Nissan subverts species supremacy

People are fascinated by vegetarianism - and I think, somewhat afraid of it.  Every vegetarian has been asked the "why?" question countless times - enough times that if you're like me, you allow your answers to vary.  So, sometimes it's about stopping the cruelty to the 27 billion animals killed in the United States each year. Sometimes it's about protesting the unsafe working conditions of slaughterhouse laborers.  And sometimes it's about saving the planet, as animal agriculture generates more greenhouse gas emissions than all forms of transportation combined.

The latter two answers - about working conditions and climate change - provoke some guilt in the meat-eaters I talk to, or they make me feel uncomfortably holier-than-thou, which is why I try to avoid these conversations.  But the first answer, about animal rights, affects people in a different way.  It doesn't make them feel guilty about their eating choices; it makes them feel threatened, because (I think) asserting the natural rights of animals challenges our dominion over the little critters.  It subverts a sense of human supremacy that dates back to the Bible, when the god character creates "every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name."

So kudos to Nissan for introducing its new electric car, Leaf, with a commercial that strikes at that hallowed sense of supremacy.  Humans are just one animal upon the earth, one that must live in harmony with it, not over and above it.  The melting ice-caps highlight the earth's fragility; it reminds us that our technological advances have not arrived in a vacuum but upon our own delicate planet.  Human choices affect others, even non-human others, and the revolutionary, even radical, message of this commercial, the one that makes our hair rise as the polar bear approaches the man and embraces him in that beautiful "awwww" moment, is that we should care.



The ad concludes: "Innovation for the planet, innovation for all."

Out of luck

Brilliance: I was biking tonight across the Taylor-Southgate Bridge, which connects Cincinnati to Newport, Kentucky, when I felt the need to know the time. Since I haven't replaced my watchband which broke a few days ago, I dug into my pocket for my cell phone. Cars rushed by on my left; the barrier ran along my right, only shoulder-high. Just as I pulled the phone from my pocket, a gust of wind (I was after all a hundred feet above the Ohio River) blew me to the right. I reached out to stable myself and in the process sent my phone flying over the edge. It bounced a few times down successive planks before I heard a soft splash way down below. I never did find out the time.

So if I don't call you back, I'm not being rude - just idiotic.

One year anniversary

It's been more than a week since I've written here. A friend called yesterday to inform me "your readers are pissed." So I'm back, and not only back, but celebrating a whole year of blogging (!).

Some stats: In the last year, I've written 140 posts (or 1 per 2.6 days), for a total of 55,418 words. That's 121 pages, single-spaced. My favorite subjects have been: global responsibility (27), politics (20), health (16), feminism (16), and vegetarianism (11). I've sometimes succumbed to the narcissism of blogging, once rating my blog and another time listing my top 10 motivations.


I started this blog on Halloween last year. I didn't have many friends in Syracuse then, so I spent the evening at home, alone. Not one person rang my doorbell, and I ended up eating a whole bag of tootsie-pops myself. So, reaching out to the world, I wrote: "I wonder whether my life in suburbia is exciting enough to merit a blog.... I wonder if my standards will slide over time, or whether, like any good blogger, I'll fill this space with inchoate musings and witty chatter. I wonder whether I should disclose my love affairs and ideological battles, and whether my spicy secrets will lose their flavor if spread too thin. But, but, in my post-college anomie, I am driven by a need to record and an urge to connect." Yes, to record and to connect. I think, a year later, I've done that okay.

I have not disclosed my love affairs. I have disclosed some of my ideological battles, but not really. I rarely write about my uncertainties, say over apparent nobility of veganism or the justifications for war or my life plans - items for which I lack a steady argument. On this blog, I mostly assess the news, talk to myself (albeit a little more formally than I usually do), and try to get used to sharing my writing, of which I am sometimes quite protective. If this blog were a 'live journal,' perhaps I'd be more inclined to share personal anecdotes. Somehow I'm stuck in a formal tone: complete sentences, proper grammar, etc. I'm been trying to break out of it, but maybe it's not a indication of my novice blogging as much as a side-effect of my overall demeanor.

What else? It is one of the great luxuries of my life that I have time for fiction. I keep a book list - check it out here. A month ago, I went to a library booksale and bought a great mass of books. But now, paralyzed with choices, I just curl up with back issues of the New Yorker. I'd love your recommendations. For my part, I'll recommend J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace. A phenomenal book.

I do love keeping this blog, but I don't know if I'm going to write as regularly in the next year as I did in the last. Blogging takes time. There's an opportunity cost. For example, I recently called up a friend who's also a blogger to see if she'd like to go to a street carnival.

"Hold on," she says, "I'm finishing a blog post. I'll call you in a hour, k?"

I smiled: the life of a blogger. I do it, too. Indeed, we all need to remind ourselves that as much as we enjoy these forums (and I really do), blogging is not a substitute for human interaction.

Too much of a good thing

One of my duties as a bioethics research assistant is to monitor the news on a whole range of topics in health policy, clinical medicine, and global health. Well, here's what I found today:

Mom sues after IVF brings 2 babies instead of 1 (Sept 18, 2007)
Australian woman seeks $332,000 to cover cost of raising extra child

Wacky. The requested $332,000 would pay for private school fees and would allot $12,427 to compensate for time off work. But as my mother always says, "If one child takes 100% of your time, two children can't take any more." (She's a mathematician.) I handed the article to the professor here who specializes in health law and reproductive medicine, who said, "Good god! They should take both kids away!" He hopes the children will grow up to be fertility specialists.

Also not to be missed, check out the New York Post's article, "A 'Baby Bjorn' Sperm Crisis: Shortage hits wannabe parents." I actually saw the article in print, which had the additional headline, "Sperm Blank: City Shortage Causing Panic." Panic?! As the article reports, NYC sperm banks are running out of seed 'donated' (for $75 a pop) by tall, blond, blue-eyed people. Why? Because "the Food and Drug Administration banned sperm samples from 30 countries to prevent the spread of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a rare, fatal disorder caused by eating beef contaminated with mad-cow disease." Pictured at right is a profile of one of those handsome Nordic sperm donors, named "Oluf," who quite sadly may have no more American progeny.

Design for the other 90%

In NYC last weekend, two friends and I saw Design for the Other 90%, an exhibit at the Cooper Hewitt Museum. The exhibit showcases equipment and machinery specifically developed for the global poor who lack access to electricity, building materials, clean water, etc. It's a small exhibit with roughly 30 items, on display through September 23. Because of the exhibit's size (it took just an hour to walk through), I'd say it's not worth the $12 ($9 for students) ticket price. I'm not even sure any of that money goes toward projects in the developing world. So save your money and read about these incredible items in the International Herald Tribune or the New York Times.

We're beginning to close the "10-90 gap" in medical research, which I've written about before, where 90 percent of funds go toward just 10 percent of the world's burden of disease. In design, the disparity is similar, seeing how 90% of world's population can't use the products sold at IKEA. So, kudos to this exhibit for bringing together the teams that are fighting this imbalance.

Picture-taking was allowed, so here's what we saw:


The LifeStraw (above) was by far my favorite. It's a water purification device used in Ghana, Nigeria, Pakistan and Uganda that removes particles to reduce the risk of infection by waterborne diseases such as cholera, diarrhea, dysentery and typhoid. So brilliant and yet so simple.

I also really liked the Q-Drum (below), an easily roll-able container that can hold 75 liters of water.


If you're in India, Nepal, Zambia, or Zimbabwe, look out for this drip irrigation system (below). It reduces water use by 30-70 percent while increasing yields by more than 50 percent. It can used for many kinds of products that come out of the earth, including fruits, vegetables, maize, wheat, and cotton. Also in the irrigation category, the exhibit included a "Super MoneyMaker Pump" (catchy name, eh?). Used in dozens of African countries, it can direct water without fuel or electricity and can irrigate a two-acre area in eight hours (which I assume is pretty good).

Top 10 Reasons to Blog

10. To merit my title as TIME's 2006 Person of the Year.

9. To define my interests. Seriously. Sometimes it seems that not much holds these posts together, but I like to believe that my defining thread runs through ethical issues in public life. I do expect to specialize one day, and when that time comes, I look forward to segway-ing to a group blog, in the style of Feministing or the editor's blog of the American Journal of Bioethics.

8. To be controversial. Or rather, to be controversial in public. To shed my cowardice.

7. To overcome the temptation to say, "Oh gosh, there's too much" and then write nothing at all. On almost every topic I write about, there's WAY too much to say. The same paralysis afflicts those of us who want to improve the world, but feel crushed by the burden of "everything."

6. To be concise. Digestible chunks. Short soundbites. People then read.

5. To remember how to write, artfully.

4. To prosyletize, about reproductive rights, global health, vegetarianism, and so on.

3. To learn. From you readers, but also as I dig up relevant links while traversing the world wide web. Blogging, I know, can be a terribly narcissistic affair. Then again, so can higher education.

2. To stay in touch. It's a pleasure to hear from you readers.

1. To find new reasons to blog.

Hey! Scientists! Leave them sheep alone!

Over New Year's in NYC, I saw a Pink Floyd cover band called The Machine at a club near Times Square. I adore Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall." The lyrics:

We don't need no education
We don't need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers leave them kids alone
Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!
All in all it's just another brick in the wall.
All in all you're just another brick in the wall.

To me, the song epitomizes a generation fed up with lies about the "evil empire" and the necessity of war. It's the mantra of free thought (if that makes sense). The mantra side of it came out at the club last weekend, when I saw a crowd of punk-rockers nodding their heads in unison, mouthing exactly the same words: "We are all individuals" - or maybe it was "We don't need no thought control," but it sure sounded like the former.

Where do the sheep come in? Well, one of my adoring fans (or at least someone who occasionally reads this blog) asked me to cover a story that's been shaking the bioethics world this past week. In 2002, a study revealed that as many as 10% of sheep are gay. The findings were celebrated as evidence that gayness is biological and cannot be changed. Well, now it can be changed. At two universities in Oregon, scientists are attempting to adjust hormone levels in the brains of "gay" sheep (i.e. rams that wear tight pants - I mean, rams that screw other rams) so that they start screwing ewes instead.

The motive, they say, is not homophobia, but rather profitability. Gay sheep that don't reproduce simply aren't as profitable. The real worry is that this research would ultimately be used to change the sexual orientation of human beings. At least one bioethicist, Udo Schuklenk of Glasgow Caledonian University, has asked that the research be stopped: “I don’t believe the motives of the study are homophobic, but their work brings the terrible possibility of exploitation by homophobic societies." We've been through nuclear energy, reproductive technology, cloning, and now, gay sheep: another episode in the saga of "dangerous knowledge."

Some people conceive of scientists (and science oversight committees) as a bunch of laboratory rats, filling test-tube after test-tube in a blind search for knowledge, and therefore incapable of thinking deeply about the uses of their research. But, strangely enough, scientists are people, too. They do think about the consequences of their research (it's why they do research in the first place). I am generally skeptical of people who insist that "such-and-such a topic is too dangerous." It's not the knowledge that's the problem, but what we do with it. Still, there really are some projects that shouldn't go forward, like trying to weaponize smallpox. But I'm going to hold out and say: It's not "thought control" we need, but policy control.

It's a sticky subject. I don't want to sound like NRA advocates who say, "guns don't kill people, people kill people," as an excuse for promoting gun ownership. Guns really do kill people. I'm also sympathetic to the argument that once some kind of knowledge exists, there's no going back. Nuclear weapons is the obvious example. But I also know that it's impossible to predict how any research will be used. The best we can do, I think, is to cultivate avenues of free thought. And then Pink Floyd shall live.

Mom, Dad, I want to be a computer when I grow up!

Just in, from the AP Wire:
World Chess Champion Loses to Computer

BONN, Germany (AP) -- World chess champion Vladimir Kramnik lost his final game in a match against computer program Deep Fritz on Tuesday, ceding a hard-fought Man vs. Machine series 4-2. ... The Russian takes home $500,000 (euro375,000) -- half of what he would have received if he had won against Deep Fritz, a commercially available chess program that runs on a powerful personal computer.

So how much money does the computer get?

Evolution in a Petri Dish

Here's something on evolution that my brother sent me from The Onion. So, moving from animal life to human life (get it?):

Kansas Outlaws Practice of Evolution

TOPEKA, KS—In response to a Nov. 7 referendum, Kansas lawmakers passed emergency legislation outlawing evolution... The new law prohibits all living beings within state borders from any willful adaptation to changing environmental conditions.

[As one intelligent design proponent said,] "butterflies who mimic the wing patterns and colors of other butterflies for an adaptive advantage, well, their days of flaunting God's will are over." Human beings may be the species most deeply affected by the new legislation. Those whose cytochrome-c molecules vary less than 2 percent from those of chimpanzees will be in direct violation of the law.

Evolution is still with us. So, moving from human life to "transhuman life," check out the World Transhumanist Association, whose members want to use technology to "extend human capabilities." They want to start using reproductive technologies not only to help people reproduce, but to create smarter, stronger human beings. We already use treatments like IVF fairly regularly. In fact, in Denmark and the Netherlands, 1 in 25 babies is conceived in a dish. So we're evolving: We once had sex to reproduce. Now we have sex for fun, and use IVF to reproduce.

Enhancement technologies could be our new opposable thumb.

But is it a good thing? Certainly not in Kansas.