Stem cell research, guilt free

You'll probably hear a lot more about this real soon...

Two teams of scientists reported yesterday that they had turned human skin cells into what appear to be embryonic stem cells without having to make or destroy an embryo — a feat that could quell the ethical debate troubling the field.

All they had to do, the scientists said, was add four genes. The genes reprogrammed the chromosomes of the skin cells, making the cells into blank slates that should be able to turn into any of the 220 cell types of the human body, be it heart, brain, blood or bone. Until now, the only way to get such human universal cells was to pluck them from a human embryo several days after fertilization, destroying the embryo in the process...

The new method sidesteps other ethical quandaries, creating stem cells that genetically match the donor without having to resort to cloning or the requisite donation of women’s eggs. Genetically matched cells would not be rejected by the immune system if used as replacement tissues for patients. Even more important, scientists say, is that genetically matched cells from patients would enable them to study complex diseases, like Alzheimer’s, in the laboratory.

Source

Many scientists believe the treatment of strokes, heart disease, cancer and birth defects could benefit from stem cell research, along with Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease. This is a huge deal.

Sense and soul in couple's therapy, Part II

I happened upon a somewhat recent article and wanted to post about it as a sort of follow up to my earlier one about meditation and science. Apparently in 2004, the Dalai Lama invited several neuroscientists to his home in Dharamsala, India, to examine brain scans of Tibetan Buddhist monks who engage in meditation on a regular basis. What scientists have found is that meditation actually does alter the structure of the brain. They call this effect neuroplasticity.

The term refers to the brain's recently discovered ability to change its structure and function, in particular by expanding or strengthening circuits that are used and by shrinking or weakening those that are rarely engaged. In its short history, the science of neuroplasticity has mostly documented brain changes that reflect physical experience and input from the outside world. In pianists who play many arpeggios, for instance, brain regions that control the index finger and middle finger become fused, apparently because when one finger hits a key in one of these fast-tempo movements, the other does so almost simultaneously, fooling the brain into thinking the two fingers are one. As a result of the fused brain regions, the pianist can no longer move those fingers independently of one another.

Weird. The external influence on the brain's structure led the scientists to explore whether or not purely internal, mental signals could likewise effect the structure. To do this, they gathered a group of novice meditators and compared the brain activity to that of the Buddhist monks who had spent more than 10,000 hours in meditation.

In a striking difference between novices and monks, the latter showed a dramatic increase in high-frequency brain activity called gamma waves during compassion meditation. Thought to be the signature of neuronal activity that knits together far-flung brain circuits, gamma waves underlie higher mental activity such as consciousness. The novice meditators "showed a slight increase in gamma activity, but most monks showed extremely large increases of a sort that has never been reported before in the neuroscience literature," says Prof. Davidson, suggesting that mental training can bring the brain to a greater level of consciousness.

On one hand this is awesome because science is now confirming meditative effects on the brain. On the other hand this is kind of lame because science is only confirming meditative effects on the brain. The really interesting effects of meditation don't happen in the brain; they happen in one's life. Meditation is truly transformative on a person's outlook regardless of physical effects. The difference is a matter of translative versus transformative. So they've translated spiritual awareness to physical brain activities? That's great. It's actually pretty awesome. But really, stop looking at the brain scans and go and meditate already. Experience the transformative side. That's so much more exciting.

Check it out: Meditation Alters Structure, Functioning

Life goes online

Or I could just show you what I mean when I say depth is better. Check out this preview for the Encyclopedia of Life:



Now that's depth web! I'd love to see the content management system running that thing. MediaWiki blows by comparison.

The Good, the True, and the Beautiful

Self critiquing, I don't think I accurately represented what Ken Wilber is up to in my post from yesterday. Wilber isn't trying to validate spiritual claims through science or engage in an apologetics of religion. It's much more sophisticated than that. According to Wilber, there's several types of truth claims, of which science is only one. These validity claims run a more comprehensive and inclusive spectrum, and narrow or "hard" science can be improved upon by including these other forms of knowledge.

Rather than muck it up again, here's how he puts it:

Science — empirical science — deals with objects, with "its," with empirical patterns. Morals and ethics concern "we" and our intersubjective world of mutual understanding and justness. Art and aesthetics concern the beauty in the eye of the beholder, the "I."

And yes, this is essentially Plato's the Good (morals, the "we"), the True (in the sense of propositional truth, objective truths or "its"), and the Beautiful (the aesthetic dimensions as perceived by each "I").

These three domains are also Sir Karl Popper's rather famous distinction of three worlds — objective (it), subjective (I), and cultural (we). Many people, myself included, consider Jürgen Habermas the world's foremost living philosopher, and these three great domains correspond exactly with Habermas's three validity claims: objective truth, subjective sincerity, and intersubjective justness.

Of enormous historical importance, these three domains showed up in Kant's immensely influential trilogy — The Critique of Pure Reason (objective science), The Critique of Practical Reason (morals), and The Critique of Judgment (aesthetic judgment and art).

Even into the spiritual levels of development, these three domains show up as, to give only one example, the Three Jewels of Buddhism, namely: Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. Buddha is the enlightened mind in each and every sentient being, the I that is no-I, the primordial awareness that shines forth from every interior. Buddha is the "I" or the "eye" of Spirit. Sangha is the community of spiritual truth that is realized, the "It" or "isness" or "thusness" or "suchness" of every phenomenon.

- Ken Wilber, The Eye of Spirit

My mistake is that I characterized Wilber as trying to mash spirituality into the narrow funnel of hard science. That's not the case at all, and I didn't mean it that way. Hard science looks at something like consciousness and sees a bunch of sparks flying around in the brain, reduced to information bits of 1s and 0s. That's a valid claim, but it's only one aspect of what's really going on. We don't actually experience consciousness as 1s and 0s flashing across our mind. We experience something else entirely. Hard science truth is only as complete as it relates to the sensorimotor part of consciousness. What other levels can we explore? Wilber's answer is expand truth seeking to all levels. He doesn't want to mash meditation into science. He wants to expand science to include it. Knowledge, he reasons, isn't just the True. It's the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

Sense and soul in couple's therapy

I'm re-reading two books by Ken Wilber. The first is One Taste, his personal journal kept over the course of a year (1997), and the second is The Marriage of Sense and Soul, which is his attempt to integrate, or at least find common ground between, the often at odds realms of science and religion. I'm not a religious person by any stretch of the imagination, nor am I all that scientific. I am always interested in the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, however, and have more than a passing interest in how we actually come to know or believe in things. I don't think religion corners the market on that, and neither does science since it's always in process. Free thought is what I'm about, but in coming up with a consensual reality there has to be some agreement on what's valid ways of knowing something.

Typically in science a valid idea is one that has been put through the scientific method and arrived unscathed on the other side. It's been tested and confirmed to be true. That's an extremely simplified version of events, however. There's actually a lot of debate in the epistemology of science over what makes up the scientific method and what things can actually be tested. This is a pretty good question if we're setting out to discover the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. How do you test ideas that on the surface seem entirely subjective?

Wilber says it has a lot to do with having an injunction, an idea he borrowed from philosopher Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996). An injunction, as Wilber uses it, is some type of action that one can perform to test an idea. As he puts it: If you do this, you get that. I should point out that Ken Wilber is widely considered to be one of the leading philosophers of our age, working on what he describes as an Integral Theory of Everything. In the case of science testing spiritual beliefs, the injunction Wilber suggests is meditation. If you perform meditation or contemplative awareness, you get X. X, he feels can be confirmed by anyone who performs the injunction. In other words, something seemingly subjective becomes objective by comparing the results of the injunction with the experience of peers who have also performed the injunction. This technically satisfies the testability part of the scientific method (the injunction is the observation), and the repeatablity part of the scientific method (the confirmation of peers who have also performed the injunction). He explains it much better than I in The Marriage of Sense and Soul. It's not half as crazy as it sounds.

Hey, maybe it is a bridge between science and religion. If nothing else, it at least hooks sense and soul up for a one night stand, even if it doesn't go so far as marry the two. Sadly, though, it's unlikely to be adopted anytime soon. Those two camps have been at each other's throats since around the Middle Ages. If they were actually a couple, Dr. Phil would have advised them to part company long ago. The other problem is that most practitioners of contemplative awareness generally agree that you need to spend at least twenty years of daily reflection to see any major payoff. Buddhist monks shun the world for years at a time. What scientist is going to go through all of that on a hunch?