What Lay People Should Know

What Lay People Should Know about The Scientific Method – The Investigative Process

2015-09-27T08:04:00.001+08:00

by Zad Datu

Preceding related article (Read first!):
What Lay People Should Know about The Scientific Method – Hypothesis vs. Conjecture

If you read the previous article, once again, I would like you to forget all scientific jargon and imagine the same scenario. If you haven't read the article, imagine the following scenario:

One night I was in the jungle and a creature of significant size attacked where I managed to escape leaving only a scratch on my shoulder. I could not identify the creature at all. The following day I hired a team of investigators to solve this mystery. Following procedures, they developed a first hypothesis, that is the creature was a large dog. They obtained a specimen (dog) of average height and weight for its breed, get it to scratch piece of animal flesh, of similar composition to my shoulder and then compare that scratch mark with the scratch mark on my shoulder. The results shows that the scratches doesn't match.

Does this prove that the creature is not a dog?

The answer is 'No'. This does not prove that the creature is not a dog. It only eliminates the hypothesis that states that the creature is a normal adult dog of that particular breed.

What needs to be done next is to test all the breeds of dogs of significant size in the same manner. In other words developing many more contradicting hypotheses then test and eliminate them one by one. Upon the tests, results for all breeds of the proved negative. Again, this doesn't eliminate that the creature isn't a dog of any breed. This only eliminates all normal sized dogs of all breeds as the possible culprit. It could be a mutant over-sized dog, but lets not go there just yet.

Moving on to the second speculation, the 'tiger-hypothesis'. Here, results proved positive - the scratch matches.

Does this prove that the creature is a tiger?

The answer is 'No', once more. This only proves that the hypothesis which states that the creature was a tiger has not been eliminated. After all, when a lion is placed to the test, the results also proved positive as expected since tigers and lions have very similar shape form and size. The creature can't be both a tiger and a lion at the same time.

Now, we have two leads to follow, and most likely other big cats of similar size would test positive as well. But before going into that, lets try to figure out how could a big cat end up in that. One possibility is through animal smuggling. To find out if this is the case, we need to investigate on the industry of animal smuggling in this area. Lets forget about this for now. Another possibility is that the big cat escaped from the nearest zoo. Easier to investigate upon and seemingly more plausible the investigators dive into this first. The investigators have discovered that there are lions and tigers in the zoo. There are no records of escaped tigers.

Does this eliminate the hypothesis that the creature is a tiger?

Again, 'No', it doesn't. It only eliminates the hypothesis that the creature is an escaped tiger from that zoo. This does not eliminate the hypothesis that the creature is a tiger from other sources, perhaps animal smuggling. On second thought, this also doesn't eliminate that the record from the zoo is incorrect. But for now let us assume that the zoo record is genuine.

The investigators then discovered that there is a record of an escaped lion. The lion escaped 7 days before the incident where I encountered the creature. The investigators would now have to consult a lion expert to find out whether an escaped lion from the zoo is likely to find its way to that jungle and how long it would take to get there. If it takes less then 7 days for the lion to reach the jungle this hypothesis still stands. Whereas if it takes more than 7 days, this hypothesis fails. To put this story to an end let us say the creature turned out to be that escaped lion and that the investigators have discovered that part of my ripped clothes were in the possession of that lion.

Now, let us restart the story all over again from where the investigators were hired. Let us say that instead of developing the 'dog' and the 'tiger' hypothesis, the first and only 'hypothesis' the came up with was that the creature is a bigfoot. This was then seconded by another member of the team, then a third. Out of anonymous decision and without further ado they pronounced the mystery solved and case closed. The creature was a bigfoot, they concluded.

Obviously, this is ridiculous. Apart from that fact, not only were they not bothered to place their 'hypothesis' to the test, they did not even bother to identify whether it is a hypothesis or a conjecture, or whether the properties of their speculation were definitive and measurable, which in this case they weren't. We can't obtain a specimen of bigfoot to put it to the test since we never caught one, hence bigfoot is an arbitrary concept. The speculation isn't hypothesis. It is a conjecture.

Even if bigfoot was a definitive and measurable property, and the speculation is a testable hypothesis. The method of how the investigators come to consensus is simply unreasonable and irrational. This isn't a reliable method to use as a source of information to confirm the credibility of one's conclusion of the incident even if the conclusion just so happen to be correct.

Though one may think that this second retelling of this investigation is ridiculous, this happens every now and then in casual conversations within many communities. When a group of people witness someone experiences mysterious symptoms upon his stay at an alleged haunted house, or when a friend claims to see things that other don't see, or perhaps when oneself see things which others don't see, it is very common for that entire group to mutually agree and conclude on single explanation without any process of investigation with a generic and arbitrary term, 'ghosts', often speaking of their conclusions as if they are as credible as proven factual information.

What Lay People Should Know about The Scientific Method – Hypothesis vs. Conjecture

2015-08-12T15:36:00.003+08:00

by Zad Datu

Forget about the term 'science' or 'scientific method for a moment'. Forget about all the scientific jargon and imagine the following scenario:

I was in a dark jungle late one night where I was attacked by a relatively large creature. I could not make out what the creature was nor its shape and form, but such size is not known to inhibit that jungle. Nevertheless, I manage to escape with only a scratch on my shoulder.

The following day I hired a team of investigators to uncover the mystery of this incident. As investigators do, they start of with speculations based on the story I told and the scratch mark on my shoulder. One speculation is that the creature was a large dog, another is that it could be a tiger, and the last speculation is that it was a bigfoot, none of which is known to inhibit the jungle.

The next stage is to see if they can put their speculation to the test. In the case of the 'dog-speculation', yes they can. They can obtain a specimen, a dog, and get it to scratch piece of animal flesh, usually that of pigs, of similar composition to my shoulder and then compare that scratch mark with the scratch mark on my shoulder.

Hence, this speculations is a Hypothesis - a testable speculation.

As of the second speculation, the 'tiger-speculation', we can also obtain a specimen and perform the same test. Both the 'dog-speculation' and 'tiger-speculation' are testable hypotheses.

How about the third speculation - bigfoot? Can we test this? Can we obtain a specimen, a bigfoot, and get it to scratch a flesh of similar composition to my shoulder and compare the results? No. Because we don't have a specimen. We never captured a live or dead bigfoot.

This speculation is a Conjecture - a non-testable speculation.

Both dogs and tigers are properties of the speculation based on discovered and studied upon life forms. The other property of the speculation, include the scratch itself which is also definitive and measurable. Hence this makes the speculation testable, a hypothesis.

Bigfoot is an alleged life form defined by the characterisation we give them as opposed to and not based on an actual captured specimen but rather on eye witness accounts and testimonies only. This makes it an arbitrary concept as opposed to a measurable definitive property. Hence this makes the speculation non-testable, a conjecture.

If something is based on an arbitrary concept, it is not testable. If it is not testable, it isn't provable. If it isn't provable, it wouldn't be reasonable give this conjecture equal credibility as proven factual information.

Those who assume that others being dismissive out of simple closed mindedness simply have not placed sufficient effort into this and other processes of reasoning.

Some seem to be quick to dismiss the credibility when others speak of arbitrary concepts such as bigfoot, ghosts, fairies, vampires, leprechauns, and so on. For some, this may be because they have placed sufficient rationalistic and reasoned thought before hand to notice the obvious, that these are conjectures and that it is unreasonable and irrational to give them equal credibility as proven factual information. Those who assume that they're being dismissive out of simple closed mindedness simply have not placed sufficient effort into this and other processes of reasoning to determine the credibility of the claims they're making.

Succeeding related article:
What Lay People Should Know about The Scientific Method – The Investigative Process

What Lay Poeple Should Know about Synthetic Biology (video)

2013-02-11T18:41:00.001+08:00

A short informative video about Synthetic Biology by TechNyou:

This are not my videos.

Random Report: ONE Fighting Championship: Return of Warriors

2013-02-06T01:44:00.002+08:00

by Zad Datu

After returning from ONE FC: Return of the Warriors on the evening of 2nd February, its very obvious that the standard of MMA in this region of the world is still low. MMA is still very fresh in this new market, so we can’t expect much and I will be looking forward to see it grow.

Coming from an underated martial art background (depends how you look at it) where there is (or was) virtually zero commercialising, that is mainstream karate, the first thing I noticed was that the standard of showmenship of the MMA fighters when making an enterance and celebrating their wins as well as their nicknames inproportionately outclassed their standards of fighting, thanks to the generally cocky (but extremely friendly) culture of USA as they took over the lead of MMA influence from Japan replacing the culture of humble confidence with theirs.

Most of the figthers were simply good enough to not make a fool of themselves. I know how it was to start out looking foolish in fights when I was new. Not to say that I am any better than them with these comment, but I do have my oppinions. There were some interesting fights but no impressive fighters thus far. I have a suspicion that part to blame for this is that perhaps it just never does look as impressive live as it does on TV (but the odd thing is in karate bouts it seldom looks as good on video recordings as how you remembered watchign it live).

Some of the fighters started training for MMA directly, some started out as Marital Arts purist from Silat, Wushu, Muay Thai and etc. whilst some were national and even world champions of speficic marital arts. Most were Malaysians but they were some from Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, USA, South Africa and Philipines (I hope I didn’t miss out on any nationalities). Surprisingly some of the standup based martial art purist entered MMA clearly didn’t prepare for ground fights or grappling fights. If they do not intend to play a ground fight, they should’ve atleast prepare to defend against ground fighters.

Anyway, on the positive side, there was a good armbar by Gianni Subba, a triangle choke which was a little hard to catch by Melvin Yeoh, a rear-naked choke by the anticipated Adam Kayoom followed by his comment on the respect which should be given to all these fighters who has sacrificed a lot and that he hasn’t seen his daughter who is only 5 months old as an example, and ended with “...we don’t need to listen to your bullshhh....” – a pre-resposne to what I’m have to say about these fighters. The most gruesome win was where Pete Davis smashed his heel against his opponent’s mouth, to be specific, who was attempting an anke lock. Leo Krishna from Indonesia ended with a chunk of his upper lip sliced appart while Pete Davis’s was heel cut open with blood gushing non-stop. Another beautiful win was a guilotine choke by Japan’s Shooto champion, Sinichi Kojima followed by a comical expression of relief and excitement during the interview in the ring just after his victory. He then snached the microphone off from Jason Chambers (yes, host of Human Weapon is a comentator here) just to say “TERIMA KASIH!”.

The final and most anticipated bout, Eric Kelly vs. Honorio Banario, turned out to be the worst of them all. Spectators couldn’t bare the the anticlimatic event as “boos” were given off here and there. They even lost interest in hooting for the ring girls up to this point. If I were to chose which match should’ve been the highlight, it would be between Sinichi’s bout and the South Africa vs USA (Vuyisile Colossa vs. Lowen Tynanes) where Tynanes submitted Colossa with a triangle choke les than 30 seconds before the end of the final round. There were good ground work in these two fights.

In the case of Kelly vs Banario, both Philipinos, they didn’t make much contact - minimal attempts to strike, minimal attempts to grapple, minimal ground game and minimal amount of exchanges. In fact, the least exchanges out of all the bouts. Just a few punches for the sake of punching and kicks for the sake of kicking. Kelly ettempted a lot of swings to the head which he clearly was doing so hoping for the luck that it would land rather than with the confidence that it would, and Banario gave a lot of leg-slaps, I would call it, rather than effective kicks. After all that, about 2 second after Banario landed a solid but not extraordinarily powerful jab to Kelly’s head without having a chance following up with more attacks, Kelly decided to slowly squat down to his but with his palm raised and open in defeat, i.e. chickend out. Not to be too critical, judgemental or to make comments of what actually went through deep inside his heart or head, but that’s what it looked like, that’s what we witnessed, and that’s what he did earning Banario the first ONE FC World Featherweight Champion.

Some are tempted to say that they both can’t fight and question how they managed to acheive the double digit professional wins and titles from other championsihps, but that obviously can’t be true. But that’s what it looks like. To add an irony, the lucky draw prize for the event was to attend 10 free lessons from the one who chickened out with a squat dow to his but and a stay away from me hand gesture. Of course, the reason of the minimal exchanges between the finalists is because they both were being cautions, familiar with eachother’s style and are of equal standards. But equal standards of high or low?

If you watched the bout, try comparing that with Asian Games Karate Event Finals Female Below 61kg bout [video above]. Yes, it’s a different game. Karate bouts are single-rounds three-minute bouts with dominantly semi-contact strikes and a some takedowns and no grapples (the screaming may be hillarious to you if you’re not familiar with kiai). But you can clearly see that they both are of equal undoubtly high standards with precision attacks, versatility of movements and striking techniques. The Malaysian kept on persuing for points delivering and receiving strikes trying her luck desperately all the way to the end as she was 4 to 5 points down whilst the Japanese maintained her ground, composition and sharpness of techniques delivering as she recieves. This is so contrasting to the arm-swings for the sake of punching and leg-slaps for the sake of kicking as seen in the ONE FC World Featherweight Finals bout. To add to that, unlike the dramatic victory celebration of running around, jumping around, screaming and punching fists into the air after wining a lousy fight, the Japanese lady celebrated with bows after bows, smiles and open-palmed waves to the spectators as she humbly strolled off to the dressing room.

I am so tempted to introduce this video collection of North Korean ITF Taekwondo bouts [above] where the quality of speed, precision and respnose of the fighters impresses. ITF Taekwondo is another example of an underated martial art (the popular federation of Taekwondo is WTF, which is in the Olympics). I also feel the need to share a hillarious video of a muay thai match [video below]. No where did any of the fighters in ONE FC looked as foolish as the Muay Thai fighters in the video below, but these two surely can fight. The punches, kicks and knee strikes they deliver surely seems powerful, not one that anyone can take without sufferign from a concussion, and they surely can recieve them with durability as well, an so can the referee. It may seems like they lack in strategy, but not anyone would dare facing these two in a bout after witnessing thsi video.

Do you now see why I would be upset with the anticlimatic event? Neither Banario nor Kelly went anywhere near halfway of the all-way-out mark. As a fighter, that’s the mark you want to reach in every fight whether it’s against a superior opponent or inferior, and that’s exactly what the fighters in the three video I presented have done. I wouldn’t say I’m a martial art expert nor to say that I can beat these fighters up easily, and though not a MMA’s biggest fan I am a marital art enthusiast and semi-enthusiast of MMA, I do consider myself qualified to make an educated oppinion though limited.

I wish it was this fight which I watched live:

MMA bouts are as close as it gets to a 1-on-1 fight scenario in reality and sis seen as a dream fighting competition for martial art enthusiasts like me. MMA is on a quick rise to popularity slowly taking over Pro Boxing in the field of combat entertainment. ONE FC, claimed to be the largest MMA event in Asia, is a Singapore based MMA promotion launched just in 2011. The idea of launcing such an organisation in this region of the world is just brilliant. I wish it was me who did it. Deespite of my criticisms, I have great respect for the organisation not just as a martial art organisation but also as a business. I have great respect for the fighters for what they have achieved despite my dissapointment on the match.

What Lay People Should Know about Christmas and Santa Claus (videos)

2012-12-25T02:49:00.000+08:00

Allow me to present to you a tale of myths after myths mixing, repalcing and adapting one another, rewriting cultures and beliefs hence leaving current believers and practitioners clueless about their current practices and beliefs, and what they're supposed to belive.

1) Another video by CGP Grey

2) An indpendent documentary film made to unwarp Christmas

2) History Channel

These is not my videos.

What Lay People Should Know about Ninjas

2012-12-16T16:54:00.001+08:00

Does the fighting techniques taught in modern Ninjutsu schools date back to the actual teachings of the historical ninja? Or perhaps, did ninjutsu ever exist as single style of organised martial art prior to the modern ninjutsu classes we see today?

Was there ever a historical “Ninja vs. Samurai” event?

Were ninja's primarily assassins?

Did the iconic ninja suit and ninja mask really existed as a historical uniform?

Did this organised covert espionage system specialising in assassinations really first evolved in Japan?

To no surprise, since this is a What Lay People Should Know article, the answers to all the questions above are “no” or at least, bordering “no”.

Here's a short but informative 2011 documentary by HistoricalNinjutsu, featuring Anthony Cummings and James Loriega to find out what the historical ninjas really were like.

These are not my videos.

What Lay People Should Know about Chicken Nuggets – How It's Made

2012-01-23T22:27:00.001+08:00

by Zad Datu

“Mmmm... Chicken nuggets!” could be your first thought when you are served it. But perhaps that would all change your mind after finding out more about how they’re made and out of what.

Let us start from the outside, then we’ll slowly move to what’s inside.

On the outside we’ve got the breadcrumbs, obviously. Once fried it gets crusty and golden, easy on the eyes and interesting to munch on. Prior to frying and without the breadcrumbs you just have a patty of lumpy chicken. But before being chopped up and shaped into patties, where were they? “In ammonia”, is the answer – washed in ammonia, the were.

Ammonia!? Washed!? Why washed? To clean it of course! “You mean it’s dirty?”, you ask? Apparently so!... It’s full of artificial colouring and artificial flavouring.

What’s with the artificial colouring? Because they looked like what is shown in the image below – all pink. That is what you may have been eating all these while, whenever you stuff chicken nuggets down your throat.

This is pink stuff what turns into the nuggets you probably eat.

Why the artificial flavouring!? Shouldn’t chicken taste like chicken already?... Not if they’re not chicken.

“Not chicken!?” Well, actually it is chicken – parts of chickens, at least. But not chicken flesh. They’re called mechanically separated/reclaimed/recovered meat/poultry. They’re basically what’s left of the chicken after the meat has all been removed – the carcase – plus chicken skin ground thoroughly to smoothness and pinkness.

One Episode from The Young Turks Network:

A Scene from Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution:

So what about Chicken McNuggets? As mentioned in The Young Turks Network video above, and according to the McDonald’s USA Ingredients Listing for Popular Menu Items, Chicken McNuggets are real genuine chicken meat.

Chicken McNuggets®:

White boneless chicken, water, food starch-modified, salt, seasoning [autolyzed yeast extract, salt, wheat starch, natural flavoring (botanical source), safflower oil,
dextrose, citric acid], sodium phosphates, natural flavor (botanical source). Battered and breaded with: water, enriched flour (bleached wheat flour, niacin, reduced
iron, thiamin mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid), yellow corn flour, bleached wheat flour, food starch-modified, salt, leavening (baking soda, sodium acid
pyrophosphate, sodium aluminum phosphate, monocalcium phosphate, calcium lactate), spices, wheat starch, dextrose, corn starch.
CONTAINS: WHEAT.

Prepared in vegetable oil (Canola oil, corn oil, soybean oil, hydrogenated soybean oil with TBHQ and citric acid added to preserve freshness).
Dimethylpolysiloxane added as an antifoaming agent.

You could even tell that it is chicken meat in your Chicken McNuggets from how the inside it looks. Just take a look at the photo below... You could even tell that this particular part is breast meat, if my guess is correct. I would assume that real chicken nuggets are generally made of breast meat as most customers seem to prefer and ask for the tender parts of the chicken when ordering chicken pieces (i.e. drumstick and thigh), placing the breast meat to waste, so its just logical to use the less wanted meat as chicken nuggets to reduce waste and save cost. In fact that’s exactly what using the carcase of the chicken does – reduce waste and save cost.

Photo of the inside of Chicken McNuggets

Speaking of reducing waste and saving cost, common sense tends to dictate that this just may be how chicken nuggets were invented. That perhaps a restaurant owner want to find way to save cost by using up the whole chicken as food, including the bones, so out popped the idea. If you assume that this is how chicken nuggets were invented, you should also assume that the restaurant was McDonalds in its infancy.

I say this because the invention of chicken nuggets is often wrongly accredited to McDonalds.

I can’t find info on the ingredients of KFC Chicken Nuggets, but from the looks of it, it is most likely to be real chicken meat. I’m sure big American companies like these wouldn’t be able to get away with using mechanically separated poultry as chicken nuggets especially with the power of the consumer’s rights in the US.

Here in Malaysia we have this famous chicken product brand called Ayamas (ayam translates to chicken from Malay and -mas sounds like from the word emas which translates to gold; put it together it sounds like chicken’s ass), and I can say that the insides of their chicken nugget does not at all look like chicken meat as pictured above. Again, I don’t have the ingredient list for this, so I can only speculate. In this country, consumer’s rights isn’t as in-forced as we wish it to be, so I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the local chicken nugget products are made of chicken carcase and skin. The odd thing is, every time I eat Ayamas chicken nuggets, I seem to get a temporary mild headache.

So... Feeling happy about eating Chicken McNuggets after knowing that they’re made of genuine chicken meat?... Hold on! The site of which I got the above image is from an article titled Anti-foaming agent found in Chicken McNuggets. Don’t you just hate news which brings crucial awareness? Or rather, don’t you just hate truths?...

Note: I'm sure more information could be included in this article, but there's a lot more I have to research and learn about food and diet before writing anymore on the subject.

What Lay People Should Know about Homosexuality (video)

2012-01-23T22:06:00.002+08:00

A short but informative and educational video on homosexuality:

This is not my video.

What Lay People Should Know about Evolution – Evidence (video)

2011-10-11T16:10:00.000+08:00

Here are two other brilliant videos on evolution and the evidence.

These are not my video.

What Lay People Should Know about Overpopulation (video; awareness)

2011-10-01T19:59:00.000+08:00

7 billion is the number. By the end of this year (2011) you will be 1 of 7 billion people.

Video by National Geographic Magazine.

What Lay People Should Know about United Kingdom/Great Britain/England (video; informative)

2011-09-20T08:37:00.000+08:00

Here is a brilliant video explaining the difference between United Kingdom, Great Britain and England.differentiating.

This is not my video.

What Lay People Should Know about Superstition – Open Minded or Gullible? (argumentative)

2011-09-12T13:59:00.002+08:00

by Zad Datu

So, the question here is “Is it closed-minded to dismiss superstitious claims or is it gullible to accept them?” Let us for now categorise claims into three groups: (1) undocumented unscientific claims, (2) undocumented scientific claims, and (3) documented scientific claims.

If scientists themselves – those who have made it a career to investigate upon any phenomenon; to build models capable of making testable predictions resembling the phenomenon; to test the models with repeatable experiments fixing it to correctness with falsifiable, measurable and observable evidence; in which the results are submitted to peer review; and then subjected to replication by other scientist; and if proven replicable, to meticulously asses the accuracy of the model for further improvements; and if possible to also provide explanations to the phenomenon – will not impulsively accept documented scientific claims from another scientist without studying the documentation, how could it be reasonable for us non-experts to do so? Especially after fraudulent scientific claims such as the ridiculous 1835 discovery of moon-people civilisation, the Tasaday Tribe, and of course the Piltdown Man, all of which stomped its way into headlines and fooled the world. I must mention the physics hoax called The Sokal Affair by physicist, Alan Sokal, whose intentions were to experiment whether the journal would publish an article as long as it sounded good and flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.

So now, if documented scientific claims should not be impulsively accepted, how could scientists impulsively accept undocumented scientific claims, and furthermore how could us non-experts do so? – Let alone undocumented unscientific claims. Not that undocumented scientific claims are necessarily more credible than the unscientific ones. False claims hoaxed under the disguise of scientific sounding terminologies are as much of lies as unscientific claims. It just sounds more credible, that’s all.

It is flawed thinking to say that one should give 50-50 acceptance to both views, or 50-50 balance to both parties. It is not sexism to say that men are generally smarter than women, it is not racism to say that Malays are lazy whereas Chinese are hardworking (a Malaysian issue), neither is it speciesism to say that dogs are smarter than cats, or humans smarter than dogs (Wait, wha...? Debatable, you say!? Am I sure that men are smarter than women, you ask?... Are dogs really smarter than cat?... Fine, lets put it as “primates are smarter than fishes”. As of men versus women, do I really need to justify this?... Future article perhaps... But anyway, you get the picture). Yes, these statements do not give equal credits to both parties, but they are not prejudiced either. Prejudice judgements are those based on preconceptions and inadequate knowledge. These statements are based on observable facts. Similarly, it is not prejudiced to trust scientific claims whilst dismissing superstitious claims.

I trust, or have faith in the information presented by the scientific community because I understand their method of investigation which I approve of, and I believe that they do so for the sake of knowledge without ulterior motives, as they do not assert absolute certainty but rather presents only what has been uncovered at the moment. “What about the hoaxes?” you may ask. It is exactly these hoaxes which prove the community’s credibility, as they are eventually exposed and scorned upon by mainstream scientists. I have a slight lesser faith in the scientific media as I myself have discovered misleading or inaccurate representation by scientific articles found in respected magazines and newspapers. If it really matters, researching into the readily available scientific papers which the articles are referenced on is an option. For me, this is enough in most cases. But if it isn’t for you, then you could investigate into the paper’s peer reviews, and if this too isn’t enough, you could attempt replicating the results. This process further demonstrates the credibility of the scientific community.

An excellent example of identifying what sources of information are credible and investigating into them.

In contrast, sources of media which I have much lesser faith in are the political media and community as well as governmental versions of recent histories. The reason for this is obvious – ulterior motives. Sources of information which I have zero faith in and which I consider to be the most unreliable are those of the superstitious, because firstly, these claims are not based on science – and when I say science, I mean well assessed, established and proven documented facts. Secondly, these claims are not references to any published research papers or studies which could be investigated upon. With this logic, it is perfectly reasonable and necessary to be sceptical, as scepticism is the default position and the burden of proof lies on the party making the claim.

However, I do recognise that not every claim requires evidence for me to accept. “I just smoked a cigarette” doesn’t trigger me to ask for evidence. But if that same claim came from a non-smoker friend whom I know very well, then I would be triggered. Claims which should be subjected to scepticism and the burden of proof are those which attempt to introduce a radical understanding of the subject. Superstitious claims attempt to introduce radical understandings on physics, biology, and nature.

But what if a trusted someone claims to have a ghostly encounter? Or worst, what if I myself experience such an encounter? Firstly, we should be very aware that our eyes can fool our minds, and so can the mind fool itself; that we are susceptible to hallucinations, illusions and delusions; that our senses cannot be entirely trusted at all times. This is exactly why men have invented all sorts of instruments capable of precisely measuring all sorts of sensations which neither our nor any other animals’ sensory organ can’t detect, which can be calibrated to a standard scale and where improvements are constantly being developed.

Secondly, somebody who says “I know what I saw because I’ve never seen anything like it before,” is completely self contradictory. Nobody can possibly know what they’re looking at if they’ve never seen anything like it before. If I encounter an uncanny experience unlike anything I’ve encountered before, the rational conclusion is not “I know what it is”, but rather “I know it’s not a dog, not a cat, not a human and etc.” The only way someone could know exactly what it is that they’re encountering for the first time, is if he or she is an expert in the field. For example, only a butterfly expert could identify that the insect he or she has never come across is an undiscovered species of butterfly, as it could very well be a butterfly which resembles another type of insect or a non-butterfly insect which resembles a butterfly.

What about self-claimed ghost experts? – Witchdoctors, psychics and ghost whisperers. Some may be intentional frauds, some may be honest fools. Those who are honest are simply under the spell of ‘bird-brain syndrome’ [refers to the first 7 paragraphs of Superstition – Types and Origins (brief)], if I may call it. Until now there have not been any demonstrable repeatable experiments or falsifiable observable evidence to justify such existences. If there are, the scientific community are readily open to rewrite science textbooks all over the world to introduce the proven new radical understanding, as they have been doing so ever since Galileo – flat Earth to spherical Earth; Earth as the centre of the solar system to the Sun as the centre; Newtonian physics to Einstein’s General Relativity and to Quantum physics; and countless more.

This video of an alleged Human-Fish went somewhat viral through handphones in Malaysia back in 2005. The background song are Qur’anic verses, perhaps to ease the spirit or something alike – a common practice amongst religious Muslims.

I've encountered this video independently twice, both with its own tale behind the ‘curse’. The first simply that a fisherman just so happen to catch this creature brought it back to his village and everybody agreed that it was a man cursed into a fish. The second story was that a girl was cursed by God into this disgusting form because she was kicking her mother in the mid of her solat.

The alleged Human-Fish is, in fact, a guitarfish, a fish in the same family of rays. What is shown is the underside of the guitarfish.

It is not just gullible but also very closed-minded to impulsively accept radical claims without assessing their credibility but rather accepting it simply because it agrees with one’s taste of truths.

“Yes, Bruce Lee was killed in a duel with an Indonesian Silat master (a Malay martial art). I know this for sure because my uncle said so,” – a myth which many Malaysians believe.

“Some styles of Silat were banned in Malaysia because the powers they possess from Jinn (or genies, an Arabic folklore which predates and found its way into Islamic beliefs) they summoned by reading Qur’anic verses were just too powerful.”

“According to his bomoh (the Malay equivalent of a witchdoctor), he was cursed by someone assisted by another bomoh.”

“This must be true! This human-looking-fish shown in this video has got to be the result of a curse placed upon a girl by God for her sinful acts toward her mother during her prayers, just as I was told a minute ago.”

These are just some of the examples of radical claims which many impulsively and unquestioningly accept with inspiring awe, unknowingly solely to their taste of truths, which I have witnessed firsthand. If accepting every or any claim presented to you, no matter how ridiculous it is, is what you call “open-mindedness”, then you have placed your God given capacity for logical reasoning to redundancy.

Superstitions are myths. Just imagine the MythBusters testing the plausibility whether girls singing in the kitchen would result in higher probability of marrying old men, whether bigfoot really exist, whether Silat masters can summon powers from Genies, or whether Feng shui really works.

For some of these superstitions, their myths are untestable and unfalsifiable due to their vagueness, non-precise and inconsistent nature, making it a perfectly useless claim – as useless as the claim of an invisible intangible inaudible pink unicorn, a Chinese teapot revolving around the sun but too small to be seen even by our most powerful telescopes, and an invisible floating incorporeal heatless-fire-breathing dragon living in my garage.

But for those which are testable and bustable, guess what conclusion Adam and Jamie would come to – MYTH BUSTED!

What Lay People Should Know about Superstition – Types and Origins (brief)

2011-09-05T12:21:00.000+08:00

by Zad Datu

In the 40s, American psychologists, B.F. Skinner had his philosophy about human behaviour challenged – a philosophy insisting that all behaviours including that of humans are results of reinforcements. The white haired, round spectacled professor explains that people do not routinely travel to their local gambling club because they enjoy every moment of pulling down on jackpot sticks, but rather a result of the built in schedule of the reinforcement.

The foundations of his philosophy are his experiments on training animals, mainly pigeons, to perform certain behaviours such as pecking on a button or turning around. Each hungry pigeons are placed in a box attached to a feeding machine, dubbed the Skinner box, in which the pigeons would be rewarded with a piece of corn whenever they perform whatever behaviour Skinner wishes to programme into the birds.

Superstition is a uniquely human behaviour, so our behaviours can’t be the results of reinforcement after all – this was the statement that challenged Skinner’s philosophy.

Skinner responded by modifying the experiment so that rather than rewarding the birds upon a specific behaviours, the machine feeds them one piece of corn every fixed interval or randomly. Skinner observed that the pigeons developed repetitive behaviours. Some were jumping up and down, some bobbing their heads, some flapping their wings, and all other sorts of obnoxious behaviours. Skinner observed that whatever movements the pigeons happen to be carrying out when the first corn piece popped out, the pigeons would repeat them hoping to be rewarded again, which coincidently out pops another piece.

That bird brains of theirs fooled themselves into thinking that it is these movements which triggers the reward, repeating them as the machine continues to release more food. This, Skinner concluded, demonstrates superstitious behaviours in animals.

So here’s the thing: superstition isn’t a uniquely human occurrence. Superstition also exists within animals. Animals and humans have to be natural in detecting patterns– to detect the patterns of their potential prey, the pattern in the climate which promotes rich vegetation, or the patterns of predators to keep out of harm’s way – to make predictions for their very survival. Combine this necessity with a complex brain, they beauty and brilliance of mathematics emerges, as counting and measuring is needed for more accurate predictions. But if this brilliant combination is accompanied by horrible reasoning, out emerges a side-effect, best exemplified with people who self-convincingly conclude that the faces they make out from still photos of smokes, and spoken words out of static noise from sound recordings of empty quiet rooms are signs of spirits. Pigeons and humans alike, when one seem to detect patterns which aren’t really there, yet remain convinced, this is superstition.

Natural rock formation which seems to conjure up images due to our innate pattern detecting brain.

Athletes and club supporters are easy example of this bird-brain behaviour. “The last two times I wore this underwear during a match, I performed really well, and I won. I’m going to wear it again for my next match to increase my chances,” some athletes may have in their mind. “I was holding my pee when my team was doing really well. But then when I decided to visit the loo to let it out and came back, they started performing really badly. Next time I will never go to the loo during a match,” some club supporters would say.

Then there is the folk beliefs type of superstition. It is a product of our ancestral elders storifying false consequences of undesired customary bad habits to the young ones, preventing them from developing.

“Do not harm animals, or your child will be born crippled.”

“Do not shake your legs when you are sitting down, or you will always be in debt.”

“Do not sit on the porch and stare outside,” a mother would advice her daughter, and if the daughter questions why, “You will get married at a late age,” would be the given reason.

“Do not sing in the kitchen,” a mother would advice her daughter. “Why?” the daughter asks, and the mother would answer “Or you will marry an old man.”

“Do not cut your nails at night,” a mother would advice her child. “Why?” the child asks. “You ask too many questions!” the mother snaps. Actually, there are quite a number of reasons for this. One of them is that it will shorten one’s life.

These are just some of the pantang larang, or prohibitions, that we have in Malay folk beliefs.

Pontianak, a Malay equivalent of a female banshee-like-vampire; toyol, a goblin-like-spirit invoked from a human foetus; orang minyak or “oil man”, an oily women-raping hominid capable of disappearing into thin air; mawas, the Johorean (Malaysia) equivalent of Bigfoot; and orang pendek or “short man”, an Sumatran (Indonesia) miniature Bigfoot are Malay cultural examples of another category of superstition – folklore, be it just a creature, or creatures with a well developed tale behind its origins.

The existence of an upright-walking, furry, 10 feet tall ape and gigantic flying birds of prey sounds very plausible since they do not contradict with biological knowledge and that there already are similar known existing creatures. In fact, there was an ape species called Gigantopithecus which lived in Asia about 1 million years ago measuring up to 10 feet tall and 540 kg – closely resembling the North American Bigfoot or Sasquatch and its other varieties (including Himalayan Yeti, Australian Yowie, Brazilian Mapinquary, South American Maricoxi, Chinese Yeren, Caucasus Mountain’s Almas, Kenyan Chimiset, Siberian Chuchunaa, Japanese Higabon and Vietnamese Nguoi Rung), and a Family of birds-of-prey called Teratorns which lived in North and South America roughly throughout 20 to 2 million years ago with wingspans measuring up to 12 feet and weighing 15 kg – closely resembling the Native American’s mythical creature, Thunderbird. As of the Scottish Loch Ness Monster, they perfectly resemble the Pleisiosaurs – again, plausible. One version of the Chupacraba is simply a hairless goat-blood-sucking dog-like animal – very plausible indeed.

So, unlike the physically and biologically implausible existence of garlic-allergic sunlight-allergic cross-shaped-allergic non-shadow-casting non-reflection-casting bat-morphing human-blood-sucking murderous caped crusaders, or green-coated cocked-hat-wearing wish-granting elderly bearded Irish dwarves with pots of gold hidden at ends of rainbows, “Bigfoot, Thunderbirds and Loch Ness monster, aren’t superstitions after all” you may ask. Wrong! Not only did their mythical existences develop long before the discovery and long after the extinction of their prehistoric counterpart, but more importantly, unlike ghost and daemons of the Middle Ages, modern day Bigfoot, Thunderbirds and Loch Ness monsters have not been discovered, studied upon, well documented, peer reviewed, published, and presented with specimen as evidence and listed in a biological taxonomy of life. The seemingly implausible mysterious life forms capable of crawling its way into people, possessing them, distorting their physical appearances, perceptions, behaviours and well being, and are always around us yet invisible to the naked eye, capable of moving through walls were scientifically uncovered to be smaller than the size of a pin head which we now call microorganisms or germs. “To be possessed by daemons” in the medieval times now translates to “to be infected by germs”, or simply “to fall sick”. Psychiatric illnesses, the bizarre alien hand syndrome and sleep paralysis, on the other hand, are reminiscence of the more extreme cases of daemonic possessions.

A video report on Alien Hand Syndrome from BBC News.
The following link is a clip from Discovery Science which explains the syndrome very well:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9Glq9SVSxQ

Sleep paralysis is a rather particularly interesting one. It is where the natural paralysing mechanism that takes place during sleep, necessary to prevent us from physically acting out our dreams, continues to function upon waking up or starts functioning upon falling asleep, resulting in losing total physical control including speech while our mind remains awake and aware. If that doesn’t terrify you, then hallucinations of two shadowy hominid figures pressing down onto your chest just after a few seconds of tremor accompanying the paralysis surely would. At least, that’s what I experienced before breaking free. Most do not break free and fall back asleep to later wake up being certain it was all real, traumatised by the mysterious murderous attack. This is where folklores of daemons sitting or pressing on a sleeper’s chest such as the Scandinavian mare dating back to the Norsemen Middle Ages are bred into cultures. Cultures around the world put the blame of these eerie experiences onto their own invented daemons – the English and Anglo North American Old Hag, the Chinese guǐ yā shēn, Japanese kanashibari, Korean gawi nulim, Mongol khar darakh, Vietnamese ma đè, Tamil Amuku Be, Turkish karabasan, Icelander lidércnyomás, New Guinean Suk Ninmyo, Nepalese Khyaak, Ethiopian dudak, Zimbabwean Madzikirira, Swahilian jinamizi, Persians bakhtak, Greek Mora, Vrachnas or Varypnas, and majority of Muslims including here in Malaysia blames the Shiatan and evil Jinns. The most modern folklore, yet science fiction, manifested from sleep paralysis, primarily in the US, puts the blame on a human-skeleton-resembling extraterrestrials – the folklore of alien abduction.

Aside from that, the sightings of Bigfoot, Thunderbirds, Loch Ness monsters and Chupacrabas, or any other creatures for that matter, are separate matters from the plausibility of their existence. The sightings are separate superstitions on their own, not any less superstitious then the sighting of Einstein and Beethoven having a delightful conversation at a coffee shop in this current day, taking note that Einstein and Beethoven were real existing people.

The next topic in question is whether it is closed-minded to dismiss superstitious claims or is it simply gullible to accept them. This, I leave it for the next article on superstition to tackle.

Succeeding linked article:
What Lay People Should Know about Superstition – Open Minded or Gullible? (argumentative)

What Lay People Should Know about the Internet – History of the Invention (technical)

2011-08-30T12:33:00.000+08:00

by Zad Datu

At the brink of the Space Race, on October 4^th 1957, the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik 1 defeating the United States’ Project Vanguard to launch the first manmade satellite into orbit. Soon after in the following December 6^th, Vanguard TV3 was launched. But just after four feet of ascend about two seconds after liftoff, the rocket fall back to the launch pad exploding and destroying itself damaging the launch pad along with it.

In response to the Sputnik Crisis and the spectacular televised failure of Vanguard TV3, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the US Department of Defense was formed, now known as DARPA. The agency’s emphasis was initially centred to space, ballistic missile defence, and nuclear test detection. But it too had its focus on computers.

Many revolutionary technological inventions like the radar, the jet engine, and scientific innovations like the discovery of atomic fusion, were inventions fuelled by the features and capabilities which war necessitates. In the case, the Cold War necessitated to the Internet.

How it All Began

J.C.R. Licklider of MIT was the man with the vision. In 1962, he was chosen by the director of ARPA, Jack Ruina to join the agency to create and manage a programme for funding research to improve the military’s use of computer technology. He became the first director of the Command and Control Research Department at the agency, now known as the Information Processing Technologies Offices (IPTO). This was when he first wrote his memos on the Intergalactic Network or Galactic Network – the first ever concept of what is now known as the internet. He is especially famous for writing two papers, which were Man-Computer Symbiosis published in 1965 which speaks of the aims “let computers facilitate formulative thinking as they now facilitate the solution of formulated problems, and to enable men and computers to cooperate in making decisions and controlling complex situations without inflexible dependence on predetermined programs”, and The Computer as the Communication Device published in 1968 co-written by the successor of his successor, Ivan Sutherland, Robert W. Taylor.

Joseph Carl Robnett “J.C.R” Licklider “Lick” had the first vision of an Intergalactic Network now known as the Internet.

One of the first and most crucial inventions which lead to the development of the internet is packet switching, the process which breaks information or various numbers of data into ‘packets’ of data, which are then sent through the network or communication line individually. The term ‘switching’ refers to the discontinuity of the transferring of these packets through the network. A connected network of computers have many pathways to move information from one station to the next, and if a computer somewhere in the network disconnects, these independently travelling packets would individually find other routes to get to its target location, and this is what is meant by discontinuity. As all these packets reach their target, they are assembled back together as how they were before they left its source.

Lenoard Keinrock (left) in published a paper on digital message switching in 1961. Paul Barand (centre) and Donald Watts Davies (right) and independent invented packet switching in the early 60s.

The packet switching concept was a parallel invention in the early 60s first developed by Paul Baran of RAND (Research And Development) in the U.S. within the timeframe of ARPA in which he called ‘message-blocks’, and independently by Donald Davies at the National Physical Laboratory in the UK, in which he called ‘packet-switching’.

As an electrical engineer at RAND, Barand was asked to research into the survivability of the communications network for the U.S. Air Force. It was his 1964 paper titled On Distributed Communications which documents the breakthrough concept of packet switching. The paper describes the robustness of the communication system, whereby no matter how much damage was done to individual components of the network, without a central control and as long as the end-to-end communication is not lost, the information will still pass through. This was upmost important to military use as the Cold War was still ongoing. Although, there was an earlier research and a published a paper of relating field mostly on digital message switching in July of 1961 by Leonard Kleinrock titled Information Flow in Large Communications Net whom later played a major role in ARPA.

Lawrence G. Roberts (right) was persuaded by Robert William “Bob” Taylor (left) to join ARPA to become the ARPA IPTO Chief Scientist in December 1966.

In October 1966, Lawrence G. Roberts of MIT and head of Lincoln Laboratory published a paper titled Toward A Cooperative Network Of Time-Shared Computers. Roberts was persuaded by the third director of ARPA, Robert Taylor to leave MIT and join ARPA. Initially resisting, in December that year, he finally gave in as the ARPA IPTO Chief Scientist in December 1966. In 1967 Roberts, Baran and Davies became aware of each other’s work at an Association of Computing Machinery conference where they met and the term packet-switching was adopted. This is where ARPANET programme (ARPA Network programme) was first conceptualised based on Roberts’ paper and the packet switching technology.

It is August 30^th, 1969 that marks the birth of ARPANET, the predecessor of the Internet, hence also the birth of the internet as well. An IMP (Interface Message Processor) was successfully delivered from BBN (originally Bolt, Beranek and Newma), a high-technology company which provides research and development services, to Klienrock’s Network Measurement Centre at UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) becoming the first node of the ARPANET. The next nodes to emerge was SRI (Stanford Research Institute) and UCSB (University of California, Santa Barbara). Then more and more nodes emerged adding on to the network at a rate of around one per month. This was virtually unknown until the International Conference on Computer Communication in Washington DC in October 1972. By then, the ARPANET is no longer just about military use, and BBN from then until now remains a defence contractor for ARPA.

Competition between the Networks

The next field of the application of computing network after military use is education. Many institutions and universities started to develop their own network. Many other networks beside the ARPANET were developed for the purpose of quick data sharing, some of which are still extensively used until today and some no longer. ALOHAnet, for example, went into operation in 1970 at the University of Hawaii under the leadership of Norman Abramson which later connected to ARPANET in 1972, but it is no longer in use today. But Ethernet, which refers to the widely and still used today Local Area Network (LAN), is based on ALOHAnet’s protocol. BITNET, developed in 1981 by Ira H. Fuchs of City University of New York and Greydon Freeman of Yale University too faded away but did have a fare share of success around 1991 to 1992. But in the following years, it was later outnumbered by the number of connections to the successor of ARPANET, the Internet. By year 2000, BITNET’s remaining heritage mailing lists in regular use was a Blues music discussion group. Although, in 1988, BITNET did merge with another network the, CSNET (Computer and Science Research Network) to form CREN (Corporation for Research and Educational Networking) which is still somewhat in use today.

CSNET started its development in 1979, lead by L. H. Landweber and sponsored by the National Science Foundation, which helped introduce and popularised what was fast becoming the internet outside ARPANET to universities around the world. These universities naturally chose ARPANET’s network protocol, TCP/IP, which played a crucial role in ARPANET’s success. CSNET led directly to the development of the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET). NSFNET was later officially dissolved on April 30^th, 1995. Although, it did retained a core research network for research only use called the Very High Speed Backbone Network Service (vBNS).

Other networks which remain active until today are FidoNet and USENET. FidoNet is an amateur electronic mail network with over 15,000 mail nodes world wide, most publicly accessible Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) incorporated as a company in 1986. By 1998, FidoNet had about 30,000 nodes world wide, and it remains active into the 21'st century. USENET was developed in a similar manner to the other networks after ARPANET, where Jim Ellis and Tom Truscott, graduates from Duke University wanted similar capabilities of the mailing list on ARPANET for universities which weren’t doing research with the by-then-called DARPA, where in 1973, ‘D’ was added to stand for Defense and Research Project Agency. USENET was originally developed to share files between computers, but evolved into a net-wide hierarchy of the eight major categories plus a catch-call.

The advantage which ARPANET had over other networks is it being affiliated to BBN. What made ARPANET a stronger competitor among the networks were the invention of the E-mail and the development of the TCP/IP protocols, both advancements were from BBN developed in the 70s for ARPANET. This lead to other networks developing similar mailing and protocol systems of and for their own. Both E-mail and TCP/IP later became the standards of their type in the 80s. This one decade long duration of development to standardisation shows the resistance of other networks to make a switch from their own convention to the ARPANET’s convention.

ARPANET to Internet

The email was invented by Ray Tomlinson under BBN for ARPANET as part of a small group of programmers who were developing a time-sharing system called TENEX and was making improvements on a single-computer electronic mail programme called SNDMSG. The world’s first messages between two computers connected only by a computer network, the ARPANET, were sent in late 1971. The next release, TENEX, went out in early 1972 and included the version of SNDMSG with network mail capabilities. He develops the ‘user@host’ convention, choosing the ‘@’ sign arbitrarily from the non-alphabetic symbols on the keyboard. Other later networks with emailing capabilities chose other characters, and it was not until the late 1980s when ‘@’ finally become a worldwide standard.


Raymond Samuel “Ray” Tomilson invented the E-mail and implemented the famous '@' standard where the first email was sent in 1971.	Vinton Gray “Vint” Cerf (left) and Robert Elliot “Bob” Kahn worked together under Lawrence G. Roberts to invent the TCP/IP protocol in 1973.

In 1973, Robert Kahn from BBN and Vint Cerf from Stanford joins the DARPA, to work for Lawrence Roberts in connecting ARPANET with other networks. By September 1973, the two gave their first paper on the new Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) at an International Network Working Group meeting (INWG meeting) at the University of Sussex, England. The term “internet” was adopted in the first RFC (Request for Comments) published on the TCP protocol, RFC 657. In technical terms, internet referrers to any network using the TCP/IP protocol.

Sooner, many other networks develop their own protocols, and it was only in 1984 onwards was when TCP/IP started its way to become world the standard. The US Department of Defence made the TCP/IP the standard for all military computer networking, which provided the protocol a higher profile and stable funding, and Dan Lynch and the Internet Architecture Board held a three day workshop on TCP/IP for the computer industry attended by about 50 researchers and 250 vendor representatives in 1985 which lead to several development of TCP/IP networking products by various companies. This is what lead to the development of the modern internet.

Before and Beyond

The previous services which the internet advanced from were of course those in the field of communications such as the electric telegraph, telephone, wireless telegraphy more commonly known as radio, and television. But as it did so from telegraph to telephone, telephone to radio and radio to television, the newer technologies simply outclassed the previous but not replace it, except for telegraphy-to-telephones. Although telephones completely made telegraphy obsolete, the submarine communications cables linking continents which used to carry telegraphy traffic now carries telephone traffic. Subsequently, the internet utilises and integrated with these telephone lines. In fact and clearly, the whole existence of the internet relied on the existence of telephones.

How the internet allowed the sharing and access of information with speed changed how the world operates.

Map of the internet (from Wikipedia)

Transforming mailing from the traditional use of using ink-and-paper for the content, and on-foot, vehicles, ships and aeroplanes for the sending, to electronic data for contents and mouse-clicks for the sending; from physical-travelling-to-purchase-products, to online shopping; from the tangible newspapers, to online news; from brick-walled three-to-four-stories libraries and archives, to search engines – Google especially; from personal paper-and-ink logbooks or diaries, to public electronic logs – web-logs, shortened to a more easily and quickly pronounced ‘blog’; from text blogging, to online video blogging (vlog) with the video sharing website – YouTube; from board games, to massive multiplayer online and to virtual worlds – World of Warcraft and Second Life respectively; from paper printed encyclopaedias, to free easily accessible online encyclopaedias opened to be edited by anyone – Wikipedia; from conventional socialising, to online and virtual social networking – especially Facebook, becoming the world’s identity registry; and from online social networking, to frequent instant personal, company, media, news and celebrity updates via the phone – Twitter; the internet has truly transformed human civilisation into a Global Village.

If there is a technology in the line of communications which can surpass the internet, one could only speculate of a technology which provides network coverage across the solar system and beyond.

World Education Ranking on Reading, Math and Science

2011-08-26T14:32:00.000+08:00

An interesting data comparing the education of various countries:

From Gurdian's article World education rankings: which country does best at reading, maths and science?

What Lay People Should Know about Cloning – Ethical and Legal Issues (technical) [Part 3]

2011-08-23T11:21:00.000+08:00

by Zad Datu

Preceeding linked article (Read first!):
What Lay People Should Know about Cloning – Animal Reproductive Cloning
What Lay People Should Know about Cloning – Other Types of Cloning
What Lay People Should Know about Cloning – Fear Fuelled Objections (opinion) [Part 1] [Part 2]

Return to [Part 1 (of 3)]
Return to [Part 2 (of 3)]

Human Cloning Attempts

Panayiotis Michael “Panos” Zavos from Kentucky Center of Reproductive Medicine &amp; IVF, a Greek Cypriot from Cyprus and American citizen currently living in Lexington, Kentucky is an infertility expert who has devoted well over a quarter of a decade to academia and research and has had a long career performing IVF, whom later founded Zavos Organization in Lexington, has been saying since 2001 that the time to clone a human is already.

On 9^th March 2001, Zavos alongside Severino Antinori, a controversial Italian gynaecologist and fertility doctor from Rome who have already made headlines when he enabled a 62-year-old woman, Rosanna Dell Corte from Canino, Italy to give birth on July 18, 1994, who became the oldest mother to give birth at that time, announced that they are fully prepared to perform therapeutic human cloning, seven months before the first human cloned embryo was successful, which did not even survive to the blasocyst stage. They even claimed to have rounded up a team of scientists and doctors who are ready to clone a baby by the end of 2002. Regardless of the risks known in the animal cloning experiments, Zavos and Antinori insist that it is safe to proceed with human cloning.

Zavos announced before the US Congressional committee Hearing on 15^th of May, 2002 of his intention to clone a human being and that “There is every indication that 2002 will be the year of the clones,” but admitted that he may not be the first to succeed. He also suggested that the best way to deal with the risks of human cloning is to legalise and regulate it instead of banning it all together, as regardless of bans someone, somewhere will attempt human cloning.

Since then, there have been many controversial human cloning claims most of which were unconvincing as they lacked evidence, causing international uproars, scorned and condemned upon by mainstream scientists, described as irresponsible and misusing genetic science:

April 2002: Early in the month, Severino Antinori announced his claim at a genetic engineering conference at Abu Dhabi that a woman is 8 weeks pregnant with the world’s first human clone. No evidence was presented. Even his own former partner, Panos Zavos claims that there have been “no clones, no laboratory, no patients and no doctors to help him,” and this severed their affiliation. But Antinori later he claimed that he had no involvement in the pregnancies – plural, not singular – and that there were three women in their 9th, 7th and 6th week of pregnancy, which he got to know of from other doctors.
27 December 2002: Brigitte Boisselier, a Raelean bishop (a religious cult with the belief that Earth life was created by an extraterrestrial species) and CEO of Clonaid (a human cloning company run by the cult) announced that a 31-year-old American woman gave birth to her own clone named Eve – another world’s first cloned human baby. With no surprise that no evidence was presented.
17 January 2004: Zavos announced at a news conference in a central London hotel claimed to have implanted cloned embryos into a woman’s womb. Zavos said that it was too early to determine if the implantation is successful. Zavos published a paper on this procedure and claimed that the procedure was filmed by independent filmmaker, Peter Williams, and that DNA testing can be performed to confirm his claim. It was later revealed on 4th February that the attempt failed – that pregnancy did not take place.

In response to the numerous non credible claims, on January 21^st 2004, the British scientific community and the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority (HFEA) made a request to news editors in the UK not to give press coverage to Zavos’s cloning efforts and to “reconsider the prominence given to repeated claims by certain scientists that they have cloned a human being, including those made by Dr. Panos Zavos last weekend”. The letter was signed by qualified scientists from many reputable institutions. Zavos took the effort to defend himself during the 31^st August press conference later that year, which is meticulously presented in his webpage http://www.zavos.org/library/library_hfea.htm.

May 2004: Antinori restates his April 2002 claim of the three pregnancies at a press conference on reproductive technology in Rome still denying his involvement but that he only gave a ‘cultural and scientific contribution’ and confirming the births and that he knows they went well and confirming the fact exists whilst refusing to provide further details or evidence.
August 2004: Zavos claimed to have cloned human embryos once again, but from the DNA of two corpses belonging to victims of road accidents – Cady, an 11-year old girl and a 33-year old man – then implanting them into a woman’s womb, and once again it was filmed by Peter Williams and has published his work in an online medical journal run by one of the pioneers of IVF. Zavos later revealed that the surrogate mother failed be impregnated. Regardless of condemnations, Zavos sees himself to be helping families to create a genetic replica of loved ones who have passed away.
2004 – 2006: Zavos have been publishing experimented on interspecies cloned embryos of human DNA from a man but an oocyte of a bovine (subfamily Bovinae, which includes cattle, bison, buffalo, yaks and antelopes) for research and practicing purposes as has been conducted by other scientists. He insists that he never intends to implant an interspecies clone for reproduction nor does he think it should ever be done.
Early March 2009: Antinori once again restates his 2002 claim, this time to Italy’s Oggi magazine, boastfully saying “I helped give birth to three children with the human cloning technique,” and “It involved two boys and a girl who are nine years old today,” adding and “they were born healthy and they are in excellent health now,” and that they are now living in Eastern Europe without providing evidence once again.
April 2009: Zavos attempted to clone Cady once again this time produce 14 embryos and implanted 11 of them into the wombs of 4 women who were paid up to £50,000, three of which were couples, one British, and the fourth was a single woman. As usual, no proof was provided nor did he submit any scientific publication. This again was filmed by Peter Williams (many of his films on Zavos procedure were presented on Discovery Channel) who testified the legitimacy of the procedure for reproductive purposes to The Independent adding that the women were genuinely hoping to become pregnant. But once again, all failed to achieve pregnancy. The location of the procedure is secret but is speculated to be in the Middle East.

Human Cloning Debates

Instead of allowing a sperm to fertilise with an egg, cloning uses a nucleus of a completely different kind of cell. Instead of having a sperm to fertilise the egg, electrocution is used. In cloning the chromosome of the ovum is removed and what else is removed along with that isn’t something we are entirely sure of. Performing all these unnatural processes to produce and offspring is very likely to be of higher risk than that of natural processes. To assume safety is to be irresponsible, most scientists would say.

With the uncertainties of cloning we are yet to solve, cloning humans is just like using humans as guinea pigs for the cloning procedure. Even if the clones appear completely normal at the early stage of life, it is still very likely that abnormality and deformities as a result of cloning would appear in the later years of life, just as they do currently in animals. Zavos argues that since there already is a 3% - 4% of genetic abnormality for natural sexual reproduction, the imperfection from human cloning is just another form to live with.

Many dismiss Zavos’s TV documentary effort as simply attention seeking. Zavos argues that there is a demand for media coverage by the public in the field of human cloning and that advances in the technology should be presented to better inform the public to educate the public to decide for themselves whether they are against or for reproductive cloning. He states that many oppose human cloning out of the fear of what they do not know. Zavos, who claims to have inquiries from around 100 potential patients, truly believes that human cloning can brighten up the life of many infertile couples. He has receive inquiries to participate at international forums to present his data and have attended numerous press conference and interviews and intend to do so more in the future to educate the public on the technology.

Both sides agree that all the cloning experiments performed thus far are on animals and that they resulted in a high percentage of birth defects. It is the interpretation of this is what both sides don’t agree with. The human cloning proponents interprets this as that these birth defects may occur to human cloning as well if attempted, and that since that there are no cloning technique on animals which has a high success rate in developing normal babies, no one can guarantee a human cloning technique of high success rate especially that there hasn’t been any experiments on human cloning – that the implications of attempting to clone a human at this stage of cloning technology is unimaginable and it would be completely irresponsible to do so.

But Zavos interprets it otherwise. There are many instances in countless numbers of interviews where he states that just because all these birth defects occurs in animals, it doesn’t mean that it will occur in humans. He says that with over 25 years of experience working with human embryos in IVF procedures in his expertise, he can use the advance fertilization techniques which animal cloning procedures do not utilise, hence the chances of successfully producing a normal human clone is higher than that of animals. He obviously seems to think that he, who has never performed cloning – not even on animals – claims to know better about human cloning than the scientists who have been performing cloning on animals since Dolly in 1997 does. Whether his confidence and optimism is a result of flawed assumption or not is up to anyone to decide, but majority of the scientific community, even cloning experts, condemn his human cloning attempts.

Dr. Zavos has also said that he is against the idea of creating human embryos to experiment on them, then killing it. This is partially the reason why he wishes to go for the ‘instant success’ path and produce a normal human clone. But the first attempt of ‘instant success’ cloned baby would be a human guinea pig. This is why nobody, except for Zavos, dares to clone a human. Most scientists would prefer to have the perfect low risk animal cloning technique in their hands before attempting to try it on humans which sounds perfectly reasonable, but Zavos obviously seems to think that this is unnecessary.

Zavos remains firm that he does not intend to create deformed babies or break any laws. He will perform cloning in countries where cloning is not banned, but refuses to reveal where, and that the embryos will be thoroughly tested for chromosomal and other defects before implanting them and will abandon the procedure if any form of defects is discovered.

Killing Embryos vs Killing Grasses (comic)

2011-08-14T01:31:00.001+08:00

The following directly relates to What Lay People Should Know about – Fear Fuelled Objections (opinion) [Part 2].

WLPSK Facebook Page

2011-08-12T12:40:00.003+08:00

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What Lay People Should Know about Cloning – Ethical and Legal Issues (technical) [Part 1]

2011-08-09T23:13:00.005+08:00

Ethical Debates on Killing Embryos

As definitive as I have attempted to establish that human embryos are not humans in the previous article, I doubt that the debates would ever end. Defining what it means to be a person is very subjective and has caused many evil acts in the past. Slavery and the massacre of indigenous people were results of subjective definitions which disregards certain races as not people or not humans.

Many scientists and scientific books on embryology state that human life begins at conception. Some argues that conscious life only begins when the heartbeat develops, which is during the 5th week of pregnancy, or when the brain begins developing activity, which has been detected at 54 days after conception. One fact which I can insist on is that embryos do not and never did have conscious feelings and thoughts.

A report in the British Medical Journal states that foetuses cannot feel pain because it requires mental development that only occurs outside the womb. Also, according to Dr Stuart Derbyshire, of the University of Birmingham, a baby's subjectivity of pain is enabled by actions and relationships with carers. But interestingly and not surprisingly enough, pro-life groups say foetuses respond to stimuli from 20 weeks.

But scientist proponents of therapeutic cloning says that embryos are not equivalent to human life as they are still incapable of surviving outside the womb – that they are only potential humans. They state that more than a third of zygotes do not implant after conception, and that far more embryos are lost due to chance than are proposed to be used for embryonic stem cell research or treatments.

A rebuttal to this is that in some countries, a relatively high percentage of children die before a certain age. Should we allow killing of children? The way I see it, this is a bad analogy as these children are capable of experiencing pain and suffering, whereas embryos are not. Another rebuttal could be regarding comatose patient whom are technically described as those who cannot be awakened, fails to respond normally to painful stimuli, light or sound, lacks a normal sleep-wake cycle and does not initiate voluntary actions. Since they are in such a state, should we allow the killing of comatose patients? The answer should be “no” because they have the potential of awakening just as those who are asleep where some who do not respond to pain in their sleep.

Coma can last from days to weeks and even years, where some regain consciousness to a stable condition, some to a vegetative state, and others die. Wouldn’t this mean that comatose patients are only potential consciousness, just as embryos are simply potential humans? Should we allow the killing of comatose patients? The difference between them and embryos is that the patients have already lived their lives as fully developed and conscious human beings whom had rights, ambitions and dreams. They do not just have the potential to regain consciousness, but potential to recover to the life they were living.

Babies born in a coma state are not and probably never were capable of pain and suffering. This is no different from embryos which never were capable of pain and suffering but only have the potential, and to define that babies aren’t fully developed humans is as valid of an interpretation as stating that embryos are not humans, since there isn’t a scientific fine line to define the matter. Is it then reasonable to kill babies born in such conditions? Surprisingly, I came up with this argument against my own logic by myself. Did I just defeat myself? I have a response to this, actually.

If the baby was intended to be raised as a son or daughter, which I certainly hope is the case, then of course it would be immoral to shatter the parents dream by killing the baby. But the parents should have the rights to have the baby subjected to euthanasia if all treatments to awaken the baby fail and if it’s concluded that nothing can be done. But if a comatose baby which never did and never will develop consciousness and experience suffering is produced with the intent to be killed and used for research and treatment purposes, if that is possible in the first place, as disgusting as I am going to sound, I suppose it isn’t a horrible act based on the “doing harm” logic for the baby. But it does harm the mother, so it is horrible. What kind of mother would be willing to go through the pain of labour for nothing? Neither I nor anyone would support such a procedure even if it is for research or treatment. Even if a woman is willing to be paid for such a procedure, there is a major concern – the exploitation of women’s body which may lead to a new form of human trafficking.

This is actually another interesting point made by opponents of embryonic stem cell research – that vulnerable women will be walking ovary factories exploiting their bodies, vulnerable to human trafficking. Former US president George W. Bush himself addressed this issue in his speech on April 10, 2002 to call back the senate to back the banning of human cloning where he says “This would create a massive national market for eggs and egg donors – an exploitation of women’s bodies that we cannot and must not allow.”

There already are about an estimate of 400,000 available frozen embryos in laboratories in the US alone which may never find its way into the womb as a result of in vitro fertilisation where only a selected few are implanted to successfully conceive a baby. Some of these excess embryos are implanted into adopted mothers to be born as healthy babies, some are donated to stem cell research, some are destroyed and some may not survive after long storage. So the argument is that we might as well use these embryos for stem cell research which kills them in the process rather than letting them die as waste. Some rebut this by questioning if it is then acceptable to kill those who are nearing their deaths for research purposes. The flaw in this rebuttal is that embryos do not and never did have conscious feelings and thoughts, whereas people nearing their deaths do.

Embryonic Stem Cells vs. Adult Stem Cells

Criticisms on the killing of embryos do not hold only for therapeutic cloning, but embryonic stem cell research as a whole. Besides criticising the field for the ending one life for the benefit of another, opponents of therapeutic cloning also criticise on the possibilities of therapeutic cloning, that they are just possibilities and has not produced any results of success, whereas the alternative technology of adult stem cells therapy has its successes in curing patients.

Human embryonic stem cells were first derived in 1998 by James Alexander Thomson from the University of Wisconsin-Madison who received patents related to a method of “isolating embryonic stem cells of humans and primates”, although there is an earlier documentation on the isolation of inner cell mass from a human blasocyst in 1994 by Ariff Bongso and colleagues from the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, National University Hospital.

Even the first human cloned embryo by Robert Lanza of Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester, Massachusetts in 2001 only produced 3 embryos out of 9 Somati Cell Nuclear Transfers (SCNT) in which none reached the blastocyst stage. The largest stopped developing only after splitting into 6 cells after three days and the other two spitted to only 4 cells. The team also performed induced parthenogenesis (a form of asexual reproduction in females where development of embryos occur without fertilisation by a male which occurs naturally in plants, common in insects and few vertebrates but not humans) on 22 human ova which succeeded in developing 6 blastocyst, but none contained the inner cell mass of which stem cells are located. Induced parthogenesis is artificial asexual reproduction hence technically is cloning, but scientists often refer to “cloning” primarily to the SCNT method, and artificial parthenogenesis of ova as “induced pathogenesis” which can only produce females.

The first successful human cloned blastocyst via SCNT was announced only in February 2004 by Hwang Woo-Suk, a South Korean established as an expert in animal cloning of celebrity status after his well received claims of successes in creating a cloned dairy cow in February 1999, another cow later on April that year, and also a BSE-resistant cow as well as the intention to clone a Siberian tiger. This human cloned blastocyst success was published in March 12^th Issue of Science. Later in May 2005, Hwang’s team announced to have created 11 human embryonic stem cells which was then published in June 17th issue of Science. Parallel to these successes, in the same month of the same year, Miodrag Stojkovic, professor of embryology and stem cell biology at Newcastle, and his colleagues succeeded in producing 3 cloned embryos which survived up to the blastcyst stage, but these were clones from human embryonic stem cells of discarded embryos and yet they failed to produce a stem cell line. Deceivingly, it turns out that all Hwang’s claims were fraudulent. There are still no stem cells from cloned embryos to date.

It was four years after the fraud, 17^th January 2008, when the first matured human embryos were cloned via SCNT by Stemagen, a privately held embryonic stem cell research company in Carlifonia, as announced by the Chief Scientific Officer, Andrew French. Stemagen’s founder and CEO, Samuel H. Wood, one of the country’s most highly respected fertility specialists, used his own skin cells and 25 donated mature oocytes (the germ cells (mother cells) of ova) to produce five blastocyst. French said that “No other scientific group has documented the cloning of an adult human cell, much less been able to grow it to the blastocyst stage, the stage at which it is the adult donor cell that is driving embryonic development, the stage that yields the cells (the inner cell mass) from which embryonic stem cell lines are made.”

Apparently, this achievement had mixed reviews by the embryonic stem cell research community. President of California’s Stem Cell Institute, Alan Trounson said “(This) is a very challenging area, and there are not many players in it because of its difficulty,” adding “This is some of the best work I've read about in this area.” Director of the Human Embryo and Embryonic Stem Cell Center at Stanford University, Renee Reijo Pera, wasn’t impressed with the quantity or quality of the embryos as and called it “a reasonably small step forward.” Robert Lanza of ACT said that the report did not show the result of molecular tests scientists normally do to prove the completion of the cloning process and said “I'd really like to believe it, but I'm not sold yet.” Miodrag Stojkovic on the other hand defended the research by saying “Stemagen's work is the first time anyone has documented that this could be done with adult skin cells,” and that the work was important enough to be published in a scientific journal.

On top of these, embryonic stem cell research has still yet to overcome problems and challenges before shifting its theoretical potentials into reality. Scientists are most concerned about the development of tumours in the transplanted tissue, which has bee proven as an occurring setback in experiments with histocompatible animals. Scientists are yet determine an appropriate state and conditions of and for differentiation of embryonic stem cells into specialised cells before transplantation, and to establish protocols for these states and conditions. This is a difficult feat due to the speed at which embryonic stem cells grow which may be uncontrollable resulting in tumours. Targeting the differentiated cells to the appropriate part of the organ also proves as a hurdle.

Common rejections of transplanted tissues occur because all cells carry antigens by which immune systems recognise. There are countless numbers of possible combinations of antigens, and if the combinations do not match, the tissue is likely to be rejected. Due to this it seems that countless numbers of embryonic cell lines is required in a bank. The best solution for this is to create an embryonic stem cell line from the patient’s own genetic material for him or herself through therapeutic cloning. But experiments in mice results in rejection of tissues derived from the specimen’s own cloned embryos.

Even if each of these problems were solved, it is estimated that the cost for the procedure is over 200,000 USD in the US, as the budget for the human oocyte material alone, which is needed to generate a customised set of nuclear transfer embryonic stem cell lines for one patient, is estimated to cost form 100,000 and 200,000 USD. Only the very wealthy could afford this, making the technology impractical and expensive to ever become widely available. On the other hand, adult stem cells require little of no manipulation, and although relatively rare, they are readily available in the patients, making the cost far more reasonable than that of embryonic stem cells.

In contrast to the development human embryonic stem cell research, human adult stem cell research first began as early as the 60’s which even succeeded in treating a patient with severe combined immunodeficiency disorder in 1968. Types of adult stem cells range from blood-forming stem cells (hematopoietic stem cell) found in bone marrows, to mesenchymal stem cell which has the ability to differentiate into various types of cells and is also found in bone marrows (as well as placenta, adipose tissue, lung, umbilical cord, and even teeth), blood vessel lining stem cells (endothelial stem cells) which is also found in the bone marrow, mammary stem cell from mammary gland (milk producing organ), and to neural stem cell found in brain tissues, and more. Since the early 70’s, hematopoietic stem cells have been treating cancer conditions such as leukaemia and lymphoma – to recover the hematopoietic cells which were killed during chemotherapy.

Hematopoietic and stromal stem cell differentiation
[image from http://stemcells.nih.gov] (© 2001 Terese Winslow)

Scientists have also discovered that adult stem cells have more plasticity then once thought. It was discovered that multipotent (capable to differentiate to a limited number of cell fates) adult progenitor cells (MAPC) found in bone marrows seem to have ploripotent (capable of differentiating into all types of cell) potentials both in vivo and in vitro as they are said to be able to develop into all of the 210 different tissue types in the human body. This has been suggested as an alternative to embryonic stem cells.

Despite the facts of “embryonic stem cell vs. adult stem cell” presented by opponents of embryonic stem cell research and therapeutic cloning, there have been a small light of success in India. Dr. Geeta Shroff, an infertility expert became the first person to develop pure human embryonic stem cell lines developed from just one donated embryo from an IVF donor. She has been treating over 700 patients from all over the world including from the United States with conditions such as autoimmune disorders, cardiac disorders, Alzhimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis, renal failure, cerebral palsy, diabetes and mainly spinal cord injury, where many of those unable to walk for years find themselves taking their first steps after undergoing weeks of injections along with intense physical therapies since 2002 at the Nu Tech Mediworld hospital in New Delhi. The procedure costs around 20,000 to 30,000 USD and none of which showed any signs of side-effects. In India, there never were controversial issues and fusses made on the destruction of human embryo, and the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) allows the use of embryonic stem cells only on conditions considered to be incurable and terminal.

Nevertheless, some scientists and stem cell researchers in the West consider that these patients flocking to Shroff are placing themselves at huge risk to undergo experimental treatments, as there is a lack of legislation governing the use of stem cell in India as well as other developing nations. As controversial fields are bound to have controversial issues, there are also criticisms mainly from the west on the legitimacy of her claims. This is mainly because instead of publishing her research to be submitted to peer-review, which is a common practice for good science, she patented her technology with the World Intellectual Property Organisation, covering over 126 countries. Criticisms have been worded as “patients could be injected with anything without knowing” and “taking advantage of desperate patients.”

But as in all cases, where there are opponents, there are proponents. The first American physician who visited the hospital, Dr. Laurance Johnston, director of the Spinal Cord Research and Education Foundations, Paralyzed Veterans of America and was a person of high credentials. He was impressed by Shroff’s treatment and was convinced that she is sincere and conscientious in her endeavors and also said “I think India is at the forefront of emerging stem-cell treatments in many ways.”

[Continue to [Part 2 (of 3)]

Sections in the part 2:

World Cloning Laws

Reactions on Animal Reproductive Cloning

Sections in the part 3:

Human Cloning Attempts

Human Cloning Debates

Cloning from Family Guy (video; humour)

2011-08-05T16:42:00.007+08:00

This may not be entirely fitting, but there are some relevance to the current series of articles.
Just for the fun of it... Watch and enjoy:

What Lay People Should Know about Cloning – Fear Fuelled Objections (opinion) [Part 2]

2011-08-02T11:54:00.005+08:00

Return to [Part 1 (of 2)]

The “Doing Harm” Logic
Let’s forget about the “creating life, hence playing god” argument.

Shouldn’t morality be based on whether or not the act does harm onto others?

Whether it is direct harm or indirect, whether it is long term or short, whether it is physical, emotional or psychological, whether it is to just one person or an entire population, the basis of immoral or unethical behaviour should be based on how the act does harm to others. An act in the legal scale as animal cruelty, man slaughter and polluting the environment to something to the scale of relationship such as cheating on one’s partner and even in a conversational scale such as using foul words, being rude and calling each other names have its unethical and immoral acceptance in this principle. Of course there are exceptions such as harming the guilty in order to protect the innocent, or physically harming someone for the sake of his or her survival. Morality based solely on the preference of the majority, the higher authority, the feared, traditions and laws is undoubtedly unreasonable. Human sacrifice, slavery, the burying of baby girls, racism and hatred towards homosexuality are just some of the many past practices – some still present – resulted from unreasonable based systems of morality.

Let’s start off with therapeutic cloning. The process requires creating a genetic embryonic replica of somebody, then later killing it. For some, such an act sound immoral. Yes, the living human embryos created are fated to be killed, but they are not capable of experiencing pain and suffering anymore than the live grasses we step on everyday and once in a while violently slicing them off with rotating blades powered by fuelled engines, as both plants and embryos do not have nerve cells. Human embryos show signs of neural folds indicating the beginning of the development of neural tube formation 19 days after fertilisation, whereas embryos are killed as the stem cells are removed which is only extractable in the blastocyst stage, which is in the day 4 or 5 after fertilisation.

Grasses, trees and plants are living beings, but never do we hear objections on the ethics of the abuse and massacre of these creatures because they are not capable of suffering. Imagine there being an NGO with the objective to end plant cruelty. Silly isn’t it? An NGO with the objective to end the cruelty against balls of brainless and nerveless cells too would be just as silly. The ethical issues raised on chopping down too many trees has got nothing to do with the non-existing pain and suffering of plants, but rather how this would affect the environment hence affecting the daily lives and survival of the human population, whom are capable of experiencing suffering.

This is the basic idea behind why there are no objections behind reproductive cloning of plants, but there are against that of animals and human. The topic in question here is the success rate and how safe the cloning techniques are. Aside from concerns of the cruelty towards animals involved in the cloning process, opponents are also concerned about the food safeties resulting from farm animal clone products.

Then, there is the argument on the value of human life. Therapeutic cloning will serve medical purposes, but no human life should be killed out of his or her will for the benefit for another, which I completely agree with. But firstly, human embryos are not humans – they are embryos. Just as plant seeds are not plants – they are seeds. Cushing a single seed is not equivalent to cutting down a whole tree, just as grinding coffee beans is not equivalent to deforestation. Yes, seeds and embryos have the potential of becoming fully developed plants and humans, but they are not fully developed plants and humans. Same goes with each and every one of your sperms or ova. Even if to kill human embryos is to disrespecting the value of human life, it doesn’t seem to apply practically to our lives.

The inconsistency of the “human life value” argument can also be revealed when compared to IVF. The process includes the in vitro insemination of the mother’s ova retrieved via a minor surgical procedure, by sperms retrieved from the father normally by ejaculation. Then the embryos are either cultured if they are meant to be freshly transferred into the mother’s uterus two to six days after insemination, or frozen (embryo cryopreservation) if they are meant to be transferred much later where they are thawed before the transfer. But before the transfer, out of the culture, the embryos undergo selection via laboratory grading methods to optimise pregnancy rates. If killing embryo against its will is equal to killing a human again his or her will, are freezing embryos and selecting embryos to be transferred against their will equal to freezing humans and selecting which to live and which not to against their will?

Lastly, commonly more than one embryo are transferred into the mother depending on her age and health factors as well as number of embryos available while expecting only one embryo to develop into a foetus to finally be born as a healthy baby. This process obviously includes the expectation of some transferred embryos, and yet IVF raises only few ethical issues while therapeutic cloning is extremely controversial and is banned in many countries. And the funny thing is that some of these countries which bans therapeutic cloning legalises IVF as well as abortion.

I understand that there are many more and stronger arguments and rebuttals against the killing of embryos which address how we consider a human to be a person. But this would be presented for the real debates in the succeeding article.

For now, let’s just assume that the cloning techniques are safe and reliable. In what way does human cloning do harm to others? And if human cloning does harm, in what way does AI and IVF does any less harm than human cloning? Certainly doesn’t seem like it, but keep in mind that morality should not just be based on reasoning alone. Morality should be based on educated rational reasoning. Ignorant reasoning will result in bad moral understanding. So maybe I am being ignorant towards the possible negative outcome of human cloning. Allow me to look into the possibilities brought upon opponents of human cloning.

Some argue that cloning to produce children may complicate a family, especially in relationship issues. Just imagine a couple with a son who is a clone of the father, and a daughter who is a clone of the mother. The siblings would not have any genetic relation to each other, and as the son and daughter reach their 20s, perhaps, they will be a splitting image as when the parents met and fell in love. Will the siblings find attraction towards each other as their parents did at their age? Or even worst, how would a parent feel when he or she finds himself or herself looking at a splitting image of his or her lover at the age they met? One may ask “How will the family ever work out?”

Ian Wilmut himself points out a possible negative implication of human cloning. If a parent were to clone a figure such as Einstein, Mozart, Beethoven, or any other genius public figure as their child, pressure may be placed upon the child by the parents to meet their expectations. The truth is that these kinds of pressure by parents occur all the time even without cloning. This is not an unnatural occurrence. Even if this does occurs with clones, it is not a question of how the child was conceived but rather the attitude of the parents towards their child.

As of the case of a son being a splitting image of the father at the same age, or a daughter to mother, this too occurs naturally all the time, yet it is innocuous. Even if a close family friend notices the extreme resemblance between the clone child and the parent, the friend probably would never figure out the truth behind the strong resemblance unless the friend was told so or witnessed a DNA test between the two. The friend would probably think it is just another case strong resemblance.

50 cents and son

On top of that, there already are families where there are no genetic relation between siblings as well as between parents and children through adoption, families with children who are from a previous marriage or from previous mirages of both parents, and there are also polygamous families. With these odd and unnatural genetic relations in families already seeming innocuous, families with clones as children should not seem so out of place. Sons will be sons and daughters will be daughters to parents regardless of their genetics.

So that’s it! There’s nothing wrong with human cloning, right?

No. I’m afraid I’m not finished yet… There still are more to look at.

Negative Possibilities on the Human Population

Greater divergence of social classes may be in threat due to human cloning with the addition of genetic modification. A social class of the genetically modified and the non-modified social classes may exist, dividing further the upper class and the lower – the wealthy and the poor – those who can afford genetic modification and those who can’t. Such speculated society my cause all sorts of tension and problems as artistically portrayed in one of my favourite science fiction movies Gattaca (1997), which introduces a form of discrimination worst than racism they called genoism – the discrimination against one’s genes. Aside from that, some simply fear against the kinds of eerie mutants and freaks which may be amongst us just like those straight out of science fiction tales as a result.

But this concern for genetic engineered clones is primarily the fear of eugenics, in which the most infamous example is the Nazi Germany’s principle of racial hygiene to improve the Aryan race which involved the mass sterilising of over 40,000 and the massacre of 70,000 people labelled as Lebensunwertes Leben – the ‘life unworthy of life’ which included but not limited to criminals, degenerates, dissidents, feeble-minded, homosexuals, idles, the insane and the weak.

Another possible concern contrasting to genetic modification and eugenics is the decrease of gene diversity in the human population. In organisms which reproduce only asexually, the population will have no gene diversity. If all the individuals in a population are genetically identical, and a virus which the sets of genes do not have the immunity against plagues them, the entire population will be wiped off from existence. This is the advantage of sexual reproduction as it is the source of gene diversity. Survival is the very reason sexual reproduction evolved. If asexual reproduction starts taking over sexual reproduction in the human population, the consequence may be negative towards our survival.

One last point which I can raise on the ethics of artificial reproduction of humans as a whole is that it would perhaps be somewhat selfish and inconsiderate to the society to chose artificial reproduction over adopting those who are readily available and in need for adoption when reproduction through sexual intercourse fails. There are already almost 7 billion humans in this planet! Do we need more? With overpopulation, balance is in risk. There won’t be enough drinking water, food, and adequate sanitation for the entire population. The fact that we know the implications behind overpopulation, it would be arguably irresponsibly unethical or immoral to allow it happen or especially when the power to prevent it is in our hands, choosing artificial sexual reproduction over adoption would just worsen the situation. Unlike the “creating life” and the “value of human life” argument, this statement applies to our practical lives.

Once again, education moral reasoning comes into play – in broader terms, one could argue that if one knows of the negative implications of a situation at risk which may affect oneself, one’s loved ones, or one’s local or the global community, which one has the power or can take measures to prevent, it would be irresponsibly unethical to stand by and chooses not to prevent it. It would be even more irresponsibly unethical and immoral to knowingly take actions, intentionally or not, which could worsen the situation at risk. To intentionally choose to remain ignorant towards the actions which could worsen the situation as an excuse too would be an irresponsible act.

Actually, these last three farfetched negative possibilities of human cloning can be the artistic yet scientific and practical representation of playing god. But this is not a conclusion stating that human cloning is unethical and immoral or not. These are just the few practical points that can be put forth against human cloning.

Anyway, most of these aren’t the real debates discussed currently. The scientific debates mostly question the safety, success rate and reliability of the current cloning techniques. Is animal cloning animal cruelty? When does human life begin? What are the rebuttals towards “embryos are not people”? Is human cloning is to use humans as guinea pigs? Is human cloning banned, and has it been performed? This is where this article shall end and where the next article will begin.

Succeeding linked article – coming soon:
What Lay People Should Know about Cloning – Ethical and Legal Issues (technical) [Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3]

What Lay People Should Know about Cloning – Fear Fuelled Objections (opinion) [Part 1]

2011-07-26T16:35:00.006+08:00

by Zad Datu

Preceeding linked article (Read first!):
What Lay People Should Know about Cloning – Animal Reproductive Cloning
What Lay People Should Know about Cloning – Other Types of Cloning

The pen is mightier than the sword.

First there was The Boys from Brazil – a 1976 novel by Ira Levin which imaged an evil uprising made possible through cloning technology. This intriguing scale of evil even made its way into the cinema in 1978.

The story depicts an amateur Nazi hunter, Barry Kohler and a professional Nazi hunter, Ezra Lieberman tracking down a case of assassinations by the Comrades’ Organisation, an international brotherhood of old Nazis. The evil plot includes a series of assassination in progress of 94 men around Europe, Canada and United States over a period of two and a half years. All the victims were 65-year-old civil servants with positions of minor bureaucratic authority, all to be killed on specific dates instructed by Josef Rudolf Mengele (an actual historical figure who was a German SS officer in the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, who was infamous for performing gruesome human experiments on camp inmates, including children, earning him the nickname Angel of Death).

Lieberman interviews three of the victims’ wives, one in Germany, another in the United States and the last in London and notices that all wives were much younger than their husbands and have teenage sons who looked identical to each other – black hair, blue eyes, pale skin and lanky body. Upon further investigation Lieberman discovers that all the three boys proved to be the result of illegal adoptions of infants from Brazil by the Comrades’ Organisation to couples all over Europe and North America who fits a description – government civil servants husbands and a wife twenty years younger.

The Angel of Death’s plot was to revive Nazi. But how are the illegal adoptions and assassinations going to do that? If you knew about Hitler’s background – that his father was a politically conservative civil servant, whom he was rebellious against due to the abusiveness and authoritarian parenting, and a mother twenty years younger than the father, and that his father died at the age of 65 when he was turning 14 – you probably would have guessed Mengele’s plot. If you didn’t know about Hitler’s background, then you would have guessed it just after reading the pervious sentence.

As indulging as the story may be, after placing the book down or walking out of the cinema, one would realise that for that moment of indulgence, it was far from reality.

Then there was In His Image: The Cloning of a Man – a 1978 non-fiction book written by a respected and credible science writer and a medical reporter for Time who even contributed articles to The New York Times, David Michael Rorvik, which reports his encounter with a wealthy unmarried man and without children, referred to as “Max”, in 1973 who was in search of a doctor to clone himself for a son with the offer of one million dollars. Rorvik agreed to assist him and found a doctor, referred to as “Darwin”. Darwin used the nuclear transfer technique similar to that used on frogs in the 60s, which proved successful on Max. The cloning was performed in a secret tropical Pacific island controlled by Max. The clone was born on December of 1976 by a surrogate mother referred to as “Sparrow”.

This book did not give the same reaction as The Boys from Brazil did once the book is placed down, as the events of this book were true. Even before its publication, the story made its way to the front page of the March 3^rd 1978 publication of the New York Post announcing the first human cloning. Many believed the tale, and even his publisher was unsure. In His Image: The Cloning of a Man became a national best seller as a non-fiction title, which brought up the public’s fear on biotechnology and ethical issues towards cloning and genetic manipulation to the centre of attention.

Of course this claim is now known as a hoax, as if it were true the first human cloning would have preceded the first test tube baby – the first human in vitro fertilisation, a technology which clearly should precede and be inferior to human cloning. Rorvik and his publisher was sued for defamation by a scientist whose research was cited in the book, and was labelled “fraud and a hoax” by the court when Rorvick failed to provide concrete evidence. Rorvik’s motives for the fraud remain unclear. Some speculate that his motives were to raise awareness on the ethics of cloning.

These two books truly started the fire and stirred up the fear to question the ethics of cloning and especially human cloning, as the pen is mightier than the sword.

This fear was preceded by breakthroughs such as the deciphering of the genetic code in 1966, the isolation of DNA ligase (specific type of enzyme that repairs single-stranded discontinuities in double stranded DNA molecule) in 1967, the first isolation of gene in 1969, the isolation if restriction enzyme in 1970, the recombination of DNA molecules in 1972, and the first recombination of DNA organisms in 1973. Further more in 1980, the United States Supreme Court ruled that “live, human made microorganism is patentable material” after court battles between Anada M. Chakrabarty from G.E. and Sidney A. Diamond, the Commissioner of Patents and Trademarks when Chakrabarty developed a strain of oil eating microbes but was rejected a patent by the U.S Patent and Trademark Office in 1978. This ruling led to the birth of the modern biotech industry. Later the Human Genome Project (HGP) , a 13 year long international collaborative scientific research project primarily to identify all the approximately 20,000-25,000 genes in human DNA, and to determine the sequences of the 3 billion chemical base pairs that make up human DNA which began on October 1^st 1990 and ended on April of 2003.

Creating Life? Playing God?

The “playing god” argument for cloning is heard of all over. Proponents of the argument view reproductive cloning as creating life, hence playing god and hence immoral and unethical. Firstly, in this context, what does it mean to create life? Isn’t making babies by having sex also creating life? Life is being created through conception, isn’t it?

If what is meant by creating life is to artificially conceive a baby, then artificial insemination (AI), in vitro fertilisation (IVF) and artificial embryonic splitting – in this case, one more extra life than what was naturally under development – too are processes of creating life. So would be the innocuous process of artificial pollination. But artificial pollination isn’t condemned as creating life.

But if what is meant by creating life is to create life out of non-life, then the statement is completely false, although this has actually already been achieved on May of 2010 by John Craig Venter – a work which costs 15 years of research and about 40 million USD to create the chromosomes that control each cell of the bacteria from scratch, eventually creating the first synthetic life form. But don’t worry! Religious groups have already fulfilled their responsibility in taking a stance to correctly condemn this creation of life, as they always do ever since the beginning of scientific advancement to many scientific researches and newly discovered scientific facts which their mythical based beliefs just so happen to contradict. In fact, going further back in time to 1952, the first Miller-Urey experiment was conducted, which involves using natural, non-life related chemical reactions to form amino acids, “the building blocks of life”.

As for AI and IVF, the process still requires the existing building blocks of a newborn – (the DNA from) a sperm, (the DNA from) an ovum and a female to give birth to the baby. Similarly cloning requires the intended DNA for the clone, an enucleated ovum and a female to give birth to the clone. With cloning, scientists have merely found ways into the existing phenomena in the system of life to artificially reproduce asexually.

So allow me to put it straight and clear: Cloning is not creating life anymore than artificial pollination is. If to clone is to create life, so is artificial pollination.

Aside from the laboratory procedures, how cloning differs from IVF and AI is the resulting DNA of the offspring. AI and IVF will produce offspring with the combined DNA of half that of the male sperm donor and half that of the impregnated female – 1: male and female biological parents, where the female biological parent gives birth to the offspring. IVF can also produce offspring with the combined DNA of half that of the male sperm donor and half that of the female ova donor and without the DNA of the female who would give birth to the offspring – 2: male and female biological parents and a surrogate mother. On the other hand, cloning can produce offspring with the DNA of a single donor (male or female) utilising a surrogate mother, or if the donor is a female fit for pregnancy, she can give birth to the offspring herself – 3: one female biological parent giving birth to her own offspring, and 4: one male or female biological parent and a surrogate mother. Looking at these four combinations of “biological-to-birth parents” artificial reproduction, we can see that combinations “3” and “4” are just the asexual version of “1” and “2”. Unless asexual reproduction as itself is unethical, I don’t see how anyone can accept the ethics AI and IVF without accepting the ethics of human cloning – assuming that the technology is safe, that is.

IVF today doesn’t seem to have that invisible hat with the word “immoral” written on it as much as it used to – it is no longer taboo. But before 25^th July, 1978, the birth of the first test tube baby, Louise Brown, IVF is seen to be as immoral as cloning is seen now. People fear such medical procedures out of ignorance and that it is just a question of breaking the taboo, the argument is.

But the truth is that there still are religious objection against IVF and AI just as there are against condoms. Their argument for this, which they also use against cloning, is mostly based on the “this is how we are meant to conceive, and not like that” logic. Or in a broader manner “according to god, this is how it should be, and not like that” – the acclaimed divine fascism of a still-to-be-discovered conscious creator of the known world.

Another argument puts forth the idea of destroying our humanity. That clone children will not be treated as humans, but rather as products and objects. Once again, this is a reminiscence of the objection against the birth of Louise Brown 33 years ago. Since then, well over a million human babies have been born healthily from IVF and none of them are treated as products and objects. Some of your friends may very well be products of IVF. You won’t even be able to make out which of your friends are test tube babies and which aren’t unless you were told so.

Actually, there is no need to go so far as AI, IVF and artificial pollination to reveal the inconsistency in the argument – we could still stay within the topic of cloning to do that. Proponents of the “creating life” argument seem to not be too bothered about artificial vegetative propagation, which is a form of reproductive cloning, but for plants. Why isn’t the “creating life, hence playing god” logic used seriously to condemn horticulture? Some less serious proponents of the argument also don’t seem to be too bothered about animal cloning as well.

Now, allow me to put this part straight and clear: Cloning is not creating life anymore than artificial vegetative reproduction is, as this ancient process of artificial vegetative reproduction itself is cloning.

Honestly speaking, the basis of the whole “playing god” argument is pretty much groundless, in my opinion as there are various versions of gods from the various groups of people, all claiming that theirs are correct and the rest are wrong. On top of that, how is the sin of creating life going to practically affect our or anyone’s lives negatively or positively?

What has consistency and practicality on why it may be immoral to clone humans, but is taken less seriously on animals and entirely not seriously on plants is the “doing harm” logic, discussed in the next section to justify how and why cloning may or may not be unethical.

Continue to [Part 2 (of 2)]...

Succeeding linked article – coming soon:
What Lay People Should Know about Cloning – Ethical and Legal Issues (technical) [Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3]

What Lay People Should Know about Cloning – Other Types of Cloning

2011-07-19T13:44:00.019+08:00

by Zad Datu

Preceeding linked article (Read first!):
What Lay People Should Know about Cloning – Animal Reproductive Cloning

Creating Embryos but Not Babies

October 13th 2001 – the Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester, Massachusetts made history in cloning the first human embryo. This represented the dawn of the new age in – no, not in human cloning, but rather – in medicine. The term “cloning” is so often thought of only as reproductive cloning, or mostly animal reproductive cloning, and often even specifically human cloning. But there is a form of cloning which involves embryos without the aim to produce a fully develop individual – Therapeutic cloning.

The aim of therapeutic cloning is not to produce live organisms, but instead to extract stem cells of an individual for therapeutic and research purposes. But simply because the word “cloning” is included, many confused opposition of creating lab baby duplicates extend their objections into this life saving field as well.

Therapeutic cloning starts off with the same procedure as SCNT for reproductive cloning, but the embryo is not to be transferred into the womb. Instead, it is allowed to develop until a stage where the cells have divided and multiplied into about 100 cells usually 4 to 5 days after fertilisation (a stage called blastocysts for mammals, homogonous to blastula for non mammals). Found in the inner cell mass (embryoblast) of the blacstocysts, the stems cells are extracted at this stage, and then cultured to large numbers. The stem cells can be directed to specialising into any type of cell to develop into a piece of human tissue or a complete human organ for transplant. The embryo is later killed. That’s the therapeutic side of therapeutic cloning. The research side of therapeutic cloning is part of stem cell research, which eventually is for therapeutic purposes

Adult stem cells have always been available from any individual in their adulthood, but it is very rare hence difficult to cultivate. The Dolly Success opened new doors to stem cell research, as for the first time scientists are able to grow embryonic stem cells, rather than just adult stem cells, from an individual in their adulthood. This was a breakthrough for the healing potentials from stem cell research because unlike adult stem cells, embryonic stem cells can be easily cultured into large amounts, and can differentiate to develop into all types of body cells. The types of cells which adult stem cells can differentiate into are generally limited to their tissue of origin. The idea is to culture embryonic stem cells from the patients themselves into large amounts to later be reintroduced into them as a transplant. Prior to therapeutic cloning, embryonic stem cells only of a donor can be transplanted which may result in rejection by the patient’s immune system.

If research leads to the possibility of deriving nerve cells from cloned embryos, light upon finding a cure to damage cords and brain disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, stroke and epilepsy may shine. In fact in 2008, a research lead by Lorenz Studer, Head of the Stem Cell and Tumor Biology Laboratory at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, proved successful in using therapeutic cloning to treat a mice model of Parkinson’s disease.

Other possibilities include differentiating embryonic stem cells into blood and bone marrow cells to heal autoimmune disorders such as multiple sclerosis and arthritis; into pancreatic cells to treat diabetes; nerve cells to treat spinal cord injury; and into heart muscle cells as therapies for congestive heart failure, arrhythmias and cardiac tissue scarred by heart attacks. The possibilities seem endless.

But the technology is highly controversial resulting in bans, condemnations as well as legalisations, and also difficulty in advancing the technology to produce results. [More on these issues are discussed in depth succeeding articles.]

Cloning Since the Ancient Times

As mentioned in the previous article, Dolly was the first animal to be cloned from an adult somatic cell – not the first organism. The first cloned organism from somatic cells was a carrot plant in 1958, where F. E. Steward of Cornell University succeeded in growing a complete carrot plant from a fully differentiated carrot root cell – No, this isn’t the ancient time which the heading refers to just yet.

Also, as mentioned in the previous article, the usage of the term “clone” on animals was coined only in 1963 – not on plants. Before the 1963 coining, the term clone was mostly used for plants to a colony of organisms derived asexually from a single progenitor – but used mostly in the context of plants, as the person who coined this term was a plant physiologist of the US Department of Agriculture, Herbert John Webber in 1903. The word is derived from κλῶνος, the Greek word for “trunk, branch”.

Reproductive cloning in other words is asexual reproduction, which does occurs naturally through apomixis where embryos develops directly from the ova alone without fertilisation common in plants, insects and arthropods, and vegetative propagation (also known as vegetative reproduction, vegetative multiplication and vegetative cloning) where new individuals of plants arise without production of seeds or spore.

Flowering plants, the dominant form of plants, reproduce sexually through flowers, which consist of both male and female reproductive organ where once fertilised, the flowers form into fruits with seeds inside them. When the seed is placed in a suitable soil condition, a new individual plant will grow. But some flowering plants such dandelion, hawkweed and citrus trees can also produce seeds without fertilisation – a still poorly understood process called apomixis – hence producing offspring asexually, while other flowering plants such as strawberry plants, apple plants, potato plants, banana plants and onion plants are also capable of asexually reproduction through vegetative propagation.

Some non-flowering plants such as pine trees, ferns, mosses and algae, on the other hand, undergo a reproduction cycle called alternation generation. One generation is the gamete (sperms and ova) producing generation – the gametophyte generation. They start of their first stage of life as male or female spores in which they become individual male and female plants. The male plant produces sperms and the female plant will produces ova. As a sperm fertilises an uvum, just like sexual reproducing animals and humans, a zygote (seed) is produced growing into a new individual sporophytes – into the alternate spore producing generation – the sporophyte generation. Sporophyte asexually produces male and female spores which restart the cycle to the alternate generation. This asexual production of spores is another example of apomixis.

Other non-flowering plants such as grass and bamboo (a type of grass) reproduces only through vegetative propagation.

In technical terms the offspring reproduced asexually are clones of their parents just as twins are said to be clones of each other because of their genetics. But in general terms, when we speak of cloning, this definition is not generally accepted as nobody would, nor would any scientist credit the parents of the first born human twins as the first people to successfully clone a human or split an embryo. In fact, neither would scientist credit the first artificial embryonic splitting (also called artificial embryo twinning where an embryo is split in the maturation before it is placed into the uterus of the female to conceive to producing identical twins) as the first cloning.

Hence, the accepted term for cloning plants would be that of artificial vegetative propagation practiced in horticultures, plant tissue propagation performed in the laboratory conditions, and just recently possible artificial apomixis of plants (the cloning of plants as seeds).

The ancient times cloning spoken of here is artificial vegetative propagation practiced by the ancient Chinese which was then adapted by the Greeks and Roman which then later spread all over Europe. It includes methods such as cutting, layering, division, grafting and budding. Cutting is to cut off a part of the plant which contains at least one stem cell, either the root, stem, leaves or other parts depending on the type of plant, then placing it in a suitable soil condition which would then start rooting hence an independent new plant. In layering a part of the stem of the parent plant is placed into a suitable soil condition resulting rooting hence a new individual plant still attached to the parent plant, which is later cut off to be separated. Division is simply breaking apart the new plants which naturally grow from to the parent plant and placing it back into the soil environment. Grafting is where the upper part (scion) of one plant grows on the root system (rootstock) of another plant allowing them to grow as a single plant and budding is where a bud is taken from one plant and grown on another, both resulting in new individuals genetically identical to their parent plant which they were taken from. Vegetative propagation is exactly what the word “clone” was referred to in the first cloning and why Greek word for “trunk, branch” was used referred to.

Samples of vegetative propagated plants

Although these are generally accepted as reproductive cloning of plants, unlike the animal cloning, artificial vegetative propagation is simply the induction of natural forms of asexual reproduction – very comparable to in vitro fertilisation and artificial insemination, except that this natural form of reproduction is not asexual. But nonetheless, to artificially propagate vegetations is to produce clones.

Plant tissue culture is basically the culturing of plant tissues grown in isolation, in sterile condition and filtered air. The cultures can be initiated from almost any part of a plant, which would then slowly divide and grow into cells mostly resembling callus cells, which are undifferentiated cells that appear on damage surfaces which would gradually heal, and kept in special conditions. The original plant tissue (called explants) are usually placed on the surface of a solid or liquid medium composed of inorganic salts, organic nutrients, vitamins and plant hormones. Tissue cultured cells can also be induced to re-differentiate into whole plants by altering the growth media. Applications of plant tissue culture includes rapidly multiplying stock plants material to massively produce more plants (micropropogation), conserve rare or endangered plant species, crossing of distantly related species of plants, as well as other possibilities.

Formation of plants via plant tissue culture.

February 18^th 2011 edition of the journal Science published the result of the first cloning of plants as seeds authored by scientists from UC Davis, US, Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, India, and L'Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique, France. They experimented with Arabidopsis (a flowering plant related to cabbage and mustard) which had genetic mutations that allows it to produce ova with equal number of genes as their parents (diploid) without sexual recombination. Normally sperms and ova are haploid (having only half the genes of their parents) so that they fuse to form a diploid individual. It has just been possible just a year ago to breed haploid Arabidopsis plant carrying genes only from one parent by introducing a genetic change so that the chromosomes from one parent were eliminated after fertilisation. By crossing these two Arabidopsis plants, about one third of the seeds produced were diploid seeds from a single parent. This form of cloning is very comparable to animal cloning through nuclear transfer as these plants do not reproduce naturally in this manner. The team hopes to produce crop plants that can fertilize themselves and produce clonal seeds.

The Last Few Types of Cloning

Other than reproductive and therapeutic cloning, the term “cloning” can also referrers to the duplication of biological material, as conventionally used by biologists, for example, cellular cloning and DNA cloning (also called molecular cloning, recombinant DNA technology, or gene cloning). Cellular cloning the process of growing a colony of cells from just one cell resulting in cells of identical DNA, whereas DNA cloning is the production of multiple copies of DNA from an isolated fragment of DNA.

Aside from biology related fields, cloning is often used as a term somewhat synonymous to creating a duplicate, common in computer programmes such as image and video editing software.

Succeeding linked article – coming soon:
What Lay People Should Know about Cloning – Fear Fuelled Objections (opinion) [Part 1] [Part 2]
What Lay People Should Know about Cloning – Ethical and Legal Issues (technical) [Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3]

What Lay People Should Know about Cloning – Animal Reproductive Cloning

2011-07-12T14:14:00.015+08:00

by Zad Datu

Dolly the Sheep – one of the major accomplishments in biology – a celebrity in the subject of cloning, marking a spot in the calendar of the topic.

Before Dolly, the first image of cloning most would conjure upon in their minds is the science fiction model of cloning. The image of human duplicates processed through advance machines producing exact copies of a person – aside from personality, exact even to the point of their biological age, and often also knowledge and memory just as it is shown in Multiplicity (1996), The 6th Day (2000) and The Island (2005). I certainly hope that nobody nowadays still think that the actual current technology of cloning is anything like this.

With this model, the clones and the cloned will be more alike than identical twins are to each other – in actual cloning, the opposite is true. Clones are not exact copies of the cloned. Cloning is just the production of one’s twin born later in life. Natural twins are more likely to be brought up in the same lifetime, by the same parents and in the same lifestyle – unlikely in the case of clones with their clone donor – making twins more alike to each other than clones are to their clone donor. For twins and clones, the people (the bodies) are different, but their genetics (the information) are identical. Just like photocopies, the words (the information) are identical, but the papers (the bodies) are two different papers. In genetic terms, identical twins are clones of each other. But in fact, animal or human cloning will not produce a clone which is truly genetically identical to the cloned animal or human.

The usage of the term “clone” on animals was coined only in 1963. British-born Indian genetics and evolutionary biologist, John Burdon Sanderson Haldane, was credited for the coining in a speech titled Biological Possibilities for the Human Species of the Next Ten Thousand Years. It was not until then that the word “clone” has been used to describe such procedures. Before this, animal cloning was referred to as the fantastical experiment which was mentioned in Hans Spemann 1938 book titled Embryonic Development and Introduction, written over a decade before the first cloning and a decade after the first successful nuclear transfer experiment by Spemann himself.

The fantastical experiment deals with the removal of the nucleuses (enucleate) of fertilised ova (egg cells; ovum for singular) and transferring the nucleus (nuclear transfer) of cells that have specialised into specific types of cells (differentiated cells) into enucleated fertilised ova, then inserting into the wombs of a surrogate mother to give birth to live organisms. The first cloning in 1952 was exactly this, except that the cloned cells were undifferentiated embryo cells, performed on leopard king frog tadpoles by Robert William Briggs and Thomas Joseph King, both of whom at the time apparently and surprisingly weren’t aware of the fantastical experiment proposal.

Born on 5th July 1996, Dolly, a product of Ian Wilmut, Keith Campbell and other colleagues at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, Scotland, was not the first mammal to be cloned. Neither was she the first animal to be cloned, and certainly not the first organism. The first animal to be cloned was a tadpole in 1952 as just mentioned earlier, and the first mammal to be cloned was a sheep in 1984 by Steen Willadsen, neglecting the 1979 controversial claim of the cloning of a mice. What is fascinating about Dolly is that she was the first mammal, and also considered as the first animal to be cloned from an adult somatic cell, neglecting another controversial claim in 1962 of the cloning of tadpoles from adult cells. The method of cloning Dolly is called Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer (SCNT). Somatic cells are differentiated body cells of a multicellular organism. These are cells other than gamete (or germline – cells which fuses during reproduction such as ova and sperm), germ cells (mother cells of gametes), and undifferentiated stem cells (undifferentiated cells that can divide and differentiate into specialised cells as well self renew to produce more stem cells).

Professor Ian Willmut and Dolly

Ian Wilmut’s initial motive to clone a sheep was for a gene insertion project which he was working on, but when he heard of the 1986 cloning of cattle from differentiated embryo cells by Willdasen, he abandoned the project and switched to cloning entirely. Prior to Dolly, in 1995, he and his colleague, Keith Campbell, successfully cloned two sheep from differentiated embryo cells they named Megan and Morag. At this point, cloning is very limited as the material needed to clone an individual, the embryo, can only be obtained from the embryonic stage of the individual. The dream was to be able to clone an animal from materials available in adulthood – somatic cells. If this is to be possible, limitless number of clones can be produced.

From cloning Megan and Morag, they learnt that newly fertilised ova enters a phase of suspended animation as it coordinates the two sets of DNA, which they called Gap Zero (G0) stage. He believed and learnt that if DNA of the transplanted cell is not in the same stage of cycle as the ovum, cloning would be ineffective. To trick the cell into entering the G0 stage, they cell is starved. This would synchronise the cell’s cycles to the ovum allowing the ovum to take up the DNA of the transplanted cell. An electric current is then used to fuse the cell with the enucleated unfertilised ovum. This process proved successful on embryonic cells producing Megan and Morag, and with amazement, it was also successful on differentiated cells to produce Dolly.

Unfertilised ova were taken from Scottish black faced ewe, a different species of sheep from Dolly, then enucleated and placed next to the mammary gland cell from a Finn Doset sheep which was starved into G0 stage. Then within eight hours an electric current is used to fuse the two synchronised cells. Out of 277 mammary gland cells which underwent nuclear transfer, 29 of them developed into embryos which were placed in sheep oviducts for about a week before transferring each of them to the uteruses of Scottish blackface ewes as surrogate mothers. Only one embryo succeeded into pregnancy, and on 5th July 1996, the first animal to be cloned from an adult somatic cell was born – one species of sheep giving birth to a clone of another species.

Animals created using nuclear transfer cannot be a truly genetically identical clone of the donor animal as only the clone’s nuclear DNA is identical whereas the rest of the genetic material comes from the mitochondria in the cytoplasm of the enucleated ovum. This readdresses the issue that twins are more identical to each other than clones are to their genetic donor.

Rainbow (left) and CopyCat

There even was a case in 2001 where the first cloning of a calico cat named Rainbow resulted in what seems to be another kind of cat, a tiger tabby, named CC for CopyCat or Carbon Copy. But they were genetically identical – aside from the genetic material from the mitochondria of the ovum donor. Calico cats and tiger tabbies are actually not different breeds of cats. A cat is considered a calico cat if its fur coat consists of a mixture of either black or brown with either red or orange and with the addition of white, while considered a tabby cat if the coat features distinctive stripes, dots or swirling patterns – in the case of CC, a brown tabby and white domestic shorthair, to be exact. The genes which are responsible for the orange colouring in cats are located in the X chromosomes. Rainbow had the combinations of brown, orange and white, and is a female hence having two X chromosomes. But during embryonic development of animals (human included), one of the X chromosomes will be randomly inactivated. In the case of CC, the inactivated X chromosome was the one which was responsible for to add orange colouring to her fur coat.

Since Dolly, many farm animals such sheep, cattle, pigs, goats, horses and deer, endangered species such as the gray wolf and gaur, and even pets such as cats and dogs, as well as one of the most popular animal guinea pig, the mice have been cloned. The early efforts in of using cloning technology for practical purposes were to mass produced clones of top breed farm animals. This was initiated by Grenada Genetics in 1985 that specialise in cattle, just immediate after Willdasen became part of shortly his success in cloning the first mammal. Several other biotechnology organisations rushed into the cloning business, hence the cloning industry erupted, and since then clones cattle and other farm animals have been mass produced from via embryo cells – until Dolly, that is.

Another main purpose behind developing techniques of reproductive cloning is to aid the genetic modification techniques of animals. To genetically modify an animal, external genes are first attached to a virus then inserted into, or directly inserted into the nucleus of an early embryonic stage of the animal. But the success rate of the animal integrating the added DNA to their genome is very low. With the aid of cloning, cloned embryos of a single animal can be cultured to the thousands, thus can be used as a control making more accurate studies on the techniques, as well as increase the number of experiments which can be carried out. A single animal with the desired traits can be accurately selected to be cloned in masses with the desired genetic modification.

Sheep Polly and Molly were the first genetically modified clones – a product of Wilmut and Campbell once again at the Roslin Institute in 1997 upon the Dolly success. Polly and Molly were grown from skin cells and were genetically modified to contain human genes. The human genes inserted were blood-clotting protein in which deficiency in this protein could cause haemophilia in people. With this genetic modification, Polly’s and Molly’s milk produces the therapeutic protein for humans with haemophilia. This process of genetic engineering animals to generate therapeutic protein within marketable food product such as meat, milk and egg whites is called pharming. The success of Polly and Molly sheds light on the further possibilities of pharming, as well engineering animals to produce organs transplantable to human.

Cloning applications for personal reasons, which many are under ethical questioning, includes the reproduction of deceased pets, and the production of genetically related child for married couples who have difficulties having children of their own artificial insemination and in vitro fertilisation. Artificial insemination and in vitro fertilisation may not be possible way to conceive for some couples perhaps to certain level of infertility or simply because they are gay or lesbian couples. The issue owners of deceased pets is that even though they have been told that cloned pets will not produce the same exact individual original pet, they still find it preferable to have a new pet very similar to their deceased pet rather than a completely different pet even though they are of the same breed. Aside from pets, there are parents with deceased children who wishes and are willing to take the necessary steps get their child back through cloning.

This marks the end of the article, but not the end of what you should know about cloning. The next article will dive into the other types of cloning. Types of cloning which doesn’t normally occur in one’s mind when the word “cloning” is mentioned – cloning not to produce fully grown organisms, cloning which existed in the ancient times, and cloning which pretty much doesn’t involve organisms. Then, unanswered questions on cloning such as “Is cloning playing god?”, “Is cloning dangerous?”, “Has human cloning been performed?”, “Is cloning or human cloning illegal, should it be illegal, and why?” and “Why is Hitler a popular topic in cloning?” shall be addressed in one more separate article.

Succeeding linked article – coming soon:
What Lay People Should Know about Cloning – Other Types of Cloning
What Lay People Should Know about Cloning – Fear Fuelled Objections (opinion) [Part 1] [Part 2]
What Lay People Should Know about Cloning – Ethical and Legal Issues (technical) [Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3]

What Lay People Should Know about Karate – Peasants or Noblemen?

2011-07-08T11:23:00.008+08:00

by Jesse (with permission)
originally published at karatebyjesse.com
original tittle: Karate Myth Busting: The Secret Truth About Peasants and Karate
[all images in this article were taken from the original publication]

Lately I’ve been noticing a pretty interesting phenomenon unfold in the world of MMA.

You know how, a couple of years ago, it seemed like only thugs, coal mine workers, brawlers and bar fighters practiced MMA (mixed martial arts)? It was like this unsophisticated, primitive form of beating each other senseless in a cage – without any apparent technique or refinement?

(Of course it wasn’t really like that, but to many people it surely seemed like that.)

"Wanna grapple?"

Then, gradually, something interesting happened.

People who usually spent their afternoon playing golf, drinking appletinis, wearing tight jeans, getting a fake tan or greasing their hair started showing up at the doors of MMA gyms all over the world.

Snobs, you might call them.

Tired of their rich boy lifestyle – looking for a new thrill – MMA with its no-nonsense approach to gritty, mano-a-mano fighting appealed to their senses. It was rough. It was tough. And it was becoming increasingly popular.

It filled a void.

For your everyday rich-daddy playboy it provided fresh excitement in a square world filled with predictable cocktail parties.

And that’s basically where we are today.

And I see it every day, even in our academy.

MMA is no longer a shady underground business, practiced by tattooed ex-cons. Far from it. It is a sport enjoyed by many different people, even rich youngsters. And interestingly enough, here’s where we find a largely unexplored parallel to the early beginning in the evolution of Toudi (or Karate as it was later to be known) in Okinawa.

You see, Toudi (Karate) was basically a pastime hobby of snobs.

No peasants.
No poor farmers.
No oppressed villagers trying desperately to fight the evil Japanese Satsuma samurai tyranny.

Aristocrats created Karate.

“Myth: a : a usually traditional story of ostensibly historical events that serves to unfold part of the world view of a people or explain a practice, belief, or natural phenomenon”
- Merriam-Webster/Encyclopaedia Britannica

People…

Karate was not a martial art developed by peasants.

Let’s get that straight, once and for all. And yes, I know I’m repeating myself here, but judging from the insane amount of “Karate was developed by avenging peasants” e-mails I keep getting, some people need to hear this more than once.

Look, the high kicks of kata Gankaku were not designed so that peasants could kick under the helmets of “samurais” riding horses. The kata Kusanku Dai/Kanku Dai was not made for peasants fighting evil Japanese killer ninjas in the night. The kata Naihanchin/Tekki was not made for peasants fighting sideways battles between rice paddies.

Question: When was the last time you saw a rich, young, handsome playboy working in a friggin’ rice field?

Never.

That’s when.

(and I have yet to step my foot in one)

Because Karate wasn’t created by farmers.

It was created by noblemen and scholar.

But please, before we go any further, don’t get me wrong here. Pesants are awesome. Hunters, farmers, fishermen… my family and relatives consists of them to a high degree. They are smart, strong, kind, cool, humble, honest and remarkable in every way. But they are, above all, incredibly b-u-s-y.

Work, work work…

Fishing, hunting, farming, harvesting; the life of a farmer today is literally filled to the brim with work, from dusk till dawn.

And believe me… the last thing they want to do on their spare time is physical exercise!

Martial arts? Fuggedaboudit!

I mean, all they do on their spare time is eat and sleep a couple of hours – until it’s time to work again! Getting punched and kicked on? No way! Having cows shit on you and horses kick on you all day long is enough, thank you very much.

So, if that’s the situation today (remember, we have loads of technology when it comes to farming these days), guess what it was like a couple of hundred years ago in rural Okinawa (still the poorest prefecture in Japan!)?

That’s right.

Even busier.

Even tougher.

And I’m not saying peasants are stupid or incapable of being martial. Oh no. On the contrary, the numerous revolutions which have shaped the history of our modern world were in fact started by disgruntled workers/farmers/peasants of some sort. Probably the last person you want to piss off is a hard-working peasant, believe me. There will be blood.

But I digress.

"Oh noes! The samurai want's to steal my thong! I must quickly defend
myself, using this piece of wood, which will become a weapon in the future!
History books, here I come!"

Karate, or Toudi as it was then called, was an eclectic martial art developed, practiced and taught by aristocratic Okinawans with strong, often governmental, connections to China and Siam. Keep the peasants out of it. Sons of diplomats, frequently on scholarship, upper class, noble families descending from the Chinese settler’s village of Kume/Kuninda (in modern day Naha), bodyguards to the king, wealthy merchants (often from Shuri, where most soy and sake breweries were located = big money = big bodyguards = trouble)… the examples are numerous and paint a clear picture.

Let me repeat myself here: Your average Okinawan villager (working night and day, remember?) just didn’t have the time nor the vigor to practice fighting techniques and develop sophisticated martial arts all day long. The only people in Okinawa who did enjoy the luxury of “playing” Karate and Kobudo were the serving noble class (shizoku) of warriors (pechin), ranging from the lowest warrior caste (chikudun) to the highest (peekumi). And above that we have oyakata (lord),which is the highest of the privileged classes before we step up to the royal classes of aji (descendant of prince) and oji (prince).

These were the type of titles held by the progenitors of Karate.

To give you a quick example of how significant the caste system of Ryukyu Kingdom was, I can inform you that a pechin was roughly 6 times ‘higher’ in social status than a regular Joe Schmoe-san. Believe dat.

A prosperous and educated warrior.

A Karate-ka.

Just to add some proof to the pudding (?), here’s some of the most famous pioneers of old-school Karate along with their social class/status/rank. In no specific order:

Matsumura Sokon (1809-1899): Pechin class. Bodyguard of the king.
Sakugawa Kanga(1786-1867): Chikudun Pechin class.
Soeishi Ryotoku (1772-1825): Oyakata class. King’s secretary!
Chatan Yara (1740-1812): Chikudun Pechin class.
Tawata Shinboku (1814-1884): Chikudun Pechin class.
Sueyoshi Anyu (unknown): Pechin class.
Chikin Seionori (1624-unknown): Oyakata class.
Chinen Umikana (1797-1881): Chikudun Pechin class.
Higa Kanematsu (1790-1870): Pechin class.
Chinen Masanra (1842-1925): Chikudun Pechin class.
Kyan Chofu (unknown): Shizoku class.
Hamahiga Oyakata (1847 – unknown): Oyakata class.
etc…

I can keep name-dropping all day. And most of the above dudes studied the fighting arts directly in China too.

What’s that? Oh, you think that’s too far back? Not reliable and accurate enough? Want more modern masters? How about Motobu Choki (1870-1944)? Aji class (direct lineage to the king, like Chibana Choshin (1885 – 1969)). So was Yoshimura Chogi (1866-1945).

Yabu Kentsu (1866-1937)? Shizoku family. Funakoshi Gichin (1868-1957)? Same. Toyama Kanken (1888-1966), Mabuni Kenwa (1889-1952), Taira Shinken (1897-1970), Shiroma Shinpan (1890-1954)… they were all either directly from a noble, upper class family or descended from one back in the days.

So let’s give the peasants a break.

Because I didn’t see no farmers, fishermen, peasants, samurai slayers or rice paddy dwellers up there on the list.

Did you?

That’s right.

Because peasants have more important things to do.

Like surviving.

So, now that we’ve got that out of the way, where exactly does this “Karate was created by peasants” –myth stem from anyway? Surely there must be some base for this myth? Some substance?

Well… perhaps.

"Dude... I just had an idea. After we finish here, you wanna do some full contact sparring?"

My guess is, when the Okinawan class system was eventually abolished (during the fall of the Ryukyu Kingdom) and these aristocratic upper class people lost their position and wealth they were often forced to leave their Bugattis and Lambos behind, moving away from their grand beach mansions to live according to new (considerably lower) standards.

Consequently, either they themselves or their descendants might then have had to occasionally work as farmers, fishermen, peasants or something else equally “lower class” and dirty, giving birth to the myth that farmers and peasants magically came up with up this deadly martial art of Karate because they were so bored of work (or something). I really don’t know.

However, what I do know is that I have yet to successfully compile a list of famous Karate pioneers who were anything less than educated, well-respected and privileged noblemen.

Because that’s how it went.

Karate = snobbery.

Just like MMA is slowly becoming.

Whether you like it or not.