Month: March 2016
Another step for Craig Venter.
I have previously posted about Venter’s work with synthetic organisms.
While I was digesting this new material, Craig Venter was making the Gene VII book obsolete. He set up a new company to compete with the Human Genome Project The result is well described in The Genome War by James Shreeve who was given access to Venter but less to the government funded project. This year, Venter’s autobiography was published and his plans for the future are described.
The links are at the original article which is from 2007.
Now, his group has progressed to a synthetic bacterium.
Using the first synthetic cell, Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0 (created by this same team in 2010), JCVI-syn3.0 was developed through a design, build, and test process using genes from JCVI-syn1.0. The new minimal synthetic cell contains 531,560 base pairs and just 473 genes, making it the smallest genome of any organism that can be grown in laboratory media. Of these genes 149 are of unknown biological function. By comparison the first synthetic cell, M. mycoides JCVI-syn1.0 has 1.08 million base pairs and 901 genes.
A paper describing this research is being published in the March 25th print version of the journal Science by lead authors Clyde A. Hutchison, III, Ph.D. and Ray-Yuan Chuang, Ph.D., senior author J. Craig Venter, Ph.D., and senior team of Hamilton O. Smith, MD, Daniel G. Gibson, Ph.D., and John I. Glass, Ph.D.
This is huge news and will take years to develop.
The most surprising result of their work—and perhaps the most sobering one for the rest of the field: The team still doesn’t understand what 31 percent of the essential genes do in even the simplest organism, to say nothing of a human genome. It’s a development Venter called “very humbling.”
“We are probably at the 1 percent level in understanding the human genome,” said Clyde Hutchison III, a distinguished professor at the Venter Institute.
That lack of knowledge isn’t standing in the way of entrepreneurs. Biology has been “hot and heavy” since the development of a molecular tool that makes gene editing easy, Hutchison explained. Scientists might be able to remove disease-causing genes or even determine a baby’s eye color. This technology, known as CRISPR/Cas-9, has alarmed many inside and outside the research community, who fear it may be used on the human genome before its effects are understood, with unforeseen results.
If he does another public seminar, I hope my friend Bradley can get me a ticket. I am now reading Lewin’s Genes XI, although he seems to be no longer the editor.
I hope I can wade through it. Sometimes, as knowledge progresses, it becomes simpler. I hope so.
“These cells would be a very, very useful chassis for many industrial applications, from medicine to biochemicals, biofuels, nutrition, and agriculture,” said Dan Gibson, a top scientist at both Venter’s research institute and his company, Synthetic Genomics Inc. Ultimately, the group wants to understand the tiny genetic framework well enough to use it as a biological foundation for more complex organisms that could address many of the world’s ills. Once each essential gene’s function is identified, scientists can build an effective computer model of it; from there, they can simulate how best to go about “adding pathways for the production of useful products,” they wrote.
I will be following this story closely, if I can only understand it.
“Part II: The Appointments Clause Imposes No Duty on the President To Nominate Supreme Court Justices, Other Article III Judges, and/or Executive Branch Officers. The Appointments Clause Imposes No Duty on the Senate To Confirm Candidates.”
It depends on what the meaning of the word shall is, says Seth Barrett Tillman:
Now the people who have opined that President and/or Senate have a constitutional duty (per the Appointments Clause) to nominate a successor to AS are distinguished commentators, whose opinions deserve fair consideration. However, there are people who have taken the opposite position. These include, for example, Professors Lawson and Seidman, Adam J. White, a well-published D.C. practitioner, and Daniel Koffsky, a senior Department of Justice attorney. See, e.g., Gary Lawson & Guy Seidman, Downsizing the Right to Petition, 93 Nw. U. L. Rev. 739, 762 n.123 (1999) (“[T]he Appointments Clause is best read as a grant of power rather than an affirmative duty.”); Adam J. White, Toward the Framers’ Understanding of “Advice and Consent”: A Historical and Textual Inquiry, 29 Harv. J.L. & Pub. Pol’y 103, 147 n.235 (2005) (“[T]he President is under no duty to nominate someone to fill a vacant office—despite the Constitution’s instruction that he ‘shall’ so nominate . . . .”); cf., e.g., Appointment of a Senate-Confirmed Nominee, Op. Off. Legal Counsel 232, 232 (Oct. 12, 1999) (Koffsky, Acting Deputy Asst. Att’y Gen.) (“The Constitution thus calls for three steps before a presidential appointment is complete: first, the President’s submission of a nomination to the Senate; second, the Senate’s advice and consent; third, the President’s appointment of the officer, evidenced by the signing of the commission. All three of these steps are discretionary.”), http://tinyurl.com/gljnnv8. These people are also distinguished commentators, whose opinions deserve fair consideration.
Here we are faced with what are essentially conflicting intuitions in regard to the original public meaning of an 18th century text. Both sides cannot be correct. What to do? We should look for evidence, and fortunately, some good evidence is at hand.
Read the whole thing.
Belgium — The Failed State in the Heart of Europe
Today in Europe, in the aftermath of the Brussels terrorist attacks, a dark truth stands reveled about the nature of the Belgian state. Belgium is a failed state at the heart of Europe…and much of the rest of Europe is following.
Belgium quite literally lacks the military means to enforce the sovereignty of the Belgian state in the Muslim neighborhood of Molenbeek in Brussels, the Belgian Capitol.
The following is via John R. Schindler of The UK Observer:
We should expect more guerrilla-like attacks like Brussels yesterday: moderate in scale, relatively easy to plan and execute against soft targets, and utterly terrifying to the public. At some point, angry Europeans, fed up with their supine politi1cal class, will begin to strike back, and that’s when the really terrifying scenarios come into play. European security services worry deeply about the next Anders Breivik targeting not fellow Europeans, but Muslim migrants. “We’re just one Baruch Goldstein away from all-out war,” explained a senior EU terrorism official, citing the American-born Israeli terrorist, fed up with Palestinian violence, who walked into a Hebron mosque in 1994, guns blazing, and murdered 29 innocent Muslims.
When that violence comes, a practically disarmed Europe will be all but powerless to stop it. To take the case of Belgium, at the Cold War’s end a generation ago, its army had seven brigades with 18 infantry battalions, plus some 30 more battalions in the reserve. Today, Belgium’s army has only two brigades and six infantry battalions, some 3,000 bayonets in all. That tiny force would have trouble exerting control over even one bumptious Brussels neighborhood in the event of serious crisis.
Thanks to Belgium’s sovereignty collapse, Europe is now in the throws of an emerging decade plus Muslim insurgency spreading from Brussels…
…while E.U. Security Forces supporting the Belgians are more concerned with repressing local predominantly white citizens from striking back at terrorist inclined Muslim migrants than dealing with the Muslim problem to begin with.
And it gets worse, with hundreds if not thousands of trained terrorists arriving with the multi-million person Muslim Migrant wave that German Prime Minister Frau Merkel kicked off in 2015. The EU faces a situation where it will see a ‘major’ (Charles Hebdo, Paris, Brussels class) EU terrorist incident every 60 to 180 days for the foreseeable future. This leaves aside the worse than American urban ghetto crime and sexual assault rates these illegal Muslim migrants are now inflicting on EU citizens.
NB: The EU is now no longer tourist friendly, with all the economic fall out that means.
The political corruption — and ethnic tensions between the Dutch speaking Flems and French speaking Walloons — that dominates the Belgian state make it impossible to remedy the Muslim insurgency there.
Nothing short of Belgian territorial partition between France and Germany can bring effective enough military governance to end the Muslim Insurgency in Brussels.
Given that awful reality, Donald Trump’s idea of reducing America’s role in NATO (Or perhaps even getting out of NATO all together?) is the best thing the USA can do.
Both Vietnam’s and Shia Iraq’s lessons for America’s citizens are that it is a futile waste of American lives and treasure to try and protect people who don’t have either the will nor the means to protect themselves.
Alternate History
Having long been intrigued by lighter-than-air craft (see earlier post on this topic), I picked up a copy of Dr. Eckener’s Dream Machine…Dr Hugo Eckener being the head of the Zeppelin company for many years, and a man who contributed much to the transient success of this transportation mode. Also, I thought the book would be a pleasant vacation from politics. However, that was not to be…