Today, the International Astronomical Union officially designated an asteroid 7307 Takei in honor of actor and activist George Takei, who is best known for his role as Hikaru Sulu in the original Star Trek franchise. The asteroid joins others named for sci-fi luminaries such as Issac Asmiov, Robert Heinlein, and Gene Roddenberry. [Via Yahoo/AP]
This movie is so mediocre that I keep forgetting I’ve seen it. As comic book movies go, it’s no Daredevil, but it’s not X-Men either. The backstory and development of the characters and their powers is interesting, but the movie fails to be compelling overall. The film’s antagonist, Dr. Doom, is obsessed with destroying his enemies, and really, no one cares.
Look, when you’re writing a comic book movie, take a lesson from the Star Trek film franchise. Nobody cares when the bad guy(s) threaten either the protagonists and some backwoods part of the galaxy (see ST: Nemesis or ST: Insurrection). But when the planet Earth is on the line, then the audience gets really involved (Star Trek VI or ST: First Contact).
By that logic, this movie would have been a helluva lot better if Dr. Doom had tried tried to take over the world or destroy New York or something. As it stands, I give it 2.5 out of 5.
Recently I was watching the ST:TNG episode “Genesis“. The science in this episode is all on the level of the Heisenberg compensator, which is to say, laughably bad. (Someone did point out once that a Heisenberg compensator doesn’t necessarily mean one can determine both a particle’s speed and position, it just compensates for the fact that you can’t.) But Dr. Crusher’s estimation of the number of genes in the human genome was pretty accurate, at least for 1994.
Estimations of the number of genes make for an amusing measure of scientific progress. I’ve heard that in the 60’s, the number was estimated in the millions. According to Star Trek, it was down to 100,000 by the mid-nineties. (It’s also interesting to note that at that time, the Human Genome Project would have been considered to be only a third of the way into it’s fifteen year lifespan, but it actually finished in 2001, four years ahead of schedule, because the technology improved so drastically during the project.) I noticed recently that my genetics textbook, which was probably written in 2001, estimates the genome to be between 40,000 and 60,000. The current estimate is much more like 27,000.
For comparison’s sake, the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster has about 12,000 genes. The bacterium E. coli, which is famous for killing people at Jack in the Box but also thrives in your intestines, has about 3000 genes.
We’re far more than twice as complex as a fruit fly, or nine times as complex as a lowly bacterium. Clearly there are other mechanisms that contribute to complexity, so that it doesn’t scale linearly with gene number. We already know about several, but we’re also finding new ones.
The picture is somewhat more complicated because the idea of a gene has changed over time, and, in my opinion, is fairly nebulous. The word “gene” actually has two different meanings, even in the halls of science. In one sense, it means “allele.” Alleles are different types (or flavors) of one gene. So when someone says, “he has the gene for sickle cell anemia,” they really mean he has the allele for it. The average person has the non-sickle cell allele.
The other meaning is “locus,” which is the physical position of the gene in the genome. You might hear, for example, that the gene for color blindness is on the X-chromosome, which really means that the locus is there.
When we talk about how many genes there are in the genome, we’re really talking about loci and not alleles. Some of the recent discoveries about gene regulationâ€â€the mechanisms that make us so much more complex than fruit flies even though we only have about twice as many genesâ€â€turn traditional notions about these mechanisms on their ear. They may even require another revision to the number of genes in the human genome.
Bruce Campbell is the best known of a stratum of middle-class actors who make their living primarily in straight-to-video movies. I think there must be a similar stratum of actors who work mainly in syndicated TV shows and make guest appearances on network shows. At least, that’s what a keen mind for trivia, a sharp eye for faces, and a lifetime of bad television have led me to believe.
For example, actors from a Star Trek series who have appeared in an episode of either Stargate series. On SG-1, both Q and the holographic doctor have had recurring roles, and Counselor Troi made an appearance as a Russian scientist. Chief O’Brien has been on Atlantis, along with one of the Agents Johnson from Die Hard. Somewhat more obscurely and back on SG-1, Lt. Barclay shows up in one episode, and the art collector who kidnaps Data played the documentary filmmaker. All this is to say nothing of Ben Browder and Claudia Black, who played lovers on Farscape, showing up in the last season, nor of Wayne Brady’s notable guest appearance (which was sadly devoid of improv, singing, or him smacking MacGyver in the face and shouting, “I’m Wayne Brady, bitch!”).
But that’s kid stuff, really. Let’s try a harder category: Star Trek actors who have appeared on The O.C.. The holographic doctor, again. He’s in damn near everything; he was in an episode of E.R. where he played the escrow agent or something for the nurse who tried to kill herself by ODing on barbiturates. Also, Chief O’Brien’s wife plays the headmaster at Harbor, the private school in The O.C..
But the most wonderfully mashed-up set of guest stars everâ€â€even surprassing Hulk Hogan on The A-Teamâ€â€was on an episode of MacGyver. In it, Mac is helping Shaft, who’s both a sex machine to all the chicks and running a program to rehabilitate gangs in South Central. Seriously. Commander Chipotle from ST:Voyager is also working for Shaft, but he goes vigilante to stop the rich white dudes who are supplying cocaine to the gangs. It’s up to Mac and Shaft to talk him down. No, really. It wasn’t some crazy dream. It was one of the most magical hours of my life.
Modern nanotechnology, such as it is, is concerned with producing materials on an atomic scale, such as fiber made from so-called “bucky balls.” Star trek fans and other afficionados of science fiction think of nanotechnology as it may some day exist — millions of microscopic machines (referred to as “nanites” or more accurately “assemblers”) pushing around individual atoms and molecules. Part of this scenario is that the assemblers are self-replicating, meaning they copy themselves using any available materials. This leads to the grey goo problem, wherein an out-of-control replication process reduces the Earth and everything on it to a mass of replicators (which look like nothing so much as grey goo).
K. Eric Drexler, the father of nanotechnology, recently published a paper refuting the grey goo danger. Basically, he says that even if we are someday able to make assemblers, it will be very difficult to make them self-replicating and there won’t be much need to do so. In fact, he says, the danger from military applications (i.e. nanotech weapons) is much greater. The problem with Drexler’s thesis is that he’s an engineer.
I mean no disrespect. In my experience, there are two camps of nano people, each with very different ideas of how the whole “assembler” idea will play out. On the one hand, you have the engineers, who are used to working with machines, so they expect that assemblers will be some sort of machine (a bioMEM in the jargon, which stands for biological micro-electromechanical machine, or something like that). On the other hand, there are the biologists, who work with cells all day and think that assemblers will be some sort of heavily engineered cell. After all, cells are just biological machines that have been programmed by nature to carry out specific tasks. Why couldn’t we just reprogram them?
It’s this biological notion of the assembler that Drexler ignores in his paper. It’s pretty much impossible that a bacteria, no matter how much you engineered it, could rearrange individual atoms in a molecule, so the massive, planet-wide grey goo problem isn’t a concern. However, I can easily envision a scenario where a biological assembler intended to clean your arteries of cholesterol grows out of control and quickly kills the patient. The crux of the problem is that while mechanical assemblers are manufactured, biological ones are necessarily self-replicating.
To control this problem of uncontrolled growth, we need multiple ways to permanently turn off the cell’s ability to replicate itself before it is administered to the patient. One solution is to knock out the replication genes in the genome and put them on a plasmid, then we would need a way to destroy the plasmid before setting the bugs loose on someone’s arteries. The cells should also have multiple metabolic dependencies (similar to the way the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park needed lysine in their diet) as well as susceptibility to multiple antibiotics.
The scientists in Michael Crichton’s novel thought they had their creations under control by making them dependent on a dietary amino acid. This was a single point of control and a single point of failure, which nature is often very good at overcoming. That’s why our biological assemblers need multiple points of control. The Jurassic Park scientists should have realized this, but I guess they weren’t very good scientists. Fortunately, they were also fictional.
