Craig Venter’s Bugs Might Save the World
In the menagerie of Craig Venter’s imagination, tiny bugs will save the world. They will be custom bugs, designer bugs — bugs that only Venter can create. He will mix them up in his private laboratory from bits and pieces of DNA, and then he will release them into the air and the water, into smokestacks and oil spills, hospitals and factories and your house.
Each of the bugs will have a mission. Some will be designed to devour things, like pollution. Others will generate food and fuel. There will be bugs to fight global warming, bugs to clean up toxic waste, bugs to manufacture medicine and diagnose disease, and they will all be driven to complete these tasks by the very fibers of their synthetic DNA.
Right now, Venter is thinking of a bug. He is thinking of a bug that could swim in a pond and soak up sunlight and urinate automotive fuel. He is thinking of a bug that could live in a factory and gobble exhaust and fart fresh air. He may not appear to be thinking about these things. He may not appear to be thinking at all. He may appear to be riding his German motorcycle through the California mountains, cutting the inside corners so close that his kneepads skim the pavement. This is how Venter thinks. He also enjoys thinking on the deck of his 95-foot sailboat, halfway across the Pacific Ocean in a gale, and while snorkeling naked in the Sargasso Sea surrounded by Portuguese men-of-war. When Venter was growing up in San Francisco, he would ride his bicycle to the airport and race passenger jets down the runway. As a Navy corpsman in Vietnam, he spent leisurely afternoons tootling up the coast in a dinghy, under a hail of enemy fire.
What’s strange about Venter is that this works — that the clarity he finds when he is hurtling through the sea and the sky, the dreams he summons, the fantasies he concocts in his most unhinged moments of excess actually have a way of coming true. He dreamed of mapping the human genome, and he did it. He dreamed of creating a synthetic organism, and he made it. In 2003, he scrawled a line across a map of the world, hopped on his boat with a small team and sailed around the planet in search of new forms of life. By the time they returned, two years later, they had discovered more species than anyone in history.
And last fall, Venter was back in motion at the end of another journey. He was crouched atop his touring bike in the final stretch of a weeklong sprint through the American Southwest, with a handful of friends trailing behind as he whipped through the mountain foothills in a blur. In the days to come, he would return to his office to piece together a design for the first of his custom bugs. But as he streaked back toward the lab, he made a final detour, swerving into the parking lot of a bakery to grab a slice of fresh pie. Venter hopped off his motorcycle, lifted his helmet and grinned into the California sun. “We hit 110!” he said. “Now I feel like I can go back to work.” (It’s a very long article.)
SOM: He is… the most interesting man in the world.
The Little Rascals are at it again.
American Dream Faces Harsh New Reality
The American Dream is a crucial thread in this country’s tapestry, woven through politics, music and culture.
Though the phrase has different meanings to different people, it suggests an underlying belief that hard work pays off and that the next generation will have a better life than the previous generation.
But three years after the worst recession in almost a century, the American Dream now feels in jeopardy to many.
The town of Lorain, Ohio, used to embody this dream. It was a place where you could get a good job, raise a family and comfortably retire.
“Now you can see what it is. Nothing,” says John Beribak. “The shipyards are gone, the Ford plant is gone, the steel plant is gone.” His voice cracks as he describes the town he’s lived in his whole life.
“I mean, I grew up across the street from the steel plant when there was 15,000 people working there,” he says. “My dad worked there. I worked there when I got out of the Air Force. It’s just sad.”
Uniquely American
The American Dream is an implicit contract that says if you play by the rules, you’ll move ahead. It’s a faith that is almost unique to this country, says Michael Dimock of the Pew Research Center.
“When Germans or French are asked the same questions about whether it’s within all of our power to get ahead, or whether our success is really determined by forces outside our control, most German and French respondents say, ‘No, success is really beyond our control,’ ” Dimock says.
In the wake of the recession, that sentiment is now growing in this country.
“I think the American Dream for the average man doesn’t exist any more,” retiree Linden Strandberg says on a recent visit to the Smithsonian American History museum in Washington, D.C.
The Strandberg family story has been repeated millions of times in the last century. His parents immigrated from Sweden in the 1920s for economic opportunity. Linden grew up and worked at the phone company in Chicago for 35 years.
“I wasn’t smart enough to go to college, so I wanted to get a steady job with decent pay,” he says. “With my overtime I was able to buy a house, take trips to Europe and visit relatives there. I don’t think a young person — woman or man — coming out of high school now could ever achieve that.”
This sense that the contract is threatened intrigued political scientist John Kenneth White of Catholic University. “We have a lack of confidence by many Americans in the future of the country,” says White, who edited a collection of essays called The American Dream in the 21st Century.
This crisis of confidence is not just because the economy is bad. In fact, the American Dream flowered at a time when the economy was at its worst.
“If you go back to the Great Depression where the American Dream originated as a concept, strikingly enough, there was still hope and optimism about the future,” White says.
A Long History Of Optimism
In 1931, author James Adam wrote a book with the working title The American Dream. Ultimately it was retitled The Epic of America. Historians say that text marked the American Dream’s emergence into the spotlight.
Yet the underlying themes had been bubbling up through the American psyche for much longer. In 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald opened his iconic novel The Great Gatsby with these lines:
In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, he told me, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.
The American motifs of growth and optimism even stretch back as far as the Constitutional Convention.
“The chair in which Washington sat had a sun, and the question was asked, is it rising or setting?” White says. “And the framers answered that question by saying it’s a rising sun.”
At that time, the American Dream was not available to everyone in the country. Black people were kept as slaves. Women were not allowed to vote or own property.
The story of the 20th century is one of the American Dream gradually being extended to more of the population.
Composer Aaron Copland, a gay Jewish son of immigrants, captured the expansive optimism of the American Dream in 1942, in his “Fanfare for the Common Man.”
Six years later, the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson expressed her faith that blacks will “Move on Up a Little Higher.” The single became an overnight sensation — the best-selling gospel record to date.
In 2009, President Obama looked back across those decades as he took the oath of office. He described his inauguration as a fulfillment of the American Dream, where “a man whose father less than 60 years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.”
While Obama embodies the American Dream in a powerful and specific way, this is a theme that every president and would-be president adopts in some fashion.
On the campaign trail, GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney talks about how his father grew up poor. “Only in America could a man like my dad become governor of a state where he once sold paint from the trunk of his car,” he says.
“Only in America” is a universal phrase in domestic politics. The challenge for politicians today is to convince Americans that the phrase still applies — that hard work and dedication still guarantee success.
Skepticism Grows
That faith is faltering, especially among the poor, says pollster Dimock. “Lower income whites and lower income African-Americans are more skeptical about the American Dream. Higher income blacks are pretty optimistic about the American Dream, as are higher income whites.”
As cynical as this may seem, the numbers suggest that the people most likely to believe in the American Dream today are those who’ve already attained it.
“There’s a certain truth to that,” Dimock says. “There are people struggling. And what you’re seeing especially right now are people who feel like they played the game the right way, like they did what they were supposed to do, and the rules they thought they could play by and be OK have changed on them somehow.”
Economic statistics validate those feelings. According to the Census Bureau, an average man working full time made 10 percent less money last year than he did a decade ago.
The question for this country is, can the dream be restored? And if it can’t, what does that mean for our identity as Americans? Or, as the poet Langston Hughes put it, “What happens to a dream deferred?”
THE TING TINGS — Guggenheim
“Somehow I’m gonna get it right, I’m gonna paint my face like the Guggenheim.”
The Tings Tings’ new album Sounds From Nowheresville is shockingly incredible. I say ‘shockingly’ because the band released a single called ‘Hands’ a year or two ago that was absolutely horrible (and is not part of the non-deluxe, ten track album). Similarly shocking is how easily the band ditched the overly-poppy beats and overall teenage sound from We Started Nothing — a combination begging for sophomore failure — and managed to totally re-invent their sound without losing their identity. I mean, you know you’re listening to The Ting Tings when you hear it but with this new album you don’t feel like you have to turn the volume down very, very low when you pull up to a stoplight in your car.
According to Wikipedia, the band apparently dumped an entire album they made in Germany because, according to singer Katie White, “We went to Spain and stumbled on this new sound so we thought: ‘F*** it, let’s make the album this way instead.” And thus a great new Ting Tings record.
There’s just something about sunny weather that says, “bring some chilled vodka to the park, baby.” And so I do.
“The beautifulness of Saturday over and over.” Lynda Barry on her unplugged life, in a (1997?) handwritten letter
Brand Loyalty
“Studies show that food marketing effects children’s food preferences, food choices, their diets — it shapes what they want to eat, what they’re willing to eat. And, unfortunately, today, it shapes what they want to eat into foods that will kill them — that will give them heart disease, cancer, and diabetes.
The First Amendment does not give companies the right to deceive children or to undermine their health. It doesn’t give them the right to promote unhealthy products to children — children who don’t fully understand what marketing is.”
2/3 of the American population is overweight or obese. Why? HBO’s new short series of documentaries, The Weight of the Nation, observes this ever-increasing epidemic and its impact on our society. (The documentaries can be streamed free at HBO.com)
What is most disturbing about these documentaries is how deeply interconnected obesity is with several other irresolute national issues, such as obesity’s resultant health care costs; its connection with poverty and real estate; environmental impact; connection to farm subsidies which reward corn and wheat growth over fruit and vegetable growth; city infrastructure (highways and roads vs. sidewalks, bike paths, and parks); the digitally evolving work force; and more. Obviously the food industry, lobbying and marketing, are the main targets of scrutiny. In many ways, I see our dependence on oil as a serious and almost disregarded underlying factor of all of the above. So it goes. I appreciate that the second half of Part IV: Challenges attempts to provide positive solutions/alternatives that the common human can adopt and adapt into their lifestyle rather than engaging in scaremongering. Unfortunately, fixing a single of the aforementioned problems alone cannot be done without addressing the shortcomings of the others, leaving us reliant on economically unpopular legislation* and legislators with personally lucrative agendas. Basically, the disturbance of the film is one of hopeless and helplessness – feelings which the alert can escape from time to time but seem evermore impending once revisited.
But there I go again, getting all macabre.
* Perhaps even more difficult is combating the divisiveness of the general public. That is, there is a significant portion of the American population that hoots and stamps at the idea of, say, removing “pink slime” from our grade school lunch meats or, even more preposterous, banning soda and high-sugar beverage machines from schools, calling such actions anti-American** and an infringement of Freedom (capital F) rather than seeing them as gestures of goodwill. True infringements of freedom, I believe, lie in the steamy wrapped bag which reads “Dorito’s Tacos Locos,” providing salty and delicious nonfood meals to the young and poor and damning its biggest customers to a life so restricted by medical debts that they are essentially trapped, enslaved. But what the fuck am I saying? Taco Bell is a success story, bro.
** Anti-American or Communism, typically, is the conditioned response to… does anyone even know anymore? Everything that isn’t the state of being stolen from, maybe? What pink slime supporters mean to say is Anti-Capitalism. Capitalism is fine, but surrendering to it lands you an interview in the above trailer.
‘Galaxy Song’ by Monty Python
Just remember that you’re standing on a planet that’s evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That’s orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it’s reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the ‘Milky Way’.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It’s a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it’s just three thousand light years wide.
We’re thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.
We go ‘round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that’s the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you’re feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space,
‘Cause there’s bugger all down here on Earth.
We Need to Talk About Kevin [2011]
BILL MAHER: In 1983… there were 50 media companies, now there’s only six — they’ve been consolidated — and they are corporations and corporations have a political agenda: I mean, they’re anti-regulation, they’re anti-tax, they’re anti-labor. In that same period we have seen regulations diminish, taxes go down, union membership go down. Is that a coincidence?
DAN RATHER: No, it’s not a coincidence… your point is well taken. Whether you’re a conservative or a liberal or a progressive, a Democrat or a Republican, everybody can be and should be concerned about this: the constant consolidation of media, particularly national distribution of media, with a few companies — no more than six, my count is four — now control more than 80 percent of the true national distribution of news. These large corporations, they have things they need from the power structure in Washington, whether it’s Republican or Democrat, and of course the people in Washington have things they want the news to be reported. To put it bluntly, very big business is in bed with very big government in Washington, and has more to do with what the average person sees, hears, and reads than most people know.
Just What's Inside Those Breasts?
When writer Florence Williams was nursing her second child, she read a research study about toxins found in human breast milk. She decided to test her own breast milk and shipped a sample to a lab in Germany.
What came back surprised her.
Trace amounts of pesticides, dioxin and a jet fuel ingredient — as well as high to average levels of flame retardants — were all found in her breast milk. How could something like this happen?
“It turns out that our breasts are almost like sponges, the way they can soak up some of these chemicals, especially the ones that are fat-loving — the ones [that] tend to accumulate in fat tissue,” Williams tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. “Unfortunately, the breast is also masterful at converting these molecules into food in the way of breast milk.”
Learning that breasts soak up lots of chemicals made Williams wonder just what else was going on with breasts. A lot, as it turns out. In her new book, Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History, Williams offers her take on — among other things — why breasts are getting bigger and developing earlier, why tumors seem to gravitate toward the breast, and how toxins from the environment may be affecting hormones and breast development.
She says many of those toxins, including the flame retardants found in her breast milk, may come from ordinary household items like couches and electronics, which often contain flame retardants. Some animal studies have shown that certain types of flame retardants interact with hormone levels.
“The flame retardants are known to react with the thyroid receptor, and it turns out that thyroid hormones are responsible for all kinds of important functions in our body, from neuro development in our brain to temperature and metabolism,” she tells Gross. “We don’t know at what levels these substances may be affecting humans, but it’s certainly enough to make us stand back and say, ‘Do we really need to have this furniture covered in flame retardants, or is there a better way here?’ “
Breast Cancer
While researching her book, Williams also learned that more tumors form in the human breast than in any other organ in the body except for skin.
“The breast is not even fully developed until the last stages of pregnancy, and that’s when the mammary gland forms,” she says. “And for many years, breast tissues are sitting around not being fully differentiated. That’s one of the theories about why the breast might be so vulnerable to carcinogens.”
She says scientists are now studying whether the plastic additive BPA, which acts like the sex hormone estrogen, may be linked to cancer and reproductive problems in animals. Most plastic products, from package wrappers to water bottles, contain BPA.
On getting her daughter’s urine tested to see what chemicals were in her body
“One of the ways in which modern life is changing our breasts is that they’re showing up earlier in young girls. Young girls are developing breasts earlier than ever before. In fact, one-third of American girls start developing breasts by their ninth birthday. And this is earlier than even 15 or 20 years ago. … There are some studies going on looking at why this is happening. And scientists are researching everything from these chemicals in girls’ environments, to their lifestyles and exercise habits and diet, to social factors. … As a way to discuss this, I thought it would be neat to test my daughter, who was 7 at the time, for some of the chemicals that are being looked at as possible culprits in the early puberty debate.”
On how men are affected
“A lot of people are wondering if boys are being affected by these hormone-mimicking chemicals. And I guess the answer to that is that we don’t really know definitively. But we are seeing an increase in male genital defects, and we’re also seeing some young boys are showing up with increased breast tissue. So certainly it’s an area for future inquiry.”
On the benefits of breast-feeding
“We know far more about red wine than we know about human breast milk. But the things they’re discovering are sort of amazing. We used to think that breast milk was just a food and that it was filled with fats and proteins and vitamins and that formula companies were successfully able to mimic this. But we now know that there are substances in breast milk that exist almost at the same levels that are not digestible by infants. So what are they doing there? It turns out, they’re digestible by beneficial bacteria. So over millions of years, the mother has been creating a substance that will recruit useful bacteria into her infant’s gut, and this sets her infant up for life. So as much as breast milk is a food, we also now understand that it’s also a medicine.”
BUKE AND GASS — Medicina
“Buke and Gass’ homemade quality is what draws you in at first. Arone Dyer plays a modified baritone-ukulele run through effects that squeal with delight while bandmate Aron Sanchez runs his guitar-bass hybrid through two amps.”
At first you’re thinking, who gave these hobos instruments? And then you think, this woman sings like a little girl. Then, BAM: Buke and Gass: members of the “experimental” genre.
God damn. This woman can sing.
