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Genetically modified cows produce 'human' milk

Games as Art

Videogame designer Brenda Brathwaite has designed a few board games that are more about art and social statements than games. One of them is called Train. Two players play Train. They have boxcars, and they can use their turns to speed down the track, load the boxcar with yellow pawns, or slow its progress. The goal of the game is to reach the end of the track. At that point the player draws a Terminus card, which has the name of a place on it. Like Dachau. The players aren't told in advance that it's a game about the Holocaust. (But, come on. You're racing to shove little yellow men into trains. Might you suspect something?) Brathwaite says her goal was to put the player in the shoes of the train conductor -- make them feel a sense of complicity.

The game doesn't end when the game officially reveals itself as a Holocaust game. The players can choose to continue until all the pawns are moved. The players can also use the rules to slow the trains down and save the pawns. For the most part, players never move all the pawns over, and they use the rules to save the pawns. I find it pretty fascinating that most players feel either morally obligated or socially pressured to save tiny, wooden pawns.

I recommend the whole article.

Embryonic Stem Cell Research

Slog has a great piece on the ethics of embryonic stem cell research. Check it out here. In short, the writer -- Jonathan Golob, a scientist apparently -- walks us through some basics of stem cells and what they mean for science and treatment. He also explains why he doesn't consider pre-implantation embryos to be human beings. Yet, he recognizes people hold strong convictions about this, and argues convincingly about the oversight that should accompany this research and donation -- and how Obama's new rules might be the first step toward that.


An excerpt:

I do not believe human embryonic stem cell research should be a free-for-all. While I do not personally believe that human life starts at the moment when sperm-meets-egg, I do recognize that human blastocysts deserve serious treatment.

I believe that the donation of blastocysts and the distribution of the subsequent embryonic stem cell lines should be strictly decommercialized. The entire process should be like how we handle organ donation from adults—with oversight, and the prohibition of money changing hands in the process.

Obama's easing of the Federal funding restrictions on human embryonic stem cell research opens the door for such a policy in a way that Bush's restrictions never did. By preventing public funding, the destruction of human embryos was forced into the private sector. In a horrifying way, Bush's policies made the destruction of human embryos a matter of private enterprise—a potentially for-profit venture. Anything else would be better.