Happy Rabbit Rabbit Day!

It's July, and that means just one more month until the next chapter of my Baltimore adventure begins! One more month until the majority of my time is spoken for! Any suggestions as to what I should do with myself in the meantime?

Gearing Up For the Best Election Ever

Because I'm physically unable to keep myself from politicizing, I'd just like to say that it's official: I no longer like Mitt Romney. Like everyone, I was taken in by his square jaw and presidential hair, but how much political aplomb can you have if you think telling people about the time you tied your dog to the roof and drove for twelve hours is a good career move? When there are so many neat people throwing down in both the Republican and Democratic primaries it doesn't take much to turn me off. I'm kind of ashamed it took this lesson in animal cruelty to get me to see this guy for the cold-blooded hardliner he apparently is. Saying that we need to expand Guantanamo and advocating for torture maybe should have tipped me off rather than the fact that he isn't the world's best dog-owner. What can I say? I'm a sucker for cute furry mammals and suspected terrorists just don't do it for me.

But on to the real point of this post. Reading the article I linked to at the beginning of this post raises an interesting legal question. I'm going to assume that since he took this vacataion in 1983, the statute of limitations has come into effect for Romney's act of animal cruelty, but what if he took the vacation last summer? Would the state of Massachusetts be able to prosecute him due to his admission during an interview? What kind of defense would he be able to raise given that he laid out so many of the facts? If he later said that he made up the story to illustrate a point would that fly in court, or would the burden of proof shift to the defendent? What about the now famous quote from Clinton about experimenting from Marijuana (obviously, since he said he was in England during the time of experimentation it wasn't technically illegal, but it's something to think about)? Being a legal neophyte I cannot answer these questions now, but I welcome any readers who want to shed some light on the issue. Hopefully by the end of the summer I'll be able to answer myself.

Science Impeding Progress

I take back everything good I said about the new findings regarding reprogramming skin cells to act like stem cells. How was I to know that something so revolutionary would be used as a justification to limit stem cell research? Color me dissapointed.

I was home sick from work yesterday, and as I sat on the couch with my leg elevated taking in as many fluids as possible I watched the hours of news covereage over the President's Veto of a Bill loosening restrictions on Federal funding of stem cell research. I found his justifications utterly frustrating. My fear is that reprogrammed pluripotent stem cells are going to become the new hydrogen fuel cell, which is to say, a distraction from how little headway we're making in meaningful areas of research. It was almost enough to make me consider voting for Clinton in the upcoming election. Let's just hope it doesn't come to that. Giuliani? Obama? I'm looking at you.

Entertaining or Tasteless: You Decide.

Today's going to be a short post, because I want to let the following image speak for itself. Of course, in doing so I'm exposing you all to some mightily indecent language, and since you probably get enough of that as denizens of the internet I've taken the liberty of editing out the choicest words. I'm not one for censorship, but hey, kids could be reading this! I took this image from the pages of a comic book titled, The Punisher Presents: Barracuda #1 (of 6). The large man with the rippling biceps is Barracuda, the anti-hero of this particular strip.

You can bet I'll be talking more about this in the near future. For now I'm going to let this foment whatever it's going to foment among my readers.

Democritizing Livers

It's always vaguely positive to hear about stem cells in the news, at least when their association with embryos isn't being protested. Now, a new process of reprogramming skin cells into stem cells "indistinguishable" from those found in embryos has been reproduced independentantly by three different labs. This is great news, because removing some of the perceived moral ambiguity of stem cells might help the rest of the United States get on board. In the year 2021, when I'm bidding on some new organs on ebay I don't want to have to pay shipping from China. Nope, only Made in America for my organ tissue replacement needs.

You may be wondering why I care. After all, I have a genetic disorder, so I should be more excited about retroviral treatment, right? I'm going to take this opportunity to issue a disclaimer. I freely admit that I am not a medical professional, and if I can be considered any kind of scientist, it's a social one. Therefore, I don't know adeno-associated viral vectors from Adam. What I do have is a working knowledge of statistics and a penchant for research, and I try to put that to liberal use. At this point, I'd have to say that I see gene-therapy as a long way off from curing hemophilia. I tried to stay optimistic about the whole thing, but then I found out that hemophilia has already been cured. This, from the bottom of a website hosted by the NIH:

"Liver transplantation does cure hemophilia, but carries its own risks. Further, if the patient already has hepatitis, the transplanted liver or liver cells are themselves subject to infection. Currently, the most likely route to a cure is thought to be through gene therapy."

I was surprised to be reading this; why does it seem like no one talks about the fact that hemophilia can be cured by liver transplant? Obviously, it would be a nightmarish operation for a surgeon to perform on someone with a bleeding disorder, but it's out there, and it's relatively low-tech. Even this little blurb dismisses the possiblity in favor of the future of gene-therapy. Other sites remain completely silent on the issue, saying only that there is "no known cure for hemophilia."

What can I say to "no known cure?" Well, they're doing it with dogs, so it's not complete science fiction. And where do stem cells come in? From what I gather, much of the difficulty with organ transplant (although, the most promising procedures at this point replace only about one-third of the liver) is rejection of the new tissue, and the inconvenience of the mecication one has to take in order to prevent that rejection. The scarcity of liver is another issue, compounded by the fact that no one is likely to fork a liver over to someone with Hep C (a sizable chunk of hemophiliacs), and that most hemophiliacs are not in danger of imminent death from hemophilia (if they were, it would be too late for a new liver).

I think I've offered enough exposition to present the conclusion and whole point of today's post: stem cells offer us the most likely option for growing livers to order. By "cloning," your sister's, parent's or child's liver you could decrease the risk for rejection. You'd have an organ with your name on it that you've waited a predictable amount of time to receive (rather than the indeterminate amount of time on an organ waiting list). With concurrent advances in the efficiency of clotting factor, major surgery might not be too far in the future for hemophiliacs around the world. And that's something to look forward to.

Law and Literature, Who Could Ask For Anything More?

Today I continue with the Cardozo love. I've been reading some of his majority opinions and there's something about them that just energizes me. I feel priviliged to be reading them, I feel priviliged to be entering his field, priviliged to live in the country that he served for the entire duration of his short life. Is that too much? I kind of took the easy route reading Posner's relatively short biography (although it's more of a literary analysis of his career), but I think I'm going to have to pick up Kaufman's 744-page behemoth because of my budding obsession.

Reading his opinions makes me think that I haven't ventured too far from my English-major roots. Judges are writers, just incredibly powerful ones. You could say with certainty that Shakespeare changed the world by writing; we're all aware of his plays, they've become a part of our universal subconscious (helped along by the fact that he borrowed liberally from archetypes that were already well settled there). Judge Cardozo also changed the world by writing, except that most of us don't even know that our world's been changed. Even some of the judges that sat with Cardozo didn't know the extent to which he was rocking the legal world. When you can make such a signifcant difference with little more than a reversal of traditional word-order that's some serious writing ability. The lesson I'm taking away from this is that a pocket full of rhetoric will take you far.

Side-note: I'm doing much better taking a biographical approach to studying the law; it's taking me much longer to slog through all these black-letter-centric primers.

Thank You, Mr. Cardozo

Reading through Posner's Cardozo: A Study in Reputation I came across a quote from Cardozo that really struck a cord with me. Say what you want about the guy's prose style (I'm personally quite fond of it), Cardozo had some incredibly insightful things to say. This from his seminal work The Nature of the Judicial Process:

"Every new case is an experiment."

Now, whenever someone gives me a funny look for going from psychology to law (which happens more often than you might think) I can skip the long explanation and quote my new partner in crime, here (partner in justice?). Reading through some of Cardozo's original writings reminds me why I enjoyed philosophy in the first place, why I thought I might graduate with a degree in philosophy. When confronted with such a well-stated, well-defined position, you can't help but flesh out your own in response. Reading through the blackletter law, I'm usually nodding along accepting everything at face value (much like you would reading a biology text, though law is much less of a science), but Cardozo's philosophy of law is at times brilliant and maddening and it's really helping to cast a light on my own jurisprudence. So thanks for the help, man.