Feeder 1.1---9/16/10
Would You Eat It?Do you eat genetically modified food? Is genetically modified food safe? Are you sure? Listening to the two sides of the argument over the safety of genetically modified food (GM food) is like listening to Planned Parenthood and the Christian Right argue over whether or not children should be taught how to use a condom in school. Both sides are absolutely convinced that they are right and claim that the other side is defending a morally indefensible belief. Due to the nature of the amount of conflicting evidence resulting from the testing of different forms of genetically modified food, I do not think that a blanket decision can be made one way or the other for all of genetically modified food. Rather, experts, scientists, and regulators should work to determine the safety of individual products rather than generalize about entire categories of food. However, there are those who think the safety of genetically modified food can be uniformly determined.
Igno Potrykus, chairman of the Golden Rice Humanitarian Board, argues in a piece entitled “Regulation Must Be Revolutionized” in the science journal Nature that, “Genetically engineered crops could save many millions from starvation and malnutrition – if they can be freed from excessive regulation.”Mr. Potrykus argues that, “the differentiation of genetic engineering from other, traditional methods of crop improvement…is scientifically unjustified,” and “wasting resources and stopping many potentially transformative crops such as golden rice making the leap from lab to plate.”[1] As an example of how long it takes for GM food to navigate through the regulatory maze, golden rice, a genetically modified version of rice that “could provide sufficient vitamin A to reduce substantially the 6,000 deaths a day due to vitamin A deficiency,”[2] was ready in the lab in 1999 and yet is not expected to be open to the market until 2012. Imagine what a crop like that could do in developing nations that are primarily rice-dependant? Imagine what good golden rice could have already done had it been approved soon after it was demonstrated to be safe in the lab? The fact that golden rice has a release date in the near future indicates that regulators have found no reason thus far to hold this crop back, meaning it is safe.
But it is not only golden rice that Mr. Potrykus cares about; he is an ardent believer in GM food across the board. He points out in his recent Nature article that, “there have not been any substantiated cases of harm to the environment or to humans, even in the litigious United States where the adoption of genetic engineering is widespread.”[3] So why are regulators holding GM food back by requiring an excruciatingly long approval process? What exactly is the problem here? According to an article written by the Institute for Responsible Technology and published on the website OpposingViews.com, quite a bit.
Although the IRT never disputes the claims Mr. Potrykus made about golden rice specifically (the article by the IRT does not mention golden rice at all), the article does seek to dispel some of the broad statements made by Mr. Potrykus about GM food in general. The title of the piece is also its thesis, “Genetically Modified Foods Pose Huge Health Risk.” The article cites the fact that recently, “the American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM) called on ‘Physicians to educate their patients, the medical community, and the public to avoid GM (genetically modified) foods when possible.’”[4] The IRT notes that several animal studies have found the following maladies to be caused by GM food: infertility, immune problems, accelerated aging, insulin regulation, and changes in major organs and the gastrointestinal system.[5]According to this article, since the early 1990’s, scientists at the FDA have uniformly been warning about these problems, but that the White House, in an attempt to promote biotechnology silenced these concerns and let biotech companies decide for themselves if their products were safe.
So what do you do when both sides are claiming that the government and other regulators are unfairly favoring the other side and ignoring the reality of the situation? What do you do when some experts are claiming that other experts are making patently false assertions and misleading the public? Even if the IRT is right about most or a lot of GM food, what about golden rice? Although the potential benefits of GM food border on miraculous, when it comes the global food supply I subscribe to the old saying, “It’s better to be safe than sorry.” And as for golden rice, it remains to be seen if it is an exception or the rule, but it reinforces the idea that, like in so many fields of experimentation, new developments should be observed and judged on a case-by-case basis.
[1] Potrykus, Igno. “Regulation Must Be Revolutionized.” Nature.http://www.nature.com.libproxy.lib.unc.edu/nature/journal/v466/n7306/pdf/466561a.pdf September 6, 2010
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Institute for Responsible Technology. “Genetically Modified Foods Pose Huge Health Risk.”http://www.opposingviews.com/i/genetically-modified-foods-pose-huge-health-risk September 6, 2010
[5] Ibid.
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Feeder 1.2
The Double Down of DrugsWhat do drugs and Kentucky Fried Chicken have in common?
Recently KFC brought to their menu a new item that takes fast food to a whole new level, the double down. You have probably seen commercials for these $5.49 heart attacks. The double down is a chicken sandwich, but instead of having a bun, it has breaded chicken fillets on the top and on bottom, and in the middle there are strips of bacon, two kinds of cheese, and Colonel’s sauce. Over time if you eat too many fried or breaded chicken fillets, you will increase your chances of getting an assortment of medical problems such as heart disease and diabetes. The same thing applies to bacon. So what do you think happens to your risk of falling victim to heart disease when you eat too much of both breaded chicken fillets and bacon? I am not a doctor, but I would guess that the risks are multiplied or at least increased. But do drugs work that way too? If I were a frequent cocaine user, and I also used marijuana, would the health risks be multiplied, or simply the same as if I were only using one or the other? According to “Cocaine Dependence and Concurrent Marijuana Use: A Comparison of Clinical Characteristics,” a report published in The American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse, the answer is that it depends on the frequency of use of marijuana in concurrence with frequent cocaine use.
The study that that the report was based off of was conducted by five psychiatrists, four from the University of Texas and one from the University of Minnesota, and consisted of studying 1,183 individuals seeking outpatient treatment for cocaine use. All participants were diagnosed as cocaine-dependant and were between the ages of 18-60. The majority of participants were African American (64.7%), male (82%) and unemployed (53%). Ninety-five participants were reported as having used marijuana at least once before, and that 95% were divided into three groups: non-users (no use within the last 30 days), occasional users (used marijuana 1-9 days within the last 30), and frequent users.[1]
Two conclusions came out of this study, one of which was a breakthrough and one conclusion merely reinforced the findings of previous studies. The first conclusion was that frequent use of marijuana and cocaine concurrently greatly increases the negative effects of the individual drugs used separately. There is an entire positive feedback cycle that gets people to the worst combination of results. For starters, frequent users of marijuana were found to also use a larger amount of cocaine as well, which could exacerbate the effects further. Also, it was found in this study that the “level of marijuana use is positively related to length of time using cocaine (earlier onset) and likelihood of meeting lifetime abuse or dependence criteria for other substances.”[2] This finding was not novel, but there was a new discovery in this study.
What this survey did differently was that instead of comparing the effects of using the two drugs concurrently as opposed to individually, it tested concurrent effects based on the frequency of use of marijuana. (Remember, all test subjects were cocaine-dependent.) The result was that there were no significant differences between non-marijuana users who were cocaine-dependant and occasional marijuana users who were cocaine-dependant. There were differences observed between occasional marijuana users and frequent marijuana users. Therefore, “the clinically important feature is not whether (or not) cocaine patients use marijuana concurrently, but rather the extent to which they use marijuana.”[3] So if you’re going to eat fried chicken, don’t eat more than a little bacon.
[1] Lindsey, Jan A., Stottsy, Angela L., Greeny, Charles E., Heriney, David V., Schmitzy, Joy M., “Cocaine Dependance and Concurrent Marijuana Use: A Comparison of Clinical Characteristics.” The American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse. May 1, 2009. 193-198. http://ehis.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=3&hid=101&sid=da1ad170-0264-4c42-b833-2c570b5d2ba1%40sessionmgr111
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
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Unit 1 Project
[7] Woltjen, Knut; Michael, Iacovos P.; Mohseni, Paria; Nagy, Andras. “piggyBac Transposition Reprograms Fibroblasts to Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells.” Nature. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v458/n7239/full/nature07863.html
March 1, 2009.
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Every person and every athlete possesses an “absolute performance,” which is how they would perform utilizing 100% of their potential. “This optimal athletic output is believed to be directly related to an individual’s physiological composition, and thus for the most part, the result of the ‘genetic lottery.’”[2] For example, a person’s sprinting capability is determined by physiological factors such as: percentage of fast twitch muscle fibers, height and stride length, peak oxygen deficit, reaction time, and anaerobic capacity.[3] Although proper training can improve some of these factors, genetics determine these characteristics for most people, and are therefore out of the person’s control.
Two kinds of factors prevent someone from performing at their absolute performance, external and internal factors. External factors include a strong headwind when you are running, crowd influences, and game officials. Internal factors can be divided into physiological and psychological factors. Physiological internal factors include injury, fatigue, illness, and improper nutrition. Athletes control all of those determinants. The third set of performance determinants can only be improved with proper sports psychology. A counterproductive state of mind for an athlete is as potentially harmful as significant negative external factors.[4] The most common example of a counterproductive state of mind occurs when anxiety consumes the athlete, “particularly when the perceived situational demands exceed the individual’s perceived ability to meet those demands and successful performance in the activity is important to the individual.”[5] Heightened anxiety can impair fine motor functioning, disrupt blood flow patterns, impair decision-making capabilities, and cause muscles to become more tense. With proper mental skills training athletes need never worry about those detractions. That is what sports psychology does, it trains athletes to relax so that they can focus, and block out all mental influences that might impair their performance. While sports psychology does not necessarily improve an athlete’s performance potential, it does uniquely help bring athletes closer to their absolute performance. Sports psychology uses many different techniques in applying to a variety of sports and situations. The real battle is not in proving the efficacy of sports psychology; it is in convincing athletes and coaches to employ it.
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Unit 1 Project
There Are Three Sides To The Debate?
The debate surrounding embryonic stem-cell research has been rendered obsolete. The are two primary sides to the argument: scientists promoting embryonic stem cells’ research potential because of their unique transformative properties, and primarily religious and other ethics groups claiming that the research goes too far as it requires destroying human life. Rarely do these two groups characterize the other in such an equitable manner. Phrases like, “You care more about clusters of cells than real people!” and “Hitler would have supported embryonic stem-cell research!” demonstrate attempts to paint the other side as extremist. It’s science versus morality and research versus murder. This dichotomy has yielded increased concentration on condemning the opposition rather than attempting reconciliation. However, new advances in science provide a solution. New modification capabilities allow adult somatic (non-reproductive) cells to possess the manipulability of embryonic stem cells. Irrelevance now cloaks the debate because embryonic stem cells are no longer necessary, thus removing the argument’s foundations. However, some scientists fervently maintain that embryonic stem cells are the only path to its promised cures.
The author of a recent editorial published in the science journal Nature and titled “A Law in Time?” is one such scientist. Throughout the piece the unnamed author seethes with rage over a recent court decision where a federal judge issued an injunction freezing U.S. government funding of embryonic stem cell research until the conclusion of a lawsuit challenging the legality of federally funding the research. The article’s stated thesis maintains that “Congress should not leave to the courts a case in which the public, on both sides of the debate, has so much invested, and which so clearly calls out for lawmakers to clarify what they intend by the amendment at the heart of the crisis.”[1] (The amendment that the article refers to is the Dickey-Wicker Amendment. It originally passed in 1996 and prohibits “federal funding of research in which human embryos are destroyed or discarded.”[2]) But the author is neither defending democracy nor standing up for separation of powers. The author’s implicit message upholds the conclusion of the debate, but a different conclusion: Embryonic stem-cell research is good, and anything that impedes it is bad. The real reason why the author calls on congress and not the courts to make the decision is because his side already lost the fight in the courts. The author asserts that, “Scientists…should not expect the courts to act in their favor. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, where the NIH's (National Institutes of Health) appeal will be heard, is dominated by conservatives, who are likely to sustain last week’s injunction, as is the US Supreme Court.”[3]
The injunction is irrelevant for finding cures and saving lives. The author believes the injunction poses a problem for, “patients and others who care about the survival of a highly promising area of biomedical research.”[4] But to date, embryonic stem cell research has proven promising only in the way that jetpacks have proven to be a promising area of engineering and aeronautics. Embryonic stem cell research has neither cured diseases nor patients. It has not even come close. Perhaps it will some day, but scientists are finding more that many of the promised “miracle cures” really would be miracles if they came from embryonic stem cell research.
For example, because many who oppose embryonic stem cell research are socially conservative, proponents of this research like reporting how embryonic stem cell research could cure the disease that killed their hero, Ronald Regan, who passed as a result of Alzheimer’s disease. However, today most neuroscientists do not find that that particular miracle cure is likely as, “[Alzheimer’s disease] does not appear to be a disease caused by damage to a particular cell, so cell therapy probably wouldn't be the most appropriate treatment.”[5]
Human embryos in fact have little connection with curing diseases. The whole promise behind embryonic stem cell research comes from its underlying technique – using transformable cells to create the exact cells scientists need to conduct their research. It is not the fact that transformable cells are found in human embryos, but those cells’ manipulability that is important. But now, that characteristic can itself be manufactured. An article published on CNN’s website a couple of weeks ago reported that, “Years ago, science created a cell that appears to be, in the words of an MIT study published last month, ‘virtually identical’ to an embryonic stem cell but is cheaper, promises better compatibility to patients and kills no embryos.”[6]
An extensive study published a year and a half ago, this time conducted by a team of British and Canadian scientists, arrived at the same conclusion and was published in…Nature. This study concluded that all that is necessary to create what become effectively embryonic stem cells is to alter four genes from the thousands that comprise adult somatic (non-reproductive) cells. “The resulting induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells resemble embryonic stem cells in their properties and potential to differentiate into a spectrum of adult cell types.”[7] While they possess the same abilities and properties, the difference is that pluripotent stem cells do not require what some consider the destruction of human life. Even if you do not believe that a human embryo counts as a human life, pluripotent stem cells contain the benefits of being cheaper and more compatible with the patients they have been tested on than embryonic stem cells.
My ninth grade biology teacher, one of my favorite high school teachers, cured his cancer because of a treatment that used his own stem cells, adult stem cells. I know what stem cell research has meant and can mean for thousands of people. But not all stem cells were created equal. Adult stem cells have produced a wide array of cures for patients and diseases. Embryonic stem cells have not. While there remains supposed potential that embryonic stem cells can be used to find medical cures, the real promise is found in the characteristics of those cells and not the cells themselves. So why would anybody oppose a mechanism that not only replicates, but improves upon those unique characteristics but does not involve the destruction of human embryos? This new breakthrough has preserved the scientists’ fundamental concern – access to transformable cells – and does not require the destruction of human embryos. As far as I’m concerned, this debate is over.
[1] “A Law in Time?” Nature. September 10, 2010. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v467/n7311/full/467007a.html
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Palca, Joe. “Embryonic Stem Cells: Exploding the Myths.” National Public Radio. March 30, 2007. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5376892
[6] Bowman, Matt. “Embryonic Stem Cells: Outmoded Science.” CNN. http://articles.cnn.com/2010-09-16/opinion/bowman.stem.cell.research_1_cell-research-human-embryos-mit-study?_s=PM:OPINION. September 16, 2010.
[7] Woltjen, Knut; Michael, Iacovos P.; Mohseni, Paria; Nagy, Andras. “piggyBac Transposition Reprograms Fibroblasts to Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells.” Nature. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v458/n7239/full/nature07863.html
March 1, 2009.
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Feeder 2.1
Do Athletes Do Whatever It Takes To Be On Top?
When most of us hear the word “psychology” we think of lying down on a leather sofa and a balding, middle-aged man interminably asking, “How does that make you feel?” Therefore it is perhaps natural that when we hear the term “sports psychology” we conjure a similar image, but tailored for athletes. While emotions and emotional responses certainly play a major role in sports psychology, such a connotative image is false. According to an article by Chris J. Gee in Behavior Modification titled, “How Does Sport Psychology Actually Improve Athletic Importance? A Framework to Facilitate Athletes’ and Coaches’ Understanding,” many coaches and players are neglecting to take advantage of the benefits sports psychology offers because of “a lack of understanding about the process and the mechanisms by which these mental skills affect performance.” Another reason for coaches’ hesitancy comes from sports psychology’s esoteric nature compared to physiology and biochemistry.[1] Whether these athletes and coaches deny the improvements derived from sports psychology, or are simply hesitant to take advantage of them, sports psychology does offer unique aid to athletes not found anywhere else. Also, contrary to the misconception often held among coaches, sports psychology can improve all athletes’ performance, and is not only needed for “problem athletes.”
Every person and every athlete possesses an “absolute performance,” which is how they would perform utilizing 100% of their potential. “This optimal athletic output is believed to be directly related to an individual’s physiological composition, and thus for the most part, the result of the ‘genetic lottery.’”[2] For example, a person’s sprinting capability is determined by physiological factors such as: percentage of fast twitch muscle fibers, height and stride length, peak oxygen deficit, reaction time, and anaerobic capacity.[3] Although proper training can improve some of these factors, genetics determine these characteristics for most people, and are therefore out of the person’s control.
Two kinds of factors prevent someone from performing at their absolute performance, external and internal factors. External factors include a strong headwind when you are running, crowd influences, and game officials. Internal factors can be divided into physiological and psychological factors. Physiological internal factors include injury, fatigue, illness, and improper nutrition. Athletes control all of those determinants. The third set of performance determinants can only be improved with proper sports psychology. A counterproductive state of mind for an athlete is as potentially harmful as significant negative external factors.[4] The most common example of a counterproductive state of mind occurs when anxiety consumes the athlete, “particularly when the perceived situational demands exceed the individual’s perceived ability to meet those demands and successful performance in the activity is important to the individual.”[5] Heightened anxiety can impair fine motor functioning, disrupt blood flow patterns, impair decision-making capabilities, and cause muscles to become more tense. With proper mental skills training athletes need never worry about those detractions. That is what sports psychology does, it trains athletes to relax so that they can focus, and block out all mental influences that might impair their performance. While sports psychology does not necessarily improve an athlete’s performance potential, it does uniquely help bring athletes closer to their absolute performance. Sports psychology uses many different techniques in applying to a variety of sports and situations. The real battle is not in proving the efficacy of sports psychology; it is in convincing athletes and coaches to employ it.
[1] Gee, Chris J. “How Does Sport Psychology Actually Improve Athletic Importance? A Framework to Facilitate Athletes’ and Coaches’ Understanding,” Behavior Modification. http://bmo.sagepub.com/content/34/5/386.full.pdf+html September 2010.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
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Unit 2 Project
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Feeder 3.1
Interpreting Warhol
There is perhaps no greater case study in the post-modern art community in cognitive dissonance than Andy Warhol. Simultaneously he seeks to glorify the superficial sense of self, as it is what brings about societal success, his personal ultimate goal, and at the same time critic that same superficiality as betraying one’s “true self,” which he also does not believe exists. Confused yet? There are three seemingly contradictory notions here: praise of superficiality, condemnation of superficiality as betraying people’s “true self,” and not believing that that true self even exists. So which notion was Warhol really upholding? Some believe that Warhol did not think that one’s deep self or “true self” existed, where as others thought that Warhol believed in the existence of depth, but merely that it was forgotten by society.
According to Donald Kuspit, “For Warhol, art’s role was to help one look good enough to be socially successful, that is, a socially compliant false self, suggesting that art betrays the true self, and as such lacks existential purpose...for Warhol the task of art is the construction of the false self rather than the expression of the true self.”[1] Here Kuspit seems to suggest that Warhol was also condemning art itself, as the purpose of art involves the betrayal of the true self. But that is not the case, because, as Kuspit points out, Warhol believed that there is no deep version of self, and that the surface of self is all that there is. So what does it matter if you betray something that doesn’t exist? In analyzing Warhol’s famous portrait of Marilyn Monroe Kuspit points out, “She is the perfect exemplication of Warhol's well-known view that the self is a surface without a depth…But her pseudo-Mona Lisa smile suggests she knows something we don't know. I think she knows that there's nothing to know, that is, there's no secret to life, more particularly, that there's no secret to being a self: it's a social performance that can be learned.”[2] As for that particular painting, the one of Marilyn Monroe, Kuspit reminds us of Billy Wilder’s question of whether she was a real person, or rather “one of the greatest synthetic products ever invented?”[3] According to Kuspit, Warhol fell on the side of her being a great synthetic product.
But whereas Kuspit opines that Warhol believed that “true” self, meaning deep self, and emotions are societal constructs, Steven Shaviro counters that Warhol believed in depth and emotions, but merely that they were forgotten by society. In Shaviro’s essay, “The Life, After Death, of Postmodern Emotions” he quotes Warhold saying, “During the 60s, I think, people forgot what emotions were supposed to be. And I don't think they've ever remembered. I think that once you see emotions from a certain angle you can never think of them as real again (italics added). That's what more or less has happened to me. I don’t really know if I was ever capable of love, but after the 60s I never thought in terms of ‘love’ again (italics added).”[4] Warhol blamed the radio and television for this removal of emotions. He claimed that after buying his first television that he cared less and less about having personal relationships and maintaining them. In the decade where many blamed the rise of the counter-culture, the Civil Rights Movement, and women’s and gay liberation movements on the creation of hyper-emotion, Warhol ignored all of those factors and focused on the advance of technology and how it deprived society of its deep self.
As Shaviro uses Warhol’s actual words in his essay to support his claims more than Kuspit I am inclined to defer to Saviro. Warhol did at one point believe in what he refers to as one’s “true self,” and that it existed, but new technology that was not reliant on human interactions deprived society of that true self and brought about a society in which not only the only thing that mattered, but the all that existed was the “false self,” the superficial self, and that is what is now to be praised.
[1]Kuspit, Donald. “From Max Ernst’s Oedipus Rex To Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe, Or Why The Sphinx No Longer Has A Secret.” Art Criticism, 2005.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4]Shaviro, Steven. “The Life, After Death, of Postmodern Emotions.” Criticism, Winter 2004.
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Unit 3 Project
