Day: April 25, 2002

Matt Welch on the Difference Between Newspapers and Weblogs

Matt Welch really caught the cultural difference between weblogs and traditional media when he told EPN World Reporter that with weblogs,

All readers are urged to create their own sites — think about that: this is a medium that by definition encourages readers to establish competing media. That’s awesome and wonderful, I think. Glenn Reynolds, about a month ago, asked people to e-mail him if they had started blogs partially because of his own example. More than 200 people mailed in. When’s the last time any publication or writer encouraged 200 people to start publications within six months?

That just really captures what is best about the weblog trend.

I was reading John Dvorak’s latest screed against weblogs in PC Magazine the other day. Dvorak was ridiculing weblogs with a guide to create a “perfect blog” which included using excessive jargon, bitching and whining when some other blogger doesn’t link to you, suck up to others in the weblog community, etc.

In the print version of PC Magazine, the reader turns the page after Dvorak’s piece and finds his “Inside Track” column, which of course is simply nothing more than Dvorak’s rumors and innuendos which he uses to alternately suck up to or bitch and moan about technology companies. The column features several goofy poses of Dvorak looking like a retarded John McLaughlin and phrases and words randomly appearing in bold.

What pisses off Dvorak is that weblogs make it possible for anyone to become a lousy hack if they so choose. The web rendered Dvorak’s schtick as a sort of technology pundit irrelevant, because plenty of people with weblogs fulfill that role much better than Dvorak does.

Not all traditional media folks react as negatively as Dvorak has, but enough of them do that it presents a fascinating look at what people in the media really think of their audience. Welch and others think one of the best things about weblogs is that almost anyone can start one and share their ideas and opinions with others.

To people like Dvorak, though, that’s a bug, not a feature.

Source:

The Welch Report – Go Publish Yourself EPN World Reporter, April 2002.

U.S. Researchers Clone Rare Pig

Wisconsin-based company Infigen announced recently that it had successfully produced clones of a rare pig. More importantly, it claims to have developed advances in cloning that allow it to produce clones with just one round of embryo implantations rather than the several rounds that have been required up until now.

The pig was the last female in one of four remaining bloodlines of Gloucestershire Old Spots in North America. Robyn Metcalfe, founder of the Kelmscott Rare Breeds Foundation in Maine, had unsuccessful tried to get the animal to reproduce via natural breeding and artificial insemination.

Infigen offered its services for free to prove its technology. Pigs have been cloned perviously, but typically two or three pigs are implanted with hundreds of embryos in order to achieve a single successful pregnancy.

Infigen has been able to eliminate the need for implanting multiple animals. In February it released results showing that it had produced three successful pregnancies from three implantations in pigs, and in this case managed to produce a successful pregnancy from a single implantation.

As cloning researcher Randall Prather told NewScientist.Com, “Sounds like they got it working pretty well.”

Source:

Rare pig cloned in single cycle. Sylvia Pagan Westphal, NewScientist.Com, April 23, 2002.

Rare pig breed cloned. The BBC, April 24, 2002.

Has Montel Williams Flown the PETA Coop?

In a recent newsletter, Americans for Medical Progress noted that Montel Williams seems to have quietly ended his association with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. According to AMP,

Talk show host Montel Williams, who has multiple sclerosis,
last year joined comedian Richard Pryor, another MS patient,
in promoting PETA’s campaign to discourage contributions to
health charities that fund animal-based research.

Now, there is no mention of Montel on PETA’s website–the
anti-health charities campaign page features a photo of
Paul McCartney and his late wife Linda, and quotes him,
actress Linda Blair and Richard Pryor as opposing the use
of animals in research. But no Montel.

The Montel Williams Foundation last donated $300,000
and this month will donate an additional $100,000
to organizations focused on finding a cure for MS. While
much of the funding is going to clinical investigations,
there is specific mention of work with a new rat model of
MS and other preclinical work in the online news release
from the Montel Williams Foundation:
http://www.montelms.org/news/News2.asp

Last week, Williams devoted his entire program to the
search for a cure and new treatments for MS. He
included biomedical researchers on the panel of experts.

Good news, but I would hope that Williams would also speak out to set the record straight on where he stands on animal research and how he came to change his mind about PETA’s anti-animal research position.

Source:

Has PETA lost another celebrity? Americans for Medical Progress, AMP News Service, April 19, 2002.

First Instance of Gene Therapy Causing Cancer Spotted in Mice

Researchers in Germany recently reported in Science that while conducting research on mice designed to look at possible ill effects of gene therapy errors, they observed mice who developed leukemia after a gene therapy treatment.

The researchers were using a retrovirus designed to introduce altered genes into the bone marrow. The virus ended up inserting the altered gene into a known cancer causing gene, however. This particular gene serves an important role in initial development of organs, but is not supposed to be active in cells that develop bone marrow. The altered virus ended up switching the gene on, causing the mice to develop leukemia.

A known risk of gene therapy is the possibility that the altered genetic information might end up in the incorrect place, but this is the first time ever that animals have contracted cancer and died as a result of a faulty application of gene therapy.

This is actually very good news. On the one hand, while the risk of this sort of effect is real, it is extremely low. Ten mice dead of cancer out of hundreds of thousands of animals who have been treated with this sort of retrovirus amounts to a pretty good track record.

On the other hand, this is precisely why researchers use animal models. It is much better to find out in animals the circumstances which cause retroviruses to target the wrong chromosome, so that they can minimize this possibility before widely deploying such treatments in human beings.

Animal rights activists keep saying that all of this sort of research can be accomplished without animals, but I’d like to see their plan for duplicating this line of research without animals.

So far, very few human beings have been treated with retroviruses. The only current therapeutic use of retroviruses in humans involves treating infants born with severe combined immunodeficiency.

Source:

Gene therapy causes cancer in mice. Andy Coghlan, New Scientist, April 18, 2002.