From Cork to Toronto

The Globe and Mail seems to think so , quoting former Liberal leadership contender Dr. Carolyn Bennett. The article by Gloria Galloway notes that in addition to providing Dr. John Hamm, former Premier of Nova Scotia, with a nice little retirement earner, the new board appointed by Tony Clement includes: a professor of Jewish studies who has written of his opposition to abortion unless life of the mother is being threatened, a social anthropologist who is director of research for the Catholic Archdiocese of Toronto, a Montreal oncologist who has spoken against euthanasia at an anti-abortion conference, and a Halifax bioethicist who opposes using fresh embryos for stem-cell research -- an opposition commonly voiced by those who believe life begins at conception. Stem-cell researchers, for instance, are nowhere to be found on this board despite its role in approving more than 20 Assisted Human Reproduction Act regulations controlling testing unborn children for genetic diseases, IVF emb...

The FDA has approved cloned meat for unlabelled sale to the public . US food can now, it seems, be any combo from genetically modified, cloned, growth promoted and antibiotic-laden. Sadly with NAFTA and the flow of livestock across the border some of that food will probably end up on Canadian tables. So it's okay to eat this stuff but not clone stem cells? All of a sudden Soylent Green is looking appetising.

Via Pete Baker on Slugger O'Toole , the news that papers in respect of discoveries by Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, Benjamin Franklin and Stephen Hawking are available, free , from the website of the Royal Society all the way back to 1665. It's only free until December so get reading.

Spotted this on realitycheck(dot)ie - a New Yorker article discussing researcher Ananth Karumanchi's research into possible causes of preeclampsia and strategies to combat it by looking at levels of certain soluble proteins. The article is as interesting for its examination of the "politics" (of a career nature) of research, of getting that research published and of obstetric research as it is for the discussion of the work to date. Don't know if it's going to lead to a cure but I'm glad he and now others are taking another swing at it.

I've been thinking some more about the AIDS Conference, and especially given the media coverage of the Federal Government's participation. It's clear that this event has caused a complete meltdown as far as the Tories are concerned, not merely because of the mileage Harper's decision to go to Alert (like Ottawa wasn't far enough away - 4,300km Harper? Seriously, you wouldn't have caught anything, not even at 1/10,000,000th the distance.) but also the bewildering performance of Tony Clement and Josee Verner, cancelling press conferences twice now. It is true that Chretien didn't go in Vancouver in 1996 but if the p'tit gars de Shawinigan is the standard against which the Tories wish to be judged now the next election can't come soon enough. What this is really about is Harper being booed. Once again we see the American influence at work, but instead of "free speech zones" far from the President, Harper is keeping himself far from anywhe...

On CBC's the National, another report on AIDS - this time from South Africa. It is frightening how quickly we have become inured to AIDS and in particular AIDS in Africa. [Realplayer, begins at 25:30, link will work until evening of 10th Aug] So many blogs and so many journalists have weighed the tens and hundreds of deaths in Israel and Lebanon, looking for a few more killed on the side they favour to prove some kind of point. In Africa the deaths come in thousands, and tens of thousands. The crises in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan have so many fewer deaths than the conflicts in Somalia, in Congo, in Sudan, and in the AIDS pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa but so many more column inches. One thousand is the number of AIDS deaths each day in South Africa. The documentary made no mention of the Mbeki regime's disastrous attitude to AIDS - if the apartheid regime had acted one tenth as culpably there would be demonstrations about genocide in every university, every union hall, eve...