weird science
Mar. 25th, 2003 10:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
saint_monkeytwo or three odd things
the other day on NPR's "The Todd Mundt" show" they covered this researcher at the University of Arizona that is growing rat brain neurons in a sealed environment. He is letting the neurons make pathways and replicate as they would in the brain, just unchecked... the resulting brain is only checked in its growth by the container size, letting scientists make rat brains o fany size and complexity that they like. if this wasn't disturbing enough...he has found a way to interface this net of neurons with a computer, to give it an artificial reality... a literal "cyberspace" to exist in. They prod and poke it from a terminal screen and they let it roam about a virtual world, and soon, it will be allowed to interact with virtual "objects." The researcher admitted that the study raised interesting questions about ethics, but didn't seemed concerned or troubled by them. He was moving institutions and when they asked about "the brain" and what it was doing during the move, he said that it had been disconnected from it's world and was sitting in a "deprivational state" of sorts. he seemed to think that it would be interesting to see if it was still sane when it was hooked up once more. giant insane rat brain, anyone? sounds like the beginning of the next spider-man movie (now that would be pretty cool, you must admit.)
the other Todd Mundt inpired thingie was this great story on how these mad scientist dentists had created a strain of streptococcus mutens (or was it mortens? not sure... i'm not in fact checking mode right now, so beware.,) which is the bacteria in the mouth that causes cavities (through the production of lactic acid when in contact with sugar) anyhow, they created a genetically modified version of this strain that fills the same niche in the mouth's fauna, but doesn't make the acid.... thereby giving the benefits without the cavities. the dentist envisioned a day when your mouth would be cleansed, and then soaked with water treated with the new bacteria, you would then eat a candy bar to help the strain take hold, and no more cavities. for life. the new strain would be edged out, and since there would be more of it, eventually the old strain would die out, worldwide... sort of an enforced natural selection eugencs program for the mouth.
a couple of cautions....if i recall, the gypsy moth, the japanese beetle, kudzu, the chestnut blight, the norway rat, and the macqaque monkey were all intended replacements and improvements made to america and other countries, and once in place, they became nuisances, free from predators and climatory restrictions, overrunning their transplanted environment. Do we really want to start engineering and introducing new strains of bacteria in our bodies? the other issue. don't second guess nature... if selection needs for streptococcus mutens or mortens or whatever to NOT produce lactic acid, then it would have selected towards that in the first place. i might wonder what advantage this lactic acid holds in a mouth ecological environment... removing the acid may have dire results elesewhere in the body (since the mouth is the first part of the digestive system...) the researchers hasten to tell us that right now, tests with dogs have produced no adverse effects... well at least it works for dogs... but their digestive systm is much less delicate... less discriminatory even, than our own... at least, i've never eaten a newspaper, a shoe, a deer skull, a rawhide bone, and a cup of bone meal and by products in one afternoon and lived to tell the tale.
the other day on NPR's "The Todd Mundt" show" they covered this researcher at the University of Arizona that is growing rat brain neurons in a sealed environment. He is letting the neurons make pathways and replicate as they would in the brain, just unchecked... the resulting brain is only checked in its growth by the container size, letting scientists make rat brains o fany size and complexity that they like. if this wasn't disturbing enough...he has found a way to interface this net of neurons with a computer, to give it an artificial reality... a literal "cyberspace" to exist in. They prod and poke it from a terminal screen and they let it roam about a virtual world, and soon, it will be allowed to interact with virtual "objects." The researcher admitted that the study raised interesting questions about ethics, but didn't seemed concerned or troubled by them. He was moving institutions and when they asked about "the brain" and what it was doing during the move, he said that it had been disconnected from it's world and was sitting in a "deprivational state" of sorts. he seemed to think that it would be interesting to see if it was still sane when it was hooked up once more. giant insane rat brain, anyone? sounds like the beginning of the next spider-man movie (now that would be pretty cool, you must admit.)
the other Todd Mundt inpired thingie was this great story on how these mad scientist dentists had created a strain of streptococcus mutens (or was it mortens? not sure... i'm not in fact checking mode right now, so beware.,) which is the bacteria in the mouth that causes cavities (through the production of lactic acid when in contact with sugar) anyhow, they created a genetically modified version of this strain that fills the same niche in the mouth's fauna, but doesn't make the acid.... thereby giving the benefits without the cavities. the dentist envisioned a day when your mouth would be cleansed, and then soaked with water treated with the new bacteria, you would then eat a candy bar to help the strain take hold, and no more cavities. for life. the new strain would be edged out, and since there would be more of it, eventually the old strain would die out, worldwide... sort of an enforced natural selection eugencs program for the mouth.
a couple of cautions....if i recall, the gypsy moth, the japanese beetle, kudzu, the chestnut blight, the norway rat, and the macqaque monkey were all intended replacements and improvements made to america and other countries, and once in place, they became nuisances, free from predators and climatory restrictions, overrunning their transplanted environment. Do we really want to start engineering and introducing new strains of bacteria in our bodies? the other issue. don't second guess nature... if selection needs for streptococcus mutens or mortens or whatever to NOT produce lactic acid, then it would have selected towards that in the first place. i might wonder what advantage this lactic acid holds in a mouth ecological environment... removing the acid may have dire results elesewhere in the body (since the mouth is the first part of the digestive system...) the researchers hasten to tell us that right now, tests with dogs have produced no adverse effects... well at least it works for dogs... but their digestive systm is much less delicate... less discriminatory even, than our own... at least, i've never eaten a newspaper, a shoe, a deer skull, a rawhide bone, and a cup of bone meal and by products in one afternoon and lived to tell the tale.
