Tuesday, February 17, 2009

DIY cells

After watching by this talk by Juan Enriquez, which i highly recommend, I followed up on something he mentioned in his talk that I found kind of amazing. Specifically, Enriquez was talking about the rapid development in the field of engineering cells. In particular, there's been a lot of focus (most conspicuously by bioentrepeneur Craig Venter) on being able to engineer unique living cells that are stripped down to the most basic possible genetic machinery, and this has turned out to be a very promising field. So, the site that I followed up on was this: The Registry of Standard Biological Parts. What a spectacularly mundane name for such an amazing thing. As Enriquez described, it's basically radio shack for cellular engineering. It's a list of "parts," or bits of cellular machinery with very specific functions, with a list of who you can get them from, so that people can put together new cellular machines. Really eerily similar to an electronics catalog...

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Purity (or why Woody Guthrie refused to eat at the kitchen table)

I've been reading along a couple of divergent lines recently. I'm taking a class on conservation biology, so I'm reading a lot about species diversity and disruption and how landscapes change in response to human activities. On the flipside, I also just finished reading "It Still Moves" (by Amanda Petrusich), a book about finding the roots of Roots music, or Americana, told mostly through a road trip to a splattering of important American music cities and filled with vignettes about local business shacks, Cracker Barrel meals, and hours on the highway. Despite the differences in content, however, there is a theme blaring out from the pages of these two readings, and that theme is purity.

I'm not sure I really have anything particularly profound to say about this subject, but it just struck as odd that what lies at the heart of so many different arenas of life is ultimately the search for purity of some kind (usually paired with a not-so-glancing blow at the evils of modern life which are continuously spoiling the pure and lovely past).

In music, and especially in American "folk" music, there is a wide following for finding, documenting, and preserving the purest, most unadulterated American music. This is more or less explicitly why lots of the old folkorists and archivers would go to jails to make field recordings, because these were presumably little time capsules where artists that learned to play before they were put into jail remained untouched by modern music. Although this is certainly not true of all folklorists, and certainly not all folk musicians, there is undeniably a strong tendency within folk and roots music to have a bias towards the past as pure and the modern as almost viral.

Conservation Biology is just bathed in the same kind of contradiction. There is some inherent value in untouched wilderness and areas that have not been altered for long periods of time, whereas anything that has been tainted by modern man loses something automatically. In some ways, I find this kind of backwards. There's no inherent reason why a "pristine" wilderness is any different than one that has been affected by human activity, and it seems rather that change and adaptation are quite the norm in the natural world, seeing as 99% of species that lived in the "pure" past just didn't make the grade and went extinct. Ultimately, I just wonder why there seems to such a universal psychological drive to maintain the past as pure and valuable.

Possibly my favorite story about this subject is about that legend of cowboy and american music, woody guthrie. Guthrie is often turned to as a potent symbol of the rambling singer/songwriter, outlaw, drunkard, romantic, dabbler, and just about every other sign you can tack onto him. He provided source material and inspiration for a whole generation, including the likes of Dylan, Seeger, later Wilco, etc. Guthrie was also seen by many as the living proof of an otherwise theoretical construct in the minds of lots of folklorists of the wandering dust-bowl refugee, the working man's hero. My favorite deflationary story about this myth is when he was at the house of the famous folklorist Alan Lomax. Guthrie was often welcomed into the Lomax home, and they offered him lots of basic comforts, which he would often refuse. He refused to sleep on the bed offered to him, and instead slept on the floor covered in a jacket, just like a hobo. Instead of eating at the dining room table, Guthrie would only eat at the sink. Bess Lomax found his antics "annoying," and complained that he was only pretending to be a hobo. For this, Guthrie is one of the great enigmatic symbols of American history, I think. Maybe he was only comfortable in the wayfaring life he had indeed lead, and didn't know how to exist in the comforts of modern society. Maybe he was just trying to inflate his own personal mythology. Maybe he did it because it annoyed the Lomaxes. Maybe all of these, who knows. Either way though, it was very american.