very creepy milk

felt sculptor Stephanie Metz from the Over bred series

CBC and others reported last week on the Chinese success in engineering and cloning milk cows with human genes to express human milk proteins. Today the Chinese authorities have approved it for testing. Is this not the final straw? Oh its just China. Or is it?


Recent progress in recombinant DNA technology as well as in embryo manipulation and transfer has made the introduction of specific genes into the germline of animals relatively commonplace. With appropriate genetic constructs expression of the inserted genes in transgenic animals can be controlled in a tissue-specific and in a differentiation- specific manner; thus, it is now possible to consider alteration of the composition of milk produced by a lactating animal in any of a variety of ways. There is a growing list of foreign milk proteins that have been expressed, and one can envisage placing almost any protein gene of interest under the control of the cis-acting promoter and enhancer elements of a milk protein gene. Modification of milk composition can be extended not only to the proteins of commodity value but also, by manipulation of key metabolic enzymes, to fat, lactose, and other minerals in milk.
Here from American researchers.

The U.S. and Australia and interestingly, the Netherlands, have been researching transgenic livestock for over 20 years, including mammary gland secretions. But, as this story mentions, after all the hard work, public repudiation has prevented its fruition. That is a lot of research dollars (our money) and profits haven`t been taken. China is one of many places where that is going (to start) being done. The Netherlands food bio is actively involved in Sabre and is a key sponsor of innovative food tweaking and and wish we were all as malleable as our Chinese comrades. The scientist in charge of China's gmo bovines, Ning Li, is the Sabre coordinator for China. Expertise, decades of research and probably funding...who knows what other favours, are visible in those transgenes.

But we can't keep ordering double doubles and make milk mustaches ...can we? When is enough?
My suggestion for humanizing milk?

Lay off our cows; their genes belong first to cows or cow divas and second to farmer's and milk drinkers due to the century old traditions of breeding, nuturing and naming, continuously, said beast: it is common property. Common trust. Common interest.
Imbue milk with human kindness. That way. Not mother's milk coming out of industrial bioreactors. Not that definition of who we are. Mother's didn't give up the name of their milk...its called Mother's Milk and it belongs to women. (God would I love to be in a room with some old feminists farmers right now).

This will only happen (good milk) if there is a tradition and deep cultural acceptance of physical work and discipline to farm on human scales communities around small farms and homesteads cooperating, ecological and numerous.

the stupidity of googone

I have another couple of months work to save for a tractor and blown in insulation before I return home to the farm. I have moved companies and am working in a large camp perched lucratively beside a large black gash in the snowy boreal forest. It is surrounded by frosty poplars, under great plumes of oily steam with beams of lights thrusting skyward. The trailers are perfectly aligned with matching porch lights lit at the same frequencies. My job is to remove all evidence of industrial and human debris from surfaces and appliances: I am a janitor.

There is a large boot room one first enters that is the threshold of this establishment and where the black gooey bitumen encroaches daily carried in on boots, gloves, PPE, etc. The rules for removal of all outside clothing is strict and they are left on hangers, shelves and the floor of this room. The union workers ("boys" as they are called) strip down to sweats, longjohns, moccasin or sneakers and then exit the boot room into the more easily managed neutrality of the halls and diningroom. Apart from a "GetRDone" poster one could then be anywhere.

One of the tools of my trade is a solvent called googone that I am required to use. After the room is assembled in order, scrubbed and vacuumed, I erase every blot of the oilsand that dared enter and interior spaces are as clean as is necessary to forget real consequence.

The joyful sky ballet of the ravens or the butt end of a bobcat sneaking back into the poplars and the full blue moon shining her light over rows of endless trailers is nature intruding in this carefully controlled world. I worry that there may soon be a substance equivalent to googone to rub out moon light or coyote tracks, lest the power of the natural world detract from the business at hand.

negative results

Quite the Journal title I tripped into the other day:

Journal of Negative Results in BioMedicine. I'll look to see if there is an Agricultural Biotech equivalent. Oughta be

The barn is a fine place for philosophy

Alexander T. Bone has made himself at home in the barn with his Moma and his (doting) Auntie. He has a few little warm spots that he curls up in, away from the foot traffic, although he hasn't found his creep yet. I check his little belly from time to time to see if it is full - which it almost always is. He has a powerful instinct to stay out from underfoot and to find the teat and suckle.

I am fascinated with instinctual or intuitive knowledge and think it is overlooked in our human culture. We glorify, codify and exalt scientific thinking as the pinacle in a hierarchical set of mental qualtities. To the top, rationality...fact based upon empirically knowable things. But ask "how do you know" long enough and it will show its all based on our guts.

Our genes are intrinsically wired with intelligent knowledge. Are these habitual actions inherited? And/or are we connected to some greater collective wisdom?

"It (Intuitive knowledge) accounts for our assent to self-evident truths and serves as the foundation up-on which all other genuine knowledge must be established. [Essay IV ii 1] Intuition is most common in our knowledge of identity and relation among clear ideas, but (following Descartes) Locke also supposed that each thinking being has an intuitive knowledge of its own existence". here

Just as it is "luminously evident" to Curls that she must nudge her baby forward, mooing softly and nuzzling his bum, it is clear to some of us that precautionary principle is common sense.
Because very young and "lower" species exhibit this brilliant instinct and because science rarely examines "self-evident truths" ....it must be a "lower" form of intelligence.

Bollocks of course. All knowledge is based on a set of stuff we can't prove, this "knowing it in the gut" quality. The most empirical thinking rests on a foundation of intuitive knowledge.

The problem is that it is masked, enslaved, and disembodied. Disembodied knowledge refuses to recognize its connections, its history, its relationships.
What is self-evident can be ignored and imperial facts made in complete violation of related "luminescent knowledge" (gut feelings) therefore not integrated with all the othere sets of "luminescently" clear stuff. Keeping us divided is strategic.

We are such powerful beings. How much of our abilities do we use? 5% of our brains? While 5 % doesn't factor in the other things a brain does beside think, perhaps some of this abilty is in our interconnectivity, the relational order not based upon heirarchical systems or dominance.

Wisdom of the body. Insights based upon connectivity. Knowledge that we are born with. That is an idea at odds with the contemporary sciencism that rules us.

Numb and Numb(ers)

With both the of tiniest of sizes in our new technology and the kind of money being printed and passed on as debt to our civilizations, I`ve been trying to understand the size of things. My relationship to quantities is intimate and based on experiences; numbers are most comfortable in the less than dozen paradigm; The under thousand are knowable and perhaps climbing up to the 100,000s in this tangible grasp.
Beyond that, I struggle to understand the relationship of millions, billions and trillions. I think they just seem like big numbers to most people, or small numbers if we`re heading down into the negatives.

But consider:
One million seconds takes 12 days;
One billion seconds roughly 30 years ago;
One trillion seconds around 30,000 years.

"A billion is a thousand million, and a trillion is a thousand billion.
To provide some perspective on just how big a trillion dollars is, think about it like this: A trillion dollars is the number 1 followed by 12 zeroes. Or you can think of it this way: One trillion $1 bills stacked one on top of the other would reach nearly 68,000 miles (about 109,400 kilometers) into the sky, or about a third of the way from the Earth to the moon." Here

The ratio of a molecule of 1 nm to the size of an orange is equivalent to that of an orange to the size of the earth.

Its not surprising then that nanoparticles behave quite differently at this scale. At this level " some compounds shift from inert to active, from electrical insulators to conductors, from fragile to tough".

Money behaves differently at the exponential scale too. It loses its utility and becomes obligation (debt) so mind numbingly remote.

groping through a fuzzy universe

Could life be a random miracle

"The anthropic principle tries to understand how a random universe could evolve to produce DNA, and ultimately human intelligence. To say the DNA happened randomly is like saying that a hurricane could blow through a junk yard and produce a jet plane".
Deepak Chopra

Double Helix

Is it a coincidence that both birkeland currents and DNA are helicoidal shape?



"The research indicates that the double helix shape of DNA is due to the electrical potential. Molecular points of equal potential in space can be interconnected by equipotential "lines" that generate perpendicular electrostatic forces. The combination of these forces obliges the components of the whole molecule to twist to one side or the other side. The dipole momentum of DNA was described by S. Takashima in 1963. His study was published in the Journal of Molecular Biology under "Dielectric Dispersion of DNA".

http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=18656117


"In the times of Watson and Crick, molecular biologists attributed the double-helix shape of DNA to the assymetry of hydrogen bonds, i.e. the bond between Adenine and thymine is a double bond, while between Guanine and Cytosine there is a triple bond. However, the real molecules with large strands formed by T-A or G-C exhibit the helicoidal shape, anyway. Thus the cause of that particular shape couldn't be the simplest explanation. It was then that biologists investigated the real cause and found that DNA molecules were affected by strong electric forces."