Author Archives: Peter

Blog to accompany Vlog 330, 3/14/2021

I made a video about the bio-engineered pig heart transplant. When my wife and I were talking about it a month ago, the patient was still alive and we were really rooting for him, and that inspired the comic (thanks to Cygnus Design for the artwork). It’s too bad the poor guy died in the mean time, but he made a real gift to science by participating in the experiment.

In case you didn’t know, people used to use pigs to hunt truffles in the wild (the fungi, not the chocolates). But the pigs badly want to eat the truffles, so you have to fight the pig every time you find some. People have moved on to using dogs.

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Luciferase is not Satanism in biotech

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I made a video about luciferase. Some conspiracy theorists think they THEY are putting LUCIFER-ase in the vaccines. I think it’s just a misunderstanding of a paper like Schlake et al. (“Developing MRNA-Vaccine Technologies.” RNA Biology 9.11 (2012): 1319–1330. https://doi.org/10.4161/rna.22269). I have been trying to end videos with some kind of call to action, but in this case I’ve been coming up blank. There are people who apparently believe the name luciferase means bioscientists are satanists and are dropping little “hiding-in-plain-sight” hints about it. What can we do about people who are that deep into conspiracy-theory cult-think?

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Not fighting with commenters, talking about SPR instead

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I wanted to fight with some YouTube commenters, but that’s dumb. Hence the comic. But I need to remember that most of the comments I get are very kind. It’s easy to focus on the negative.

Thing 1. Someone said I have lesbian hair. I imagine this person thinks they were trolling me? But I take it as a complement. From what little I know, lesbians have really cool hair.

Thing 2. Someone compared climate science to a house of cards. I think his idea was “the pandemic caused a slowdown in CO2 production and we didn’t see a proportional change in climate! Checkmate, athe- climatologists!”

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Regarding arthritis and high heel shoes

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I uploaded a video this week about the possible link between senescent cells and arthritis. Injury can generate senescent cells. Injury can make cause (or at least increase) osteoarthritis. So could that be the mechanism? Could senescent cells be causing or exacerbating osteoarthritis? I’m not the first to think so. This paper from 2017 shows how a drug to kill senescent cells in mice helped with arthritis. But, unfortunately, the drug didn’t work in people as of 2020.

This got me thinking of arthritis and “high-heel socks.” So I made this comic in collaboration with an artist. I’m very glad Snowman was available to do the art again. They do wonderful work.

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Jurassic Park and Climate Science

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Youtube:

This week I posted a youtube video about how Michael Crichton was wrong about climate change. Snowman did the art for the comic above used in the video – I think it turned out great.

Crichton said, “The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.” I see that as edging into misleading. Yes, the final authority of science is experiment, not consensus. Yes, scientists had to break with consensus to present truly novel theories, hypotheses, and results. But… this makes it seem like breaking consensus correlates with being correct.

And that’s not true at all.

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