Archive for December, 2007

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Some thoughts about Rudy

Friday, December 21st, 2007

UPDATE: The Times now admits the story of “hiding” funds was bogus. Better late than the day after the New Hampshire primary, I guess.

I don’t support one candidate in the Republican primary yet. I supported McCain in 2000 but he has made some choices that make him a lot harder to support this time. I think campaign finance reform, as defined in the bill he sponsored with Senator Finegold, was dumb and has led to more corruption rather than less. McCain seems to respond most vigorously to personal affronts. He was caught up in the Keating Scandal as a freshman Senator. This was a cynical ploy to make the scandal bipartisan. Keating was a constituent of McCain’s. That was not true of the others, except Deconcini. He was only peripherally involved but it tarred his reputation and he has been a ferocious opponent of political skulduggery ever since. However, the legislaton he sponsored has made matters worse with the growth of “527” groups, so-called because that is the section of the IRS code that approves them. He also was angered when tobacco company executives lied to him committee in hearings some years ago. He decided to punish them for that and, I submit, legislation based on personal pique is usually bad legislation. Smoking causes illness but so does eating. Once the truth is available to the public about smoking and it has been for 50 years, government’s role should stop. McCain doesn’t see that.

Rudy is a better general election candidate as far as I can see. He is also the best equipped to accomplish what needs to be done. David Frum has a couple of reader contributions about Rudy that I think deserve emphasis. Here is one.

Reader Michael Ladenson writes:Here’s why I support Giuliani, and it has nothing to do with his response to September 11:  Rudy Giuliani eliminated street crime in New York City. The conventional wisdom said it couldn’t be done, and the reasons are suspiciously similar to what the same bloviators say about the war against Islamofascism today: 1. There actually isn’t a problem; if you think it’s a problem, you’re a racist. 2. Okay, there is a problem, but it’s because of white racism; to try to eradicate the problem using barbaric force without solving the root causes is useless.3. Okay, force can in some sense solve the problem, but unless you bend over backwards to accommodate the rights and liberties of your assailants, you’re creating a climate of fear – essentially a dictatorship.Giuliani may be a rank egotist. He may have treated his own family like a monster (instead of treating them with respect, like President – well, you know who). I don’t particularly care. Where it counted, he showed the toughness and wisdom to ignore the conventional wisdom; to disregard the epithets hurled at such failed law-and-order mayors as Ed Koch and Frank Rizzo; and to do exactly what he said he would do. It is the most breathtaking political achievement of anyone in the race.For the objections outlined above are essentially a form of western self-hatred, and they have come tumbling out to cede the fight to our enemies. Giuliani’s triumph over such nonsense in New York is enough qualification for me.

That sounds about right to me. Also, the recent miniscandal about police protection for his wife when she was still his girlfriend, is bogus. The lefty bloggers had fun with it for a few days but it is a non-scandal. Frum has another reader comment that I want to emphasize.

Reader Troy Doby writes:  How did we win the Cold War? That is the essential question, it seems to me, to understanding both how we can win (and also lose) the War on Terrorism.We won the Cold War because the Russians were maneuvered into a position that they couldn’t borrow any more money from Western banks to feed their urban population with imported wheat. Bread was extremely important in the Soviet Union (Xleb i mir was Lenin’s slogan that helped him with the soldiers). What precipitated this was the price of their one valuable export commodity, oil, wasn’t as valuable as it had been. At the same time, they were fighting an expensive, non-terminal war in which they were bleeding.We are engaged in a contest in which the price we pay for an important commodity, oil, keeps increasing, while we are bleeding in a theater of the war that may have some solution, but in another theater (Afghanistan again) that is likely to get hotter. The price we and our allies have to pay for this commodity helps few of our allies (Norway is the only beneficiary) while strengthening adversaries or potential adversaries (Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, . . . ) Petroleum has really only one purpose — to fuel transportation. Yes, it is the feedstock for plastics and other industries, but that is almost residual compared to fuel for transportation. So we need to find a way out of using petroleum for transportation. This is where the debate should begin. The problem is, nobody is talking about this. Nobody is there. That’s why I could not care less about the coming election. While all the Republicans are talking about who’s a bigger believer in Jesus, I yawn. Jesus isn’t going to get us out of our predicament.

I think the talk about Jesus is about over but the reality of energy policy is pretty well stated.  Romney has done pretty well, has less baggage than Rudy and may well be electable. I wonder if he has the stones to get done what needs to be done. Bush has done well in Iraq, a crucial front, but has been weaker on domestic issues. Energy policy (and I don’t mean Global Warming) will be a challenge that Bush has, so far, not met.

Posted in politics | 8 Comments »

Bush’s last year in office

Friday, December 21st, 2007

The president has one more year to govern. What will he do with that time ? Some have speculated that he will attack Iran. The probable purpose of the infamous NIE report was to foreclose that option by misleading the American public about the status of Iran’s nuclear program. What other option has he ?

Well, he could attack Congress. The growth of earmarks has marked the past decade. What are earmarks ? They are spending provisions that are added after a bill has passed and gone to committee. They are not voted on and there are no committee hearings or other due diligence measures used to avoid waste or corruption. They are a way for individual Congress members to reward donors or to favor their own districts with tax funded projects, regardless of merit.

Richard Nixon tried control spending with something called “Impoundment”, in which the executive branch simply refused to spend money appropriated by Congress. Congress retaliated by passing the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act in 1974. There are two differences between then and now. One, the funds Nixon impounded had been appropriated, meaning they had been in the law passed by Congress. Earmarks are not in the law. They are added in committee reports, chiefly to avoid public scrutiny. Second, by 1974, Nixon was fatally compromised by the Watergate scandal. From that point on, Congress was in control until Reagan was elected. The results of that control included the fall of South Vietnam, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the 20% inflation of the Carter years. Congress was probably not responsible for the Iran Hostage Crisis, but the military was terribly weakened by Congress during that era. The rescue mission failure followed.

Are earmarks popular ? Ask Rudy Giuliani. Spending has a constituency, frustrating those of us who would like to see major reductions in government spending. What about earmarks ? If they were popular, you would think they would be specifically mentioned in the legislation. Instead, they are concealed from view. Why ?

The “Bridge to Nowhere is a good example. Alaska Senator Ted Stevens added this to a transportation bill and an uproar ensued. It wasn’t exactly an earmark but it illustrates the issue. Gravina Island has 50 inhabitants and Ketchikan only about 8000. The bridge to connect them would have cost over 200 million dollars. Some of this demonstrates the odd politics of Alaska. Juneau, the capital, cannot be reached by land from the rest of the state. An initiative to move the capital to Wasilla failed in 1994. Wasilla is a town north of Anchorage and was a compromise between the bitter rivals of Anchorage and Fairbanks. Ultimately, Stevens lost his battle for the Bridge to Nowhere but smaller pork barrel projects are enacted every year by way of earmarks. I have previously posted on this issue. Now the Porkbusters may get some real help.

Bush has suggested that, since the earmarks are not actually in the legislation, they are not law. The executive branch may choose not to spend the money on them, requiring Congress to pass legislation and make them very visible, or allow the earmarks to melt away in the glare of publicity. This might be a very good way for Bush to reclaim some of his tattered legacy on domestic issues. At his Press Conference he said:

earmarks are special interest items slipped into big bills often [un]asked — at the last hour. congressional leaders at the last election, [said] they would curb [ear] marks. they made some progress. there is more transparency in the process, but they have not made enough progress. the bill they just passed includes about 9800 earmarks. together with the previously passed defense spending bill, congress has approved about 11,900 this year. i am instructing the budget director to review options for dealing with the wasteful spelling in the omnibus bill.

He has been thinking about this for a while because, at his State of the Union Address last January, he said:
“Over 90% of earmarks never make it to the floor of the House and Senate — they are dropped into committee reports that are not even part of the bill that arrives on my desk. You didn’t vote them into law. I didn’t sign them into law.

It will be interesting to see what happens. So far, the Democrats have flubbed the chance they were given in 2006 to show they can govern. Will they fight for earmarks ?

Posted in politics | 7 Comments »

Progress in Iraq

Thursday, December 20th, 2007

Today, the Energy Report of UPI, describes further improvement in Iraq’s electricity generation. It is up 14% above a year ago and that was above pre-invasion levels. Saddam Hussein used electricity like most of Iraq’s assets to reward supporters and punish opponents. Thus Baghdad had electricity nearly 24 hours per day while Shia areas had none. A 2006 report was pessimistic although positive items could still be found.    For example: According to the Brookings Institution’s Iraq Index, the number of telephone subscribers in Iraq is greater than 7 million, well over the estimated prewar level of 833,000 subscribers. More than 200,000 Iraqis now have Internet subscriptions, compared to just a few thousand subscribers before the war. The pre-war electrical generation levels seem to depend on the politics of the source, ranging from 5000 megawatts to 4400 before invasion.

What about the prognosis for improvement now ? Michael Yon posts a Barry McCaffrey report. McCaffrey was opposed to the war so this should be free of any pro-Bush bias.

There is good news.

Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) has been defeated at a tactical and operational level in Baghdad and Anbar Province and is trying to re-constitute in the north and along the Syrian frontier.

And bad news.

There is no functional central Iraqi Government. Incompetence, corruption, factional paranoia, and political gridlock have paralyzed the state. The constitution promotes bureaucratic stagnation and factional strife. The budgetary process cannot provide responsive financial support to the military and the police—nor local government for health, education, governance, reconstruction, and transportation.

He believes that we have another 18 months to get the Iraqi Army and Police up to speed so we can start to draw down our forces. The most serious error the Bush Administration has made this far, in my opinion, is the failure to expand the Army. McCaffrey has some serious things to say about this:

Our recruiting campaign is bringing into the Army thousands of new soldiers (perhaps 10% of the annual input) who should not be in uniform. (Criminal records, drug use, moral waivers, non-high school graduates, pregnant from Basic Training and therefore non-deployable, lowest mental category, etc.) We are losing our combat experienced mid-career NCOs’ and Captains at an excessive rate. (ROTC DMG’s, West Pointers, Officers with engineering and business degrees, etc.) Their morale is high, they are proud of their service, they have enormous personal courage—however, they see a nation of 300 million people with only an under resourced Armed Forces at war. The US Army at 400,000 troops is too small to carry out the current military strategy. The active duty US Army needs to be 800,000 strong to guarantee US national security.

The leftwingers are all excited at this prospect of failure. I suspect few of them, if any, have been through basic training and have seen what the recruiters are capable of dredging up from the farms of Idaho. I have and can still remember a group of us in the barracks dragging a farm boy into the showers in the middle of the night and beating the s**t out of him while we scrubbed him down. We then set up a rotation to make his bunk and polish his boots to avoid the collective punishment that the military excels in doling out to establish team spirit.  We need a bigger Army and a few less F 22 fighters would pay for a couple of well trained and equipped brigades.

Iraq was worth the cost, even if it proves that Arabs cannot govern themselves without tyrants. I think it will turn out alright but we need a bigger Army. Iraq is not a one-time thing. We will see other counter-insurgency campaigns for the rest of the century unless Islam finds the capacity for Reformation.

Posted in politics, terrorism | 1 Comment »

The Mercy of Islam

Wednesday, December 19th, 2007

There are several stories in the news this week on the subject of the treatment of minor transgressions under Islamic law. There is also some additonal evidence of the foolishness of well-meaning westerners when dealing with the culture of the Middle East, if you know what I mean. First the foolishness.

The USAID is our foreign aid agency that dispenses  aid to worthy causes. It is supposed to avoid giving money to terrorists. That would seem fairly basic. Well, it was too much trouble for some bureaucrats eager to give money to Palestinians. The result ?

After the shooting stopped, Fatah displayed large caches of weapons recovered from inside the university, and the Washington Times reported the school had received more than $140,000 in USAID funding. “In the basement of Gaza Islamic University, a U.S.-funded institution,” said Rep. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., who sits on the House Appropriations Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations and requested the audit, “Palestinian police found several Iranian agents and an Iranian general teaching the students in the U.S.-funded chemistry lab how to make suicide bombs.”

David Frum’s comments on the USAID story explain a bit of the bureaucratic mind set. This sort of thing helps explain the recent NIE on Iran.

David Pryce-Jones has written an excellent book on the Arab Mind.  Today, his column discusses mercy under Islam. Everyone has read the story about the female rape victim in Saudi Arabia. He recounts another, even more obnoxious if possible, incident. There, a fifteen year old Swiss boy was abducted by some men, and raped. When the injured boy went to the police to report this crime, he – again, the victim – was arrested for homosexuality, a punishable offence in Dubai.   It is significant that it occurred in Dubai, a heavy investor in the US. There is an old saying: “When you sup with the devil, use a long spoon.” Is our spoon long enough?

There have been complaints, particularly on the left which opposes the Iraq War, that the fall of Saddam has worsened the situation for Iraqi women. There may be some truth to that. Early on, Saddam was a secular Arab although, as he lost his wars, he seemed to increase in piety, perhaps to stave off criticism from other Arabs. The fact is that the world is seeing a peculiar wave of Muslim radicalism and a return to the culture of the Arab Empire. This is manifested in a demand for return to the Sharia, a law that was appropriate, perhaps, in a culture of warriors and scarcity living in the desert of 900 AD. Islam closed its face to the western world about 1450 when Constantinople fell. The invasion of Egypt by Napoleon in 1798 was an immense shock to the Islamic World as it recognized its backwardness. Since World War I and the end of the Ottoman Empire, Turkey has sought modernism as most of Islam remained a backwater. Now even that may be changing with the new Islamic government. The Turkish cultural ambassador to the EU has asked for political asylum. This seems to be a tide that we are bucking in Iraq. What will be the result ? No one knows. God help the Arabs if the oil runs out before the tide of radical Islam does.

Posted in politics, terrorism | 11 Comments »

Is Evidence-Based Medicine Socialized Medicine?

Tuesday, December 18th, 2007

Today, Glen Reynolds of Instapundit linked to a rather heated denunciation of Evidence-Based Medicine. The term, vigorously debated in medicine, may not be familiar to those not part of the industry. The definition involves two major issues. One is the medical literature and what is called a randomized trial. This involves a new, or occasionally a standard, form of treatment. The question to be answered is whether the tested form of treatment is better than the control form, which may be no treatment at all. The treating physicians, or institutions, and the patients being treated, ideally, should not know whether the treatment being given is the test version or the control. Obviously, this is easier to do with pills. For ethical reasons, it is difficult to do with surgery although a very few such trials have occurred. Arthroscopy of joints involves very small incisions and a few sham operation trials have been conducted to test the effect of arthroscopic surgery. Those studies are very controversial. Another alternative is the use of randomized trials comparing surgery against non-surgical treatment. The problem here is that it is obvious to everybody concerned, who got the surgery and who didn’t. One such study compared surgery on the medial meniscus of the knee (The rubbery cushion in the knee that is subject to tears) to simple exercise therapy. The results? According to the outcome scores arthroscopic partial medial meniscectomy combined with exercise did not lead to greater improvement than exercise alone.

This brings up the concept of “Outcomes Research.” The difference between outcomes research and the standard clinical research we have done for 100 years is in what is measured. Most journal articles on clinical research list the results as mortality (death) or morbidity (poor health) or cure, if cancer is the topic. In studies of non-fatal conditions, such as low back pain or knee arthritis, results can be misleading. Dartmouth Medical School has studied benign prostatic hypertrophy (known as BPH) for 30 years. The results of surgery, removal of the prostate, cannot be assessed by measuring mortality rate as the mortality of that operation is very low. The cure rate is also misleading because removing the prostate “cures” the condition but often leaves a series of complications, major and minor, in its wake. Outcomes research uses survey methods to determine how the treatment affects the patient’s quality of life. One such is called the “SF 36.” If a man is cured of BPH but dribbles urine all day, the improvement from the pre-treatment condition may be minor or even negative. Similar studies have been done with low back pain. The reader will note that many of these studies come from countries with government funded health care programs. Some of that is because it is easier to follow patients for a long time in such systems because of a uniform record and a single source of data. In a distributed system like the US, there may be difficulty tracking subsequent care, a major consideration for this type of study. We want to know how this patent is doing five years later. In the US people change employer and/or insurance carrier every three years on average. Regrettably, insurance companies usually do not share data.

Take the example of spine fusion for back pain, a common procedure. For many years, the literature on such procedures looked like this. A small number of patients, followed only in retrospect and with no control for possible bias. Surgeons like to operate and they rarely report bad results. A series of 67 patients reported by a malpractice lawyer might look very different.

The Patient Outcomes Research Team approach (or PORT) looks like this. Other studies have shown that spine fusion done for back pain alone has a 95% failure rate when residual pain is the metric. An awful lot of spinal fusion surgery is done in this country every year, billions of dollars worth. Is it all useless ? There are “Guidelines” for what will produce results worth the cost and risk. How are these derived ?

Guidelines are of several types. Some are established by the government. How do they decide what will be included ? The best guidelines are based on randomized trials. Those are few. Many are based on the PORT method where common conditions are studied over years using every system of data collection availabe. Prospective trials, which are randomized, are the best in surgical cases, where it is obvious who got what treatment, but they are difficult to do. Patients may refuse to be included because they, or their doctor, are convinced one type of treatment is best. This is where fear of socialized medicine is most concentrated. They fear that the guidelines are based on cost, not efficacy. I might add that insurance companies often resist outcomes research because they fear that optimal treatment may be more expensive than what is commonly done now. There is always a lot of fear when changes come.

The least useful guidelines, and the most common, are called “Consensus Guidelines.” These are derived from committee meetings in which a group of experts concludes what the best treatment should be. Most of the time, the experts are using a lifetime of experience and a thorough knowledge of the medical literature to come to their conclusions. Bias, however, is not excluded by this process and the guidelines are often muddied with second guessing and reluctance to challenge colleagues who may be out of date. If all doctors kept up to date on medical progress, such guidelines would probably be unnecessary. As it is, they are better than nothing. Evidence Based Medicine, then, consists of trying to use “best practices” when they can be identified. In many instances, the art of medicine still remains the better indicator of what should be done. Doctors need to listen to their patients and they may find that explanation will cure something that surgery would only aggravate. I see this every week when I make hospital rounds with medical students. The students have much less information than the older resident physicans but they have time and interest and patients may respond to that when the science has failed. It is important to know the difference.

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

Posted in health reform, medical history, medicine, science | 10 Comments »

More on synthetic biology

Monday, December 17th, 2007

UPDATE:  Bradley Fikes has been bugging me to add a correction to this post. His argument, which I acknowledge without really buying it, is that the discovery of DNA Polymerase by Kornberg in 1958, qualfies as “created DNA in a test tube.” His work received a Nobel Prize but I’m not sure it merits this statement: “It has been 50 years since scientists first created DNA in a test tube, stitching ordinary chemical ingredients together to make life’s most extraordinary molecule. ” He discovered the mechanism for DNA synthesis and was able to produce nucleotide chains. Anyway, maybe Badley has a point.

The Washington Post today  has a piece on synthetic DNA that is interesting although it contains a few errors. The first is that scientists did not “create DNA” 50 years ago. Watson and Crick, with a lot of help from others, some of whom they neglected to credit, discovered that DNA is the genetic code. In 1983, Kerry Mullis discovered the polymerase chain reaction, which will make thousands of copies of a small fragment of DNA. This allows the use of DNA in forensic science, as in the “Innocence Project” which uses DNA found at a crime scene to be magnified to measurable amounts for analysis. It still isn’t “creating DNA”, it is merely copying it.

Aside from that quibble, and there are probably a few other errors I don’t recognize, the potential for this technology is enormous. I have previously posted on this topic but it is interesting to see it in the main stream media, errors and all.

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Posted in History, science | 2 Comments »

Global warming and reality

Sunday, December 16th, 2007

UPDATE: Guess who has had the best record on CO2 emissions since Kyoto was signed.

I have previously posted on the Australian PM’s change of heart once he was actually in charge of the government. At Bali, little was accomplished. The political left is not happy. Why ? Ask Al Gore. Gore says the Global Warming hysterics are the “first global people power movement.” What have those people accomplished and why are we the villain? Let’s look. Here are total emissions by nation. Part of our objection to Kyoto was the exemption of certain “developing” countries from the goals. One was China. Here are emissions per capita and China is down to 91. Fair enough.Now here is an explanation of why our emissions may have risen. I’ve previously posted my opinions on why natural gas is a bad source of electricity generation. One more reason is the amount of CO2 emitted. Nuclear power does not add to CO2 emissions. Of course, this may all be much ado about nothing. Mr Watkins told the Financial Times: “If the rich countries can cut emissions by 80 per cent we have a 50:50 chance of [limiting] temperature rises to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels [which scientists say is the limit of safety]. So what do we do ? The BBC says When Kyoto was agreed, the US signed and committed to reducing its emissions by 6%. But since then it has pulled out of the agreement and its carbon dioxide emissions have increased to more than 15% above 1990 levels. So it’s all Bush’s fault. Funny, I have a different recollection. So does Ed Koch, former Democratic Mayor of NY City. Who was Vice-President in 1997 ? I forget.If you want to know the costs associated with the “Cap and Trade” system proposed by Kyoto, look at this report. If you can’t decipher the bureaucratic language, here is the conclusion.  GDP and consumption impacts in the Full Auction case are substantially larger than those in the Phased Auction case. Relative to the reference case, discounted total GDP (in 2000 dollars) over the 2009-2030 time period in the Full Auction case is $462 billion (0.19 percent lower), while discounted real consumer spending is $483 billion (0.29 percent) lower. In 2030, projected real GDP in the Full Auction case is $94 billion (0.41 percent) lower than in the reference case, while aggregate consumption is $106 billion (0.69 percent) lower, almost twice the estimated consumption loss in the Phased Auction case. A reduction in GDP is called a recession.A reduction that is permanent is called a Depression.Personally, I think all we are seeing is the end of the  Little Ice Age. I also believe that the present climate is not yet as warm as the Medieval Warm Period when Vikings farmed on Greenland. There are no farms on Greenland yet. I think it is too soon to kill our economy for a theory that doesn’t explain the climate.

Posted in politics, science | 10 Comments »

Cell biology and Evolution

Saturday, December 15th, 2007

This video is a nice illustration of the incredible advances of molecular biology in the past 25 years. When I was a medical student, a long time ago, we learned all the anatomic structures of the cell but had no idea what many of them did. We knew that mitochondria made energy from oxygen but, aside from basic genetics (very basic) we didn’t understand most of what went on in the cell. Over the past six or seven years, I have spent some time reading about molecular biology so I could appreciate what has been learned and in an attempt to appear better informed to my students. Along the way, I got very interested in mitochondria.

 

First, a nonbiologist must learn the difference between a Eukaryote and a Prokaryote. A eukaryote is a cell, or an organism made up of cells, that has a nucleus (containing the chromosomes) enclosed by a membrane and a structure of cell organelles that carry out cell functions. Plants, for example, are eukaryotes and have a larger number of genes than humans do. They also have mitochondria. The prokaryote has its genetic material, often a single chromosome, lying free in the cytoplasm. Bacteria are prokaryotes. Yeasts are eukaryotes with nuclei.

If you don’t believe in evolution, it would be best if you stopped reading here.

It is generally accepted that the first living cells were some form of prokaryote and may have developed out of protobionts. Fossilized prokaryotes approximately 3.5 billion years old have been discovered (less than 1 billion years after the formation of the earth’s crust), and prokaryotes are perhaps the most successful and abundant organism even today. Eukaryotes only formed later, from symbiosis of multiple prokaryote ancestors; their first evidence in the fossil record appears approximately 1.7 billion years ago, although genetic evidence suggests they could have formed as early as 3 billion years ago.

 

Protobionts are thought to be the precursors of living cells. Maybe the prion, which causes mad cow disease is actually the ancestor of all life. Because of the extreme conditions existing early in the Earth’s history, proteins may have been the original genetic material. Christian de Duve, a Nobel Prize winning biologist, has written a book on the subject. Until the discovery of DNA, proteins were thought to be the genetic material by most biologists. Frederick Griffith began the modern field of genetics when he discovered Transforming Material, which was DNA. DNA “melts” at 87 degrees centigrade, however, and RNA, which will tolerate higher temperature, does not seem to be able to replicate itself without DNA. The origins of life may involve self replicating proteins, like prions.

There has been considerable interest in Archea, a class of organisms found in extreme conditions, because they may have been able to survive in those conditions. Perhaps, they were the first life forms. Originally thought to be bacteria, and first called “Archaeabacteria”, they are quite different and have a different cell membrane composition. First discovered in extreme conditions, like steam vents in the ocean floor or geysers, they are now recognized as widely distributed in all conditions, including ocean plankton. Craig Venter, whom I have previously discussed is collecting ocean water samples looking for useful Archaea samples to study their genome. They may hold the solution to the energy problem, for example.

Mitochondria were probably early prokaryotes in the evolution of life. They carried a unique characteristic. They can create energy from oxygen. As the earth cooled and plants began to develop, the atmosphere, at first made up of methane (which Archaea love) and carbon dioxide (which plants use as fuel), began to contain measurable oxygen. The ability to use that oxygen became desirable. The origin of mitochondria has stimulated intense research. Mitochondria may have been ingested by early eukaryotes and, because they carried the ability to use oxygen and produce more energy than anerobic metabolism, the relationship may have changed from predator to cooperation. Genome sequencing has allowed proof of theories that were only speculation 25 years ago. The mitochondrion has its own DNA. It was almost certainly once freeliving but, as it adapted to symbiosis, it lost unused genes until some types have only three. The study of mitochondrial DNA has contributed to the study of human origins. The “African Eve” theory is derived from the fact that all mitochondria are inherited from the mother. There are no mitochondria in the sperm.

UPDATE: An astute reader pointed out that my statement above is incorrect. Actually, it is a sign of how old I am as this was the previous understanding. However, sperm do have mitochondria but they are tagged for destruction and do not survive in the egg. Why this is, is not explained although the paternal mitochondria may be harmful in some fashion.

Other evidence that mitochondria were once free living come from the study of Rickettsia, cause of diseases such as typhus (which defeated Napoleon’s Grand Army in Russia) and Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. The organism is named for Ricketts who discovered the organism and lost his life in the process.

That’s enough cell biology for a Saturday morning. The basics of evolution are contained in this story, however.

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Posted in general, science | 18 Comments »

The workers paradise

Friday, December 14th, 2007

cuba-raft.jpg
Click to enlarge the photo.

This makeshift raft carried eight residents of Fidel’s paradise to Belize.  The picture appeared in Latitude 38, a  sailing publication based in the San Francisco Bay area and exhibiting no right wing sympathies I have ever been able to decipher. Last week, I spent an afternoon teaching medical students the abdominal examination. One of them was wearing a Che Guevara tee shirt. Castro and Guevara have captured the imaginations of thousands of students and I sometimes wonder at the naivete’ of these children. My middle daughter, who is fluent in Spanish and tends left politically, took a trip to Cuba a few years ago. She expected to find that Cuba was much better than it was portrayed in her home country. Instead, she found it was worse. I think her fluency in the language helped. This would be an argument for opening travel to the island but the chief benefit would be to Castro and his jailers. Hopefully, he will be gone soon and then, maybe, it will be possible for the young to get a true picture of the regime and its consequences. In the meantime, think of why those eight people (six of whom are still hospitalized) would risk their lives to escape.

Posted in politics, sailing | 4 Comments »

More on Putin’s “successor.”

Thursday, December 13th, 2007

The Economist has a piece this week on Dmitry Medved’s role in the “succession” going on in Russia. I previously posted on this issue, which has some qualities of farce. Russia is a country being run by the former secret service of the USSR. Our own CIA, as demonstrated by the recent NIE, has ambitions along this line but nothing like the competence of the old KGB

Posted in general, politics | 1 Comment »

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