"the hardest thing in this world is to live in it"
This is mostly a memory-holder for Wil Wheaton’s story about Almost Famous and staying present in the moment as an actor, for the next time I’m beating my head against the wall wanting to use the story to illustrate Deleuze and the image-movement from Cinema 2.
…don’t ask.
Adrian Lamo is in trouble again. Not for cracking any new computer systems, but because he won’t give the federal government a blood sample so they can isolate his DNA and add it to the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System (CODIS). He did bring nail clippings and hair samples, but those in charge will only accept blood for the sample.
Now, I’ve known about CODIS for a while. The point is to be able to store the DNA of sexual predators and violent criminals. What I hadn’t realized is that the 2004 Justice for All Act expanded the CODIS purview to include samples from all newly convicted federal criminals. Including white collar criminals – people who commit crimes that rarely leave any traces of DNA for testing.
What, then, is the point to collecting the DNA of these white collar criminals? It makes me uncomfortable, because the government has ruled in the past that elements of your body – your blood, your cancers, your spleens, anything that can be taken from your body – are no longer yours once they are removed from your body. Including DNA.
This means that your DNA can be taken, stored, sequences, analyzed, and released to the public, without your say, without your benefit. And potentially to your detriment; there are growing fears that DNA samples showing proclivities for diseases will result in insurance companies denying coverage, for example.
What happens if the government sequences the DNA of one of these incarcerated criminals, and finds something of value, something that requires more samples? Criminals have very little rights over their bodies – will they then be able to just take what they (the government they, that is) want?
It’s concerning.
Granted, these concerns existed when CODIS was implemented to begin with, but many people deemed the benefit of DNA samples and ability to match future DNA to known criminals who’re at high risk to returning to criminal behaviour, worth the potential abuses of having that DNA.
But now we’re talking about people with low rate of recidivism, who aren’t dangerous, per se, who’re having their DNA added to this system, for who only knows what reasons.
The ethics of this, and the potential for abuse of the policy, is worth thinking, and even perhaps worrying, about.
There is a new artificial knee joint on the market, and it claims it’s for women only. This is interesting, because as is noted in the article, there are nearly two dozen differences between a man and a woman’s knee. Yet, like most medicine, the artificial knee joints were designed for and tested in men, not women.
Women are typically excluded from medical trials of all sorts, because of fear that they might become pregnant and sue, or a lingering bias that says the different hormone levels over the course of a month will skew data results. Of course, the immediate response to this is “well, then, if that’s a problem, shouldn’t it be considered before giving it to women? And, btw, what the hell about the difference in hormone levels in men and women to begin with?”
These differences, and the fact that women are so rarely in clinical trials, is often held up as the reason that drugs, once they hit the ‘real’ world, work poorly in women and not men. (Children is a whole ‘nother Pandora’s box, rife with similar problems.)
So it’s interesting that there is now a knee being marketed for women – hype, trying to create a new and expanded market for the company, in the grand tradition of capitalism and growth, or a legitimate medical need? Kind of hard to say, although the idealist in me does truly hope for the latter.
Colour me impressed – the Catholic Church actually has somewhat consistent rules about IVF, namely, forbidding it as violation of Church doctrine. While I personally don’t agree with the idea of IVF being bad (although I have issues when it’s done on people who claim they can’t selectively reduce the number of embryo’s implanted if more than three are), I do appreciate the Catholic Church being consistent in the application of their doctrine.
What I find interesting is that so many people in the United States who had herds of children thanks to IVF claimed Catholic beliefs as the reason they couldn’t selectively reduce. “Woops.”
According to a study published in the May issue of Psychological Science, “a person’s racial identity influences who he or she sees.” They reached this conclusion by seeing how fast black, white, and biracial participants performed in a visual search task, finding black folk in crowds. They asked the biracial participants to write about one of their parents before performing this search function, and concluded that “visual perception is malleable to top-down influences, such as orientation provided by one’s racial group membership.”
Now, I’ve only read the EurekaAlert brief, but it seems to me that another really big conclusion you could draw from this is that people tend to find that which they were thinking about before doing a search function like this, and their lineage had bunk all to do with the results.
Sometimes scientists irritate me.