Day: March 8, 2002

Transplant Method Pioneered in Beagles Ready for Human Trials

Back in 1999, I wrote about medical research on beagles designed to understand the problems with creating and transplanting artificial organs. Last month the researchers involved in that work announced they are now seeking regulatory approval to try out their methods in human beings.

Researchers at the Laboratory for Tissue Engineering at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School took bladder cells from six beagles. They then grew the bladder cells around a plastic form that mimicked the shape of the dogs’ bladders. Once the organs were fully formed, they transplanted the bladders into the dogs. After about three months, these newly grown bladders were fully functional. The dogs were monitored for more than a year with no problems emerging.

Now, Dr. Anthony Atala of Boston Children’s Hospital says he has applied to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for approval to try this technique in human beings. Atala believes he will obtain such approval before the end of the year.

Atala will reproduce the experiment with the beagles, only this time growing a human bladder and transplanting it into a human whose bladder has been destroyed due to disease.

If that succeeds, Atala believes the sky is the limit as far as the applications for tissue engineering. “I think over time there will be no limit,” Dr. Atala told the BBC. “I think it is just a question of figuring out all the different tissue types and cell types and how they work best, but eventually I think that following the same strategies just about every organ in the body will be repairable at the very least.”

Longer term this could reduce the number of people who are on waiting lists for organ transplants, though Atala says he doesn’t believe that his technique will ever be able to completely replace organ donations. Instead it will be yet another tool that doctors will have to treat human disease.

Source:

Lab-built bladders on the way. Pallab Ghosh, The BBC, February 15, 2002.

Protesters Use Extreme Tactics Against Princeton Deer Hunt

The New York Times this week published an article documenting the extreme tactics taken by protesters opposed to Princeton, New Jersey’s controversial deer cull. The situation there has deteriorated to the point that animal control officer Mark Johnson has taken to wearing a bullet proof vest after an altercation with a protester.

Princeton has a major deer problem and several years ago hired a company, White Buffalo, to reduce the deer population. The year before White Buffalo was hired to thin the herd, there more than 300 deer died in automobile collisions.

White Buffalo originally used sharpshooters to kill the deer. It quickly switched to a net-and-bolt method, however. The deer are lured into a trap and a net is then thrown over the animal. A shot to the head from a bolt gun is used to kill the animal.

The protesters claim that this method is cruel, but White Buffalo argues that most deer die within 30 seconds and all deer killed this way die in less than 90 seconds. The company kills 200-300 deer this way. The charge that this is a cruel method of killing is a bit odd given that the alternative is large numbers of deer dying in automobile collisions which does not exactly sound like a humane death (especially since it can frequently take a very long time for injured deer to die this way, especially if they are able to leave the scene of the accident).

And, of course, animal rights protesters have resorted to the extreme tactics that their opponents have become so familiar with. For example, somebody spread deer entrails over a car owned by the husband of Princeton mayor Phyllis Marchand. This was accompanied by a note protesting White Buffalo.

Another protester is accused of hitting animal control officer Mike Johnson in the chest. Johnson was trying got arrest the protester for contaminating one of the deer traps when the alleged assault occurred. For good measure, somebody also poisoned Johnson’s dog, which later died. Fearing for his safety from animal rights fanatics, Johnson has taken to wearing a bullet proof vest while discharging his duties as an animal control officer.

Source:

Protesters against Princeton’s deer hunt turn increasingly nasty. Maria Newman, The New York Times, March 5, 2002.

It’s All Tolkein’s Fault

The New York Times this week ran a bizarre column by MIT sociology professor Sherry Turkle which decried the male-dominated computer culture and blamed JRR Tolkien, of all people, for its limitations.

The major criticism that Sturkle offers of both the computer culture and Tolkein is that, according to her, they both entail worlds bounded by extreme absolutes. Sturkle writes that, “In many ways, Middle Earth, the universe of “The Lord of the Rings,” is like a computer program, rule driven and bounded.” Of course, one of the reasons for this is that the ethics of Middle Earth are largely Christian, although this is nowhere near as explicit as it is in something like C.S. Lewis’ Narnia Chronicles.

Turkle may be uncomfortable with moral absolutes, but in a world where people feel justified in hijacking planes and crashing them into buildings, young readers could do a lot worse than Tolkien’s vision of right and wrong (and especially, Tolkien’s warnings about the corrupting nature of power).

Turkle connects this obsession with rules in Tolkein, computers and role playing games, writing,

Like the rings, the inhabitants of Middle Earth behave according to a set of rules. This is part of what makes it so easy to translate Tolkien’s work into game worlds. In “Dungeons and Dragons,” for instance, character attributes like charisma or strength are assigned according to a point system. There is little room for psychological ambivalence or complex motivations in such a personality.

Frodo, the hero of “The Lord of the Rings,” is part of a fellowship, although it is more properly called a fraternity: in Tolkien’s world, the men bond. The few females are loved and feared as icons or charms.

And the computer culture, by and large, is a world built by engineers for engineers, by men for men. (This is a culture that found it natural to have “abort, terminate, and fail” as three choices on a screen prompt.) Like Tolkien’s world, most computer games are about mastery through violence; they serve as a socialization into the computer culture for adolescent boys.

Before proceeding to dissect this nonsense, note that not only does Turkle object to a lack of moral ambiguity, but she also has an ambiguous relationship with truth and accuracy. There was never a screen prompt with the three options, “abort, terminate, fail.” The actual prompt, given by MSDOS when a file could not be located on a disk, was “abort, retry, fail.”

In addition, it is absurd for Turkle to claim there are 856,000 web sites devoted to Tolkien. She seems to have arrived at this number by simply typing in “Tolkien” into Google’s search engine. That indeed returns 856,000 search results, but that in no way represents 856,000 distinct web sites devoted to Tolkien.

Most of her other claims suffer from similar problems — it is not that they do not contain a grain of truth, but rather that they are nothing more than one person’s biased observations not backed up by any data.

For example, she complains that since characters in role playing games like “Dungeons and Dragons” are assigned numerical attributes that this leaves “little room for psychological ambivalence or complex motivations in such a personality.” But, in fact, such numerical abstracts allow a lot of room for psychological ambivalence and complex motivations. In fact, such numerical ratings are rarely seen as the end-all be-all of a character’s motivations (and, of course, one could also point out that this is meant to be a game, which by definition must be simplified in order to be playable. Monopoly does not incorporate many of the complexities of real-life real estate markets, but it is nonetheless an enjoyable way to spend an evening).

Similarly Turkle complains that “most computer games are about mastery through violence.” You have to wonder exactly what she means by “most computer games.” Here is a list of the 20 top-selling computer games of 2001:

1. The Sims (EA)
2. RollerCoaster Tycoon (Infogrames)
3. Harry Potter & The Sorcerer’s Stone (EA)
4. Diablo 2 Expansion: Lord of Destruction (Vivendi)
5. The Sims: House Party Expansion (EA)
6. The Sims: Livin’ Large Expansion (EA)
7. The Sims: Hot Date Expansion (EA)
8. Diablo 2 (Vivendi)
9. Sim Theme Park (EA)
10. Age Of Empires 2: Age of Kings (Microsoft)
11. Black & White (EA)
12. Frogger (Infogrames)
13. Roller Coaster Tycoon Loopy Landscapes Expansion (Infogrames)
14. Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 (EA)
15. Backyard Basketball (Infogrames)
16. SimCity 3000 Unlimited (EA)
17. Backyard Baseball 2001 (Infogrames)
18. Age Of Empires 2: Conquerors Expansion (Microsoft)
19. Max Payne (GodGames/Take 2)
20. SimCity 3000 (EA)

Of those 20 games, only 6 (Diablo 2 Expansion, Diablo 2, Age of Empires, Command & Conquer, Age of Empires and Max Payne) involve “mastery through violence.” The really odd thing is that Turkle complains that computer games and players are excessively rule bound with no ambiguity, and yet half of these games are so-called “god games” in which a major feature is that there is usually not set winning/losing condition.

There is, for example, no way to “win” playing The Sims. There are no victory or loss conditions and the game can be played pretty much however the player wants. Some people, for example, play it by imposing such conditions — i.e. they try to have their characters accumulate the most money possible, etc. Others focus on extensive social relationships. Still others don’t play the game so much as use it a backdrop for telling stories about the characters. The game has some constraints, obviously, but contains a tremendous amount of ambiguity as far as what the goals (if any) of the game are.

Turkle’s claim that the computer culture, computer gamers and role playing gamers are rule bound binary thinkers is nothing more than an inaccurate prejudice of Turkle’s. In fact you could say that it is a rigid oversimplification that does not allow for any ambiguity. It is Turkle who apparently insists on seeing her world in black-and-white with no shades of grey.

Just as Turkle claims that “Tolkien’s work says more about us than it does about Tolkien,” so Turkle’s comments on computer culture seem to say more about her than they do about the computer culture.

Source:

Lord of the Hackers. Sherry Turkle, The New York Times, March 7, 2002.