Sum

I've just read "Sum" by David Eagleman. I didn't intend to buy it, and I'd never heard of it before this afternoon, but I was drawn to it in Waterstones today, and am incredibly glad I was. It's one of the most unique fiction books I've read in ages. It consists of fourty short (2-4 pages) narratives explaining how the afterlife might be. It expounds beautifully on the huge range of possibilities that our universe presents, and how no-one really knows the answer to any ultimate questions.

A particular favourite quote of mine comes from 'Missing' where it is explained that God is in fact a married couple, and that when you die, you enter a parent-child relationship with them. I love how cleanly it explains the synergism between science and religion

"Every human in the world is a child to them, and they devote a tremendous effort to their parenting skills.
It is heartening to see that they learn from us in the same manner that all parents learn from their children. For example it turns out they didn't know how to express the workings of their universe as equations, so they are greatly impressed with the ideas of their physicist children, who phrase clearly for them for the first time what they wrought"

This is a fantastic book, and I would unreservedly recommend it to anyone. It's well thought out, imaginative, unique, entertaining, humorous and moving, all at once.

Amnesia...?

So anyway, little thought for the week. A hypothetical situation to consider…

I am given a drug - a perfect amnesiac, producing 100% amnesia, but no analgesia, muscle relaxation, loss of consciousness etc. This drug is administered for 1 hour, and lasts for only 1 hour, by which time it wears off instantly. During this one hour period, I am exposed to a painful stimulus, say a capsaicin infusion that lasts only 10 minutes, before wearing off with no lasting pain.

During this 10 minute period, I can of course feel the painful stimulus, I have not been given any analgesia. However, as far as I would be aware, I would also have “woken up” one hour after the analgesic was administered. Extreme cases of amnesia result in people believing they have woken up for the first time regularly, as they have no memory of anything that has happened in the past. So, if I was effectively “asleep”, though 100% conscious during that time, and presumably able to scream at the pain, if I feel, after 1 hour that I was asleep the entire time, did I actually “feel” the pain - was my welfare compromised?

It’s a really interesting question I think!

Thoughts

Jesus' 1st instinct when confronted with the sick was to heal. Lepers, the blind etc. So a god doesn't 'like' suffering, he hates it.
I'm sure I've lost a proportion of my readership already (however many you are). Simply using the J word evokes emotions in most people - in many, fear, confusion, anger, pity and resentment. I know for me the word still conjours up images of South American States-types preaching "Jesus Christ, praise the lord" which I find shocking. And images of CICCU hoodies and people professing to know all the answers. People telling me I am "a parachutist without a parachute" [CU in 1st year] just succeed in scaring me off and creating a stigma for themselves and religion as a whole.
In Alastair McGrath's rebuttal to Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion", "The Dawkins Delusion" he makes the observation that many eminent scientists and intelligent people are practicing Christians - surely they are not all "deluded" people with an "imaginary friend" as Dawkins would have you believe - do they know something I don't?
I've already had the shocking epiphany that a belief in God and an understanding of science are not incompatible (here) which was vitally important in seeing that 'God' is not a deluded excuse for not understanding. I suppose it is an explanation for that which cannot be explained; that which we can explain (his work???) we do - through science.
I don't want to be "Christian" or "religious", I'm almost ashamed of the stigma, but there is also no way I can be an atheist - it seems to be ignoring a huge proportion of the argument. I couldn't come to terms with, for example, the death of a loved one with a simple "that's the end" attitude. I would need to believe that there is something more, that I would one day see them again. Of course need is a well documented atheist explanation for the existence of religion, and that shouldn't be a starting point, but it's important.
One of my previous questions "Why church?" has been answered in a number of ways. One, an evangelical response was "If we believe that God exists, then it demands some sort of response rather than apathy as most of the British public choose" ,and another less evangelical one "it's like going to a dinner party where you've had an amazing time and thoroughly enjoyed yourself. You should say thank-you". Both I think, are good answers.
I realise that I'm mostly just presenting information here in an unstructured fashion - maybe I'll return to this later and make it more readable (perhaps a cogent argument would be useful), but at the moment I don't really know where I'm going with it, so it's difficult to structure. I'm writing this down to justify decisions I make. Any move from here will have to be one I find logical and one I believe to be valid.
To leap back to the start, suffering. People believe different things (or more than one). We have free will, and certain types of suffering (war etc.) are a result of a human abuse of this. Other, natural forms of suffering are harder to justify in a loved world. I suppose they simply result from the natural way the world is set up. Take cancer as an example. It is, in most cases, a normal cellular function taken to an extreme - cell growth uncontrolled, and the result of a mutation in the genetic code for either a "tumour suppressor gene" (TSG) or an "oncogene" (actually an 'after the horse has bolted nomenclature, like calling bones 'flaccidity preventors', or television aerials 'static removers'). All genes are mutable and this can result in their malfunction which can lead to cancer through the loss (TSG) or gain (oncogene) of function of these genes. However, of course mutation - the imperfection in the replication and maintenance of DNA is vital for the processes of evolution - without this imperfection, all species would be static, infact, most wouldn't exist at all. So in order to have evolution, there must be imperfections in the system which leave it open to pathology. Does this mean the world is imperfect? Not necessarily, it's just the way it is.

Witches and infectious diseases. Apparently, medieval cases of zoonotic diseases used to be blamed on witches... more to come.

Real Magic

Nnrgh - I can't sleep. Winding down time with a bit of a conundrum - I'm not eloquent on the subject, but here's the way it seems.

My fear is thus: If one assumes there is a "god", for want of a better term, then all I have spent the last 3 years learning about is pointless.

Why? If one assumes there is a "god", then all the glorious feats of science and biology that I am confronted with, baffled with, and amazed by are nothing but simple creations to him. It's not this apparent simplicity that upsets me, more the "magic". It' s all here by magic. Our hugely complex physiology is all there by magic, the brain... magic... he did it. Oh... How dull.

Here comes the revelation (I'm sure it's been said before a million times, a million ways, but it's a personal realisation that has got me thinking properly for the first time about this subject). Maybe it is "magic", but, magic that functions in a way we can describe - science. It is incredible, but explainable. Where does this leave God? There's no reason why there shouldn't be a God. Science can explain a lot extremely well (the expression patterns of Engrailed in the Drosophila parasegments to take a poignant example), but surely a point will be reached where we just cannot explain some things - they'll be outside our field of understanding? Is such a wangling in of God into scientific understanding just an "easy way out" for the religious? I'm no longer sure that it is. Many scientist are religious, and they are certainly not "deluded fools" as Dawkins would have you believe.

Why God? this is my main problem now. I've leaped over the "Science and God are mutually exclusive" boundary (that, incidentally, Dawkins still seems to be stuck behind), but why bother with believing in something so unbelievable, why bother with "Church" (though of course, by church I mean any sort of religious ritual)? I'm working through these parts slowly... but it's an interesting journey. This "real magic" point really has excited me, but I'm still nowhere near anything but agnostic.

Any (constructive - no knee-jerks) ideas are welcomed.

Olfactory Ensheathing Cells.

Yesterday was spent mostly in the midst of an extensive amount of Neural Degeneration. Why won't CNS neurones regenerate when PNS ones will, and what can we do to stop this? And, I read about some very interesting cell types, the olfactory-ensheathing-cell. The injured CNS provides an inhibitory environment to axon regeneration, but the OECs may be able to ensheath the axons and provide a permissive environment for axon growth by integrating with astrocytes in the brain. It's all quite exciting. In mouse studies they've helped axons regenerate across a cut spinal cord and led to some functional improvement. Clinical trials have started so watch this space for developments.

70 pints a DAY!?

The ITV News yesterday showed a huge 10 minute piece about the offspring of a cloned cow that had been born in this country about a year ago, and proceeded to launch into an "analysis" of what the risks to consumers might be. As far as I can see this is just shameless scaremongering - the only risks to cloning cattle to produce 70 pints (yes, 70) of milk a day is that to the animal. Before the intensive selective breeding of Fresian/Holstein (and Jersey to an extent) cattle they produced a fraction of the milk they do now. This was clearly less efficient, but seeing modern dairy cattle walking around with hugely distended udders, covered in scratch marks, and the high rate of mastitis present in the UK dairy herd makes you wonder. The metabolic strain that producing such high quantities of such a product must surely take its toll, and eventually lead to premature culling.
Cloning cattle to massively increase yields is wrong, but the human biased angle put on it by ITV was shocking. I hope that consumer worries stem from a welfare perspective rather than the implied health perspective given.

Darwin, Dawkins, God and Me. All in 417 Words

This is not a radical post – it is my opinion.

If, all those million years ago, the tiny life-like particles had come together and “discovered” a DNA-like way of copying themselves, but, one that was perfect, I mean 100% perfect, letter for letter, chemical for chemical, then we’d still be sitting in a primordial soup. The sheer fact that we cannot copy ourselves perfectly has enabled us to become what we are today, and isn’t that incredible? – Me, 2006

Evolution by natural selection is an amazing thing, and in my opinion, explains everything there is to know about the origins of us, and every other living thing on the planet. Richard Dawkins also believes this, and I am currently reading his book “The Blind Watchmaker”, and it is fantastic. Full of beautiful metaphors and well explained theories (though his analogy of DNA to the ROM of a computer was extremely confusing), it is well worth reading. However, I think if he is going to more widely spread the amazing news that is neo-Darwinism he is going to have to divorce it from his arrogant atheism.

Now, I’m not religious, and I don’t really believe that there is a God – perhaps I’m hedging my bets – an agnostic. As I’ve said, my beliefs about the origin of life are the same as Dawkins’s, but that’s not the point. That does not immediately disprove the existence of a God. God and evolution (even evolution by natural selection) are not mutually exclusive, it just simply gives a different role for a deity. All the species we have on this earth today are descended from an original (or a few original) ancestors, and that’s great, but so what? Maybe once all religious experts realise that evolution did happen, and that natural selection is the perfect, most logically perfect way to explain this, and people like Dawkins realise that while it may disprove the book of Genesis as a literal fact, it does not prove organised-religion to be a breeding ground for unintelligent, uninformed, brainwashed fools perhaps we can all get on. Religion in general makes a lot of people happy, and I believe has helped us set up a large majority of the moral codes we hold today. I have no problem with peaceful religiousness; it’s just not for me.

Aside from these religious misgivings, the book is well worth reading and shines a glorious light on all that is natural. Completely natural, and beautiful.

Anyone else’s opinion would be welcomed!

Tom

Vetsci Discoveries

I'm sat watching the cricket (Steven Harmison is kicking arse! He's 20* and England are 373-9 (dammit... 373 all out now)) and I've been looking through the BBC news website, following on from finding that picture of Banksy's.

Apparently, some PhD student in Melbourne has discovered a way of identifying a dog's blood type - could be useful, particularly in saving old Dave the Greyhound giving blood to some dogs with a different blood type, or maybe getting him some companions! But, there's never going to be a country-wide canine blood bank whatever happens, that would just not be plausible (or sensible), so, it could be of limited use, unless every practice keeps donor dogs ready and waiting to be cannibalised, which may be seen as wrong, though perhaps the lives of however many dogs may be saved is worth more than the continued discomfort of one dog?

I've also just been reminded of the sueing (is that how you spell it) of a vet who administered cortico-steroids to a show-horse without warning the owner of the slight chance of them causing laminitis that I heard about from Alex's family... she won £350,000 apparently. I guess this proves that you really do have to cover every single angle that you can to protect yourself, and stick it all in writing... or, don't work with expensive horses!

Lateness, Muscles and Cake

Interesting morning - to cut a long story short, Alex and Andrew thought our test was at 11am, while Mary and I were sure it was 11.30. We eventually gave in and left, arriving at the anatomy room at 11.10, 10 minutes late. Oops... not sure how we got into out heads that it was that time, though Ben(Bob) turned up at 11.30 - maybe Dr Holmes got the time wrong once which we cottoned onto?

I got 49.5/70, 48/70 if you dont count the questions I cheated on :S. Still, thats 69% and the pass mark is 70% - hopefully I'll be ok come June.

Had lunch in Ask with Alex, nice pizza, a cookie cake and coffee. It's alot more expensive than Pizza Express which we thought was an all round more enjoyable dining experience.

Spent the afternoon revising forelimb muscles, which worked amazingly (I even know that the long head of triceps has a synovial bursa in the olecranon groove!) - we now remember much more. Speaking through and discussing stuff really helps you remember it much better. We both agreed that Dr Holmes view that the rhomboids are anti-abductors is untrue and they are infact anti-adductors (surely there is a pivot around the point of the scapula?) - do any other vets have a view on this subject?

Dinner with Dave and Jen, which was beautiful, before some of Alex's Mum's chocolate cake. Wow!

Now I'm going to do a bit of Digestion revision before going to Reece and Iona's to help them celebrate their 6 month anniversary!