Cheap by Waterfront Standards

Infrared image of a subject sitting on a bench.

While yesterday's visit to Super Bowl City didn't live up to expectations, I was glad that we went. The content was mediocre, but San Francisco impressed with its organization, security, and minimal (tolerable?) disruption to city life. Super Bowl 50 demonstrates to the Olympic Committee that the SF Bay Area could be a viable host.

The day wasn't lost; we spent a couple of interesting hours at the Exploratorium science museum. Though we're members, we've delved deeply into only 20% of the exhibits.

The Exploratorium is normally very crowded on weekends. This Wednesday afternoon it was empty. The $29 adult admission may seem high, but it's cheap by San Francisco waterfront standards.

The Original

The mind's eye switches between the columns and the shadowy figures.

Contained within the vision and hearing section of the Exploratorium is the original "angel column" optical illusion.

In 1989 David Barker designed, lathed and painted the columns, an achievement perhaps unappreciated in an age of high-speed computers, rendering software, and 3D printing technology.

Practical Lens

Exploratorium exhibit

The abortion debate has reared its head again, this time over undercover videos of Planned Parenthood officials making controversial statements. While partisans on both sides argue largely from principle, I daresay that the majority of the American public view the subject through a practical lens: if what is being killed is recognizably human, then the procedure should be restricted, if not banned.

Along the lines of the looks-like-a-baby measure, can you distinguish the human embryo? If it will help, the other four embryos are dog, chicken, skink, and zebrafish.

21st Century Begats

What was once a trickle of media mentions has become a cascade. The Economist devotes this week's cover to CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats). The Economist even uses the "G" word.

There are those who will oppose CRISPR because it lets humans play God.

The gene-editing technology is remarkably easy to use, "like the find-and-replace function on a word processor."

CRISPR has one additional feature not present in old-fashioned gene-splicing: it can change not only the organism but also all of its descendants. [bold and italics added]

By changing a gene in an early-stage embryo, or in the cell that makes an egg, you could ensure that the change is found in every cell in the adult body—including its own eggs or sperm, which would pass it to the next generation and thus on down through the ages. No one is pursuing such avenues in the clinic as yet.

We can do more than Victor Frankenstein ever imagined: we can create the monster, who will beget another monster, who will beget...

Model of fruit fly DNA at San Francisco's Exploratorium: "Changing even one chemical 'letter' in an animal's
DNA can sometimes cause major changes to its body."