God doesn't have a sense of humor apparently.

They say emulation is the highest form of flattery, but apparently impersonation is in bad taste ... especially if it´s of imaginary characters. In an article reported by The Seattle Times three days ago, a DJ named Revin John was fired from his job for a sketch released over Virgin Radio Dubai in Dubai of the United Arab Emirates. According to the article:

The Arabian Radio Network said in a statement Revin John had been "let go" over a sketch Monday on Virgin Radio Dubai in which he quoted an article about a U.S. court throwing out a lawsuit against God.

John then pretended to act out a telephone conversation with God, prompting complaints from listeners of "diverse faiths and nationalities," said a statement written in reponse to questions from The Associated Press.

"He intended to be funny, not to offend anybody," said Arabian Radio Network Chief Operating Officer Steve Smith. "However, what he did was highly offensive to the Muslim and Christian community in the UAE."

Apparently impersonating fictitious characters is only allowed if you're doing a sketch on Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, pink unicorns, etc. In fact, I don't believe equal opportunity is shown to all deities here - I wonder: if he impersonated Zeus, Ra, or Quetzalcoatl would he have been fired? I reckon all gods are not created equal.

Mariam Zarouni, a 20-year-old chemical engineering student at the American University of Sharjah, said she was so offended by John's comments that she formed a group to protest the incident on the social networking Web site Facebook. It had 569 members by Wednesday evening.

"When somebody crosses the line, then you have to defend your religion," Zarouni said. "Honestly ... how can he do this? We're in a Muslim county. But even Christians would take offense to that. You can't insult God."

First off, when you create a facebook group, if you have less than 1,000 members you can hardly call yourself 'protest' group. A group on facebook called "Gay Marriage Killed the Dinosaurs" has almost 40,000 members. Secondly, if a 20-year-old chemical engineering student has time to be offended, she's not studying hard enough.

My favorite comment is "You can't insult God." Really? REALLY? To begin with, I was not aware that impersonation was in fact necessarily an insult. I figured that if we really wanted to insult god, it would take the form of, "Hey, god, your mom is so ugly, when she goes to the beach, cats try to bury her." No? Not appropriate? How about, "Hey god, while you were out last night killing all the first born, smiting the gentiles, and cutting the foreskin off of other babes, I was banging your wife." You're right. That's over the top. I'm gay, so I would probably bang god's husband, not his wife ... only if he was hot ... who I'm kidding, he's married to god, of course he's gonna be hot ... and probably a catcher, not a pitcher. After all, god is supposed to be omnipotent, that's got to come in handy sometimes.

I'm lucky enough to live in a country that truly believes in free speech. And I intend to practice that right until the day I die. There is no such thing as blasphemy. No topic should be off limits. When we decide that some things can't be said, that some things should never be discussed, we lose our freedom of speech and begin sliding down a slippery slope to fascism. When we make topics off-limits and cut ourselves off from free scientific inquiry, we end up with periods of history called the dark ages ... just ask the victims of the medieval inquisition or the salem witch trials.

And for any of you who may think that my views as an atheist are offensive, just remember what the people can do to a man or woman with a dissenting opinion. I'm sure you've learned about the holocaust at some point in your life ... the holocaust was a horrible, horrible stain on human history and I hope that it is not repeated, especially on that scale. Unfortunately there are people in this world who deny that the holocaust ever happened ... sick bastards. I bet you don't like their views either, just like me. But what should we do about it? Should we educate others about the truth? Should we oppose them in open public debate? Should we arrest and put in jail those people who claim the holocaust never happened? Right now, on October 25th, 2008, holocaust denial is explicitly or implicitly illegal in 13 countries: Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Israel, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Poland, Portugal, Romania, and Switzerland.

Does that scare you? I mean, I whole-heartedly disagree with flat-earthists and creationists but I would never promote legislation that would INCARCERATE them. Being free means you have the freedom to be smart AND stupid.

Don't forget that.

On a final note, Dubai is supposed to be the most liberal of the seven UAE states. The age of enlightenment began almost 400 years ago. Will it be another 400 hundred before the rest of the world catches up? 1000? The answer is up to us.

Natural Selection of a Graduate Student

It's getting closer and closer to the 2008 graduate student symposium event! For your enjoyment, watch this video I made about 'natural selection' of graduate students:



Yes, we stole the idea from the Gatorade League of Clutch videos. But ours is *so* much cooler.

Not a moment too soon ...

It's been such wonderful weather lately - I was wearing shorts and t-shirts just last week before the temperature took a turn for the colder. Halloween is almost upon us, then the election (don't forget to vote!), then I'll teach a Saturday for Duke TIP, then the Graduate Student Symposium when Dr. Robert M. Hazen comes to talk about his origins of life research, then Thanksgiving, then our big choir concert, then finals, then some gift shopping, and finally a little christmas time with family. And right on time (about 2 weeks before Halloween) Rev. Donald Wildmon is starting his 'fight' to take back christmas!

That's right, we can't even get to "trick or treat" before we have to hear conservative wingnuts complain about the infamous and imaginary 'attack-on-christmas' propaganda. Rob Boston said it best in his blog entry:

Some stores, aware that not all of their customers celebrate Christmas, use a generic greeting. No one is trying to offend you or ruin your holiday. In fact, if you are really bothered by the type of holiday greeting you receive from a drug-store clerk in December, I'd like to suggest that you need to ask Santa to bring you a life.

Does anyone seriously think Christmas is under assault in the United States? Retailers certainly don't. In fact, they are starting to panic. Worried that the economic downturn might reduce spending this year, retailers are looking for ways to boost Christmas spirit - and sales. I imagine big corporations will instruct their employees to use any greeting possible if it will encourage more buying.

And therein lies the problem. Wildmon and his obsessive Religious Right pals continue to fixate on the use of the phrase "Merry Christmas," as if store workers' by-rote repetition of it will somehow cause Americans to infuse the holiday with more religious meaning. (It reminds me of how the Religious Right persists in believing that 30 seconds of watered-down, generic prayer in public school every day will make kids more devout.) Wildmon is looking at the business community to make Christmas more religious - the business community!

The 'Rev.' Wildmon is from the American Family Association. To fight back against the war on christmas they employed the use of ... buttons! Indeed, there are buttons and glossy stickers of all different sizes (and different prices for that matter) that you can buy to push back against the evil-doers who might be inclined to say 'happy holidays' instead of 'merry christmas' to be more inclusive of strangers they might meet.

In the words of the 'Rev.':

It's hard to believe that there are companies and individuals who want to ban "Merry Christmas" and replace it with "Holiday Greetings" because, they say, they don't want to offend anyone.

It gets better:

Christians can take a stand and proclaim to our communities that Christmas is not just a winter holiday focused on materialism, but a "holy day" when we celebrate the birth of our Savior. We can do it in a gentle and effective way by wearing the “It’s OK to say Merry Christmas” button.

But fighting back isn't free:

Purchase enough buttons for each member of your church and enough Glossy Stickers for each family to have one to go on their automobile. Urge your fellow members to wear their buttons and display the Glossy Stickers during the entire Christmas season.

If you are unable to sponsor your church yourself, ask your Sunday School class to make it a class project. You can even order buttons and Glossy Stickers to share with co-workers, children in Christian schools, customers, etc.

And for any of you nay-sayers who think that asking big-business to stop being so inclusive of everyone by wearing buttons won't work:

Some might think simply wearing a button or displaying a Glossy Sticker is a small thing, but God can use small things to make a big point, and to create opportunities to share the Good News. And what a great time to do that at Christmas!

That's right, is there anything god, zeus, athena, thor, apollo, ra, purple spaghetti monster, etc. can't do?

In response to their button, I'd like to offer my own:

Brainbow mouse!

Someone made a comment about "Brainbow" mouse, the 18th place winner in this year's Nikon Small World Contest. If you want to see all of the top twenty winners just click here.

Here's my favorite ... "Brainbow" transgenic mouse hippocampus:

Glowing Green with Envy

In all of this election clamor, I forgot to post the winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this year. The award was split between three scientists for their discovery and development of Green Fluorescent Protein or GFP: Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie, and Roger Y. Tsien.

I think this prize was rightly awarded this year. Their discovery boosted a huge jump in basic science research by pioneering a new tool that could be used to investigate questions about that molecular world. GFP was originally discovered in the jellyfish, Aequorea victoria, and is known to give that iridescent glow to our sea-water friends. This natural sort-of night light is not uncommon in the animal kingdom. It turns out that bioluminescence has evolved independetly about 30 differents times in organisms we see today. Another example is the firefly which uses a protein called luciferase to activate a substrate which will the glow after cleavage. GFP is different, however, because it can fluoresce on its own, with no need for a substrate.

The implications for the discovery of GFP have been far-reaching, and I'll just touch on a few in the biomedical sciences. GFP is a protein coded for by a gene in the jellyfish. Scientists were able to cut this gene out, and put it in other species to make them glow - first, by just making it glow in all the cells for a proof of principle. Then they began to put different promoters in front of the gene, or 'switches' that can control whether or not the gene is on or off. For example, if Gene X is only turned on in the stomach and I want to put GFP only in the stomach, I'll take the 'switch' for Gene X (usually sits right in front of the gene) and put a copy in front of GFP so that it only turns on in the stomach. This way, scientists could label particular organs, tissues, or even single cells to carry out different studies.

But what about more than one cell type? No problem - scientists have tinkered with GFP to make RFP (red), YFP (yellow), BFP (blue), CFP (Cyan), mStrawberry, Tomato, Cherry, Plum, Katushka, Kate, and the names just get better and better. We can label all sorts of cells differently and all at the same time!

What's even cooler, is that we can actually engineer a normal protein that has a normal function in a cell to have GFP at the end of it, literally attached to it. This way we can follow around single molecules inside a cell to see where they go and what other molecules they interact with!

Other strategies have used this type of labeling to sort out cell types from complex tissues using a machine that recognizes the fluorescent color.

These examples just scratch the surface of the kinds of techniques GFP has allowed us to explore. I'll leave you with a picture I took of one of my embryonic mouse gonads using a transgenic mouse line using GFP. This is a picture of an E12.5 mouse testis from an Oct4:EGFP embryo - that means only germ cells are labelled - in this case, I've psuedocolored the GFP positive germ cells to look PINK, so don't be fooled - I've labelled two other molecules: laminin and PECAM.

Behold the power of GFP:

Cellular Manipulations ... Stem Cells on the Rise

Just last week in the peer-reviewed journal Science, a report was published detailing how to generate induced pluripotent stem cells (or iPS cells) through genetic manipulation without the use of viral vectors. This work was submitted by Keisuke Okita, Masato Nakagawa, Hong Hyenjong, and Shinya Yamanaka.

Dr. Yamanka and colleagues previously published research detailing their work creating iPS cells using retroviral and lentiviral vectors that randomly incorporate into the genome of the host cell. These incorporated genetic components used only three genes: Oct4, Sox2, and Klf4. The resulting iPS cells could differentiation into any cell type.

Though promising, clinical progress would be limited due to safety concerns using retroviral/lentiviral infection - it turns out this poses a seroius risk of activating or inactivating important host genes that could ultimately lead to cancer or other disastrous consequences.

Using this new plamist transfection reported this month, that risk is averted - though the efficiency of manipulation is actually lower. The successful cells could still be differentiated into progeny of all three germ layers, indicating the continued power in iPS cells derived using this newer method.

While efficiency issues still need to be worked out, this is a huge step forward and could soon be translated into the clinic with a lot more hard work.

Evolution is ... Jewish?

One of my friends sent me a link this week to a website that exposes a particularly sinister PAC called the 'Fair Education Foundation.' Upon initial examination you might suspect that this is some sort of joke, but after careful scrutiny you'll find that the people behind it are quite serious.

It turns out that this particular exposure is a little dated (from Feb of 2007) but worth an entry on my blog for the sake of demonstrating the kind of kooks you can find trying to tamper with our government.

The following is a memo purportedly sent from the office of Ben Bridges (R-Cleveland, GA) and concerns how to combat the teaching of evolution in the public school science classroom:
Particularly interesting is the strategy: since creationism and intelligent design (ID) can't be taught in the science classroom because of their religious agenda, Mr. Bridges will attempt to make evolution the agenda of Judaism. I'm sure they would love to live in this fantasy world where they can defeat evolution/science while also scoring points against another rival religion. Too bad this is one of the most absurd ideas and would never fly in a court of law.

Overlooking the apparent anti-semitism, the supporting evidence that is offered is the best part of the whole ordeal. The actual website for the PAC also includes further information about our planet and universe. Specifically they suggest 'evidence' for the idea that our planet does not revolve around the sun, but that it is suspended motionlessly in space by magnets ... magnets that were placed by god, no less:

So the take home message is that according to the Fair Education Foundation not only is evolution a lie from a cult Jewish sect, but the heliocentric model of our solar system is blatantly incorrect - all evidenced by scriptures from the christian bible.

It's sad that they believe this - though it's even more depressing that while Ben Bridges denies issuing this memo, claims to support it more than he would 'evolutionism' or 'big bangism.' To be exact he says, "I agree with it more than I would the Big Bang Theory or the Darwin Theory,” ... “I am convinced that rather than risk teaching a lie why teach anything?"

He is a state REPRESENTATIVE! Well, why would we expect someone who graduated from Barber College to actually understand basic 7th grade science?