Archive → January, 2009
A Race for Life
I thought I’d add something for you to listen to while you read*. Not “as shock and awe” as some of the other stuff I’ve written lately ….. apologies.
I could never really appreciate biology when I was in school. I think it was because I always felt that there was more to it than the boring lists that that people ( or more aptly fuddy duddy, bored and unmotivated teachers) kept imposing with regards to what exactly constitutes life and what we call living. Most basic biology books tend to impose a piece of dogma which is used to decide whether a tree, a germ or a hamster is living or not living. This was known as the seven (and later eight) characteristics of living thing. These included:
- Feeding
- Pooping (excreting)
- using the food (metabolizing)
- responding to stimuli (yes, even plants have it, why else would your roses grow at angle indoors)
- reproducing (and lord knows I’m a fan of that)
- growth
- respiration.
Now, anybody with a basic science degree can probably argue that all that is complete total and utter trollop.
But can we call something man made (from single molecules) living? If it can reproduce, divide and feed then can we say that it is alive? Or is it just a very complex chemical like any other? Can we infact create living beings by putting together a couple of living cells or is there more to life?
The Picture Above is a Simulation of one of the first living cells made from scratch by a human.
That’s what some of smartest bastards in the world have been arguing over the past couple of years and in a recent conference in Florence Italy, entitled the 15th International Conference on the Origins of Life it included posters, papers and workshops and presentations centering around the science of artificial cells or protocytology as they call it in the trade.
The thing started off in 2001 when a David W. Dreamer (now Professor Emeritus at U.C. Santa Cruz) published his paper on self assembling molecules where he essentially proved that the same mechanism that allows molecules to form in a cell can be simulated in a lab and work successfully and since then there has been a race on to produce a molecule with a piece of genetic material in it that can reproduce, make a perfect copy of itself and continue to function. Among the forerunners are a team at Harvard, headed by Jack Szostak who have managed to produce functioning models of cells that can infact be called living in that they metabolise (use energy), replicate and die. Another group have been working on artificial bacteria and have even managed to get the damn things to evolve and modify their genetic material.
It’s interesting how close people are getting to producing custom made cells and how little time it took (about 8 years) to come up with what is essential a public beta of a brand new field in medicine, science and even brewing. Unlike the false promise of genetic engineering which has yet to come up with anything more than diagnostic techniques and a couple of pales of grain that aren’t worth the R & D companies put into them, protocytology will probably end up giving more and more incite into how cells form, how genetic mutations, cancer and hereditary diseases happen and how they can be stopped.
It’ll even allow us to develop custom make bacteria, fungi and other living organisms which will lead to a new generation of drugs that’ll be able to augment our immunity (imagine a version of the flu virus that’s close enough to the real thing for your body to develop an immune response to it without actually causing any symptoms or a set of bacteria designed to eat up cells that look cancerous to it) and change the way we grow crops, and be able to enhance and control fermentation and cheese manufacturing (providing you with that perfect wine and cheese combination).
But still there are ethical considerations to be made as one of the guest speakers at the conference pointed out; producing a brand new form of life will mean that we’ll be creating a whole new evolutionary path (assuming that all of us came from that first cell that divided into 2 then 4 then 8 then 16 and so on), something that has never happened before and is not likely to bode well in the end. And I doubt that any of the religious groups out there would be happy about a couple of scientists claiming to have created a new lifeform …….. then again there’s very little that most religious groups haven’t managed to file an objection as of late.
* The music is Make a New Road By Walking performed by the Menahan Street Band. If you liked it then please support them by buying the album.
A Little Less Ballsy than Last Weeks
You can’t talk about balls without mentioning Edward Bodkin and his illustrious (albeit short lived) career as a cutter. Bodkin (like most perves) was born and raised in the farming community of KoKomo, Indiana where he was probably bored and had nothing better to do than sit around and dream of castrating people, livestock and pracitcally anything else with balls.
Now like most bright young people with vision and the desire to cut someone open; Bodkin did the research. He came across a lovely little ‘zine called the Ball Club Quarterly which was described by it’s editor as the magazine “For men into BALLS! Those who have them, those that want them, those that vacuum pump them! Personal ads, generally uncoded, with photos.Good articles and fiction. Excellent reference to other interests such as golden showers, fetishes, tattoos, piercing, sex-clubs, offbeat videos, and very offbeat stuff including: saline injection, enemas, catheters, rough bondage, transsexuals, castration, fisting, bizarre home-made videos, electrolysis, spanking, ball-stretching, rough ball play, sounds, electro-shock, genital modification and more.” and decided to place an ad in it describing himself as a “cutter” (an underground surgeon for piercings, implants and castrations etc). At the time he was trying to attract “voluntary eunichs” who wanted to be castrated(= get their balls removed) voluntary for fetishistic purposes for the most part.The magazine had a circulation of 200 at the height of it’s popularity and surprisingly 10 of them responded to the ad. (you have to understand that the internet that we now take for granted was still largely a bunch of irc channels, newsgroups and a couple of dail-up BBS’s. Not exactly the place where ball fetishists would hang out)
Bodkin at the time of his arrest (I think)
Bodkin offered a DIY castration in which he would take out a persons balls (a.k.a an orchidectomy) in exchange for 2 things:
- A chance to film the procedure and sell it through the ‘zine (ebay was still in it’s infancy back then)
- He gets to pickle the guys balls and keep them a jar at home. He eventually had them in jars in his kitchen.
To his credit Bodkin did manage to perfect the procedure over the course of the nine or so castrations he performed. He started off with nothing more than orange-handled art knife, manicure scissors, a special curved needle (now known as a Bodkin needle in the trade) and eventually ended up purchasing a full surgical set along with horse tranquilizer (kitamine) from a local vet supply store. However despite his best efforts a fair share of his patients/victims/clients did end up developing some amount of bleeding and infection. Most survived in the end.
And the reason why Bodkin only did 9 procedures despite having had 10 people respond to his ad on BCQ is because one of them was a tattle tale and ruined all of Bodkins fun. Victim/client/patient number 10 decided to go to the police one day before the procedure and confessed to the whole thing (It’s a felony to want to get rid of your balls and still be a man in mosts states. Voluntary castration or bilateral orchidectomy can only be done if the patient/person wants it as part of a sex change procedure, for cancer/other diseases or if he is a previous sex offender.*) he also accused Bodkin of wanting to go after kids next (wouldn’t be surprised if the sick bastard did ………).
Fortunately the sick bastard got caught, was put on trail and sent to the slammer; strangely though he confessed and plead guilty to all charges. When asked what his motivation was all Bodkin could say was:
“I can’t sit here as a reasonable human being and give you an intelligent answer to that.”
*Incidentally, I was very surprised to find out that you can now get chemical castration done. The pervs didn’t even have to go to Bodkin in the first place……. fucking retards……
Doc Brinkley: Talk about a Load of Bull
Was reading about the boo ha ha a certain group of doctors have been making about their colleagues at Adan in the paper. People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones still they should thank their lucky stars they ain’t working with this fuck-up.
Part of Brinkleys Mega-Bucks Advertising Campaign
It was 1915 and young John R Brinkley, having spent the last 8 years trying to get through the first four years of medical school had finally decided that medical school was not for him, so he joined the Eclectic Medical University in Kansas and for a rather reasonable fee of 500 hundred dollars the boys at the University granted him a nice little medical degree with practically no effort involved.
The now Dr Brinkley (much nicer ring to it don’t you think) went on to open his own practice in Arkanses where he practiced medicine for a number of years, servicing the local farming/meat packer community (who weren’t exactly the sharpest tools on the shelf). Regrettably, one of his patients who at the time was suffering from impotance, loss of libido and a general lack of energy suggested to the young, bright, broke and ever so ethically inclined doctor that perhaps the solution lies in implanting bull testicles in him (seeing as bulls were known for their erm ….. virile nature ….. damn rednecks always had skewed logic). The man even offered him 2500 dollars (the equivalent of 10 grand by today’s standards).
So having been offered the good chunk of change to essentially kill a person the good doctor performed his first surgery (ever) and inserted the bulls testicles into the man and low and behold 9 months later the man had his first child ( yes, it was all in his head and no the bulls testicles didn’t work). Now, Brinkely having been faced with such an excellent opportunity decided to take the money and hire an advertising company, get him self a spot on the radio (” The Doc Box” on KFKB (Kansas First, Kansas Best) and call himself a fertility specialist with “the only proven cure for impotence” (remember Viagra wasn’t around at the time)
Since then Brinkley went on to make over 12 million dollars over 15 years by performing his procedures on men, women and even children. The vast majority of the procedures when done in the back of his practice while he was drunk and many of his patients developed bleeding, infection and a good number (even by Kuwaiti healthcare standards) died and even those who survived only managed to keep they balls for a couple of months before their bodies reacted to them and destroyed them by inflammation.
A wedding photo from when he married his second wife (yes, he was still married
to his first one at the time…… like most sick fucks that bastard was polygamous*)
A regular person/doctor/false profit would have decided to call it quits after he’d killed a couple of people and many of us would probably admit that we were wrong, however the good doctor insisted that the procedure required a person of “intellegence” for the it to be a success and blamed his patients for his failures (sounds familiar to anyone?) and in the end it took the fine efforts of Morris Fishbein (executive secretary of the American Medical Association) to get Brinkleys licence revoked and even then the bastard tried to run for governor so that he can appoint an new board of directors for the American Medical Association and get his licence back.
Oh well, if it’s any consolation Brinkley died alone, penniless (thanks to the IRS) and with one leg chopped off ……. Yes, Karma is infact a bitch in stilletoes*.
*I can’t spell and wordpress’s spell checker is giving me hell ….. live with it …..
I wanna do that to yer Face !
Click on the title to view the video …. fucking hilarious …..
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