Free Republic

Adult cells that have been reprogrammed into stem cells harbor a number of genetic mutations, some of which appear in genes that have been linked to cancer. While scientists don't yet know how this might affect the use of the cells in medicine, they say the findings show that the cells need to be studied much more extensively.

Tuesday, July 06, 2010 Fairfax, Va. -- The National Rifle Association is supporting a lawsuit against Mayor Richard Daley and the City of Chicago's newly adopted gun control ordinance, which violates the U.S. Supreme Court's recent ruling in McDonald v. City of Chicago. Last Friday, the City Council rushed through passage of this ordinance in response to the Court's June 28th decision rendering Chicago’s draconian handgun ban unconstitutional. “The Supreme Court has now said the Second Amendment is an individual freedom for all. And that must have meaning,” said Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association. “This...

Cyberspace has become an indispensible component of everyday life for all Americans.  We have all witnessed how the application and use of this technology has increased exponentially over the years. Cyberspace includes the networks in our homes, businesses, schools, and our Nation’s critical infrastructure.  It is where we exchange information, buy and sell products and services, and enable many other types of transactions across a wide range of sectors. But not all components of this technology have kept up with the pace of growth.  Privacy and security require greater emphasis moving forward; and because of this, the technology that has brought many...

A New York Times article on Sunday discussed the debate over whether more and more potent types of cannabis affect the levels of addiction to the drug. This particular issue has become part of the larger debate over whether marijuana should be legalized or decriminalized. Antidrug activists say that if the drug is legalized, more people will use it and addiction levels, made worse by the increased potency, will rise too. Legalization advocates note that pot addiction is not nearly as destructive as, say, abuse of alcohol. What would be the effect of legalization or decriminalization on marijuana abuse and...

One of the most important experiments in evolution is going on right now in a laboratory in Michigan State University. A dozen flasks full of E. coli are sloshing around on a gently rocking table. The bacteria in those flasks has been evolving since 1988--for over 44,000 generations. And because they've been so carefully observed all that time, they've revealed some important lessons about how evolution works.

A single cell is the most awesomely sophisticated molecular machine yet produced. A self-directing, self-replicating micro-factory capable of complex constructions, automated repair and even (like all good sci-fi-sounding devices) self-destruct. The first cells, however, were much less "complex mechanisms" and significantly more "Shake and Bake" - a model that we're now ready to build ourselves. These proto-cells didn't have any sophisticated cellular functions, consisting of nothing more than a fatty cell wall just dense enough to have an inside and an outside, with a speck of DNA on the "not-outside" side. This child's model of a cell drifted in the...

Singapore scientists at the Genome Institute of Singapore (GIS) and the National University of Singapore (NUS) have unveil an atlas that showing the location of "genomic hotspots" of essential protein "switches" (transcription factors) that are critical for maintaining the embryonic stem (ES) cell state. Using advanced high throughput sequencing technology, the scientists discovered over 3,000 hotspots. These findings could improve understanding of the unique properties of stem cells that enable them to maintain their intriguing ability to grow and differentiate to virtually any cell type. "This is the first time such a large scale study has been conducted in Singapore...

Wal-Mart, the nation's largest seller of firearms, which Azi notes has been unsuccessful to date at getting a toehold in the city, agreed today a 10-point "responsible firearms" code championed by Mayors Against Illegal Guns, the group fronted and funded by prominent anti-illegal gun activist, Mayor Bloomberg. The deal, announced at the Mayors Against Illegal Guns National Summit underway in Washington, D.C., calls for Wal-Mart to implement the following standards "over time" (no exact schedule was given): 1. Videotaping the Point of Sale for All Firearms Transactions. Participating retailers will videotape the point-of-sale of all firearms transactions and maintain videos...

AS HE TROOPS about Europe, with notebook and camera crew, guidebook author Rick Steves witnesses what the late historian Barbara Tuchman called "The March of Folly," the sites of wars and witch hunts waged by feckless rulers. Steves has come home with a mind to take on our leaders' folly, the federal government's enduring, woefully unsuccessful War on Drugs, and the battle front against marijuana. He would replace a strategy of locking people up with a policy designed to lessen harm. It's a lot like the "Four Pillars" approach to drug use adopted by Vancouver, B.C.: treatment, harm reduction, prevention...

A fractured state Supreme Court has ruled that random drug testing of student athletes is unconstitutional, finding that each has "a genuine and fundamental privacy interest in controlling his or her own bodily functions." The court ruled unanimously Thursday in favor of parents and students in the lower Columbia River town of Cathlamet who opposed the tiny Wahkiakum School District's policy of random urine tests of middle school and high school student athletes, but some justices said random tests could be justified under different circumstances.

In the increasingly divided American landscape, where language, faith, and prime-time television no longer unite us as they once did, a thin golden line holds the nation together. It connects entities as disparate as Britney Spears, the Miami Dolphins, the Tecumseh High School Science Club, the cashier at your local Walgreen’s, even George W. Bush. Its domain is the restroom stall. Its associated features include tiny plastic cups, attentive strangers, and, on occasion, latex stunt penises and disposable heat packs. It is, of course, the precautionary drug test. In 2008 it doesn’t matter if you’re a millionaire entertainer, a service-industry...

We write a television show. Measured against more thoughtful and meaningful occupations, this is not the best seat from which to argue public policy or social justice. Still, those viewers who followed The Wire — our HBO drama that tried to portray all sides of inner-city collapse, including the drug war, with as much detail and as little judgment as we could muster — tell us they've invested in the fates of our characters. They worry or grieve for Bubbles, Bodie or Wallace, certain that these characters are fictional yet knowing they are rooted in the reality of the other...

For the past few months, the federal government has been celebrating the fact that U.S. cities are experiencing "an unprecedented cocaine shortage" due to increased law enforcement in the southwestern United States and Mexico. But fact-checking by NPR reveals that while there are indeed spot shortages of cocaine, they are neither nationwide nor unprecedented. And the scarcity may have unintended consequences. The price of cocaine is one of the main ways the government tallies the score in its war on drugs. The reasoning is that if prices go up, it means that agents are winning — they're squeezing the supply....

WASHINGTON – It has been 50 years since scientists first created DNA in a test tube, stitching ordinary chemical ingredients together to make life's most extraordinary molecule. Until recently, however, even the most sophisticated laboratories could make only small snippets of DNA – an extra gene or two to be inserted into corn plants, for example, to help the plants ward off insects or tolerate drought. Now researchers are poised to cross a dramatic barrier: the creation of life-forms based on completely artificial DNA.

A national pro-pot group that backs a Bay State campaign to decriminalize marijuana is shopping around a new Swiss study showing that teens who smoke grass are just as likely to get good grades as kids who abstain. The study, which is being promoted by the Marijuana Policy Project, found teens who smoked pot were also more likely to have strong relationships with friends and were not any more likely to be depressed than their substance-free counterparts. A top Beacon Hill lawmaker slammed the study, which was published in last month’s issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine. “It’s...

1. AFTER PABLO On the day of his death, December 2nd, 1993, the Colombian billionaire drug kingpin Pablo Escobar was on the run and living in a small, tiled-roof house in a middle-class neighborhood of Medellín, close to the soccer stadium. He died, theatrically, ­ridiculously, gunned down by a Colombian police manhunt squad while he tried to flee across the barrio's rooftops, a fat, bearded man who had kicked off his flip-flops to try to outrun the bullets. The first thing the American drug agents who arrived on the scene wanted to do was to make sure that the corpse...

A controversial study about drug testing of high school athletes found that such testing does not deter drug use. In fact, the mere presence of drug testing could increase risk factors for future substance use, the study by an Oregon Health & Science University doctor found. "It shocked us," said Dr. Linn Goldberg, who oversaw the study and heads the Division of Health Promotion and Sports Medicine at OHSU. The study, conducted at 11 high schools in Oregon, is the first randomized clinical trial to assess the deterrent effects of drug and alcohol testing on high school athletes. The results...

I've looked forward to interviewing the U.S. drug czar for years, and Tuesday afternoon I finally got the chance when current czar John Walters visited with the U-T editorial board. I'm happy to note that he took my libertarian griping seriously; many drug warriors seem amazed that anyone could suggest that the drug war is futile, costly, counterproductive and hypocritical, and often amounts to an assault on civil liberties. I said to Walters that by any possible statistical reckoning of deaths, car wrecks, suicides, drownings, crimes of violence, etc., alcohol is vastly more destructive in the U.S. than all illegal...

These are perilous times for drug warriors. With self-reported illicit drug use flat or declining, there is a danger of complacency—or, worse, smaller budgets. At the same time, it's important to claim a victory now and then; otherwise taxpayers may begin to worry that their money is being wasted in a futile effort to stop people from using politically incorrect intoxicants. In its description of the latest numbers from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, the Office of National Drug Control Policy walks that thin line between gratitude and apathy, panic and hopelessness: YOUTH DRUG USE AT A FIVE...

Heard the latest buzz about cannabis? Word on the street is that today’s pot is exponentially more powerful, and thus more dangerous, than the marijuana available some 20, or even 10, years ago. The nation’s drug czar says so. (“We’re no longer talking about the drug of the 1960s and 1970s,” John P. Walters recently warned Reuters; “this is Pot 2.0.”) Law enforcement says so. (Speaking to the Associated Press in June, United States Drug Enforcement Agency special agent Mark R. Trouville, who heads the agency’s Miami office, said, “This ain’t your grandfather’s or your father’s marijuana. This will...