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Anti-Silly-Sally-Rally!

Category: Politics

Yo!

Tomorrow at noon, OK Capital, some folks are meeting up to protest Silly Sallys 'proclamation of morality'.

Too bad for her the 2011 Evolution meeting is going to be in Norman. Kern has 2 years to get out of OK to avoid Gaaaaaawds wrath!

Posted by ERV at 12:00 PM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

OMG I CAN SELL MY EGGS NOW!! EEEEEEEEEE!

Category: General Science

This is so awesome! Women in New York can now be fairly compensated for donating their eggs for stem-cell research! WHOOOO!

With the exception for near-sightedness, a sweet tooth, and a 'bad attitude', my family doesnt have a history of genetic diseases. It would be SO AWESOME if I could donate my eggs to a research laboratory and be fairly compensated for the time/pain/risks involved!

But lots of assholes dont want me to do that.

Remember Lisa Billy? Convinced scientists will prowl alleyways, hunting for poor black women to harvest their eggs for $20? See, if I just want to donate my eggs for free, thats one thing, but the second scientists start paying $$, why, poor people will be forced to donate so they can pay the gas bill! *cue picture of screaming and crying black woman laid out, spread-eagle, while ravenous evil white male scientists harvest her eggs*

Shes not alone--Heres a Catholic priest all worried about women!

"Moreover, critics worry that the move could lead to the exploitation of women, especially poor women, who tend not to be in demand for infertility donation.

"With the economy the way it is, you don't need to be a rocket scientist to know that when a woman is looking at receiving up to $10,000 to sign up for research project, that's an undue inducement," said Thomas Berg, a Catholic priest who directs the Westchester Institute for Ethics & the Human Person and serves on the Empire State Stem Cell Board's ethics committee. He opposed the decision. "I think it manipulates women. I think it creates a trafficking in human body parts."

But religious nutbars arent the only ones against basic stem-cell research. Some 'ethicists' are angry too.

According to some 'ethicists', if you dont offer women an appropriate sum, then they are donating because they want to. If you actually pay women a sum scientists, IRB panels, and donors think is fair, which is equivalent to how much woman make for donating eggs to an infertile couple ($2500-5000), youre 'exploiting women':

"In a field that's already the object of a great deal of controversy, the question is, are we at the point where we really need to go that route in order to do the science?" said Jonathan D. Moreno, a professor of bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. "I'm not convinced."
...
But Moreno, at the University of Pennsylvania, questioned whether enough effort had been made to persuade women to donate eggs without compensation. "I wonder if all the expertise that could be brought to be bear on this problem of getting unreimbursed donation have been explored," he said.
...
"People recognize that eggs can make a baby. That's a very concrete good for society. But you can't be sure any biological material you collect for research will be part of a medical breakthrough. That's the goal, but you can't be sure," Moreno said.

*spit*

*frown*

Actually, you can be sure 'any biological material you collect for research will be part of a medical breakthrough', Mr. Im-not-a-scientist-but-I-like-telling-scientists-what-they-should/shouldnt-do. If I donated eggs tomorrow, I have zero expectations that *my* eggs will be the ones used to cure _____. The experiments conducted on my eggs will inch scientists towards a cure for _____, either through 'Hey! This works! But we still need to do A, B, C.... WWW, XXX, YYY, ZZZ' or 'Shit! This approach will not work to cure _____'.

Both positive and negative data contribute towards 'medical breakthroughs'.

A scientist would know that.

Additionally, I can also be 100% sure how much 'good' my eggs will go towards if I dont donate. None. Oh, if I really cared I would do it for free, Mr. Ethicist? Even though every other study gets to fairly compensate their volunteer participants? What is the 'ethical' reason for why I cant be fairly compensated for donating my eggs to a cause that will move the medical community in a positive direction?

Piss off, 'ethicist'.

*high-five* to NY State for siding with scientists on this one!

"This is a really great, appropriate policy," said Susan Solomon, co-founder of the New York Stem Cell Foundation, a private, nonprofit research organization. "This could help us to pursue some critical experiments that we hope will lead to treatments for devastating diseases."
...
"Women are perfectly capable in our society in deciding to get plastic surgery, Botox, donate a kidney. I find it patronizing beyond belief. We compensate people in clinical trails for time and burden all the time," Solomon said.

"If you're donating oocytes, there is time and burden," Ms. Solomon said. "And in our society, we compensate for time and burden."

Posted by ERV at 6:00 PM • 41 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Fish drowning in stupid: Now with added prions!

Category: General Science

Anne Hart is still on her anti-frankenfishscapade.

Actually, this latest article looks like she plagiarized her last article and added stuff about prions.

She still doesnt understand retroviruses or gene therapy:

Farmed fish start out by having the rous sarcoma virus implanted into a specialized gene early in their embryonic development in order to amplify the fish's growth hormone. The virus acts as a carrier. It's called a vector (meaning a carrier virus). The farmed fish are made to grow faster and larger.

This specific rous sarcoma virus has been known since 1911 to cause cancer in chickens. See the article titled, "The Rous Sarcoma Virus (RSV)." For more information, also see The Cholersterol Hoax, by Sherry A. Rogers, M.D., page 193. In the book, The Cholesterol Hoax, the section on page 193 specifically mentions that farmed fish are implanted with the rous sarcoma virus. On page193, the reader also is referred to the doctor's newsletter, Total Wellness, 2001.

The irradiation of farmed fish not only destroys the bad bacteria. It also neutralizes some of the vitamins. So now you have fewer vitamins in farmed fish than in wild fish. When you get the cheaper farmed fish home, perhaps the fish are microwaved.

Now the fish coming out of the microwave oven has had all the antioxidants destroyed.

But this June 28th article adds more anti-science fear mongering to RETROVIRUS, CANCER, AIDS, and MICROWAVES... PRIONS!!!

Read on »

Posted by ERV at 1:00 PM • 22 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Fish drowning in stupid: GMOs and retroviruses collide!

Category: General Science • Virology

Can anyone name one anti-GMOer thats not a self-indulgent, arrogant moron?

Google News alerted me to this breathless expose by an Anne Hart: "Why farmed fish are genetically altered for faster growth with a carrier retrovirus"

Now, for some reason I can only get this article via Google cache. Hopefully this means some editor pulled this article because its so mind numbingly stupid/arrogant/shrill. But somehow I doubt that.

Frequent readers of ERV could probably fix Harts 'errors' themselves, at this point, but Imagonna do it anyway :)

Read on »

Posted by ERV at 1:00 PM • 45 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Hysterical chiro-woo at White Coat Underground

Category: Skepticism/Critical Thinking

ERV does not have a monopoly on teh crazy.

Pal really reels them in with his chronic lyme disease posts, and now, evidently, chiro-woo.

I could not have made up this post from 'Dr. Howard Boos' if I had tried.

You tell me this asshole doesnt sound EXACTLY like a Creationist or HIV Denier!
1. Hates science
2. Uses title of 'Dr' in an attempt to gain unearned credibility
3. Personal expertise/experience trumps scientific community
4. Little/No interest in modern scientific findings, eg journal articles
5. Scientific community wants to hurt people
6. Science itself hurts people
7. Woo makes people happy
8. Scientific community persecutes professional wooer
9. Desperate pleas for 'civility', btw, scientific community is made up of murderous Nazis who genuinely enjoy seeing children in pain

**LAUGH!!!**

When he signed 'Tulsa, OK', I thought Id look him up on the Google machine. Dude is totally a real human. A real batshit insane human. Not only is he a chiropractor, hes also a proud graduate of Oral Roberts, and according to Google, a 'tax protester'.

Though they might traditionally be sleepy government repositories, clerk's offices are increasingly being used by fringe groups for antigovernment activism. In March, Howard Boos, an Oklahoma chiropractor and tax protester, was charged with filing in a clerk's office a false $20 million lien against two IRS agents who were investigating him for evasion.

Oh whatever. Lets go see what kind of fun facts we can learn on Dr. Apparently Antigovernments website:

Read on »

Posted by ERV at 12:15 PM • 31 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Have you ever wondered why your chickens gonads are lopsided?

Category: ERVs

Weird science fact of the day:

Girl birds only have a left ovary. The right one kinda develops, and then regresses. Left ovary is the only one that works. All birds.

What the hell?

What kind of evolutionary weirdness led to this absurdity?

I bet you guessed an ERV is involved :D

OVEX1, a novel chicken endogenous retrovirus with sex-specific and left-right asymmetrical expression in gonads.

Read on »

Posted by ERV at 10:15 PM • 22 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Making influenza fun! SNEEZE!

Category: General Science

No idea what this website is (Routes?), but they have some fun science themed (loosely science based) Flash games, like SNEEZE!

They also have 'DNA Hero'-- Guitar Hero with ACTG sequences, and 'Ginger Dawn'-- increase the frequency of that recessive gene, baby! LOL! And it looks like there are a few more games in the works... gonna have to investigate this site more.

Posted by ERV at 11:15 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Charles Jackson: Expert on ERVs

Category: Creationism • ERVs

There is nothing wrong with not knowing something.

I dont know lots of stuff.

You dont know lots of stuff.

Its okay-- we share knowledge with each other. I dont *have* to be an expert in car repair. I dont *have* to be an expert in particle physics. You dont *have* to be an expert in retroviruses. We are a hippy commune of knowledge.

Seems like the only people who *have* to know EVERYTHING are Creationists. Pressures not on them from our end-- I dont expect Creationists to know how to feed themselves without assistance, much less the details of ERVs. No, its the Creationists who insist that they KNOW EVERYTHING. They are experts in EVERYTHING. William Dembski fancies himself a biochemist. Casey Luskin (aka DoubleD) is an expert on molecular genetics.

And Charles Jackson, the fellow who I 'debated' a while back, thinks of himself as an expert on ERVs.

Even though he had no idea what they were when he and I 'debated'.

But he heard my presentation, and my presentation was directed towards laypeople like him, so now he KNOWS EVERYTHING. He knows SO MUCH about ERVs, that hes now using them in his email 'debates' with people. As if these people arent going to email me with their questions. As if Im not going to blag about it.

Now, I spent about an hour this morning (admittedly, pre-coffee) trying to get the formatting of Jacksons email right. I cant. Its so far down the TimeCube hole, MoveableType doesnt know what to do with it when I break it up into quotes. So first, I will post the email in its entirely to you can appreciate its html beauty. Then Im going to break it up into normal font/color/size for rebuttal:

POINTS OF ORIGINS with Dr. Jackson

a ministry of CREATION TRUTH FOUNDATION (www.CreationTruth.com )

Dr. J, your debate with Abbie Smith did very well ... I was appalled at the accusation you were not a Scientist. About Endogenous retroviruses and their impact on evolution and creation, I have not heard much about these.

Thank you so much for what you do, Alex

(see exerpts of the debate on YouTube : use search word "creatordebater" )

Alex, evo's talk like ERVs are an evo slam-dunk. Not!

Here's what they are: A retrovirus injects an RNA stand into a cell. The strand backward-copies ("retro"-copies) itself in DNA form, then splices ("endogenizes") into a spot along the victim's DNA. The strand is now called an "Endogenous RetroVirus" sequence.

Here's why they matter: To become inherited, an ERV must get into a sex cell. After that, it should show up at the same spot in the DNA of every new generation. So, if youhave the same ERV in the same spot as somebody else(so goes the reasoning) then you must be related through a "common ancestor." So -- evo's hunt for ERVs inhumans that are the same in chimps hoping to prove we have a common ancestor.

Here's the evo bogus-ness: Evo ERV-story makesassumptions -- like ERVs always only splice into host DNA at random sites. But research reports they are slightly non-random -- that alone could explain the mere 14 out of 98,000 human ERVs that happen to be in the same sites (orthologous) as 14 of the chimp ERVs. Evo's claimjust one's enough to "prove" chimp-human evolution. Do the math. What's worse, ERVs shuffle around once they endogenize a genome. So how can you be sure where you see it now -- is where it's always been?! Plus, evo's sayone ERV created all the special traits of placental mammals. The average ERV is only 500 base-pairs long -- the average gene is 1500 bp's -- and it would take manygenes to account for placental traits! Do the math.

Like all evo-"proofs," their ERV argument is really justa buncha hype! Keep thinking! Dr J

Read on »

Posted by ERV at 1:45 PM • 83 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

The rise and fall of zinc as a cure for the common cold.

Category: Virology

Zincs connection to the common cold isnt as wooie as you all might be thinking after this weeks Zicamscepade (cough, sniffle). Though Zicam was marketed as a 'homeopathic' remedy, zinc-->common cold connection wasnt established by some naked sweaty white guy pretending he is a Native American deciding that Ayurvedic law dictates 'colds' require a 'hot' metal like zinc to neutralize viral chi.

Zinc-->common cold was discovered by boring 'science' a long time ago. In 1974, Korant et al tested a ton of metals ions at lots of different concentrations to see if they had any effect on cold virus replication-- cadmium, calcium, cobalt, copper, magnesium, manganese, mercury, molybdenum, nickle, and zinc.

Zinc is the only one that worked. Turns out it interferes with the cleavage of an essential polyprotein (like how HIV-1 gp160 gets cleaved into gp120 and gp41), interfering with cold virus replication. YAY!

Well, all those experiments were in tissue culture. Know how we kill HIV-1 in tissue culture? Bleach. Tissue culture victories arent always real-world victories.

In 1984, a clinical trial involving zinc salt lozenges showed promise, but later analyses demonstrated that zinc salts did not provide therapeutic concentrations of zinc, so if zinc was 'working', it wasnt by the mechanism proposed in 1974.

Around 2000, scientists started publishing the results of their new idea: Maybe the zinc ions are binding to the receptors on the outside of the viruses, preventing them from binding to our receptors, limiting infection? Well, the cold virus replicates in your nose/respiratory tract, so why not just put zinc gel/spray up your nose? Like putting EGCG in condoms, put the drug where the action is.

Some of the nose-zinc trials worked, some didnt-- the scientific community was still working out the kinks... too late. Zicam blew through the door in 1999, and was marketed straight to the public. None of that hoity-toity lab learnin for THEM!

Charles Hensley and his colleagues at Gel Tech thought the solution was as plain as, well, the nose on your face. Why not skip the mouth and spritz the zinc directly into the old proboscis? They developed a gel that can do just that and tried it out on 104 volunteers. The results of this study, having been withdrawn once, will probably never be published in a scientific journal. Because Zicam is marketed as a homeopathic remedy, however, the Food and Drug Administration doesn't require it to undergo rigorous testing.

At this point, the only fair thing to say about Zicam is that its benefits are still not proved. Maybe if I'm desperate, I'll try it next time I get a telltale tickle in my throat. In the meantime, I hope to sidestep the problem by following the advice of Dr. Jack Gwaltney of the University of Virginia School of Medicine, a top cold researcher. "Wash your hands a lot with soap and water," he says, because cold viruses like to linger there. Don't put your fingers in your eyes or nose, as they give easy access to the nasal passages.

Results: Coronal sections of the rat ONe and corresponding olfactory bulbs showed consistent cellular and tissue damage of increasing severity that correlated with the duration of treatment with the zinc compound when compared with the control group animals.

Conclusion: The results of this analysis indicate that the repeated oral administration of such zinc-containing compounds have neurotoxic effects on the ONe and to the mitral cells in the olfactory bulbs of treated rats. These findings point toward the need for increased investigation into the potential deleterious effects of zinc-containing compounds to humans as well.

The agency says that since 1999, it has received more than 130 reports of loss of smell associated with Zicam Cold Remedy Nasal Gel; Zicam Cold Remedy Nasal Swabs; and Zicam Cold Remedy Swabs, kids size. The products have been linked to long-lasting or permanent loss of smell called anosmia. In some cases, the loss of smell occurred after the first dose.

So there you have it. The rise and fall of zinc as a cure for the common cold. Decades of work by real scientists has been tarnished in an instant by some money grubbing 'homeopathic' businessmen. Zinc didnt deserve to die like this.

Posted by ERV at 1:30 PM • 18 Comments • 0 TrackBacks