Experts Say Obama’s Stem-cell Funding Will Trigger a Worldwide Renaissance in Regenerative Medicine

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

As I continue to debate with my friends and family over the quality of Obama’s economic policies, I am always quick to let them know, that like this post from the Daily Galaxy, if Obama does nothing else during his President other than what he did this past week with stem cell research, I will still be ecstatic.

Obama has already lived up to his promise of change, signing stem-cell research funding into law and basically saying "Hey, how about we let the doctors and scientists run this medical research thing?"  It’s terrifying that that’s actually a new sentiment on Capitol Hill, but at least it’s there now.

Previous Presidential proclamations have paralyzed this lifesaving science for almost two entire Olympics, seven-and-a-half years of being restricted to less than 5% of the available stem cell lines.  Hundreds of ideal models for genetic diseases and organ replacement, ignored because people whose education in stem cells began with "no, they’re not part of a plant" said "Bad!"

There are hopes that this isn’t just throwing the shackles off stateside science, but could lead to a worldwide renaissance in regenerative medicine.  The idea is that other repressive countries might ask themselves "Wait, we’re writing rules AGAINST curing disease?  And do those people screaming against stem cells even know what they’re talking about?"

Experts Say Obama’s Stem-cell Funding Will Trigger a Worldwide Renaissance in Regenerative Medicine

50 Billion Suns! -The Biggest Single Object in the Universe -A Galaxy Insight

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Roughly 1 million Earths fit in to the sun.  So, multiply 50 billion, by 1 million (50,000.000.000 x 1,000,000 = 50,000,000,000,000,000 Earths [That's 50 Quadrillion])  I suddenly don’t feel so fat.

Based on this self-regulating maximum rate, scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Massachusetts, and the European Southern Observatory, Chile, have calculated an upper limit for these mega-mammoth masses.  Fifty billion suns, that’s 100 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 kg, otherwise known as “ridiculously stupidly big” and triple the size of the largest observed black hole, OJ 287.

50 Billion Suns! -The Biggest Single Object in the Universe -A Galaxy Insight

James Lovelock says the human race’s only hope is to adapt - fixing global warming will just make it worse

I have always felt that James Lovelock was on to something with his Gaia theory of Earth, which as The Daily Galaxy states, “the Earth is essentially a complex interacting system that can be thought of as a single organism.

But, in this case, I hope that he is wrong.  According to his latest thoughts on global warming, it is really too late to do anything about it, and the “affluenza” that Thomas Friedman emphasizes in his book, ‘Hot, Flat, and Crowded‘ has taken over the developing world is starting to affect the planet.

Here is the kicker, not only is it too late to do anything about it, according to Lovelock, doing too much to fix it might actually make it worse.  Essentially, he says we should be more responsible for the sake of it and just learn how to adapt to what is about to happen to us as a race of people.

It also brings to mind a comedy sketch I saw by George Carlin when he said something like:

“The planet has been through a lot worse than us.
Been through all kinds of things worse than us. Been through
earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar
flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the
poles…hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and
asteroids and meteors, worlwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires,
erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages…And we think some plastic
bags, and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The
planet…the planet…the planet isn’t going anywhere. WE ARE!” Here is the whole thing, but in typical Carlin fashion, it includes a lot of profanity.

The Status of “Spaceship Earth”

It’s a horrible catch 22 situation that leaves only a very small gap for any joy at all. If we continue to do nothing (note the use of the word continue), then we will doom ourselves. If we do do something, like a massive cut back in the emission of carbon in to our atmosphere, Lovelock believes that we would further damage Earth.

“Any economic downturn or planned cutback in fossil fuel use, which lessened aerosol density, would intensify the heating,” Lovelock will say, in a lecture to the Royal Society today. “If there were a 100 per cent cut in fossil fuel combustion it might get hotter not cooler. We live in a fool’s climate. We are damned if we continue to burn fuel and damned if we stop too suddenly.”

Consciousness revisited - interconnectedness between all things

A couple of weeks ago I asked the question, “Is consciousness nothing more than a survival mechanism for the human body’s ecosystem,’ but then I read the ‘Space Zen’ article from ‘The Daily Galaxy’ that delves even deeper in to the human conciousness farther than I was thinking about it at the time.  The question that I had asked was related to a white blood cell attacking a piece of bacterium in the human body.  I was looking at the question from a microscopic level up instead of a macroscopic level down.  I was also looking at it from the point of view of a human on Earth, as opposed to all things, living or not.

As the ‘Daily Galaxy’ points out, consciousness is defined simply as ‘the most basic level of awareness.’  From that point of view, even plants have been shown to have a particular level of awareness.  (If you happened to catch the banal [Yes!  10 points for use of the word 'banal'] movie ‘The Happening,’ you would be fully aware of this concept.)  This does not disprove the question of a possible purpose of consciousness being a survival mechanism.  However, it does illustrate the idea that the mere existence of consciousness is not solely a means to exist.  Consciousness, while highly developed in human beings, is perhaps one of the simplest building blocks of our universe - an interconnectedness between all things, both animate and inanimate.

In February, 1971, Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell experienced the little understood phenomenon sometimes called the “Overview Effect”. He describes being completely engulfed by a profound sense of universal connectedness. Without warning, he says, a feeling of bliss, timelessness, and connectedness began to overwhelm him. He describes becoming instantly and profoundly aware that each of his constituent atoms were connected to the fragile planet he saw in the window and to every other atom in the Universe. He described experiencing an intense awareness that Earth, with its humans, other animal species, and systems were all one synergistic whole. He says the feeling that rushed over him was a sense of interconnected euphoria. He was not the first—nor the last—to experience this strange “cosmic connection”.