A Very Cockroach Thanksgiving

A Very Cockroach Thanksgiving

Dear the human race, hello I have something to say,

I know I am just a cockroach,

 but soon is our dear Thanksgiving Day.

There are many thinks I am thankful for,

though you may or may not care.

Like this lovely home you have provided to me,

and my four hundred children to share.

We are thankful for so many things,

especially the phenomenal food you cook.

Your breads, your ham, and desserts galore,

 In fact all of the recipes of your book.

So enjoy your football with family and friends,

Try not to stay up too late.

For when you are tucked away in bed,

We will help you clean every plate.

Defying the Monopoly

I suppose to a certain extent, I am uncomfortable with the idea of DIYbio..."bio hacking", at least in the context of being in close proximity to where I eat and sleep.  We have already discussed this, however, and I would like to instead discuss an interesting and recurring theme in DIYbio that I do greatly appreciate.  This is the unyielding spirit of the need to "defy the monopoly" as I put it.  Throughout just about every chapter, if not every chapter of our book, the main concern of all hackers is being able to take what should be made available on a mass scale but is made to be too expensive, and reproduce it to be made available either for free, or for a minimal cost in comparison.  From the men trying to make cancer research more effective, to Aull, a 23 year old MIT graduate with a real genetic problem and wants to make her test she even had to use available for others without the expense.  This became especially apparent to me in the case of the farmers in India.  As if farmers in the country had not already had enough to deal with trying to keep up in a global economy, as is typical in business a lot of the time, the big company became the shark.  Although the herbicide company Monsanto had not yet been approved for use in the country, they were already on the move to crush the farmers in the country by forcing them to bend to their will.  Like what the "Men Who Built America" (Vanderbilt and the railroads, Rockefeller and oil, Carnegie and steel, etc.) did to succeed by not only being the first in their area of expertise, Monsanto was ready to charge whatever they could squeeze to make a profit.  Where else would these Indian farmers have to turn to?  That's where many of the hackers see the problem.  There is biological knowledge and practice that is being kept from the average person, when in the beginning we were all pretty much on a level playing field.  However, because now things have gotten so complicated, these monopolies enjoy reminding customers of that every time they pick up a prescription, or pay a doctor bill for a simple lab test they could have done at home.  Most of this stuff has to do with our genes, and our health, so why should it be kept at such an expensive rate?  The affects of Monsanto's financial wrath reaches into the lives of the farmers in India to the extent that there have been a surge in suicides in the country as a result.  Thousands of farmers left to ruins because they could not compete with genetically modified seeds saw no other way out.  How sad is this?  I find it incredibly so when businesses take nature, which was here long before we became a species, and turn it into such a business that they have to control and continue to make profit off of.  When does it end?  Where do we see the light that is the heart of someone who fights to bring knowledge, nature, and good ole' genetics to everyone...the stuff that we and nature are made of?  This is the positive side of bio hacking I appreciate the most, the spirit of freedom in being able to help each other, and even sometimes ourselves as usually it seems these hackers have a personal connection to their projects.  This I appreciate.

DIY: Too Close for Comfort...

...Unless you know what you are doing of course.  This subject has left me divided; prior to reading Biopunk, I would have been completely against the idea of experiments in the home.  If I were to come home and find my roommate had embarked on a DIYBio mission and transformed any part of our home space into a lab, I would probably be disturbed.  First of all, I would hope my roommate would have the courtesy to call me before embarking on such a mission.  Secondly, I would probably feel a little bit disrespected because although they have every right to privacy in their share of the space, the idea of chemicals and experiments being conducted in a place where two people live in close proximity to one another and are not both voluntarily consuming any type of side effect of their experiments is kind of rude.  Although I believe it was never ruled one way or the other exactly what caused the heart failure of Hope Kurtz in Part IV of the Biopunk literature, I would still be very concerned about the possible implications of having biological agents of any kind in close proximity of where I am living.  Not only does this pose a possible health threat (the fact is, you never know what exactly might or might not kill you when experimenting with this stuff, what about viruses and various bacteria?), but I would also be concerned about Steve Kurtz' run in with the law.  We live in a very skeptical age, especially in regards to bioterrorism, at least in the government's eyes, and I would be worried that even if my roommate had the best of intentions, they could easily be misconstrued.  

Now that I have all of my negative reactions out of the way (as I am a very emotional person and they would likely be the first to come out), I can now discuss what I actually might appreciate about my room mate's endeavors.  Galileo did not buy a telescope, he built it.  As they mention in Chapter 8: My Life of Biopunk, Benjamin Franklin used a kite and key to discover the power of electricity.  Marie Curie's work in radiation was not sponsored by the school she worked for, but yet she received a Nobel Prize in her work on radiation...and the list goes on.  If many individuals had not had the self determination and will to explore science the way they did, without government assistance or harassment, where would we be today?  The spirit of hacking the sciences has long been a part of our history and I sometimes do believe that everyone should have a right to participate.  The bigger the brain pool, the better, right?  So believed Andrew Hessel...we should have a cure for cancer, or in his terms, we should have many different treatments for cancer tailored to their particular kind (Chapter 8: My Life of Biopunk).  As our book has pointed out so many times, there should always be an easily accessible alternative for those who wish to participate in biological research, if not just for their own understanding of themselves, but also for the possibility of a break in research.  You just never know!  In this sense, I do support the spirit of bio hacking.  

Everything comes back to laws, safety, and security, however.  I would request that my roommate have a clear understanding of what they are handling, and if not, to not conduct the experiments at all.  Actually, I have to admit, I would probably not be comfortable at all with the lab in the apartment and respectfully request that they attempt to find somewhere local that they could convene with like-minded bio hackers and utilize equipment in a safe environment supervised by people experienced in the field.  I would try to be understanding, as well as educated myself on what they are trying to accomplish (not to a great extent), and probably help them in a search for a place they could practice safely and legally.  I imagine I might want to take a class with them (MIGHT), just out of curiosity, but I do not see myself picking up bio hacking as a hobby anytime in the near future.  In the end, I also do not imagine that my current room mate (my boyfriend) would be conducting any kinds of these experiments without my knowledge; for that I am grateful. 

Citizen Science!

I found this week's online lab portion to be a great deal of fun!  Actually, what I think really made it fun was the fact that I am paralleling in my Astronomy class lessons on galaxies.  I had been learning about the composition of galaxies, the types and characteristics, the physics, etc.  Being able to go on the Galaxy Zoo website helped me in that I got to get some practical application in.  My Astronomy class is online so it is kind of tough sometimes to get the hang of the stuff (especially the physics), but the website we got onto to classify the galaxies showed me that this kind of stuff can in deed be somewhat simple.  Like I said, I thought it was a lot of fun, and I got a little giddy when I was able to identify some characteristics in the pictures, as well as different objects within the pictures or even outside of the galaxies, such as binary systems and so forth.  

This leads me into the rest of our project this week.  I chose the project on the Zooniverse website of exploring an ancient Greek community.  Really, the website asks for help in deciphering the transcripts that they have found of an ancient Greek city.  Here I was thinking that this kind of stuff was only left up to the "professionals", and they want my help?  Cool!  Let us get to it then!  At first, the process was a little confusing, and since I know just about nothing when it comes to the Greek language, some of the writing was a little difficult to look at.  There are a lot of similarities in our language's letter and theirs as well, though.  You can tell that they have put a great deal of effort into helping the average citizen understand the task, though, as there was a click-through tutorial.  Also, the letters on the keyboard would show different examples of written versions of the letters if you hovered over them so you could kind of get the gist of them.  I think I did pretty well, considering I was trying to read an ancient language.  If it was impossible to see the letters, I was happy to see that they let you move on and they have options for you to chose that lets them know that.

Overall, I think citizen science is a great way to get the average public more involved and interested in science.  On the few projects I had skimmed through, they made it really easy for someone who knew nothing about the subject to understand what their task at hand was.  The advantage for the scientific community is obviously having more eyes and brains on the thousands, or millions of pictures and records experts would have to go through in the specific area.  Different view points is also an advantage for the scientific community.  Advantages for the public are that you do not have to have a doctorate in an area to help conduct research and I just think that is so cool!  Who knows?  Maybe someone would stumble upon a project they become really interested in and wish to make it their career?  Maybe even if someone does not take a liking to the project they work on specifically, it would inspire a "tinkering" spirit in them to work on something else, such as DIYbio!

Fantasy vs Science Fiction

Science should equal reason, right?  Then reason should be common sense?  At least this is what we are taught in the ideologies of our society.  However, if this is the case, then it should be peculiar why with all of the time and money we put into scientific research we seem to prefer fantasy over science fiction.  What I would consider once being a method to teach children morals, ethics, and basic life lessons by using their imagination (hence, the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis) has become a common indulgence even among adults in the forms of Harry Potter and Twilight.  The profession of "cryptozoology" has seemingly been developed from a pastime of fantasy.  The more we become acquainted with science and "reason"...reason being what we want in life...the further we push away from it.  There are several hypotheses that I can explore here, though.  First, we can take a step back and study trends in society over the past century.  You know there is no secret in the rise of the consumerism culture after the birth of the industrial revolution that eventually gave rise to mass produced products and, eventually, mass entertainment via mass communication.  I imagine that novelists, artistic creators and movie script writers were searching for ways to capture the human imagination.  Maybe fantasy has been a way that we have coped through some of the roughest times in humanity, such as World War II, the period in which the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was written.  Producing fantasy I am sure up to that point seemed to be silly.  However, fantasy has long been a way that we have managed to let our minds escape the ugliness, like the Korean War, JFK's assassination, Vietnam War, the Cold War, Embassy Bombings in the 1980's, the Gulf War, Somalia, and the list goes on.  With the rise of the television of the 1960's, writers needed new script, and what was once considered "low culture" became mainstream.  

I could talk all day about the effects of consumerism on generations X, Y and Z, but I can also explore other options.  I feel as though maybe once there became a greater divide between the scientific community and the general public, things might have become too technical to capture readers.  Cryptozoology had long been a tool of the past to unleash playtime upon the imaginations of the public.  Just like hoaxes, people love a good story, whether it is true or not.  I believe this was the ground work of fantasy and as science fiction became too technical for many people, they instead turned to this type of fantasy.  Are there vampires that exist among us?  Are there witches and warlocks?  Most people would say "of course not" but that first, does not keep us from enjoying the chase, and two, you will most likely still find a fanatical following that wholeheartedly supports the fantasy.  We know there are no witches as prescribed in Harry Potter, but it is easier to ignore the complicated science behind it and unleash our minds in a completely uncomplicated way.  This I think is the real reason behind the growing interest in fantasy fiction and the general population's recent repulsiveness of science fiction.  I cannot completely ignore that there is actually quite a large following of science fiction but there, I think, is even a larger group that would rather read textbooks than science fiction and would consider those followers "geeks"!  Maybe this is a result of the lacking scientific education that we receive here in the United States.  We often hear how far behind we are in Math and Science in the world and now, since we are not equipped with the progressing pool of knowledge that is within the scientific community, we are repulsed by the technicality of science fiction that was actually meant to make this type of knowledge more accessible to all.  I think both of these hypotheses are accurate to some degree, but not completely one way or the other.  We are a consumer culture and we do seek to indulge our minds the best we can, especially when the road gets tough, but there had to be some reason writers turned to fantasy in the first place.  Building off of an age-old hoaxish following, and the fact that science was becoming far too complicated than most of us can generally stand, fantasy taps into our desires and explores the world of facts that never came to be.

The Way They Thought of this Future

Prior to the possibility of space flight, we as Americans had only imagined the beautiful, odd or scary creatures that may inhabit the universe beyond the power of our telescopes and science.  The hoax War of the Worlds was an example of this, as well as the reaction by radio audiences everywhere.  I believe there was a scientific spirit, and a burning desire to know whether or not we truly are the only planet here in our galaxy that has the blessing of living organisms.  Are we alone?  This question was apparently entertained quite often in the years following the legendary broadcast that claimed we would be invaded by aliens since the following year (1939) someone would make a prediction about such matters.  This prediction was that "The force of gravity on Mars is one-third of that on the earth and therefore we would seem to be three times stronger.  Ten-foot high jumps, forty-foot long jumps and lifting 300-pound weights would all be possible.  This would be of great advantage if any creatures of Mars attacked us, for we should be the equal of three of them.  And if there were too many of them to fight, we should also be able to run faster than they can" (1).  I get the feeling that this was the result of someone pondering the circumstances of an extraterrestrial invasion, and if we would be able to defend ourselves in such the case.

 I suppose since Charles Darwin's Origin of Species was published in 1959, scientists had sought to prove that if evolution could appear here, it was possible elsewhere.  What better place to assume this theory than Mars?  After all, Mars is the closest planet to us but not closer to the sun where it might be a bit TOO hot.  What is the atmosphere like there?  Astronomers and philosophers, various cultures, had long known about the planet, but it was not until telescopic observations had become advanced enough in the 18th and 19th Century that began to fuel this possibility.  British Astronomer William Herschel in 1784 addressed the Royal Society about Mars, declaring that he had observed by his telescope some clouds, and "considerable but modest atmosphere, so that its inhabitants probably enjoy a situation in many respects similar to our own" (2).  Nearly a century later in 1877, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli introduced a map based on observations of the planet that detailed "canali", or canals that were Earth-like.  Later, American astronomer Percivial Lowell would be influenced by his canali and establish an observatory that took the first photographs of Mars that "proved" canali (2).  So if Mars had features that were indeed Earth-like, as what had supposedly been observed by the technology of the time, then there would be evolution!  There should be inhabitants on Mars! Of course, these canals would later be discovered to be an error in observation (as the telescopes at the time were not as advanced), however, that did not stop a flurry of Earthlings imagining life on the planet.

Along with the general consensus of paranoia that plagued the United States throughout the Cold War, "unidentified flying objects" (UFO's) flavored even more so the idea that Martians could indeed invade our planet.  We had yet to make it to space when the Roswell alien invasion had supposedly occurred in the 1940's.  The "Race to Space" was the acceleration of our obsession with not only space, but what also we could do with technology to explore space.  Surprisingly enough, although it took until a few decades later, people were already entertaining the idea of space ship rockets by 1928, when according to Fritz von Opel (a German automaker) there was a scientific possibility to the "construction of man-carrying rockets capable of crossing the millions of miles of outer space and researching planets" (4).  The 1960's saw the Apollo 11 mission to the moon (first man on the moon) as well as the first surface photos of Mars by the Mariner expeditions, which successfully made it to the red planet and gave the people of Earth our first close up observations of its atmosphere (3).  By the late 1970's, we were sending rovers to Mars for additional photos, and today we continue to collect data from the planet's surface by way of rovers such as the Opportunity and Curiosity rovers.  Although we do not generally believe anymore in Martian invasions or even probably other life within our galaxy (since we have observed a great deal more with our space missions over the second half of the twentieth-century and first decade of the twenty-first), we are still determined to know what life might exist or has existed on Mars.  We are still obsessed!  We would not have sent as many missions to the planet if we were not still determined to know if the theory of evolution is applicable outside of our own planet.  Now, of course the 1939 prediction of Martian weaklings seems almost completely ridiculous (since science is still discovering the planet, of course), but I chalk it up mainly to the fever that was an after thought caused by the previously mentioned legendary broadcast War of the Worlds, as well as the scientific research (in the field of astronomy) that had been possible up to that point.

References

(1)  Benford, Gregory. "Chapter 6 This Unfinished World." The Wonderful Future That Never Was. New York, NY: Hearst, 2010. 172. Print.

(2)  Plaxco, Jim. "Mars Timeline of Discovery:1800 Thru 1962." Mars Timeline of Discovery. N.p., Dec. 1999. Web. 27 Sept. 2012. <http://www.astrodigital.org/mars/timeline2.html>

(3)  Williams, David R. "The Mariner Missions." The Mariner Missions. NASA, 06 Jan. 2005. Web. 27 Sept. 2012. <http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/mars/mariner.html>

(4)   Benford, Gregory. "Chapter 6 This Unfinished World." The Wonderful Future That Never Was. New York, NY: Hearst, 2010. 194. Print.

The Way of the Future as They Once Thought of it...

The 1939 World's Fair was filled with many wondrous works of the technological imagination.  On lookers were often encased in class bubbles, or glass walkways to over look "advances" in science.  Model cities were built with the idea that they would soon be constructed by "levels", including the buildings, depending on the purpose that they served.  This included skyscraping walk way; both of these are shown in the first pictures of 1939's 'World of Tomorrow' Shaped our Today (Snyder, John. "1939′s ‘World of Tomorrow’ Shaped Our Today." Wired.com.), as well as in the first chapter of The Wonderful Future That Never Was.  General Motors' Futurama just sounds like a science fictional wonderland with robots and flying cars.  So much progress had been made over the century prior, and America was moving at such a rapid rate, one could only fathom the types of technologies that would be available soon.  To be modern fueled the formation of the mass consumer culture in America.  Making a life at home on the farm was slowly becoming obsolete to many people as the more technology that came to be with a wider variety of professions that were offered to people in the cities.  And progress was not just related to space, plastic and glass seemed exciting and new as well.  Mass production was becoming more and more important, and more common with the use of synthetic materials.  It seemed to be that anything could have been made out this stuff!   Homes could be constructed in a day and filled with mass produced furniture.  Electricity, as pointed out in chapter 2 of he Wonderful Future That Never Was, was an invention that was transforming homes across America.  Appliances would be able to wash clothes and keep food cool.  Artificial lighting and radios were becoming a staple as well.  These discoveries were promising for the future and all anyone had to do was dream it, and that would be the future of technology.  With the way things were going, who could say no to a future where cars flew, or robots trimmed your hair, styled your make up or whatever else might make life a tad bit better.  The video "All's Fair at the Fair" is a peek into how people of the 1930's were imagining possibilities of the future.  Only a handful of actual people were present throughout the video, and the rest was dominated by robots that had personalities of their own.  There was no need to hire someone to pay the piano, when you could make from patrons sliding a nickle or so into a robot to do the job.  Technological innovations would hopefully become cheaper and more widely accessible by 2000 A.D. 

As for the broadcast that made history on Halloween 1938, The War of the Worlds by Orson Welles, it was a piece of science fiction presented as fact.  The actors did announce, I believe twice, that it was an entertainment piece derived from the 1898 H.G.  Wells novel.  However, to the average person, family, or gathering that naturally tuned into the radio in those days, you might not have tuned in at the right time to catch this disclaimer.  The play sounded exactly as a normal radio news broadcast in the day, so an unknowing listener would take it just as serious a real one.  Also, Welles uses a great deal of scientific terms in the broadcast, and speaks with a few "professors" from well known and respected universities, such as the Natural Science Museum Astronomical Division's "Dr. Grey", who supposedly records an earth quake, or Mr. Richard Pierson, an astronomer reporting from the Princeton Observatory.  They discuss the distance of Mars from earth (40,000,000 miles), a description of the planet, and what has been observed via the telescopes there, including "explosions". Taking the same individuals (the commentator Carl Phillips, and Mr Pierson) out to the sight of the "invasion" of the Martians to speak with other individuals and discuss further scientific occurrences, such as heat rays, make the radio broadcast that much more believable.  They just sound so professional that in today's world, I would be jumping on the computer or turning on the television to confirm truth in the matter.  The fact is, though, that people did not have other means of communication in the day and I could easily see how this whole broadcast could have fooled them and caused panic.  The broadcast uses real locations, as well as what sounded like credible professors using prominent school names, and used scientific terms to describe what was going on.  Anyone could easily believe this is fact.  In my opinion, the broadcast really shows the generation's fascination with science fiction at the time and what people thought could be possible at the time.