Our Pacific Northwest

Our Pacific Northwest

 

Stanford Makes Big Steps Towards Aiding Those With HIV

A week after their Berkeley counterparts announced a prototype for artificial leaves with the potential to produce clean fuel; The San Francisco Chronicle reported today Stanford scientists have created a technique to genetically engineer immune cells in order to make them more resistant to HIV. It has not been tested on people yet, but the article indicated if the technique proved successful in human trials, it can provide a less rigorous choice to the lifetime of medication those infected with HIV cope with. According to the article, the latest regimen of HIV drugs focuses on two particular receptor genes in T-cells, which is how the HIV virus infiltrates the body, eventually leading to AIDS and a crippling of the immune system. The technique developed by the scientists at Stanford greatly strengthens these receptor genes, making the continuous intake of expensive HIV drugs unnecessary. Scientists hope to begin human trials within the next five years. This indicates a small step for those suffering from this terrible disease, with hopes of living a more fulfilling life due to the help of some of the brightest minds in our Pacific Northwest. 

 

 

Lynn Margulis and the Pursuit of Knowledge

Rebel with a Cause

by Dorion Sagan

Photo: Victoria Reay

Although my father, Carl Edward Sagan (1934-1996), is still far more famous for being a scientist and popularizing it, I believe that future historians will gauge my mother, Lynn Petra Alexander Margulis (1938-2011) to have made the greater contribution to human knowledge.

Lynn Margulis
Photo: Roshi Joan Halifax

When your parents are famous and they die it must, I think, be different than if they're not. Perhaps it is that way for everybody: instead of expiring, vanishing into the shadows never to return again, they become bigger, their presences enlarge. Living matter, which I take to be a complex open thermodynamic system at Earth's surface, one whose intelligence not only dwarfs but contains humankind, has been saving aspects of its information, memorizing itself as it were, for 3.8 billion years. Indeed, this is part of what my mother studied—she studied the “earliest stages of evolution” because, she said, “in this way I can lay low and not be ‘name-called’ . . . [for example] ‘denialist’ . . . because I ask hard questions and require solid evidence before I embrace a particular causal hypothesis. Indeed, is not my attitude of inquiry exactly what science is about?”

Here she was talking about the AIDS-HIV connection, which she had investigated and she found was full of holes and unanswered questions. It also didn’t pass the smell test: If the science was there, and good, why the ad hominem attacks, the obfuscation, the pillorying of those who would ask questions.