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Yule Heibel's Bookmarks tagged bioneering   View Popular

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Plant Tweak Could Let Toxic Soil Feed Millions | Wired Science from Wired.com

UC Riverside scientists have a breakthrough that would allow genetic engineering to enable plants to become tolerant of aluminum toxicity. Apparently, much of the world's potentially arable land has that aluminum toxicity, and therefore can't be used for food production. Ths would circumvent that problem, and possibly signal a breakthrough into the second wave of a Green Revolution. (The first one has kind of reached its limits.)

Tags: wired_magazine, agriculture, bioneering, genetic_engineering, food, crops, paul_larsen on 2008-10-03 and saved by 2 people -All Annotations (4) -About

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Transmaterial 2: To Redefine Our Physical Environment - PingMag - The Tokyo-based magazine about “Design and Making Things”

PingMag interview with Blaine Brownell, architect and sustainable materials researcher, whose focus is on green building.

"From repurposed materials that act as surrogates, to recombinant ones that fuse several materials into a hybrid, making them stronger and more effective — Blaine points us to products that might shape our physical environment in the future."

Materials discussed include self-healing polymers inspired by biological systems, which can automatically heal cracks in buildings, for example.

The article includes many other photographs / examples with descriptions of weird and wonderful bioneered and sustainable building materials.

Tags: pingmag, transmaterial, bioneering, biomimicry, architecture, technology, blaine_brownell, sustainable_materials on 2008-05-23 -All Annotations (0) -About

more frompingmag.jp

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The Stupidity of Dignity, by Steven Pinker

This is a great essay by Steven Pinker, which skewers the conservatives' "latest, most dangerous ploy," namely their "defense" of "dignity." Pinker proceeds from bioethicist Ruth Macklin's 2003 challenge to the conservatives, her essay, "Dignity Is a Useless Concept."
QUOTE (from Pinker's essay):
The problem is that "dignity" is a squishy, subjective notion, hardly up to the heavyweight moral demands assigned to it. The bioethicist Ruth Macklin, who had been fed up with loose talk about dignity intended to squelch research and therapy, threw down the gauntlet in a 2003 editorial, "Dignity Is a Useless Concept." Macklin argued that bioethics has done just fine with the principle of personal autonomy--the idea that, because all humans have the same minimum capacity to suffer, prosper, reason, and choose, no human has the right to impinge on the life, body, or freedom of another. This is why informed consent serves as the bedrock of ethical research and practice, and it clearly rules out the kinds of abuses that led to the birth of bioethics in the first place, such as Mengele's sadistic pseudoexperiments in Nazi Germany and the withholding of treatment to indigent black patients in the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study. Once you recognize the principle of autonomy, Macklin argued, "dignity" adds nothing.
UNQUOTE
Exactly. Autonomy should be the key driver -- not some "wooly" concept of dignity, which, as Pinker points out, is usually used as a weapon to keep "uppity" people in place (women, for example, or gays wanting to marry, and so on). From "dignity of..." to "sanctity of..." is just a small shift, after all. And once they've cowed people with the godawful sanctity stuff, the authoritarians have won.

Tags: bioneering, bioethics, ethics, dignity, steven_pinker, autonomy on 2008-05-18 and saved by 15 people -All Annotations (4) -About

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