Stocks and News
Home | Week in Review Process | Terms of Use | About UsContact Us
   Articles Go Fund Me All-Species List Hot Spots Go Fund Me
Week in Review   |  Bar Chat    |  Hot Spots    |   Dr. Bortrum    |   Wall St. History
Stock and News: Hot Spots
  Search Our Archives: 
 

 

Dr. Bortrum

 

AddThis Feed Button

https://www.gofundme.com/s3h2w8

 

   

05/25/2005

It's Pronounced ky-Meer-uh

First, a follow-up on surge suppressors. A few weeks ago, I
wrote about my friend Dan’s surge suppressor fire. Now Harry
K. in Canada writes that he recently had some cable Internet
problems. The technician who brought him a new cable modem
said that you should never plug the cable modem into a surge
suppressor! For some reason, he said the surge suppressor leads
to problems with Internet access. Harry mentioned that, back in
the 1970s, he had researched transient voltage spikes. He found
some controversy on the types of surges that surge suppressors
were designed to handle. One of his sources maintained that
these types of surges never actually occurred on real power lines.
On the other hand, Harry found other reports that supported the
opposite view. I’ve just searched the Web and found references
to IEEE studies that found spikes in voltage ranging from tens of
volts to many thousands of volts, together with reports of surge
protectors working just fine and some where they have not.

Speaking of suppressing, both last week and the week before, I
included chimeras as the main subject in my first draft of the
columns. However, when I posted the columns, any mention of
chimeras had vanished. I had decided to suppress any discussion
of chimeras for the near future. Then this week’s May 22
Sunday New York Times Magazine section headlined the word
chimera in big bold letters in William Safire’s weekly “On
Language” column. For those unfamiliar with the Safire column,
he discusses at some length various words or phrases that are in
current use. I took Safire’s column as a sign that I must talk
about chimeras, especially since it turns out that I didn’t even
know how to pronounce the word! Safire gives two acceptable
pronunciations, ky-MEER-uh or ke-MAIR-uh, not the CHI-mur-
uh (as in chimney) that I was using. In Greek mythology the
Chimera was a creature consisting of a lion’s head, a goat’s body
and a serpent’s tail.

In the years following those frightening mythical days of the
Greeks, chimera took on a broader meaning, “an impossible or
foolish fancy” in my 1978 Webster’s New World Dictionary. I
find the mermaid to be a more pleasant example of a chimera
than the lion-goat-serpent. My dictionary also gives another,
biological definition – “a living structure or organism in which
the tissues are of varied genetic origin, sometimes as the result of
grafting.” A crisper definition by Jamie Shreeve in the article
“The Other Stem Cell Debate” in the April 10 Times Magazine
makes clearer the reason for the current interest and controversy.
He defines a chimera as “an organism assembled out of living
parts taken from more than one biological species.”

Let’s take the mermaid. If science could somehow create a real
half fish-half human by melding the two species together, I
would expect virtually everyone to say, “Wait a minute, this is
crossing the line and the experiment should never be done.” OK,
let’s step back. I had a friend who had a pig valve in his heart.
Indeed, there are many people with pig valves grafted into their
hearts. Did I call my friend a chimera? Hey, I couldn’t even
pronounce it! There’s no groundswell of public opinion rising
up against the use of pig valves in ailing human hearts.

Let’s try the reverse. What if we grafted a human heart valve
into a pig‘s heart? I suspect you might feel a bit queasy about
that, even if the human valve came from a cadaver. If that makes
you queasy, what if we used human stem cells implanted in the
pig to grow a valve in the pig’s ailing heart. Would you be less
queasy? Depending on your viewpoint, the source of those stem
cells might make you vigorously opposed to their use in pigs or,
for that matter, in humans as well. Witness the impassioned
rhetoric yesterday in Congress on the stem cell bill.

What if we injected human stem cells into a chimpanzee embryo
and those stem cells multiplied to form a brain that was mostly
human? Imagine a chimp that might think as we do and maybe
even talk to us. I think almost everyone would agree that, as
with the mermaid, we had crossed the line. These are the kinds
of questions that Doug Melton, the philosopher, poses. I learned
of Melton from the article “Doug Melton: Crossing Boundaries”
by David Ewing Duncan in the June issue of Discover. Melton,
an embryologist, has degrees in both philosophy and biology and
a Ph.D. in molecular biology. He also has a son and a daughter,
both with diabetes, the son the youngest ever diagnosed with the
disease at Children’s Hospital in Boston.

It’s understandable that Melton’s passion, and mission, is to find
a cure for this disease. To this end, he’s pursuing research
involving placing human stem cells in mice, chickens and frogs
to try to get a handle on how to turn embryonic stem cells into
pancreatic beta [islet] cells, the type that make insulin. In his
Times Magazine article, Shreeve details the work of various
other researchers working on inserting human stem cells into
different animals. Their goal is to find the keys to using stem
cells to repair or grow human body parts. These researchers
must be concerned that they not cross the line of creating animals
that have too much humanness in them.

Here, however, I’m more taken by Melton’s philosophical
arguments and questions about these chimera experiments and
how they’re perceived. He points out that at one time it was
considered unacceptable to cut or otherwise intrude in the human
body, the temple of the soul. Last week I had a CT scan, a
follow-up on kidney surgery that certainly cut into the depths of
my personal “temple”. Attitudes change and Melton suggests
they will continue to change. Take the issue of cloning a human.
Melton thoroughly agrees that this is unacceptable.

However, he poses this disturbing question. Suppose, over the
next 20 years, scientists perfect cloning to the point where it’s
understood and controlled sufficiently that it’s virtually 100
percent certain that the result will be a normal, healthy baby.
Would the government then be justified in saying that natural
childbirth, being more risky, should be banned in favor of
cloning? I think not but, as Melton says, attitudes do change and
I’d be surprised if someone hasn’t cloned a human before the end
of this century, even if attitudes haven’t changed.

Finally, change was the subject of another article in this week’s
Sunday New York Times Magazine section. The author of the
article was Art Segal, who described his long time unhappiness
with his given name, Arpard Herschel Fazakas. After much soul
searching, at age 51, he officially changed his name to Art Segal.
Segal is a modification of Siegel, his mother’s maiden name.
Now, a year or so later, Segal finds himself with some
misgivings about the name change. He even refers to himself as
Faz on occasion.

It’s a small world. I found his description of his life and the
process of changing his name fascinating and called it to my
wife’s attention. She immediately said, “That’s Arpard
Fazakas!” If this is indeed the same fellow, he lived across the
street from some very good friends of ours and our older son has
his signature and a message in his high school yearbook! And,
as a child, that Arpard was unhappy with his name. Art/Arpard,
if you once lived on Maple Street, we’d love to hear from you.

Allen F. Bortrum, who also has another, real name!



AddThis Feed Button

 

-05/25/2005-      
Web Epoch NJ Web Design  |  (c) Copyright 2016 StocksandNews.com, LLC.

Dr. Bortrum

05/25/2005

It's Pronounced ky-Meer-uh

First, a follow-up on surge suppressors. A few weeks ago, I
wrote about my friend Dan’s surge suppressor fire. Now Harry
K. in Canada writes that he recently had some cable Internet
problems. The technician who brought him a new cable modem
said that you should never plug the cable modem into a surge
suppressor! For some reason, he said the surge suppressor leads
to problems with Internet access. Harry mentioned that, back in
the 1970s, he had researched transient voltage spikes. He found
some controversy on the types of surges that surge suppressors
were designed to handle. One of his sources maintained that
these types of surges never actually occurred on real power lines.
On the other hand, Harry found other reports that supported the
opposite view. I’ve just searched the Web and found references
to IEEE studies that found spikes in voltage ranging from tens of
volts to many thousands of volts, together with reports of surge
protectors working just fine and some where they have not.

Speaking of suppressing, both last week and the week before, I
included chimeras as the main subject in my first draft of the
columns. However, when I posted the columns, any mention of
chimeras had vanished. I had decided to suppress any discussion
of chimeras for the near future. Then this week’s May 22
Sunday New York Times Magazine section headlined the word
chimera in big bold letters in William Safire’s weekly “On
Language” column. For those unfamiliar with the Safire column,
he discusses at some length various words or phrases that are in
current use. I took Safire’s column as a sign that I must talk
about chimeras, especially since it turns out that I didn’t even
know how to pronounce the word! Safire gives two acceptable
pronunciations, ky-MEER-uh or ke-MAIR-uh, not the CHI-mur-
uh (as in chimney) that I was using. In Greek mythology the
Chimera was a creature consisting of a lion’s head, a goat’s body
and a serpent’s tail.

In the years following those frightening mythical days of the
Greeks, chimera took on a broader meaning, “an impossible or
foolish fancy” in my 1978 Webster’s New World Dictionary. I
find the mermaid to be a more pleasant example of a chimera
than the lion-goat-serpent. My dictionary also gives another,
biological definition – “a living structure or organism in which
the tissues are of varied genetic origin, sometimes as the result of
grafting.” A crisper definition by Jamie Shreeve in the article
“The Other Stem Cell Debate” in the April 10 Times Magazine
makes clearer the reason for the current interest and controversy.
He defines a chimera as “an organism assembled out of living
parts taken from more than one biological species.”

Let’s take the mermaid. If science could somehow create a real
half fish-half human by melding the two species together, I
would expect virtually everyone to say, “Wait a minute, this is
crossing the line and the experiment should never be done.” OK,
let’s step back. I had a friend who had a pig valve in his heart.
Indeed, there are many people with pig valves grafted into their
hearts. Did I call my friend a chimera? Hey, I couldn’t even
pronounce it! There’s no groundswell of public opinion rising
up against the use of pig valves in ailing human hearts.

Let’s try the reverse. What if we grafted a human heart valve
into a pig‘s heart? I suspect you might feel a bit queasy about
that, even if the human valve came from a cadaver. If that makes
you queasy, what if we used human stem cells implanted in the
pig to grow a valve in the pig’s ailing heart. Would you be less
queasy? Depending on your viewpoint, the source of those stem
cells might make you vigorously opposed to their use in pigs or,
for that matter, in humans as well. Witness the impassioned
rhetoric yesterday in Congress on the stem cell bill.

What if we injected human stem cells into a chimpanzee embryo
and those stem cells multiplied to form a brain that was mostly
human? Imagine a chimp that might think as we do and maybe
even talk to us. I think almost everyone would agree that, as
with the mermaid, we had crossed the line. These are the kinds
of questions that Doug Melton, the philosopher, poses. I learned
of Melton from the article “Doug Melton: Crossing Boundaries”
by David Ewing Duncan in the June issue of Discover. Melton,
an embryologist, has degrees in both philosophy and biology and
a Ph.D. in molecular biology. He also has a son and a daughter,
both with diabetes, the son the youngest ever diagnosed with the
disease at Children’s Hospital in Boston.

It’s understandable that Melton’s passion, and mission, is to find
a cure for this disease. To this end, he’s pursuing research
involving placing human stem cells in mice, chickens and frogs
to try to get a handle on how to turn embryonic stem cells into
pancreatic beta [islet] cells, the type that make insulin. In his
Times Magazine article, Shreeve details the work of various
other researchers working on inserting human stem cells into
different animals. Their goal is to find the keys to using stem
cells to repair or grow human body parts. These researchers
must be concerned that they not cross the line of creating animals
that have too much humanness in them.

Here, however, I’m more taken by Melton’s philosophical
arguments and questions about these chimera experiments and
how they’re perceived. He points out that at one time it was
considered unacceptable to cut or otherwise intrude in the human
body, the temple of the soul. Last week I had a CT scan, a
follow-up on kidney surgery that certainly cut into the depths of
my personal “temple”. Attitudes change and Melton suggests
they will continue to change. Take the issue of cloning a human.
Melton thoroughly agrees that this is unacceptable.

However, he poses this disturbing question. Suppose, over the
next 20 years, scientists perfect cloning to the point where it’s
understood and controlled sufficiently that it’s virtually 100
percent certain that the result will be a normal, healthy baby.
Would the government then be justified in saying that natural
childbirth, being more risky, should be banned in favor of
cloning? I think not but, as Melton says, attitudes do change and
I’d be surprised if someone hasn’t cloned a human before the end
of this century, even if attitudes haven’t changed.

Finally, change was the subject of another article in this week’s
Sunday New York Times Magazine section. The author of the
article was Art Segal, who described his long time unhappiness
with his given name, Arpard Herschel Fazakas. After much soul
searching, at age 51, he officially changed his name to Art Segal.
Segal is a modification of Siegel, his mother’s maiden name.
Now, a year or so later, Segal finds himself with some
misgivings about the name change. He even refers to himself as
Faz on occasion.

It’s a small world. I found his description of his life and the
process of changing his name fascinating and called it to my
wife’s attention. She immediately said, “That’s Arpard
Fazakas!” If this is indeed the same fellow, he lived across the
street from some very good friends of ours and our older son has
his signature and a message in his high school yearbook! And,
as a child, that Arpard was unhappy with his name. Art/Arpard,
if you once lived on Maple Street, we’d love to hear from you.

Allen F. Bortrum, who also has another, real name!