spasm Tuesday

Midway through afternoon surgery my lower back goes into sudden and severe spasm, localised over the right sacro-iliac joint. This problem is an old friend; it almost always comes as a consequence of accumulated stress and can last from a few days to several weeks. Please God it will be the former. I have tried all sorts of remedies, from osteopathy, through chiropractic to physio and good old fashioned drug analgesia. But the only reliable treatment appears to be the passage of time itself.

COMMENT

Last week the American geneticist Dr Craig Venta modestly announced he had created a synthetic life form, "a first for science and an enormous breakthrough for the human race"
When I first heard the announcement, I thought "Wow! You mean he's actually made a cell, complete with semi-permeable cell membrane, nucleus and the other intracellular apparatus? That's incredible!" And so it was. He didn't do anything of the kind, rather he used an existing bacterial cell, and injected synthetic DNA into it. In my opinion, and also in that of more qualified experts than myself, our latterday Dr Frankenstein has a way to go before he can genuinely claim to have created life. No, what Dr Venta is trying very hard to do is a)win a Nobel prize. and b)snatch the patents on a huge range of genetic techniques, which, if he is successful will make him and his company one of the wealthiest and most powerful institutions the world has ever seen and, contrary to what he might have us believe, this will actually be to the great detriment of humankind, because we'll all be in hock to him.

We've seen this already in the USA, where a company tried to patent the gene for breast cancer, and then charge $3000 to everyone wanting to use it, excluding vast swathes of humanity who, doubtless, according to the Republican party anyway, have been too profligate to be able to raise the $3000 required. If my facts are right, a women's collective in the US have been able to circumvent this, frankly evil, plan. But beware!