KellanStec

To the regular readers that I probably don’t even have, I am sorry for my lack of activity in the past two months. My summer job has been keeping me very busy. I might write about that later.

A few days ago, I saw this article, and found it to be very interesting. Apparently, some scientists have managed to inject foreign DNA into a bacterium of another species with few adverse side effects. The bacterium acted as though it were the organism from which the DNA originated. The success rate was not very high (1 out of every 150,000 attempts), but with more research the rate should improve.

The team includes Craig Venter (the first man to have his entire genome read) and Ham Smith (a Nobel Prizewinner). Venter was featured on The Colbert Report on February 27, 2007 and is also the co-founder of Synthetic Genomics. I suggest visiting their website and looking around. It’s cool stuff. They describe the process in greater detail there–and with pictures!

Anyone familiar with genetics knows that this “species transplant” is a huge step for scientists. What exactly does this mean for us? Well, with more research and fine-tuning of the technique, we will be able to inject synthetic genes into bacterium (or even multicellular organisms!) to basically get them to do whatever we want. We could program them to digest toxic chemicals into something harmless, produce fuel, absorb CO₂ from the air, among many other uses.

Here’s what I envision scientists doing with this amazing technology. They could start from scratch, and create a genome minimal to supporting life in the bacterium. This would only require genes for metabolizing energy, reproduction, and other (minor?) cell functions. From this “parent genome”, they could add all kinds of genetic material. This is entirely possible with the help of computers, although there would be a significant amount of time involved until we can perfect the technique.

I like this quote from another article:

Journalists have often asked if the creation of artificial life is a step too far, whether Dr Venter and his team are ‘playing God’. (‘We don’t play,’ Ham Smith likes to joke.)

It will be interesting to see how long it takes the team to develop an entirely new organism from scratch. Will “within months” be accurate?

Further information:
Download the mp3 interview with Roger Highfield. (2.1 MB)
Visit the Synthetic Genomics homepage.

Yesterday, one of my friends forwarded me to this article on Newsweek. It discusses some new discoveries in the physiology and cell mechanics of the human body. Apparently, once someone has died–that is, their heart has stopped beating–their cells aren’t really dead. Clinically, their body is declared dead, even though their cells are not. The cells can survive for an hour or more with no oxygen!

What was even more amazing is what triggers the cells to die. After more than five minutes of oxygen deprivation, the cells die when the oxygen supply is resumed–a process called reperfusion. The cell death is a misfiring of the natural process of cell suicide (apoptosis) carried out by the mitochondria. This cell suicide is a method of controlling cancer. When the cells are deprived of oxygen and are reperfused more than five minutes after deprivation, the cells are tricked into thinking that they are cancerous and kill themselves. Dr. Lance Becker quotes:

It looks to us as if the cellular surveillance mechanism cannot tell the difference between a cancer cell and a cell being reperfused with oxygen. Something throws the switch that makes the cell die.

Amazing! The implications of this are startling: the standard procedures for treating victims of a heart attack are exactly backward. In attempting to restore oxygen to the cells–and succeeding–we are inadvertently killing the cells.

So, doctors are now experimenting with new methods of resuscitation. What they do is use a heart-lung bypass machine to maintain circulation to the brain while the heart can be safely restarted with minimal cell death resulting. The procedure found an eighty percent success rate among a group of 34 individuals, while the traditional method produced a fifteen percent success rate.

The article closes with a chilling quote:

The body on the cart is dead, but its trillions of cells are all still alive. Becker wants to resolve that paradox in favor of life.

Now, my friend and I were thinking: what could this mean to the world’s religions that believe in an afterlife? If we brought back a number of people from an hour or more of death, we would know for certain whether or not one exists. We would be able to verify what science says about near-death experiences–that they are a result of the natural release of chemicals of a dying brain. Many religions rely on the afterlife as a “great equalizer” for the injustices that we suffer in this world. It gives comfort to those who have lost a loved one to know that they are in a better place.

How many people would be willing to accept the truth if it were presented to them? I wouldn’t have much of a choice to accept the reality if we discovered that there was no afterlife. On the flip side, what if we were to discover for certain that there was an afterlife? Those who do not believe in the supernatural would have to radically alter their worldview to reconcile with this new evidence. Those of faith could boast to be certain about something that no human could possibly be certain about today. I am not saying that this itself could determine whether or not an afterlife exists, but I think there’s reasonably strong evidence that can go either way.

So, my question is: if we could unequivocally say whether or not there was an afterlife, would you be willing to radically alter your current worldview to coincide with the new evidence?

Today, I have decided to diverge from my normal topics and write about my life. This week is my spring break, and I am home alone all week. It can’t go much better than it has been. I have been working on two different websites; one for a class and one for a paying client. It’s been a long time since I have done any website development. I think the last major thing that I did was my sister’s website. My normal approach was to take a design in Photoshop, chop it up, and put it into neat tables. I took a different approach this time, and decided to go for a table less design–something I had never tried before. At first it was tough, but I am really starting to get the hang of it. It’s much easier to position things exactly where I want them, and it takes much less space than a typical table design. Now I’ll tell you a little bit about them.

Little Red Hen Theater
This is the website that I am developing for a class. Instead of registering for Website Development this semester, I talked to the instructor and worked out a deal to test out, since I have been doing this for a number of years and really wouldn’t gain much from the class. It is also saving me about $300 for credits, plus the time I have to waste going to class. This was not my first attempt at doing a XHTML/CSS site with no tables, but it was my first successful attempt. It took me a while–much longer than a table design would have. But once I knew how to do it, it was simple. So far it’s a very simple design, and I just need time to design a suitable logo and fill it with content. Also, I’m not sure about that grey bar on the bottom, it seems like it makes the site look a bit too bland. If anyone has any ideas, let me know. I’d like to toy around with some different colors, but I don’t know where to go with it.

Volf Records
I am working on this website for my buddy Nick, who owns his own record company. This is where I really started to like CSS. If you click on the image to the right, a new page will open of the live design. As you can see, the logo hangs off the edge of the design a little bit. I really like the way that looks, and it would have been nearly impossible to do efficiently with tables. It would have either required me to chop up the logo and put the pieces in different cells, or to create one cell that spanned two below it. This would have created an empty cell to the left of where the links will go (column 1), and threw the whole design off-center. So, in order to remedy that, I would have had to put another cell to the right of everything. Talk about inefficient. Now I’ll show you the (very simple) way I did it. First comes the container for the cell behind the image. I made it the same height as the image, and used a z-index (the third dimension, or depth, of a website) to make that cell go behind everything. Then I positioned the image with three percent less padding than the main container for the entire site. It kind of makes me mad that this is the furthest that I will be going with the site for now, because I left the original design image on my computer in my dorm. But, I worked with what I already had on my web server.

Here is the code for the Volf Records logo:

<style type=”text/css”>
<!–
#contents {
margin-top:0px;
margin-left:10%;
margin-right:10%;
background-color:#333333;
height:100%;
}
#logo_back{
background-color:#333333;
padding-left:10%;
clear:left;
height:100px;
z-index:-1;
}
#logo{
float: left;
position:absolute;
left:7%;
z-index:1;
border:0px;
}
–>
</style>
<div id=”contents”>
<img src=”images/logo.png” alt=”logo” title=”Volf Records” id=”logo” />
<div id=”logo_back”></div>
</div>

Simple, huh? It is much simpler than a table design, that’s for darn sure. I know most of my readers probably don’t understand this code, but I am really excited to be learning something new. I had to share. If any of you have any suggestions or comments, please feel free to leave a comment in the form below. I’d love to hear feedback. Keep in mind that I am still working on these, and there are still some obvious problems with them. If you want to report a problem with the way the site is rendering, please tell me which browser and version you use. I have only tested them in Internet Explorer 7. I have nothing else to test with, since this is my family’s PC which is on dialup. I am not downloading Firefox on 24k.

Also, for my readers who are competent with CSS, you can sure suggest ways to optimize my code. I’m new to this!