Posts by dyan campbell
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Out of interest, at what week of pregnancy would you not allow an abortion? Because after 30 weeks baby is very viable.
Not very viable with minimal technical support though. I think at 38 - 38 weeks, where there is less need for ICU intervention for the premmie is a better point. But at any point, right up to full term, the mother's right to life far outweighs the infant's.
Superstition - by that I mean religion - is just fine, but it has no place in society - certainly not in hospitals or schools - no place outside religious people's own private spiritual pursuits.
Embryologist Lewis Wolpert says it so much better than I do:
“I’m not against religion,” he explains. “Invoking God to explain evolution and the origin of life doesn’t help one iota, but it makes people feel better. That’s the point, you see? I’m only against religion when it starts to interfere with other things, like telling people they can’t use contraception, or banning abortion, or stopping euthanasia. These bloody religious nuts in Parliament! Nobody else, other than the Catholic Church, ever went around saying a fertilised egg was a human being, and now people are starting to believe it. Authority plays a big role in our beliefs.” -
Also I I'm pro-life from the very beginning of human life
So am I, but an embryo or feotus is not yet a human being, so abortion is not "killing a human being", it's killing a collection of cells that have formed inside a human being..
As embryologist Lewis Wolpert points out in his new book about life How We Live and Why We Die an embryo or foetus is not actually a baby until it can survive outside its mother's body, with minimal technical support.
But I agree with you about the death penalty -
mainly because it's morally repugnant, but also partly because it's hard to get juries to convict when there is a death penalty, and partly because the death penalty is so incredibly expensive in a democracy.I an provisionally pro-euthanasia, but having worked with terminally ill people I don't think legal euthanasia until that very end stage is a good idea. It became apparent to me the motivation for euthanasia is rarely to avoid pain but usually to avoid being a burden on family. Sometimes that sense of being a burden is simply having them witness the dying person's suffering. But what I realised is that even when a dying person is suffering physically, they still wish to cling to life. Of all the people I knew who were dying, not one wanted to die because of their physical suffering.
Adequate hospice facilities and unlimited (to the point of euthanasia really) pain relief at the very end stage are better options than legal euthanasia at the very diagnosis of a terminal illness.
The danger with legal euthanasia is that many people will make their family members their priority, rather than themselves.
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The vast majority of pro-life protests are legal and non-violent.
The term is "anti-abortion" not "pro-life". Everyone is pro-life, but some people are anti-abortion.
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'I'd like a glass of water, please.'
<blank look>
'Water.'
'What was that, hon?'
'Wahdder.'
'Oh, a glass of WAHDDER! Coming right up.'
I have had that exact conversation more times than I can count.
(See also: beer --> bee-ERRRRRRRR)My poor husband had several variations on that conversation in Canada, when introducing himself
"Hello, I'm Paul"
"Pole? What an unusual name..."Of course the cultural thing can cut both ways. Just a few days ago we were driving along a downtown Auckland street and I saw a billboard that said "TAKE YOUR KIDS TO BRISNEYLAND!" and I turned to Paul and said "Not many Jews in NZ eh?"
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I saw Glenn Wool play at the same venue in the link - he was great.
Glenn Wool is great - very funny guy - but how can he (as he says on his website) claim to be Canadian and reject Canada's beloved crime solving German Shepherd? He is referring to the tv show The Littlest Hobo which had two incarnations - one in 1963 to 1966 and the other in the mid 1970s, although both had the same catchy theme song.
The Hobo was a stray dog who rode the freight trains from town to town, pulling unconscious children from burning buildings, foiling would be kidnappers, saving people from drowning, rescuing other (dumber) species from various fates, preventing murders, leading doctors to injured children lost in the woods. Every episode ended sadlly, with the dog declining the offer of a comfortable suburban home, and the final camera shot when the credits rolled was of the countryside rolling by from the boxcar, shot from behind the dog's ears.
I believe in one of those shots the dog is actually driving a car.
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A large prospective study followed a group of 715 homosexual men in the Vancouver, Canada area; approximately half were HIV-seropositive or became so during the follow-up period, and the remainder were HIV-seronegative.
And the HIV-Lymphadenopathy study that preceeded that. HIV-AIDS is one well documented retrovirus. It's hard to isolate because it works works (on a cellular level) in the opposite direction from ordinary viruses. Imagine a photographic negative, rather than a photograph itself; it's like a ghost-image of a virus, if that makes sense.
I knew literally everyone involved in that study. I was working for AIDS Vancouver waaay back then - not as a researcher - I was the non-threatening public relations face of AIDS Vancouver and behind the scenes rat-of-all-work in the office.
It was a steep and alarming learing curve for my (then) new NZ husband who wound up spending his free time helping me on literally dozens of different projects. We even spent our days off at the hospice, volunteering.
I remember well how dumbstruck he was when he found when we had planned a march to publicise the need for government funding for what passed in those days as pharmaceutical treatment for HIV-AIDS.
We timed our march - which included very sick guys in wheelchairs - to coincide with Grey Cup Weekend - the big grid-iron football game, when the city would be full of drunk jocks.
We also had a guy dressed up as a condom-covered penis, our mascot King Condom. "They'll attack us Paul said, horrified at the prospect of marching through a drunk, homophobic and testosterone fillled crowed with our crew of the sick, the gay and the sympathetic. "Well, yes dear" I told him, that's exactly the point ."
Which of course, was exactly what we were hoping. They did, and none of us were hurt much beyond getting pelted with eggs and tomatoes (stung a bit). But we made the national news and the AIDS patients got a public surge of sympathy which did indeed speed up the funding. We called it our Joans of Arc march, partly because several of our volunteers were called Joan. We had a lesbian motorcycle gang called Motorcycle Dykes From Hell run interference for us, though they were really meant to incite rather than deflect hostility. We had a big Gay Cup Party afterwards.
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Length is always greater than width but has less influence. A natural conundrum?
Didn't Friedrick Schelgel and Lewis Carroll solve that one Steve? Fermat's Last Theorem is gone too, I'm afraid.
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Bonjour Bart
I think we are largely in agreement about the use of GE and the role of science, except perhaps
However I would point out that GE has been around since 1983, I was personally making transgenic plants 20 years ago! And GE crops have been on sale since the early 1990s. How long do you want?
26 years is not long in science. It's certainly not long in medicine. As I quoted Julian Davies, speaking at a conference in biosciences
"in fact already in 1946, Alexander Fleming warned that we should be careful not to overuse antibiotics because of the possibility of acquired resistance but no one could have predicted either its extent nor its stability in the year 2000. It makes one wonder what the comparable consequences of the introduction of GMOs might be?"
26 years may seem like a long time when you're young, but it's really short time in terms of assessing the long term effects of a new technology. Just as in previous generations were wrong about the effects of radiation, a generation later they were wrong about the the rate at which bacteria could mutate in response to antibiotics, it's quite likely the present generation of scientists will be wrong about some aspect of the introduction of GM into the food chain. I'm not saying that we should stop researching GM, but I do think we should be extremely cautious. Geneticist David Suzuki says it all much better than I can -
dyan - thanks for the links.
There is a huge lack of references on both sites-Bonjour Islander! It's a fascinating area of research.
The first link has no references as it is referring to a conference; the papers presented will have references, but not the site where you sign up to attend.
The second link is a news article from Duke, and if you really want to see refs, they are talking about Prof Barker (obesity and ancestral health) and Prof Meany (foetal rats) and their work is easily googled. Both men have been speakers at the Liggins Institute's excellent lecture series. Epigenetics is a new and emerging field, and like all new fields everything is contentious.
Barker and Meany - and Gluckman (with his "camel" hypothesis) - have all made well documented contributions to the field.
If you look at the Liggins Institute, you will see epigenetics and agriculture are already working in tandem.
As Peter Gluckman says "Considering that animal genetics only account for around 20% of the variability in populations, and that the other 80% is shaped by DNA that is not inherited and in all probability epigenetic, there is a lot that we have yet to explore - but with this agreement we are one step closer."
My favourite quote is from the rat guy, whose work is mentioned in the Duke article - I think they are talking about the Canadian Prof. Meany who says "when people ask which is more influential, nature or nurture? I ask them what has more influence on the area of a rectangle: length or width?"
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dyan - epigenetics is highly controversial, unproven - indeed contested -work. It is not yet scientifically proven.
Hi Islander. You might wish to read this...
"Epigenetics" Means What We Eat, How We Live and Love, Alters How Our Genes Behave
By Duke Medicine News and Communications
DURHAM, N.C. -- A mother rat withholds nurturing licks from its pup and elicits a brain change that impairs the pup's response to stress as an adult, researchers in Canada found. A pregnant woman's dietary deficits increase her offspring's risk of diabetes, stroke and heart disease later in life, researchers in England have shown.
These startling scientific discoveries illuminate the emerging field of epigenetics, in which single nutrients, toxins, behaviors or environmental exposures of any sort can silence or activate a gene without altering its genetic code in any way.
The last two conferences I helped plan have dealt with (in part) epigenetics and obesity.
You might also be interested in this conference:
Developmental Biology Conference
Developmental Biology is at the center of the Life Sciences. Developmental biologists discovered inductive tissue interactions, thus creating the field of cell-cell signaling. Developmental biologists have uncovered the basic biological processes of embryogenesis and pattern formation, organogenesis, neurogenesis and sex determination, aging and cell death, cell and tissue polarity, and epigenetics.
In honor of the 40th anniversary of Lewis Wolpert’s Positional Information model, there will be a special session on Morphogen Gradients.