until close enough to that of Neanderthals, and the embryo brought to term in a chimpanzee.

“The big issue would be whether enough people felt that a chimp-Neanderthal hybrid would be acceptable, and that would be broadly discussed before anyone started to work on it,” Dr. Church said.

Considering the close similarity between the human and chimpanzee genomes, I doubt there would really be much difference between chimp and human genomes modified to be "close" to Neanderthal DNA. For me, at least, the ethical considerations would be the same using either approach: what would we gain by creating a lone Neanderthal, beyond the "gee whiz" factor?

And Larry Moran points out another potential issue:

What if the Neanderthals turn out to be smarter than us—a distinct possibility? Wouldn't they take over all the good jobs, like university professors? And what if they turn out to be stupider than the average human? Don't we already have enough creationists?

Scary!

More Information:

• Mammoth Genome Project Web Site
• Wade N. "Regenerating a Mammoth for $10 Million" New York Times, 19 November 2008
  
• Rebuilding a Mammoth, One Piece at a Time (illustration of the NY Times article)
  
• Palaeogenes" mammoth task, Nature Editor's Summary (20 November 2008)
  
• Miller W et al. "Sequence the nuclear genome of the extinct woolly mammoth" Nature 456, 387-390 (20 November 2008) | doi:10.1038/nature07446
  
• Knight Science Journalism Tracker rounds up articles in the main stream media
• Sedwick, C. "What Killed the Woolly Mammoth?" PLoS Biol 6(4): e99 doi:10/1371/journal.pbio.00660099
  

Related Post:

• Living Neanderthals
  

Images: top: scene from SciFi movie Mammoth, middle: drawing of a woolly mammoth, bottom: recreation of a Neanderthal face from a skull, from BBC Horizon Programme
Tags:science fiction, cloning, genetic engineering, mammoths, Neanderthals

Eleventh Hour Facts

I should start out by saying that I haven't actually seen an episode of the new CBS version of the Eleventh Hour yet. Our household has been watching Life on Mars, and I haven't felt compelled to watch a second hour of (recorded) drama. Fortunately, they are available for viewing online if I do feel the urge to watch.

The premise of the show isn't too different from Fox's Fringe, at least superficially. An attractive blond female FBI agent, Rachel Young, is the handler for "brilliant biophysicist" Dr. Jacob Hood. The two of them investigate science-related crimes across the country. The primary difference, as far as I can tell, is that instead of Fringe's almost-paranormal fringe science, Eleventh Hour plays the science straight. See, for example, this SciFi.com interview with the series' stars where they emphasize the "reality" of the science on the show.

But do they really use good science? It seems not so much. In Annalee Newitz's review of the first episode, she goes into great detail how Eleventh Hour actually goes out of it's way to make the scientists seem sleazy and evil. That episode apparently involves a rogue gang of human-cloning scientists that impregnate down-on-their-luck women and throw away malformed fetuses by chucking them out of a moving car. Dr. Hood then potificates and solves the crime. Now this just sounds bad:

5. The main thing scientists bring to the table are poignant aphorisms.
We never see Hood actually geek out about anything, or go into a lab. Instead, he just says sciencey things like "In science a negative result is just as valuable as a positive one," or "DNA is like a personal barcode."

He also explains cloning - badly - with a bunch of grapes. Maybe episode 2 was better, but I suspect that "all scientists except our tame one are evil" is one of the major themes of the show.

For completely different view of episode 1, see Stephen Cass's review at Science not Fiction. He thought the show "stuck close to today's science". And he thought the grape-cloning bit was a "lucid and accurate explanation of the cloning process". I'm not sure he and Annalee were actually watching the same program.

The Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) clearly believes the science was bad - or at least poorly explained - and has decided to fight the misinformation with its own web site, Eleventh Hour Facts. Actually, to be fair, they don't say that they are trying to correct the record. Instead they frame the site as simply providing additional information.

Like the intriguing characters on Eleventh Hour, biotechnology works to solve crises. Our researchers work to unlock the power of nature to produce breakthrough solutions to some of the world’s most persistent challenges. However, because this show is a dramatic interpretation of the power of biotechnology, we encourage you to return here to see how the actual science works. Eleventh Hour can take creative license with these intriguing processes to ensure that the dilemma is solved in 60 minutes, but our scientists are working every day to improve quality of life for all of us.

It looks like it's going to be used to explain the positive side of biotechnology as it relates to each episode. For the first episode they have posts about reproductive cloning, and this video interview with Michael Werner of the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research.


The Eleventh Hour web site has it's own meager science section with links to news articles and YouTube videos (scroll down for the links).

Tags:Eleventh Hour, biotechnology

Growing Rapidly On The Fringe

Fringe, JJ Abrams new series, is like an updated X-Files where every week a gory and mysterious event is investigated. Unlike the X-Files, however, there aren't alien bounty hunters or human-alien hybrids. Instead, it's science run amok ("The Pattern"), stemming from the decades old research of Dr. Walter Bishop and his colleagues. Bishop isn't the bad guy, though, since he's spent the past 17 years in a mental institution. His is old "lab partner" William Bell, is another story. He's the founder and CEO of Massive Dynamic, a giant corporation which is seemingly involved all aspects of cutting edge technology, from genetic engineering to artifical intelligence to rapid transportation. It also has suspiciously advanced R&D labs. Could Massive Dynamic be behind "The Pattern"?

To investigate these events, an unlikely team has been brought together: FBI Agent Olivia Dunham; brilliant Dr. Bishop, on furlough from the mental hospital; his estranged son Peter Bishop, a "jack of all trades" who is naturally brilliant at math and chemistry (and, it was hinted this week, of unnatural origin); and Homeland Security Agent Phillip Broyles, who seems to know more about The Pattern than he's telling.

This week's episode, "The Same Old Story", had a horrific beginning: a young man and woman are in a hotel room, when suddenly the woman starts to writhe in agony and we see something moving and growing in her abdomen. She dies just before giving birth in the hospital to a rapidly growing infant that dies of old age a mere four hours later. Dr. Bishop recognizes that this may have something to do with some of his Vietnam War era research that aimed to rapidly grow soldiers from eggs fertilized in vitro. While they were successful in using pituitary extracts to stimulate rapid growth, so that the lab-reared soldiers reached the physical age of 21 in a mere 3 years, the scientists on the project were unsuccessful in stopping the rapid aging at that point. Soldiers aren't too useful if they are only at their physical prime for only few months, so the project was abandoned. One of my pet peeves about the "clone an army" trope is that it's inefficient if you have to wait decades for replacements to develop, so it's fun to see that problem turned on its head. So is there anything to the science? Could a pituitary extract really rapidly advance aging? Almost certainly not.

The pituitary gland secretes a number of different hormones including growth hormone and thyroid-stimulating hormone. Growth hormone increases height in children and adolescents, stimulates the growth of internal organs, along with a number of other effects. Children with overactive pituitary glands that produce excess growth hormone can end up 7 or 8 feet tall, but they don't age any faster than usual. Thyroid-stimulating hormone does what the name suggests: it stimulates the release of thyroid hormones from the thyroid. Thyroid hormone regulates metabolism and works with growth hormone to promote growth in children (among other functions). Excess thyroid hormone production - hyperthyroidism - have an increased metabolism. Again, no effect on aging. But what if embryos, rather than children, were exposed to high levels of hormone? Overexpression of growth hormone in frog embryos causes the tadpoles to grow twice their normal size before metamorphosis, but they don't develop any faster than their untreated siblings. And while thyroid hormone is necessary for normal development of the brain and other organs, again there is no indication it affects the rate of development.

So is the science in this week's episode completely made up? At the beginning of the episode, Dr. Bishop mutters about cell cycle inhibitors.

"Disabling and reversing cell cycle inhibitors. Activating and turning CIP/KIP and INK4a/ARFs into catalysts."

It may sound like gibberish, but what he is talking about are proteins that normally cause cells to stop the cell division cycle by inhibiting the function of cyclin-dependent kinases (CDKs). It seems that Fringe's resident genius thinks that rapid aging is caused by excess cell division. The Dapper Alchemist explains why they aren't equivalent:

Dr. Bishop previously mentions that one can induce conditions, such as progeria [rapid aging], through pituitary gland modulation. Although the pituitary gland is affected in progeria², I’m not sure if it can be induced as such. Reduction of the CDK-inhibitor function of certain domains causes enhanced tissue growth, which manifests in animals with larger body size³ and leads to increased cell proliferation in the pituitary gland. It seems that JJ has muddled together enhanced tissue growth with rapid aging, the two don’t necessarily go hand-in-hand.

So stimulating division of cells can mean excess growth, but not rapid aging.

But the aging effects of the pituitary turn out to not be that important anyway. The bad guy on this week's show is a serial killer who removes the pituitary from his young female victims while they are still alive. That method that is apparently more satisfying than simply purchasing pituitary extract from Sigma (or maybe he couldn't get a purchase order). Anyway, it turns out he is the last remaining "rapid growth" test subject who must have fresh pituitary to keep him from aging. Growth hormone does have some anti-aging properties, so I suppose it's not too much of a leap to suggest that it stops aging all together.

My impression so far is that the science in Fringe ranges from sort-of-implausible to completely impossible. It's no worse that X-Files or Star Trek, though, and I have enjoyed watching it. I like the truly mad Dr. Bishop, who chooses a single cow as his experimental organism, and he keeps her in his basement lab where she gets to watch Spongebob with him. And evil corporations running secret experiments and possibly plotting to take over the world are plausible villains. I'll tune in again next week.

More about the science of Fringe:

• Dr. Walter Bishop's lab notes
  
• SE Kramer at Popular Mechanics explains the science problem with this weeks episode: no pituitary effect in progeria and you cannot "read" images from the optic nerve of a dead person
  
• Science Not Fiction looks at the possibility of artificial wombs
  
• Watch the Fringe Video Extra that shows how the scene in which the team accesses a victim's optic nerve was created.
  

Tags:Fringe, biology

The Biological Science Fiction of Vu Kim Dung

One way that I try to keep up with new biology-related science fiction news is by subscribing to a Google News search using those terms. Most of the news reports are pretty predictable (for example, yet another article about "Spore"). However, every so often something new and different turns up.

One example of an interesting new news story is this interview in the VietNam News with author Vu Kim Dung. Vu was trained as a biologist, but gradually turned his attention to science fiction:

I started writing my first work, Co Kien Trinh Sat (A Scout Ant), in 1972 while I was studying at the university. Once it was published it became very popular among children.I chose to write science fiction because it combines my love for science and literature.

His subsequent science fiction novels were also based on hard biological science:

My book, Nguoi Dep Hoi Sinh (Beauty Revived), is the most satisfying work for me. From a cell of skin, the dead beauty is revived. In the book, I predicted that scientists would discover human cell cloning. I’m proud that I wrote the book before Dolly the sheep was born. The book is respected in this country.

Writing science fiction doesn’t mean basing stories on imagination alone. I have to study science and find scientific evidence. Then I work as a normal writer, finding context and making the stories interesting.

On the other hand, a writer must be creative and predict the future. That’s the big difficulty. The writer’s role is to create what hasn’t been invented. Writing on what already exists creates a story without value.

I Googled around, but couldn't find any additional information about his novels, at least doing a search using the spelling in the article. It makes me curious, but I supposed I'd have to learn Vietnamese to learn more.

Vu Kim Dung is currently the head of the Viet Nam Fund of Science Fiction, which was created by the Viet Nam Association of Young Scientists and Engineers to support science fiction writers. Read the whole interview for more about the VFSF and the reading and writing of science fiction.

Tags:science fiction, biology, Vu Kim Dung, Vietnam

Are clones like cheap knockoffs?

The Science Not Fiction blog points out a scene in the recently-released post-apocalyptic movie Babylon A.D. where mercenary badass Toorop and his charges spot some tigers in a local marketplace:

Anyway, there’s the market place, there’s the tigers, there’s Aurora as Toorop and Sister Rebeka come up behind her. Toorop is not so impressed, later dismissing the beasts as “copies. Clones of clones. Fakes.”
But why so dismissive, Toorop? Cut them, and do they not bleed? Stick your hard-bitten, badass finger near the bars, and will you not bleed?
Of course you would. Cloned tigers are still tigers, after all, but for some reason, science fiction often depicts clones as somehow degraded from the original: The Michael Keaton film Multiplicity compares cloning to being photocopied, with each copy worse than the last, and Austin Powers’ spin on the concept is to render a Dr. Evil clone an eighth the size of the original.

That degradation of clones is actually a significant plot element in Kate Wilhelm's 1976 novel Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang. Humanity is nearly wiped out in an environmental catastrophe, and the only hope of human survival is a small well-supplied group of survivors who were able to collect the equipment and reagents needed to run a cloning operation. But there is a snag:

". . . the decline starts in the third clone generation, a decline of potency. He was breeding each clone generation sexually, testing the offspring for normalcy. The third clone generation had only twenty-five percent potency. the sexually reproduced offspring started with the same percentage , and, in fact, produced offspring, and then it started to climb back up and presumably would have reached normalcy again."

Walt was watching him closely, nodding now and then. David went on. "That was the clone-three strain. With the clone-four strain there was a drastic change. Some abnormalities were present, and life expectancy was down seventeen percent. The abnormals were all sterile. Potency was generally down to forty-eight percent. It was down-hill all the way with each sexually reproduced generation. By the fifth generation no offspring survived longer than an hour or two. So much for clone-four strain. Cloning the fours was worse. Clone-five strain had gross abnormalities, and they were all sterile. Life-expectancy figures were not completed. There was no clone-six strain. None survived."

I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to say that, while the characters overcome some of the technical difficulties of cloning to save the human race, ultimately it's individuals who are the product of sexual reproduction that re-inherit the Earth.

Wilhelm's characters cite the research of non-existent scientists Semple, Frerrer and Vlasic, but the fact is that at the time she wrote her novel the only animal that had been successfully cloned was the frog Xenopus laevis. I don't think it was particularly unreasonable for her to suppose that errors in DNA replication or other factors might cause clones to be somehow inferior to their parents, and, in fact scientists have found potentially damaging problems in cloned animals. The significance of some of those differences, such as shortened telomere length (usually a sign of aging), is unclear. I don't think it's unreasonable to believe that subsequent cloned generations might have compounded problems, a process called "replicative fading" (at least in the Star Trek universe).

However, since the 1970s cloning technology has improved significantly. The first mammalian clone created by nuclear transfer using embryonic cells as a source was reported by SM Willadsen in 1986. Ten years later Dolly the cloned sheep was created by nuclear transfer from an adult cell by Scottish scientists Keith Campbell and Ian Wilmut. And, more relevant to our discussion, scientists have begun to demonstrate that multiple generations of cloning is indeed a technical possibility. Some of the milestones:

• In 1993 Steven Stice and Carol Keefer successfully generated cloned cows from embryos up to the third clone generation. Great result, but it wouldn't have helped Dr. Evil, since this particular study transfered the nucleus from embryos to create the clones.
• In 2000 Teruhiko Wakayama and colleagues demonstrated clones of clones ("reiterative cloning") up to six generations. The authors acknowledge that "that any deleterious effects of cloning might be expected to be amplified in sequentially cloned mice", but they detected no such problems.
• In 2004 Chikara Kubota and colleagues reported serial cloning of a bull.
• More recently, independent research groups in Korea and Japan were able to serially clone pigs to the third generation. The Japanese group has claimed a 4th generation cloned pig, but that doesn't appear to have been published yet.

So the good news is that it appears that if you can clone an animal, serial cloning is possible (even if less efficient). Of course it isn't ethical to perform similar cloning experiments aon humans, so it's unlikely we'll discover if the rule holds true for Homo sapiens any time in the near future. Hopefully the human race will never become so desperate that cloning technology is the only means for our survival.

Image: "Tiger Tiger Burning Bright" by digitalART2 on Flickr
Tags:science fiction, cloning

Is Cordwainer Smith's Future Today?

Science Fiction writer Cordwainer Smith (1913-1966) set his stories thousands of years in the future, when the Instrumentality of Mankind rules Earth and humans have servants - the Underpeople - created by genetically modifying animals. Wikipedia has a few more of the elements of Smith's future universe:

• the planet Norstrilia (Old North Australia), a semi-arid planet where an immortality drug called stroon is harvested from gigantic, virus-infected sheep each weighing more than 100 tons. Norstrilians are nominally the richest people in the galaxy and defend their immensely valuable stroon with sophisticated weapons [...]. However, extremely high taxes ensure that everyone on the planet lives a frugal, rural life, like the farmers of old Australia, to keep the Norstrilians tough.
• the punishment world of Shayol [...], where criminals are punished by the regrowth and harvesting of their organs for transplanting
• planoforming spacecraft, which are crewed by humans telepathically linked with cats to defend against the attacks of malevolent entities in space, who are perceived by the humans as dragons, and by the cats as gigantic rats, in "The Game of Rat and Dragon".
• the Underpeople, animals modified genetically into human form and intelligence to fulfill servile roles, and treated as property. Several stories feature clandestine efforts to liberate the underpeople and grant them civil rights. They are seen everywhere throughout regions controlled by the Instrumentality.
• Habermans and their supervisors, Scanners, who are essential for space travel, but at the cost of having their sensory nerves cut to block the "pain of space", and who perceive only by vision and various life-support implants. A technological breakthrough removes the need for the treatment, but resistance among the Scanners to their perceived loss of status ensues, forming the basis of the story "Scanners Live in Vain".

The result is a richly imagined future shaped in part by advanced bioengineering technology. You can read number of Smith's short stories for free online:

• "Scanners Live in Vain" (as noted above, Scanners have their sensory nerves cut to to be able to survive the "pain of space")
• "Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons" (about the defense of Norstrilia)
  
• "The Dead Lady of Clown Town" (a story of the dog girl D'joan)
• plus several others
  

The Cordwainer Smith Blog (maintained by his daughter Rosana Hart) is asking for tips on science news items that look like part of Smith's future:

Many things which Cordwainer Smith wrote about are happening now– animal cloning, for one So I have started a category of this blog called “It’s Happening Now,” and when you come across news items that remind you of something in a CS story, do come by and post a comment on this post with links if it was something online you found. Please comment on what bit of what story it reminds you of!

There's already one example up: use of rat brain cells to guide a robot which echos the laminated mouse brain computer in Smith's "Think Blue, Count Two". I'm trying to think of some good examples of my own.

Tags:Cordwainer Smith, biotechnology, genetic engineering

Seeds of Change

I think that one of the things that science fiction can do well is provide fresh and thought-provoking insight into current social and political issues. Seeds of Change is a new anthology edited by John Joseph Adams that focuses on those sorts of stories:

Gathering stories by nine of today’s most incisive minds, Seeds of Change confronts the pivotal issues facing our society today: racism, global warming, peak oil, technological advancement, and political revolution. Many serve as a call to action. How will you change with the future?

Authors include Tobias S. Buckell, Ken MacLoed, K.D. Wentworth, Jeremiah Tolbert, Mark Budz, Ted Kosmatka, Blake Charlton, Jay Lake and Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu. The selections I've read (freely available on the Seeds of Change web site) are thought provoking without sacrificing the entertainment value of the story.

Several of the stories have biological themes:

• "N-Words" by Ted Kosmatka is a story about racism. What makes it SF is that the race in question are newly resurrected Neanderthals.
• Read an excerpt of "N-Words"
• Read Kosmatka's afterword, in which he discusses science and race and some of the biology relevant to his story
• "Endosymbiont" by Blake Charlton (who is a medical student) was inspired by his father's struggle with cancer. Charlton commented: "As the national debate about health care reform continues to gather steam, I hope ‘Endosymbiont’ makes people think about what it’s like to struggle with disease, about what exactly defines a human-being neurologically, and about what we—as individuals and as a society—might do to alleviate the burden of disease."
• Read an excerpt of "Endosymbiont"
• Read the interview with Charlton about the origins of "Endosymbiont"
• Further reading related to the story
• In "Arties Aren't Stupid" by Jeremiah Tolbert street artists work with cells rather than pain.
• Read "Arties Aren't Stupid"

And, of course there is a trailer:

Download the free stories and excerpts in PDF, HTML or Mobipocket format.
Purchase Seeds of Change at Amazon.com (affiliate lnk)

The Science of Star Wars: Clones, The Force and a Galaxy of Humanoids

Scientific American has a series of articles in this month's issue that focus on the science of the Star Wars universe, presumably as part of the lead up to the release of Star Wars: The Clone Wars . SciAm interviewed Jeanne Cavelos, author of The Science of Star Wars: An Astrophysicist's Independent Examination of Space Travel, Aliens, Planets, and Robots as Portrayed in the Star Wars Films and Books*, to get an update on how the science in the series has fared since her book was originally published in 1999.

Not surprisingly, she talks about cloning, of which she has an optimistic view:

We have cloned many different animals at this point—cats, dogs, sheep—and there is very little holding us back from cloning humans except ethics and law. It's entirely conceivable that we will see humans cloned for medical or reproductive purposes in the coming decades. The link between genes and behavior has also become much better understood in recent years, and like the Imperial armies in Star Wars, human clones could probably be genetically altered to be obedient and programmable. One area of Star Wars cloning technology that is not very realistic according to today's science is the limited amount of time the clones have to grow and learn. Nevertheless, cloning technology is something in Star Wars that we will be seeing more of soon.

And she also has an explanation for all those human-shaped aliens in that far far away galaxy:

It seems that the human species, or whatever its equivalent is in that faraway galaxy, either colonized all these worlds or was genetically "seeded" on many planets. This species became dominant somehow. It's unlikely though that one species could live on so many planets without some kind of respiratory assistance. Each atmosphere is a quirky mixture of ingredients found only on that planet; you wouldn't have the same mixture of oxygen and carbon dioxide as we do.

That's a pretty similar idea to the ancient humanoids that seeded our own galaxy in the Star Trek universe. Her ideas about how The Force works are necessarily more speculative, since it's pretty much indistinguishable from magic.

The best chance we have of explaining The Force is through the midi-chlorians, which were introduced in the new trilogy. Lucas explains these midi-chlorians as organisms that live within our cells and allow us to feel The Force. The element that seems scientifically based here is the sensing of someone strong in The Force. You can compare this to creatures living in water that generate small electrical fields. Some fish generate these fields, and these can sense when other fish come into these fields as well as the strength of the field put out by the approaching fish.

Or maybe The Force is similar to magnetism. Birds sense magnetic fields with cells in their beaks and eyes, called cryptochromes. Birds may actually "see" the magnetic field, so you can imagine a similar kind of thing happening in Star Wars. If Darth Vader is standing in the next room, maybe you can see the emissions of The Force like a magnetic aura around him.

Read the whole interview for more on the science of robots, space travel, light sabers, exoplanets and aliens.

You can also read several excerpts from her book, The Science of Star Wars:

• R2-D2 and C-3PO: Do Droids Dream of Electric Sheep? looks at the possibility - and possible necessity - of giving robots emotions and personalities.
• Darth Vader: The Six-Million-Dollar Sith speculates about Anakin Skywalker's lava-induced injuries and the prosthetic parts that allow him to live on as Darth Vader (note that some of the questions raised were answered in Revenge of the Sith)
• Might a Sarlacc Really Take a Thousand Years to Digest its Prey? In case you've forgotten, a sarlacc is a very big radially symmetrical desert creature that creates a teeth-lined pit.
  

Related post: Star Wars and the Midi-Chlorian Menace
Image: Young clones in training from Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones

Tags:Star Wars, biology

Tropes in Speculative Fiction

Television Tropes & Idioms is a wiki that focuses on common tropes ("story components or elements which have become standardized through decades (or more) of use") in television, movies, novels, and comic books. It's got a great long list of speculative fiction tropes - and the entries don't just describe the trope, some also explain why the trope is wrong. Here are snippets from a few of their biology-related entries:

• The Adam and Eve Plot: only two members of a race remain to repopulate their species. The problem?
  

  This, of course, ignores real population genetics. A certain minimum number of genetically divergent individuals are needed in a gene pool to maintain a healthy genetic diversity. For humans it is somewhere between 150 and 160. You usually won't find this in direct siblings. More casually, this results in the unspoken implication that said newly propagated species does not have a problem with incest.

• Bizarre Alien Biology: while aliens are humanoid on the outside, their totally different f on the inside
• Brain in a Jar: pretty much what it sounds like
• Cloning Blues: it's not easy being a mere copy
• Evilutionary Biologist: "Some evil mad scientists use their twisted intellect solely for personal gain. This particular villain is not so provincial. His genius and his motives go hand in hand, and his concerns are (he thinks) with the welfare of the human species. Simply put, to the Evilutionary Biologist, humanity is stuck in an evolutionary rut, and it's up to him to put us back on the proper path so we can continue to evolve."
• Evolutionary Levels: Yes, there's evolution in SF, but it's usually depicted incorrectly.
  

  One popular misconception seems to be how the entirety of evolution is preprogrammed, past and future. Evolutionary states that don't exist yet are just waiting in human DNA to be triggered by rather simple means, as opposed to the culmination of little changes brought on by passing down genes over hundreds of generations. Likewise, it's easy to "regress" in evolution. A Mad Scientist or a Negative Space Wedgie for example, can hit humans with rays that will turn them into Neanderthals or monkeys, regardless of the fact that humans evolved from neither. (If they made an effort, this could work, because there is a remotely linear progression of common ancestors for species. So close, and yet, so dumb.)

  Not to mention the love of Lamarckian-style evolution that's caused by environmental change, evolution that affects entire populations simultaneously, and future humans with gigantic heads. And that's how you get Mutants with a capital M.
  
• Genetic Engineering is the New Nuke: in the old days superpowers were created by radiation. Today, genetic engineering does the job.
• Genetic Memories: our genes store the memories of our ancestors
• Half Human Hybrids: despite bizarre alien biology, humans interbreed with a variety of other species. See also No Biochemical Barriers.
  
• Soylent Soy: in the future meat is very scarce . . .
  

Be sure to look at their list of "Applied Phlebotinum" and "Hollywood Science" tropes too.

(via The World in the Satin Bag)

Tags:science fiction, biology, tropes

Biology in Science Fiction Roundup: August 2 Edition

Here are some of the biology in science fiction-related posts I've been reading the past couple of weeks:

Written Word

Robert J. Sawyer writes about the genesis of his Neanderthal Parallax trilogy.

Pod People reviews the new novel by David Louis Edelman, MultiReal:

[. . .] the book is full of Big Ideas, in the best tradition of science fiction. Hundreds of years after the Autonomous Revolt, an attempt by artificial intelligences to take over the world, humans have rebuilt society and use “bio-logics,” programs which run in the human body, to interact with the world. Natch, an entrepreneur and programmer, has helped develop a radical new technology. This technology, called MultiReal, allows users to manipulate virtual computer networks in such a way as to gain vast powers. They can literally think rings around any human opponent.

io9 lists novels picked by writers Jeff Hecht, Steven Popkes, Robert J Sawyer, Ian Randal Strock and Michael A. Burstein that explore why we seem to be alone in the universe (aka the Fermi paradox).

Movies

Bloody Disgusting tells you how you can download sample tracks from the upcoming sci-fi horror musical movie Repo! The Genetic Opera.

Dr. Who writer Steven Moffat was interviewed by Tor and explained that clones don't always turn out to be cool:

“When you first saw Star Wars, and that really exciting moment where they were--when Obi Wan Kenobi said “Aaaaah, the Clone Wars...” and your little child brain went “Whoa, that must be fantastic, there’s millions of clones, all identical, they were grown in vats... there’s new clones, old clones, clones falling from trees--brilliant!” Then they showed us, and it was a bunch of meetings... You can’t ever live up to something like that, can you? Some things are best being myths, and [the time war] has become a new part of the myth”.

Shock Till You Drop reports that there are plans for a prequel to I Am Legend and io9 has a poll asking readers what they think the plot should be. I'm voting for Will Smith as House.

io9 also takes a look at the new X-Files movie, and the surprising need of Dr. Scully to Google stem cell research - and the "Frankenstein" research she uncovers.

Television

James at Science, society, and stuff... writes about Dr. Who and the disappearnce of honey bees.

Cool Science

Damn Interesting takes a look at what really happens when a human is exposed to space.

Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy explains why there are no green stars. Yes, it has a bit to do with our biology, namely how we see color.

Scientific American interviewed Ian Wilmut - creator of Dolly the cloned sheep - about reproductive cloning (he thinks it should be banned for use in humans) and embryonic stem cells.

Weird Universe links to news that "brain wave science" is being used to convict murder suspects in India.

At Pharyngula PZ Myers has an interesting post about the sometimes confusing field of epigenetics. And ERV explains why you should eat broccoli (epigenetics!).

Razib an Gene Expression writes about the difficulties in making a perfect baby by genetic engineering.

TEDBlog reports on a new body armor under development that's inspired by the layors of scales on the African fish Polypterus senegalus.

Wired Science reports on a suggestion by NASA scientists that we should create an experimental plant habitat on the moon to examine the effects of low gravity, temperature, pressure and high radiation on their gene expression..

Tags:science fiction, biology