Module 3

The Science education students, shall attain the following objectives here in Module 3,
namely:
1. STS in information age

2. biodiversity and the healthy society,
3. the nano world, gene therapy, climate change and the energy crisis, and
4. environmental awareness.
SAQ 3.1. The present situation is pampered by information which

can be found in the internet. However, the information sometime
becomes so dangerous to a point where its reliability cannot be
discounted. When is information classified as social media? Non-
social media? Do standards of becoming a reliable source
information applied for both? Defend your answer. (20 points)
THE INFORMATION AGE (GUTENBERG TO SOCIAL MEDIA)

The Historical Timeline of Traditional to New Media
https://stnicholascom.wordpress.com/2017/11/22/the-historical-timeline-of-traditional-to-new-
media/ retrieved on 3 Jun 2021 11:49AM
Before anything else, let us trace the how communication evolve from the earlier media
account to the very complex way of how information can be disseminated across the world. The
accounts (different gadgets) have been invented for this purpose of bringing people closer despite
of their geographical distances.
Drawings in Caves (38000 BCE). Communication began as

drawing. It is a painted drawings on walls or ceilings mainly of prehistoric origin. The paintings are
remarkably similar around the world, with animals being common subjects that give the most
impressive images.
Property of and for the exclusive use of SLU. Reproduction, storing in a retrieval system, distributing, uploading or posting online, or transmitting in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise of any part of this document, without the prior written permission of SLU, is strictly prohibited. 46
Clay Tablets (2,400 BCE). In the Ancient Near East, clay tablets were used as a
writing medium, especially for writing in cuneiform, throughout the Bronze Age and well into the Iron
Age. Cuneiform characters were imprinted on a wet clay tablet with a stylus often made of reed
(reed pen).
Punch Cards ( ). A punched card or punch card is a piece of

stiff paper that can be used to contain digital information represented by the presence or absence
of holes in predefined positions. The information might be data for data processing applications or, in
earlier examples, used to directly control automated machinery.
Johannes Gutenberg, Printing Press (-500 BCE). The first printing press that changed
the world of printing was invented in the Holy Roman Empire by the German Johannes Gutenberg,
based on existing screw presses. But have been established in 242 cities in various countries mostly in
Western Europe around 1500 according to the scholars and considered as the first medium for the
masses. It altered the church, science, arts, and politics, accelerating developments that would see
its pinnacle in Industrial Revolution of 17th century.
Codex (-300 BC). A book constructed of a number of sheets of paper,

vellum, papyrus, or similar materials, with hand-written contents invented by the Christians. A
document which can be rightfully referred as the prototype of book. It this time, it was already bound
together for easy reading and flipping the pages.
REPORT THIS AD
Papyrus (-220 BC). Papyrus was produced in Egypt, and in ancient
Greece and Rome. which was woven from papyrus plants.
It transmit ideas, messages and scriptures like for churches activities.
Acta Diurna (1455). A daily papyrus newspaper, the Acta Diurna (Daily Events),
was distributed in locations in Rome and around the Baths. Its motto was “Publicize And Propagate.”
Probably the low-grade saitic or taenotic papyrus was used for daily publishing, no doubt one of the
reasons that no scraps of the Acta Diurna have ever been found.
Doctrina Cristiana (1684). The Doctrina Christiana was an early book on the
Roman Catholic Catechism, written by Fray Juan de Plasencia, and is believed to be one of the
earliest printed books in the Philippines. He derived its name from the Latin term Doctrina Christiana
meaning the “teachings of the church” .
Telegraph (1770). Telegraphy is the long-distance transmission of

textual or symbolic (as opposed to verbal or audio) messages without the physical exchange of an
object bearing the message. Thus semaphore is a method of telegraphy, whereas pigeon post is
not. Telegraphy requires that the method used for encoding the message be known to both sender
and receiver.
A press that had the ability to conduct dialogue and even argue with the government..
It was triggered by the imposition of taxes on a paper by the British empire, so it could generate the
much- needed revenues to finance its wars.
The income of the printers were severely affected by this development (1800), so they openly
denounce this colonial policy of taxation.
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Typewriter (1846). A typewriter is a mechanical or electro-mechanical machine

for writing characters similar to those produced by printer’s movable type. A typewriter operates by
means of keys that strike a ribbon to transmit ink or carbon impressions onto paper. Typically, a single
character is printed on each key press. The machine prints characters by making ink impressions of
type elements similar to the sorts used in movable type letterpress printing.
La Esperanza (1889). La Esperanza was the first daily newspaper edited by Felipe
Lacorte and Evaristo Calderon and was published in the country.
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Vitascope (1900). Edison Vitascope was on public debut in New York,

where it showed a film ” Rough Sea at Dover” by Robert Paul. It was such a novelty and large screen
projection enabled massive audiences to watch and at the same time starkly different practice from
the newspaper that was helsdby a single reader, and perhaps, passed on to the next individual who
expressed interest to read the current news.
Television (1930). Television was already used in magazine called the ”Scientific
American “.The first telecast of a television program took place transmitting from the experimental
studio of General Electric in New York. A much improved technology (1946) from the mechanical
scanning introduced earlier.
A type of phased array antenna, that is a computer-controlled array antenna in which the beam of
radio waves can be electronically steered to point in different directions without moving the antenna.
By the 1939, President Franklin Roosevelt became the first president to appear on the tube.
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Transmitter (1946). James Lindenberg, an American engineer began

assembling transmitters in Bolinao, Pangasinan but he failed at not fully successful to attempt to
establish a television station.
Transistor Radio (1949). The invention of the transistor radio signaled the
development of semi- conductor devices, considered the foundation of modern electronics, as it led
to the invention of integrated circuits, a technology that will be critical in the development of the
computer.
Packard (1969). Packard Bell is a Dutch-based computer manufacturing

subsidiary of Acer. The brand name originally belonged to an American radio manufacturer, Packard
Bell, founded by Herbert “Herb” A. Bell and Leon S. Packard in 1933. Some websites use 1926 as the
founding date when Herbert Bell was an executive with Jackson Bell Company, Los Angeles,
California.
Apple 1 (1980). Apple Computer 1, also known later as the Apple I, or

Apple-1, is a desktop computer released by the Apple Computer Company (now Apple Inc.) in 1976.
It was designed and hand-built by Steve Wozniak. Wozniak’s friend Steve Jobs had the idea of selling
the computer.
Laptop (1986). A laptop, often called a notebook or “notebook computer”,

is a small, portable personal computer with a “clamshell” form factor, an alphanumeric keyboard on
the lower part of the “clamshell” and a thin LCD or LED computer screen on the upper portion, which
is opened up to use the computer. Laptops are folded shut for transportation, and thus are suitable
for mobile use.
Bulletin Board System (1993). A computer running software that

allows uses to connect and exhange messages and information using a terminal program.
It was started to operate this time using software that ran on an IBM XT Clone PC, with a modem that
ran on 1200 bpm.
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Mosaic Browser (1994). Mosaic, is a discontinued early web browser. It has been
credited with popularizing the World Wide Web. It was also a client for earlier protocols such as File
Transfer Protocol, Network News Transfer Protocol, and Gopher. The browser was named for its support
of multiple internet protocols. Its intuitive interface, reliability, Windows port and simple installation all
contributed to its popularity within the web, as well as on Microsoft operating systems.
World Wide Web (1994). Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World
Wide Web and finally launched in the Philippines. It is information system on the Internet that allows
documents to be connected to other documents by hypertext links, enabling the user to search for
information by moving from one document to another. The Philippines was formally connected to
the internet using the PLDT network center in Makati City.
First Smartphone (1999). A refined version was marketed to

consumers in 1994 by BellSouth under the name Simon Personal Communicator. The Simon was the
first commercially available device that could be properly referred to as a “smartphone”, although
it was not called that in 1994.
Live journal, Blogs (2003), It is a Russian (originally American) social

networking service where users can keep a blog, journal or diary. A wide variety of political pundits
also use the service for political commentary. As with many other social networks, a wide variety of
public figures use the network. LiveJournal was started on April 15, 1999 by American programmer
Brad Fitzpatrick as a way of keeping his high school friends updated on his activities.
Skype (2004). Skype is an instant messaging app that provides online

text message and video chat services. Users may transmit both text and video messages and may
exchange digital documents such as images, text, and video. Skype allows video conference calls.
Facebook (2005). Facebook is an American for-profit corporation
and an online social media and social networking service based in Menlo Park, California. The
Facebook website was launched on February 4, 2004, by Mark Zuckerberg, along with fellow
Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz,
and Chris Hughes.
Youtube (2006). YouTube is an American video-sharing website

headquartered in San Bruno, California. The service was created by three former PayPal employees
– Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim.
Twitter (2008). Twitter is an online news and social networking service

where users post and interact with messages, “tweets”, restricted to 140 characters. Registered users
can post tweets, but those who are unregistered can only read them.
Netbook (2013) Netbook is a generic name given to a category of small,

lightweight, legacy-free, and inexpensive laptop computers that were introduced in 2007. Netbooks
compete in the same market segment as tablet computers and Chromebooks (a variation on the
portable network computer).
Google ( ). The present social structure of media including people,
industries. academe, research, and almost all can be found here in google. It becomes an electronic
hi-way where bundles of information have been practically stored for people’s consumption.
TEDTalk: Julian Assange on “Why the World Needs Wikileaks”
LET’S WATCH THIS!!!
A day without Technology

retrieved from https://www.greenpapermusic.com/a-college-essay-sample-about-a-day-without-
technology/ on 3June 2021 at 6:45PM
Most of us cannot imagine that they can go for a day without the touch or use of the technology we
are used to. Today, almost all we do is reliant on technology. We have phones, iPods, and computers
just to mention a few. Technology is useful but sometimes overused and other times even misused.
Some are addicted to their phones or their computers. You may have noted how people constantly
keep checking their phones for texts or emails. Others keep looking or logging in to their computers.
We want to check and see who has contacted us or what they want. Sometimes it is just because we
have an addiction. It is essential to try to have a day that is without the use of technology. It is surprising
that some have never tried or attempted to keep off technology even for a day. There are some
benefits and advantages associated or linked to having a day that is without the use of any
technology.
You can try or attempt to spend or have one day that is free from technology use to experience these
advantages. Quality time can be spent with friends and even family. When you are not playing online
games or watching movies and chatting on social media, you can have quality time. One can have
enough or a lot of fun with no interruptions from calls or texts from other people including friends or
even workmates. Story and experience sharing with the friends and family are achievable in a day
with no technology. You can engage in refreshing activities and games together and have fun.
Sometimes keeping off technology is fun as it allows you to have outdoor activities as much as you
want, or you may like. You can also take rides around the field or the packs to maximize the quality
of a day without technology. Concentration on school work that does not require you to do research
is easier if you are not using technology. The interruptions are minimized, and you can, therefore, do
tasks and assignments in the best way. The night is more peaceful for you if you are not using
technology, for example, your phone or your computer compared to having the devices on. You can
sleep well and easily with no disturbances from technology.
You could miss an important or urgent call. There can also be missed opportunities. If you are not
outdoors, keeping off, technology can result in boredom.
I Survived a Day without Technology

https://medium.com/@jennifermonahan_28426/i-survived-a-day-without-technology-1037113cfe66 on
3 June 2021 at 10:00 PM
Jennifer B. Monahan
Today was a forced “no electrical devices” day. Most of the area of the state I am in in Guatemala
had no electricity because of maintenance work being done. Fortunately, we were given 24 hours
notice, so I was able to plan ahead: preparing meals that didn’t require cooking or refrigeration, filling
the bathtub with water (no electricity = no water, since the pumps would be down), and printing out
hard copies of materials I needed for work.
At 7:30 a.m. the power went out. My little Guatemalan village got strangely quiet: the human-made
noise — the music, the electric tools, the cell phones — were all silenced. All that was left were the
sounds of nature — the wind rustling through the trees, the wide variety of birds singing, chirping and
screeching, and the monkeys howling.
As I watched the family of monkeys that live in the trees in my and my neighbors’ yards, it struck me
that today was no different for them than yesterday was. They hadn’t spent time letting clients know
that they wouldn’t be available. They hadn’t had to cancel meetings or make arrangements to have
a rerun play on their radio show. They hadn’t rushed around all morning getting as much done — while
playing a few rounds of Words with Friends — before the power went out. They were just going about
their day, eating leaves, business as usual.
I know that I am usually tethered to my phone and laptop. I do my best to take breaks from them, but
often will take just a quick peek to check emails and texts, or to see how many likes that picture of the
iguana in my yard has gotten.
Today was different. I couldn’t take peeks. I sat on my balcony with a pad of paper and pen to work,
and was immediately transported back to summer days when I was a grammar school-aged kid. I
would sit on my grandmother’s porch, put my feet up on one of the porch pillars, and read a book
while shelling peas or snapping the ends off of green beans. I realized that I had almost forgotten the
quiet, unending stillness of those days.
Today, for the first time since I got here, I relaxed fully into the rhythm of a jungle day.
I watched a small lizard make his way busily through the leaves in my yard. Who knew that they made
so much noise when they walked? I made a game of trying to discern as many different bird calls as
possible. I’m up to 11. Except for the rooster and the woodpecker, I have no idea what types of birds
they are. That will have to wait for another power-free day. I discovered that I loved the sound of the
wind going through the leaves of the tress and making some of the leaves fall almost as much as I love
the sound of bamboo rustling in the wind.
Today I took my time with my work. Having to write instead of typing will do that. There’s a sacredness
and a connection to the handwritten word that doesn’t exist on a computer screen and I found myself
recognizing and acknowledging the power of each word and the unique style of each curve, line and
dot as I wrote them. Because my pace was slowed, each word I wrote was far more deliberate and
pointed.
Today I enjoyed the distractions of nature over the distractions of being constantly connected. I
listened to my body and what she needed instead of powering through the day to get a task done,
often at the detriment of my physical needs. (How many times have you gotten to the end of the work
day and realized that you hadn’t even had time for a bathroom break? Me too.)
Today I drank plenty of water, sat in the sun, and gave my wonderful, amazing body that I often take
for granted (and sometimes even neglect) what she needed to feel good and nurtured.
Today I had no sense of clock time. The day stretched out in front of me like an eternity.
Today, for the first time in a long time, I lived a fully connected life. Not connected like we think with
our phones, computers, and internet, but truly connected to me and the world around me.
And today, when the power came back on at 6 p.m., I simultaneously expressed gratitude for the
many gifts that electricity and our electronic technologies bring and vowed to incorporate more of
the true connection I experienced today into my life.
Timing your Technology
retrieved from https://www.gwern.net/Timing on 3 June 2021 at 6:58 PM
TIMING TECHNOLOGY: LESSONS

FROM THE MEDIA LAB
The Use of Technology by the Elderly

https://www.hsj.gr/medicine/the-use-of-technology-by-the-elderly.php?aid=3614 retrieved on 3
June 2021 at 7:06PM
Zoe Roupa1*, Marios Νikas2, Εlena Gerasimou3, Vasiliki Zafeiri4, Lamprini Giasyrani5, Eunomia
Κazitori6 and Pinelopi Sotiropoulou7
1Professor in Nursing Department, Technological and Educational Institute of Larissa
2MSc, Community Nurse
3Graduate of Nursing Department A’ TEI of Athens
4Ph.D., Dentist
5R.N
6MSc, R.N., General Hospital “Geniko Kratiko Nikaias” Hospital
7MSc, Health Visitor Nurse, “Sotiria” Hospital
*Corresponding Author:
Zoe Roupa
Aigosthenon 86, Galatsi, 11146
Tel: 210 2931022
Mobile: 6974780723
E-mail: zoeroupa@yahoo.gr
Abstract
The use of technology and its’ providing information allows the elderly to face more easily the
difficulties of modern life, trespassing the limits of their social and emotional isolation, thus achieving a
more qualitative living. The purpose of this research was to explore whether the elderly were familiar
with modern technology. Material and Method: The sample studied consisted of 300 people, 65-85
years old. Collection of data was conducted by the completion of an anonymous questionnaire.
Analysis of data was performed using the SPSS 15 statistical package and one-way ANOVA x2-test,
and t-tests were applied for the statistical process. Results: Οf the 300 individuals studied, 134 were
men and 166 women. 79.7% were in the age group of 65 to 74 years. All respondents reported that
they used everyday appliances. In detail, 94% of women used machines that help in household tasks
such as washing machines, 98.5% iron, whereas the 98.8% of men preferred watching television.
Regarding the use of ATM machines, women faced more difficulties with a statistical significant
difference, compared to men, p
Keywords
elderly people, technology, electronic devices, quality of life
Introduction
In the rapidly aging population, the elderly are called upon to adapt to new technology and the
demands of modern society. It is widely accepted that elder individuals show low adjustment to the
advent of new technologies compared to younger generations, either because they do not have
the technological experience or because of their current health status [1,2,3].
Furthermore, at their effort to use new technologies, they usually face many difficulties deriving from
demographic characteristics such as income, education, geographical location, possible disabilities,
as well as difficulties related to the complexity of new technology. Other contributing factors for this
low adjustment to new technologies are the lack of incentives, economical obstacles, digital skills and
appropriate training. A commonly held view is that the market is not currently investing enough on
innovations for the elder users, such as comprehensive and userfriendly services for healthier living
conditions. In addition, many products and services often are not appropriate to the needs of elder
users, exacerbating the sense of frustration and leading to dependence on other people [3,4,5].
The main sources of information for the elderly is the Internet, thematic television channels and
magazines. In their effort to take greater responsibility for their personal health, physical status and
independent living conditions, the elderly users need to be more informed through the use of Internet,
thematic television channels, magazines and other sources of information [6,7].
Technology may involve the use of most simple everyday electrical appliances (TV, kitchen, vacuum
cleaner, dishwasher, etc.) or other more complex machines (ATMs, PCs, mobile phones etc.)
premising the ability to properly use them.
In is widely accepted the use of new technology by the elderly population has a beneficial effect on
their quality of life. It is an essential step if the younger help them to familiarize with technology, thus
removing all fears of new technology use. Furthermore, understanding the difficulties that the elderly
experience should prompt health professionals to provide adequate information that will significantly
contribute to the improvement of their quality of life [8,9,10].
It seems very important, that the state could contribute to the elderly’ s adaptation in new
technology, as they may organize a publicity campaign (leaflets with instructions, spots, etc.) in order
to raise public awareness.
Material and Method

The sample of this research consisted of 300 people (134 men and 166 women) aged 65-85 + years
from the geographical divisions of Macedonia, Thessaly, Central Greece, Attica and the
Peloponnese. The sample has been taken in accordance to the rules of random sampling, by
personal interview of the researcher, visiting Open Centers of Protection for the Elderly.
At first, a preliminary study (pilot study) was conducted in 30 subjects, by using all necessary
parameters, as well as all specialized techniques and tests for the analysis of the data collected.
Data were collected by the completion of a questionnaire, consisted of 26 items related to the
demographic characteristics, the use of technology and the health of the participants. The
questionnaire included closed and openended questions, and was completed by personal interview
of the researcher, after having given the necessary information, clearly explained the objectives of
the survey and ensured anonymity of the respondents. The completion of the questionnaires lasted
from August to October 2007.
Statistical Program for Social Sciences SPSS 15 was used for the statistical processing of the data. The
chi-squared test was used for testing the hypothesis of independence between two variables, as well
as for testing the homogeneity of distribution for two categorical variables. Whenever the above test
was not applicable (expected frequencies of less than 5), the Fisher exact text was used. Cronbach’s
alpha, showing the internal consistency of scale, is a=0,9027. The Anova and the t-test were used for
testing equality of means for more than two or less than two groups respectively.
All tests are significant when the p-value is less than 0.05. For the graphical display of data, frequency
graphs and percentages were used, such as histograms, pies and statistical tables.
Results
Of the 300 participants, 79.7% women and 71.08% of men aged 65 to 74 years. Women, 6.77%, were
the highest percentage in the upper age group (>85 years) compared with men, 1.81%. (Figure :1)
Figure 1: Distribution of the sample according to the use of electrical device.
In regard to the use of electrical device by gender, 94% of women used washing machine, 67%
vacuum cleaner, 87.2% electric iron, 98.5% with electric stove and 54% wireless phone. Almost all the
respondents answered that they were able to handle the TV. (Figure :2) More in detail, compared to
men, women were more familiar to the use of washing machine, vacuum cleaner, electric iron,
electric stove, with statistical significant difference, p<0,001.
Figure 2: Use of electrical appliances by gender
In regard to ATM (automatic teller machines), 28.4% of the participants reported that they “always”
used ATMs (approximately 85 people in the study), “sometimes” 39.2%, “rarely” 28.4% and “do not
ever use” ATMs, 4%. (Table :1). More in detail, regarding the frequency of use ATM in relation to sex,
49.6% of women and 11.4% reported that they never used ATM, 27.0% of women AND 48.8% of men
reported that they used ATM rarely, whereas 22.5% of women and 33.1% of men reported that they
used ATM sometimes an never 0,7% of women and 6,6% of men. (Fig: 3). 78.3% of the participants
used mobile phones. More in detail, regarding the use of mobile phones in relation to Sex, 40.6% of
the women and 6.6% of men did not use mobile phone, whereas 59.4% of women and 93.3% of men
used mobile phone. (Fig: 4).
Figure 3: Distribution of the sample-studied according to ΑΤΜ use in relation to Sex
Figure 4: Distribution of the sample-studied according to Use of Mobile Phones in relation to Sex
In regard to the use of hearing aids, 72.93% of women and 89.76% of men did not use it, whereas
27.07% of women and 10.24% of men used hearing aids. (Fig: 5).
Figure 5: Distribution of the sample-studied according to Use of Hearing Headsets by Sex
Discussion
This research, studied the ability of the elderly to meet with the rapidly advancing technology and
mainly the use of everyday appliances and devices, such as household appliances, mobile phones,
banking machines and auxiliary hearing aids if the elderly experienced hearing problems.
According to the results the average age of women, in all three age groups, was higher compared
to men. One possible interpretation is that women develop greater life expectancy than men,
following the general trend worldwide, and seem to outnumber men. According to a report published
by the G.S.V.E.E. in 2003, life expectancy in Greece stood at 76.5 years for men and 81.3 years for
women [11].
Very important are the findings, about the proportion of elderly people who use electronic household
appliances. Thus, in their daily lives, the elder individuals used appliances such as washing machines,
electrical kitchen, wireless phones, vacuum cleaner, iron and the overwhelming majority used
television. Interestingly, however, is that in all cases, women used these devices in a greater proportion
than men, who only show elevated rates in using the television, compared to women.
A similar survey conducted by the National Statistical Service of Britain, from 1998 to 2001, at a national
level, among people aged 65 and older, showed that elderly people used largely household
appliances [12]. Specifically, the use of electrical kitchen and oven from 65% in 1998, rose to 75% by
2001, the use of TV from 13% to 23% in 2001, while the elderly in Britain are aware of and able to use
computers and the Internet in a proportion of 14%.
An additional survey that was conducted in New Zealand by Alison Robins [13], indicated that the
majority of the elder citizens enjoyed at a high rate almost all domestic facilities, provided by electrical
devices. More in detail, 93% of the participants were able to handle TV, 87% washing machine and
dryer, 99% high technology refrigerators and 94% to use wireless phones.
Similar to the present findings, the results of the by the Statistical Office of Finland showed that 30% of
the elderly women used washing machines, whereas 7% of men used these electrical devices [14].
According to the results of the present study few participants used ATM machines. A possible
explanation is that the elder individuals, having not been familiar with new technology, are frequently
discouraged at their effort to use ATM due to the difficulties they face such as handling the keyboard,
fear, ignorance, screen problems.
The results of the present study are similar to those by Arsenos at al.,[15] who showed that 57.8% of the
elder participants living in Athens had not ever used the ATMs and consequently they ignored the
services and opportunities provided by the machines of this type. On the contrary, 5.9% of participants
reported that they were aware of all the services and capabilities of ATMs.
The reasons to avoid using ATMs were the difficulty of handling the keyboard, the lack of knowledge
about their operations and the fear of being robbed during the transaction.
Similarly, in Netherlands, Mollenkopf et al.,[16] showed that only a small percentage of the elderly
used the ATMs because all the other found it difficult to adjust to new technology and generally to
the use of new devices. However, those who used them, reported quite satisfied and found out that
technology facilitated their lives.
Very interesting are the findings concerning the familiarity of participants to mobile phones. More in
detail, elderly men (93.4%) used them more often than women (59.4%). Interestingly, knowledge of
mobile use is limited in achieving calls and in some cases, sending short messages. There is no
extensive use of services and opportunities offered by mobile phones.
In Japan, Hata et al., [17] showed that among Japanese women, aged 70-89 years, only 10% where
using mobile phones, whereas 60% of the participants showed interest in learning how to use a mobile
phone. Thus, researchers concluded that the design of a type of keyboard combining the features of
a touch screen and a dictionary could be highly beneficial for the elderly. Furthermore, the survey
conducted, by Shizuka et al.,[18] in Japan, showed that 37.8% of individuals aged 60-69 years and
19.1% aged 70 to 80 years used mobile phones Interesting also are the results by Salmon et al.,[19]
who studied whether individuals with Alzheimer in Belgium were able to use mobile phones. This study
showed that after 2 sessions about the use of mobile phone, two patients learned properly to use it.
This study highlights the efficacy of coordinated and organized efforts for patient autonomy.
According the difference between sexes and the use of mobile phones, there is a study conducted
by Sri Kurniawan, [20] the United Kingdom, showed that women were those who make more and
often indiscriminate use of mobile phones, especially those of age 65 to 74 years, at a percentage of
60%, while those aged 75 years and older, 36%. A research carried out in Malaysia, among 176 senior
citizens, by Mohr Hairum Nizam et al., [21] concluded that elderly people are able to use mobile
phones, especially men use them at a rate 60 %.
From all the above, is easily seen that in countries where technology is highly developed, such as
Asian countries, the elderly are more familiar with the use of advanced phones, compared to elderly
people living in countries where technology is in early stages and is under development.
Important are also the findings related to elderly people with hearing problems. Thus, 82.3% of elderly
people do not use hearing aids. The percentage of women who used hearing headsets was higher
compared to men. In a survey conducted in Kuopio, Finland, in March 2005, related to the
percentage of avoiding the use of hearing aids, among the elderly over 75 years, Lupsakko et al., [22]
concluded that 13-15% of older people with hearing problems, have held hearing headsets. But most
of them did not use them, either because they could not understand how they work, or because it
was not the perfect device to have chosen, in shape and size.
It is worth noting, that the hearing aids cannot be used by people with intellectual disabilities and
concluded that the use of hearing aids by persons with disabilities can lead to incorrect use, therefore,
these people should be monitored and receive special treatment from qualified people.
Regarding hearing headsets, Fletcher et al., [23] studied elderly people who had problems with their
hearing related to use of hearing aids. The researchers collected personal information for 32.656
individuals and gave the opportunity to 78% (14.877) of them to do an acoustic test. It was found that
8% participants (2537), showed great difficulty in listening and 46% failed in acoustic tests. More than
half of people who failed the test had no special equipment, while 60% of the participants who wore
hearing aids, stated that they use them regularly. The level of use of hearing devices were in perfect
line with the level of perception of the elderly.
From the results of the present study, it is evident that the use of new technologies by the elderly
population significantly contributes to a better quality of life, improving parameters of daily living such
as transportation facilitation, communication and participation in social life. Further, it offers the link
of elderly to services that meet their immediate needs, and in particular the cooperation and
coordination with the network of Primary Care and Social Protection.
Conclusion
Education of the untrained elderly is the most essential step in order to become familiar with new
technologies. More in detail, this can be accomplished through specifically designed education
programs that teach elderly the way new technologies work.
Furthermore, these programs should be also addressed to individuals who belong to the supportive
environment of the elderly such as the younger members of the family. It would be beneficial if the
younger helped them to familiarize with each object, removing fears of using high technology
devices.
(References may be seen from the original file as appended in this module)
"How We Decide"
By Jonah Lehrer '03CC (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).
Retrieved from https://magazine.columbia.edu/article/review-how-we-decide on 3 June
2021 at 7:21PM
Early on in his new book How We Decide, science writer Jonah Lehrer '03CC describes the fascinating
downfall of a woman named Ann Klinestiver. Raised as a devout Christian, the 52-year-old high-
school English teacher was the very model of small-town propriety in her West Virginia community and
an object of empathetic admiration as she battled the tremors of Parkinson's disease. And then, as
Lehrer recounts, she began to act very strangely. She started hanging out at casinos and dog-racing
tracks, compulsively playing the slot machines. After a year of gambling binges, she'd blown through
more than $250,000 of retirement savings, lost her husband, and even resorted to stealing small
change from her grandchildren. As in most neuroscience whodunits, her neurons made her do it -
specifically, her dopamine-producing neurons.
It turns out that Klinestiver's abrupt change in behavior, and her disastrous run of poor judgment, were
side effects of the medication she had been taking in ever-greater doses to treat her Parkinson's
disease. As Lehrer nimbly explains, Parkinson's disease arises because of the mysterious degradation
of a specific group of neurons nestled deep in the midbrain that produce the neurotransmitter
dopamine. As these cells gradually disappear, and the amount of natural dopamine diminishes, the
symptoms of Parkinson's become more pronounced. Hence, a standard treatment for patients like
Klinestiver is to replenish, often dramatically, levels of dopamine in the brain.
Now it also turns out that dopamine is the crucial ingredient in our neural apparatus for automatic (or,
to use substitutive terms, instinctual or intuitional) decision making. Dopaminergic neurons keep track
of what emotionally satisfies our desires and urges; dopamine is the juice that reinforces rewarding
behavior when we make a satisfying decision, especially when we gratify primal physiological urges
like hunger, thirst, and sex. In fact, it is so crucial to learning in primates like us that, as Lehrer puts it,
"the process of decision-making begins with fluctuations of dopamine." These neurons unconsciously
guide much of our emotional behavior. But, as Lehrer explains in one of the best sections of his book,
it gets even more interesting than that.
Once we discover something that pleases us, dopamine neurons begin to fire in anticipation of
satisfactions; they predict reward before a decision is made, and they freak out when the prediction
turns out to be wrong. In the neural shorthand of the dopamine system, success and habit breed
boredom and low-grade contentment; errors and false predictions breed alarm and learning, and,
most important in the context of slot machines, unexpected and pleasant surprises (ka-ching!)
provoke the strongest dopamine-driven satisfactions. We literally get a neural kick when we learn
something new, and unexpected pleasures are, thanks to dopamine, the most pleasant of all. Thus,
a brain doused with dopamine can create powerful addictions that alter behavior. In addition to
gambling, Parkinson's patients treated with dopamine also have reported stunningly atypical sexual
addiction and promiscuity.
In his skillful explication of the dopamine system, Lehrer correctly builds the structure of his book around
one of the most important developments in neuroscience of the past two decades; human emotions,
he writes, "are rooted in the prediction of highly flexible brain cells, which are constantly adjusting their
connections to reflect reality." Dopamine explains learning, habit, impulse, subconscious information
appraisal, intuition, and a number of other decision-making processes based on emotion, all of
which How We Decide successfully reprises. Indeed, Lehrer displays a prodigious knowledge of the
current literature on decision science, and dips adroitly into these recent findings with concision and
wit.
But this is also a book largely built out of two kinds of anecdote. Some, like the Klinestiver story, emerge
directly out of neuroscience, reflect Lehrer's own reporting, and succeed marvelously at conveying
the science. But these are rivaled, and often overshadowed, by a separate class of anecdote that
seems, though beautifully rendered, exaggerated and somewhat removed from everyday
experience. "From the perspective of the brain," Lehrer writes, "there's a thin line between a good
decision and a bad decision . . . This book is about that line." That line, alas, is often drawn with
melodramatic flair - and a very heavy marker. About halfway through the book, you begin to wonder
if a more appropriate title might have been Extreme Neuroscience.
To illustrate decision-making processes like focus or intuition, Lehrer tells stories about a Super Bowl
quarterback making a crucial pass in the waning minutes of the game and an airline pilot landing a
crippled plane. The story of a Montana forest fire that swallows up more than a dozen young
firefighters is a parable of panic and habit, and the tale of serial killer John Wayne Gacy is used to
explain moral decisions. Each of these anecdotes is deftly told (perhaps too deftly; we'll get to that in
a moment), but they also strive so hard for drama and attention that they seem to be bulked-up
examples of decision making - anecdotes on steroids, if you will. They represent extreme, split-second
examples of expert decision making that often don't resonate with the more mundane, protracted,
agonizing back-and-forth uncertainty many of us wrestle with on a daily basis, without a single Super
Bowl ring to show for our efforts.
In recasting the timeless battle between the emotional and cognitive voices of the human mind,
Lehrer is captive, as we all are, to the original Platonic metaphor for rational thought: reason is the
charioteer, struggling to control and steer the horses of emotion, which is wild, impulsive, and has a
mind of its own. Metaphors for emotional impulse run the zoological gamut, from the horse to the
grasshopper (Aesop), or the elephant (recently suggested by psychologist Jonathan Haidt), as
everyone works out neural mechanics of communication and control between the rider (the
prefrontal, rational part of our brain) and the beast (our dopamine-trained, emotional decision
makers). In truth, these two ostensibly separate neural duchies are so snarled and entangled with
interconnected wiring that they look like the back of your home entertainment system. They talk back
to each other, they contradict each other, they take turns vetoing each other. The big message from
recent neuroscience, reiterated in the book, is about the decision-making power and acumen of the
emotional brain. "The reason these emotions are so intelligent," Lehrer writes, hearkening back to the
dopamine system, "is that they've managed to turn mistakes into learning events."
Several caveats: Despite Lehrer's agile handling of a lot of complicated material, I never was quite
sure about the line that separated his reporting from other people's work. Lehrer's account of the
disastrous 1949 firefighting episode in Montana, for example, with which he began his July 2008 story
about insight in the New Yorker, apparently represents no original reporting, but instead is an
elaborate four-page retelling of Norman Maclean's Young Men and Fire (1992). Lehrer mentions the
Maclean book in the main text, yet oddly doesn't attribute his very detailed account to it. This and
other derivative anecdotes are written with such immediacy and visceral detail that it is the kind of
prose we normally associate with eyewitness reporting or fastidious, scrupulously sourced
reconstruction. At minimum, it would have been gracious to acknowledge Maclean explicitly in the
text as the main source of Lehrer's extended, vivid account.
One final but important quibble: How We Decide makes the story of decision science sound more
settled than it sometimes is. The findings of a recent experiment on patience and self-control, for
example, read like neural law; in reality, the results have been sharply contested in the literature.
Readers of How We Decide will come away with a swift, smart, and genial survey of the recent
research on how we make decisions - including, especially, the decisions we inevitably screw up. They
shouldn't, however, come away with the sense that the hash of decision-making science is settled. To
the contrary, it's just beginning to get fractiously interesting.
Information: The New Language of Science (Hans Christian von Baeyer) retrieved from
https://sites.google.com/site/pdfnew2017/download-information-the-new-language-of-science-book-pdf
on 3 June 2021 at 4:40PM
The murky relationship between reality and our knowledge of it is one of philosophy’s most famous
conundrums. According to this engaging tour of contemporary information science; the question
may be moot since; if some theorists are to be believed; 'the stuff of the world is really; at bottom;
information.' That may be the sort of grandiose claim cyber-enthusiasts make when they get a new
Palm Pilot; but physics professor and journalist von Baeyer (Warmth Disperses and Time Passes)
manages to invest it with real intellectual substance. Delving into the history of science from ancient
Greek theories of the atom to the frontiers of astrophysics; he shows how the concept of information
illuminates a huge variety of phenomena; from black holes to the gamesmanship strategies of Let’s
Make a Deal. Along the way; he provides a lucid and easily accessible treatment of some fairly
sophisticated topics in thermodynamics; communications theory and quantum mechanics; his
account of such aspects of 'quantum weirdness' as superposition and action-at-a-distance; in which
the law of the excluded middle is repealed (e.g. how Schrodinger’s cat is both alive and not alive)
and particles seem to have an eerily telepathic knowledge of regions of space where they have
never been; is a tour de force of popular scientific exposition. Von Baeyer manages to steer clear of
equations without resorting to the hand-waving metaphors that too many science popularizers lapse
into when trying to convey difficult ideas. The result is a stylish introduction to one of the most
fascinating themes of modern science.
Review
Hans Christian von Bayer is well known for explaining the complexities of science to the rest of us; and
in this book he lives up to his reputation by taking on one of the most difficult concepts around--
information. Starting with his characterization of information as a gentle rain that falls on all of our lives;
he leads us through a universe in which information is woven like threads in a cloth. Masterful! (James
Trefil; Clarence J Robinson Professor of Physics at George Mason University and co-author of The
Dictionary of Cultural Literacy)In Information; physicist Hans Christian von Baeyer sets out to explain
why...information is the irreducible seed from which every particle; every force and even the fabric of
space-time grows. This is deep stuff; but von Baeyer romps through a huge range of subjects; including
thermodynamics; statistics; information theory and quantum mechanics with ease....You will never
think of information the same way again. (New Scientist 2003-11-01) Von Baeyer has provided an
accessible and engaging overview of the emerging role of information as a fundamental building
block in science. (Michael Nielsen Nature 2004-01-01). Delving into the history of science from ancient
Greek theories of the atom to the frontiers of astrophysics; [Von Baeyer] shows how the concept of
information illuminates a huge variety of phenomena; from black holes to the gamesmanship
strategies of Let's Make a Deal...Von Baeyer manages to steer clear of equations without resorting to
the hand-waving metaphors that too many science popularizers lapse into when trying to convey
difficult ideas. The result is a stylish introduction to one of the most fascinating themes of modern
science.
"Like the other reviewer (Frenzen); I also had read von Baeyer's book on thermodynamics; which I felt
was a fantastic read. Hence, I was excited to see a book on information theory; a natural follow-on
topic. Like, his previous book; von Baeyer has written a book with no equations; plots; or figures of any
kind. Presumably; the idea behind this approach is to appeal to non-technical readers. As a person
who knows some math; I found myself wishing over and over again to get just a peek at the equations
behind the "talk" to figure out what is really going on. As they say about pictures; "one equation is
worth a thousand words." I don't know whether the publishing proverb that "the number of copies sold
is inversely proportional to the number of equations" is at work here; but omitting math so completely
does a disservice to readers. The goal of von Baeyer's book is to ask; over and over again; "what is
information?" In this regard; the book attempts to give nontechnical insight into Shannon's ideas. Next;
the book transitions to the truly exciting edge of information; namely; quantum information theory.
Since I had only a very vague idea of how qubits work before I picked up this book; I hoped to get
some real insight from von Baeyer. Unfortunately; I learned nothing from the presentation. I found no
clear and simple explanation as to how qubits work and how they could be used to compute
something. The "bead" contest was presumably intended as a "clear as day" explanation; but it was
just too much to swallow. Next; we hear about a breakthrough qubit-based algorithm for factoring
integers; but there is barely a hint about how the algorithm works. (Is there a Quantum Mechanics for
Dummies? Read more "What a delightful surprise to stumble across this book on Amazon a few months
ago; before it had even been released. Since I was familiar with and greatly admired von Baeyer's
book on Maxwell's Demon; ``Warmth Disperses and Time Passes''; I immediately pre-ordered a copy
of ``Information--The New Language of Science'.' How pleasant to find it dropped on my doorstep a
week ago (3/16/04). The book is published by Harvard University Press; so physically it is very high
quality. Von Baeyer is an excellent expositor; and has written several books on science for the lay
person. Check out his other books by all means. Information; as a physical quantity; has been rapidly
evolving. It is destined to play a pivotal role in this century; especially in physics. We now distinguish
between classical and quantum information; and it is safe to say that there are many mysteries still
unsolved about how information is to be understood and what role it plays in the universe. Von
Baeyer's book begins with eight chapters on background information (pardon the pun!) --- how our
ideas of information have evolved; the idea of the bit; Shannon's information theory; the role of
genetic information in biology; the tension between the ideas of reductionism and emergence in the
sciences; and a hint at how the ideas of Bohr; Wheeler; and Zeilinger suggest that; ``Science is about
information.' 'The next ten chapters flesh out our understanding of classical information. The
connection between probability and classical information is explored; as is Boltzmann's discovery of
the microscopic interpretation of entropy; noise; Shannon's model of communication theory;
bioinformatics; and the discoveries of Landauer and Bennett about the destruction of information
and the reversibility of computation. Read more; If you want an introduction to information theory;
and; in a way; probability theory from the real front door; this is it. A clearly written book; very intuitive;
explains things; such as the Monty Hall problem in a few lines. I will make it a prerequisite before more
technical great books; such as Cover and Thompson.
I found this a useful book. This is a completely non-mathematical book. That means in some ways it is
limited. It also means you can read it without much background. I have a math background but I
certainly learned some useful things from it.
"Being a big fan of information; I was very interested in the book. But the contents were a huge
disappointment. The writer spends too much time about telling stories of personal relations to the
people behind the models; and the role of "information" in various parts of the book is lost quite
completely. There are however very interesting and informative (sic) parts of the book. Noise in the
Shannon-Weaver -model is described in a way that really tells more about the concept; both in the
respect if information theory and everyday life. The effects of noise are brought up in several parts of
the book; in various fashions.The book is well-written; and easy to read. But title is misleading; and the
contents are quite thin for somebody interested in the subject.";"
Germ Catcher (David J. Ecker, Scientific American, 2014) retrieved from

file:///C:/Users/LATITUDE%20E5440/Desktop/stela%20sts/Germ%20catcher%206-
14%20page%2050%20(1).pdf on 3 June 2021 at 8:50PM
Read the article on Germ Catcher that is included in this module.
Germ Catcher (David J. Ecker, Scientific

American, 2014).pdf
Physics of the Future: How science will shape human destiny and our daily lives by
the year 2100 (Michio Kaku, Doubleday, 2011) retrieved from https://issues.org/br_elliott/ on 3 June 2021
at 9:09 PM
The Human Future

BY EUEL W. ELLIOTT
REVIEW OF
Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100
BY MICHIO KAKU
New York: Doubleday, 2011, 389 pp.
Michio Kaku is the rare individual who is both a top-flight scientist (he is a theoretical physicist who
has done pathbreaking work in string theory) and a successful popularizer of science and
technology. His new book, Physics of the Future, although not on par with his best
effort, Hyperspace, is thoroughly enjoyable and definitely worth reading.
Physics of the Future explores what humanity can expect to occur during
three time frames: the present to 2030, 2030 to 2070, and 2070 to 2100, in the
fields of computing and artificial intelligence, medicine, nanotechnology,
energy, and space travel. His predictions will not be stunning to those familiar
with many of the scientific and technological issues raised in the book and
certainly not to specialists in those areas. Nonetheless, he writes about
complex matters in an easy and accessible style. The educated public will
find the book highly engaging.
Any forecast 100 years into the future is inevitably going to have some
predictions that seem farfetched. Examples here include the construction of
space elevators (enormous structures using special ultra–high-strength
materials that would extend from Earth’s surface to a distance several
thousand miles into space and be used for transportation) and the
beginning of terraforming projects on Mars (the creation of Earth-like
conditions using genetic engineering and other technologies to transform
the planetary surface) before the end of this century. Much more plausible
are Kaku’s predictions of permanent lunar bases, the development of
advanced propulsion systems, and human voyages to Mars. His description
of nanoscale automatedspace probes—molecular-sized spacecraft that
could be deployed in very large numbers and offer an extremely cost-
effective way of exploring large areas of our immediate galactic neighborhood—is fascinating.
In the area of medicine, Kaku mixes the plausible and the ethically troublesome. These include almost
fully computerized visits to physicians’ offices, medical treatments based on precise analysis of one’s
genetic makeup, the ability to grow human organs, designer children, and most alarming, human
cloning. Although he argues that cloning would be an achievement equal to that of the creation of
artificial intelligence (AI), he states that clones will “represent only a tiny fraction of the human race
and the social consequences will be small.” This is truly a breathtaking assertion.
For the most part, however, Kaku, a technological optimist, makes clear that he understands that
technology can be used for dark as well as for good purposes. For example, he cites how the
development of sonograms has led to dramatic increases in abortions, primarily of female fetuses, in
certain developing countries. More of this would have improved the book. He would have done
readers a service by discussing, for example, the potential implications of new health care
technologies on health care costs, given that the life-extension technologies he discusses could
radically extend the human life span. Indeed, throughout the book, he tends to downplay the fact
that advances of the magnitude he is predicting will probably require major public investments. The
political will to make these commitments seems notably absent today.
A chapter on nanotechnology covers topics ranging from the highly probable, such as the
development of nanoscale diagnostic devices for use in medicine, to the more speculative use of this
technology in developing quantum computers. Other possibilities, more akin to science fiction,
include the creation of replicator devices à la Star Trek. Kaku also discusses the development of
shapeshifting capabilities, which would seem to be one of the more implausible future wonders. Yet
significant research on this subject has already been done. It may actually be possible to program
various kinds of material so that they respond to changing electrical charges, leading to a
rearrangement of the material into dramatically different shapes.
More generally, Kaku’s effort would have benefited from a more nuanced analysis of the possibilities
for some of the technologies. Although some, perhaps many, will probably to come to fruition, others
will not see the light of day.
Some projections made in Physics of the Future are fairly prosaic. For example, continued gains in
computing power are prophesied, courtesy of Moore’s Law, although Kaku recognizes the
fundamental physical limits to continued gains in computing power. He thinks that by 2020, Moore’s
Law will run out of gas for current semiconductors, although he is relatively confident that new
technologies, including carbon nanotubes, will replace them. Assuming that some successor to
standard chip technology is found and computing power continues to advance, the possibilities for
the future are tantalizing, with virtual reality beginning to compete in a serious way with traditional
physical reality.
Even without the technological breakthroughs that would allow the continuation of Moore’s Law, the
ability to access the Internet anywhere at any time through, for example, contact lenses or computers
built into clothing, is not that many years away. Kaku sees a time before the end of the century when
humans, interfacing with machines at a distance through computers capable of understanding
human thought patterns, can lift objects through mental commands.
No book about the future of technology would be complete without a discussion of AI. Like futurists
such as Ray Kurzweil, Kaku sees the steady development of machines beyond their mere
computational capacity to the point, late in this century, when machines become self-aware. Kaku
sees this advance, which in certain respects would be the most important achievement in human
history, as being substantially more difficult and time-consuming than do Kurzweil and others, who
believe that true AI is probable before 2050. Whoever is correct—and there are those such as the
eminent Roger Penrose who believe true that AI is not possible—the policy and ethical concerns
associated with this breakthrough will be legion. Unfortunately, Kaku only begins to scratch the surface
of the implications for society posed by self-aware, superintelligent machines.
The technological future that Michio Kaku sees will require energy, and plenty of it. Moreover, the
future he envisions will require that energy be generated in ways that minimize humanity’s carbon
footprint. He believes this will be possible eventually through the successful development and
deployment of nuclear fusion and other technologies, while in the shorter run the further development
of existing technologies, such as electric cars, wind, and solar, will help bridge the gap to the future.
His analysis of nuclear fission is prescient, given the recent disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant in
Japan; he has serious questions about the dangers of meltdown and the never-solved issue of nuclear
waste disposal. Nonetheless, it is seems clear that despite Kaku’s doubts about the viability of nuclear
fission, many countries will continue their drive toward increasing reliance on this technology, as oil
and coal become more expensive during the next several decades.
Kaku thinks the successful transition to a low-carbon future is critical; he takes the threat of global
warming very seriously and entertains several ideas that would at least supplement the drive toward
noncarbon energy sources. These include geoengineering solutions and technologies, including the
genetic engineering of plants and trees that could absorb larger amounts of carbon dioxide. Many
readers will probably balk at some of these possibilities, but Kaku argues that as the cost of global
warming becomes more evident, future society will be willing to consider an array of possibilities that
are considered to be too far outside the box today.
Some readers will also have doubts about Kaku’s hopes regarding the ability to deploy commercially
viable nuclear fusion sometime between 2050 and 2070, given the numerous false starts we have seen
over the years. And his tempered optimism regarding the short-run viability of solar energy will surely
be disputed by many. If renewable sources fail to do the job and if society decides to reduce carbon-
based fuels over the next few decades, we may need to swallow hard and accept the reality of a
long-term presence of nuclear fission as a key energy source.
Social scientists will be particularly attracted to the final chapters. Although Kaku’s optimism is evident
throughout the book, that optimism is tempered by the daunting tasks facing the United States and
and the rest of humanity. He speaks movingly about the U.S. education system: “The United States will
eventually have to overhaul its archaic, sclerotic education system. At present, poorly prepared high
school students flood the job market and universities, creating a logjam … and the universities are
burdened by having to create new layers of remedial courses to compensate for the poor high school
education system.”
Nonetheless, it is not evident from reading Physics of the Future that the author is fully cognizant of the
extent of the problems facing the country. Of particular concern is an increasing lack of
understanding of and even hostility in U.S. society toward science and its practitioners. It may be that
some of the difficulties science has in communicating with the mass public involve the sense that
science and the technologies it creates operate in a moral and ethical vacuum. Kaku, although very
good at developing interesting scenarios about various future developments, may not fully
appreciate the challenges that lie ahead in building an adequate foundation of support among the
public.
The advances Kaku envisions will not occur automatically; the future is still to be written. Without
support from both elites and the public, the future may not be nearly as bright as portrayed by the
author. And if there is to be a future anything like that described by Kaku, it may be one in which the
United States will play a far less prominent role in scientific and technological advances than it has
during the past century. In short, if the scientific and technological wonders envisioned in Physics of
the Future are to come about, it will in substantial part depend on the actions taken in the next
decade to address profound deficiencies in our culture, economy, and educational system.
Notwithstanding these caveats, Physics of the Future is highly recommended. Kaku’s vision of our
technological future and its implications are an important contribution that will appeal to a wide-
ranging audience.
Euel W. Elliott (eelliott@utdallas.edu) is a professor of public policy and political economy at the
University of Texas at Dallas.
SAQ 3.2. Illustrate, using 5 specific examples with short explanation or
description, how the social media and the information age have impacted
our lives. (25 points)
BIODIVERSITY AND THE HEALTHY SOCIETY

GENETICALLY MODIFIED ORGANISMS: SCIENCE, HEALTH, AND POLITICS
Evolution and biodiversity Ecoscience-Biodiversity: an overview retrieved from

https://www.ohio.k12.ky.us/userfiles/1139/Classes/25630/chapter4%20opt3.ppt on 3 June 2021 at 9:22PM
“The Politics of Golden Rice” (Dubock, Adrian GM Crops & Food. JulSep2014, Vol5 Issue 3 p 210-222
13p.) retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5033200/ on 3 June 2021 at 9:30PM
The Politics of Golden Rice

Adrian Dubock*
Author information Article notes Copyright and License information Disclaimer
This article has been cited by other articles in PMC.
Abstract
Genetic knowledge applicable to crop improvement has erupted over the past 60 years, and the
techniques of introducing genes from one organism to another have enabled new varieties of crops
not achievable by previously available methodologies of crop breeding. Research and particularly
development of these GMO-crops to a point where they are useful for growers and consumers in
most countries is subject to complex national and international rules arising out of the UN's
Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety to the Convention on Biological Diversity, with 167 country
signatories. (The USA and Canada are not signatories.) The Protocol was developed based on
concerns initially expressed in the 1970's that such technology presented unusual risks to man and
the environment. Those ideas have comprehensively and authoritatively been proven to be wrong.
The Protocol has nevertheless spawned significant regulatory obstacles to the development of
GMO-crop technology at great cost to global society and in conflict with many other UN objectives.
The suspicion induced by the Protocol is also widely used, overtly or covertly, for political purposes.
These points are illustrated by reference to the not-for-profit Golden Rice project.
Keywords: Cartagena Protocol (CP), Convention on Biodiversity (CBD), GMO-crop, Golden Rice,
regulation, Tufts University, vitamin A deficiency
The complete research file has been included in the google classroom for this course
“Ethics in Research with Vulnerable Populations and Emerging Countries: The
Golden Rice Case.” (Duguet, Anne Marie et. al., Journal of International Law and Commercial
Regulations. Summer 2013, Vol. 38 Issue 4, p979-1013, 35p) retrieved from
https://scholarship.law.unc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&artic
le=1978&context=ncilj on 3 June 2021 at 9:39 PM
Agroecology: What it is and what it has to offer? Is this the future of farming?
Retrieved from https://pubs.iied.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/migrate/14629IIED.pdf on 3 June 2021 at
9:45PM
THE NANO WORLD
Ray Kurzwell on “How Technology Will Transform Us” retrieved from

file:///C:/Users/LATITUDE%20E5440/Desktop/stela%20sts/Ray%20Kurzweil_%20How%20Technology%20Wi
ll%20Transform%20Us%20_%20The%20TEDxClassroomProject.html on 4 June 2021 at 4:10PM
Throughout this talk, Ray Kurzweil explains exponential growth and how it relates to various things in
the world such as technology, life expectancy, and medicine. He believes that all of these things,
while incredibly slow-growing for a long time, at some point have a dramatic increase in acceleration
and shortening of the time it takes for great advancement. I believe his point was proven in my
personal reactions and thoughts throughout his entire talk-for the first fifteen minutes or so, I quite
honestly could not follow anything he was talking about nor figure out where he could possibly be
going, but by the end of it I found myself completely terrified for the future of humankind.
Why the sudden transformation?

Towards the end of his talk, Kurzweil begins discussing phenomenal, seemingly futuristic new
technologies that, according to him and following the pattern of exponential growth, will become a
reality in a mere decade or two. These nanotechnologies involve incredible things such as creating
technological red blood cells that, when replacing natural human red blood cells, can for all intensive
purposes create the ultimate, real-live superhuman. Kurzweil claims that with these, humans will have
unheard of capabilities, such as sprinting at Olympic speed for a straight fifteen minutes without tiring
or staying underwater without breathing for four entire hours. He claims that the human brain will be
entirely reverse-engineered by the 2020’s, and that it will then be able to be modified to be
exponentially more powerful than the natural human brain.
Well this sounds truly amazing; why am I so terrified?

My thoughts resemble those of many of the people who commented on the talk, whose views I read
following watching the video. While Kurzweil makes a convincing argument that many things in life
truly do grow exponentially, if these technologies were ever to be commonly implemented in society,
as he plans to have happen in not-so-distant years, an ever important question must be asked: Does
human morality grow at the same rate as this new technology? My opinion is that it does not.
The technology that Kurzweil speaks of involves it being implemented inside the human body to
modify or even replace the natural features. While it sounds amazing and exciting that there may truly
be a possibility of “superhumans” and “superheroes” (and conversely “supervillains”…), we must not
neglect the terrible consequences. Technology is not perfect. It malfunctions. It shuts down. It stops
responding. If we have machines operating inside our bodies to do natural bodily functions, what
happens when this occurs? Do we die? Do we shut down? Do we short-circuit?
Additionally, technology does not normally run by itself; there are tech people that make it work and
do the troubleshooting. So would there need to be people to make us work? Would there be,
essentially, people that can control what those machines in our bodies do and therefore what we do,
with us powerless to stop them? If morality does not grow exponentially to match the technology,
which I can hardly believe it does, who’s to stop anyone or everyone from trying to play God? And,
if everyone has a technologically “modified” brain, would we even have morals anymore? Machines
are not moral, and that is exactly what we would be-machines. We would lose our humanity. We
would eventually become emotionless robots, moving about the planet taking orders from some sort
of “Big Brother”-like figure.
While I acknowledge the fact that the beneficial possibilities of this new technology are apparent and
great, I also believe that the possible consequences greatly outweigh any good it could do. If this
ever becomes a general part of everyday life, I do not think it would be too overly dramatic to assert
that it could very well prove to be the beginning of the end for humanity as we know it.
“Nanoethics: The ethical and Social Implications of Nanotechnology” (Patrick Lin and
Fritz Allhoff, Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley and Sons, Inc. 2007)
Nanoscience + Ethics = Nanoethics; Societal and Ethical Implications (SEI)

David W. Mogk, MONT Project, Montana State University
Rertrieved at https://serc.carleton.edu/msu_nanotech/nano_ethics.html on 4 June 2021 at 4:25PM
Oh brave new world! The nanotechnology

revolution has opened the door of possibilities to technical wonders beyond our wildest imagination.
But, this also open the door to many ethical issues regarding the responsible development of
nanotechnology: how are new nano-products introduced to society; how are decisions made (and
by whom) regarding the development and use of these technologies; how do nano-products impact
the environment and by extension human health; what are the (often irreversible) consequences of
developing and using nano-products? The law of "unintended consequences" should be considered
across the interests to nanotechnology and nanoscience (see Tenner, 2001 below). It is also important
to consider risk (perception, minimization, mitigation) and uncertainty regarding impacts and
consequences of release of engineered nanomaterials to the environment, dose/response of human
exposure to nanomaterials, and the potential for nanoparticles to interfere with natural processes
(e.g., application of geoengineering by way of seeding Fe in the ocean system to stimulate plankton
growth, or seeding the stratosphere with sulfate aerosols to offset climate change).
Nanoethics addresses the societal and ethical implications (SEI) of the advancement of
nanotechnology/science as it impacts humans, society and the environment. As
nanotechnology/science advances, it is important to also consider the associated short-term and
long-term benefits as well as the limits and potential risks and hazards of nanotechnology. Khan (2006)
recommends that nanotechnology stakeholders should strive to achieve four social objectives:
1. Developing a strong understanding of local and global forces and issues that affect
people and societies
2. Guiding local/global societies to appropriate uses of technology
3. Alerting societies to technological risks and failures
4. Developing informed and ethical personal decision making and leadership t solve
problems in a technological world
The breadth and scope of nanoethics spans domains from the personal to planetary. Nanoethics
issues include aspects of personal value systems (as people and scientists), and responsibilities to the
profession, to society, and to planetary stewardship.
• Nanoethics and Self: what are the internal attributes of and values that establish the
ethical foundation required to successfully prepare for and contribute to a career in
nanotechnology/science?
• Nanoethics and the nanotechnology/science professions: what are the ethical
standards expected of nano-practitioners if they are to contribute responsibly to the
community of practice expected of the profession? What responsibilities lie beyond
"the dominant belief system that the only ethical responsibilities of researchers revolve
around the "Holy Trinity of Research Ethics": lab safety, data integrity, and respect for
intellectual property (e.g., not plagiarizing the ideas or words of others and giving all
contributors credit in publications in proportion to their respective contributions to the
achievements in question)?" (McGin, 2010).
• Nanoethics and society: what are the responsibilities of nanotechnology/science
researchers to effectively and responsibly communicate the results of their research to
inform society about issues related to their work in order to protect the health, safety,
and economic security of humanity?
• Nanoethics and Earth: what are the responsibilities of nanotechnology/science
researchers to provide good stewardship of Earth based on their understanding of how
natural, incidental and engineered nanomaterials may ultimately impact natural
planetary Earth, environmental, biological and social systems (see Hochella et al.,
2019)?
Should nanoethics be distinguished as a new branch of ethics? Many scholars such as Allhoff and Lin
(2006) argue that "some [ethical] issues are emerging that appear unique to nanotechnology, namely
the new environmental, health and safety (EHS) risks arising [from] nanomaterials." However, McGinn
(2008, 2012) argues that these examples are simply new instances of ethical issues that are "...new
instances of risks of the same sort raised by other technological materials, but they are not a new kind
of ethical issue. They are new examples of a well known category of risks that various scientific and
technological materials, products, and processes have posed, are posing, and will pose in the future:
viz., risks to environmental safety and human health...that the nanotechnology-related ethical issues
claimed to be new (and sometimes unique) amount to old ethical wine in new technological bottles".
Nonetheless, the emerging fields of nanotechnology/science does appear to embrace two new
important aspects to ethics (McGinn, 2010):
• Nanotechnology is addressing societal and ethical implications (SEI) up front, and as an

integral part of nanotechnology research programs; not an afterthought. McGinn (2010)
reports: "Some of nanotechnology's key institutional promoters, e.g., NSF, have
supported the upstream exploration of nanotechnology's "social and ethical
implications" in parallel with pursuit of basic nanotechnology research. The rationale
appears to be to protect the field against the possibility of strong negative public
reaction downstream if nanotechnology were to be implicated in serious social harm
through negligent or irresponsible practitioner action, regulatory oversight, or
manufacturing practices. Put differently, upstream study of ethical (and social) issues
related to nanotechnology is viewed by some forces that support it as an investment in
stable public funding support for nanotechnology R&D work in the future."
• Nanotechnology researchers have embraced a high degree of ethical responsibility for
their work and their impacts on society. In a survey of nanotechnology researchers
(n=1037), McGinn (2008) reports: "For most respondents, the ethical responsibilities of NT
researchers are not limited to those related to safety and integrity in the laboratory. Most
believe that NT researchers also have specific ethical responsibilities to the society in
which their research is done and likely to be applied. NT appears to be one of the first
areas of contemporary technoscientific activity in which a long-standing belief is being
seriously challenged: the belief that society is solely responsible for what happens when
a researcher's work, viewed as neutral and merely enabling, is applied in a particular
social context. Survey data reveal that most respondents strongly disagree with that
paradigmatic belief."
For reference, McGinn (2008, 2010) cite Leon Lederman: "Our lame but perhaps time-
honored response is that scientific knowledge is not good or evil; it is enabling. Modern
science, however abstract, is never safe. It can be used to raise mankind to new
heights or literally to destroy the planet. As democratic government spreads, it is the
people and their representatives who must use the power provided by science. We
give you a powerful engine. You steer the ship!" (Lederman LM, The Responsibility of
the scientist. NY Times, pp A15, July 24, 1999). From McGinn (2008): "This response profile
suggests that in the nanotechnology community a new paradigm of ethical
responsibility in technoscientific research may be emerging to challenge the one
reflected in Lederman's conventional views. Nanotechnology appears to be one of
the first fields, if not the very first field, of contemporary technoscientific inquiry in which
this challenge is being posed and played out. What is reasonably clear is that most
NNIN respondents do not exclude nanotechnology researchers from the list of groups
whose members they believe have ethical responsibilities toward society at large."
This world-view of nanotechnology researchers is very much in line with AAAS (1998, accessed
at Resources for Research Ethics Education) that states, "If the U.S. is to respond effectively to the
challenges of the 21 st century, we must find ways to reorganize our science and technology
enterprise to:
• address tomorrow's needs and aspirations'

• maintaining global sustainability;
• improving human health;
• addressing economic disparities;
• understanding our place in the universe;
• promoting peace and security, and
• directing the products of technology toward the betterment of society, nationally and
worldwide."
The AAAS report (March 2015), A Preliminary Inquiry Into the Perspectives of Scientists, Engineers and
Health Professionals, shows a remarkable convergence in scientists' affirmation of the social
responsibility among the STEM disciplines, as can be seen from the following table:
https://serc.carleton.edu/msu_nanotech/nano_ethics.html
“Environmental Impacts of Nanotechnology and Its Products” (Zhang et. Al Proceedings of

the 2011 Midwest Section Conference of the American Society for Engineering Education, 2011) retrieved at
https://faculty.atu.edu/cgreco/ASEEmw_2011/ASEE_2011_Proceedings/Peer_Reviewed_Papers/ASEE-
MIDWEST_0030_c25dbf.pdf on 4 June 2021 at 4:36PM
Environmental Impacts of Nanotechnology and Its Products

B. Zhang1 , H.Misak1 , P.S. Dhanasekaran1 , D. Kalla2 and R. Asmatulu1
1
Department of Mechanical Engineering Wichita State University 1845 Fairmount
Wichita, KS 67260-0133
2
Department of Engineering Technology Metropolitan State College of Denver Denver, CO, 80014, USA
Abstract
Nanotechnology increases the strengths of many materials and devices, as well as enhances efficiencies of
monitoring devices, remediation of environmental pollution, and renewable energy production. While these
are considered to be the positive effect of nanotechnology, there are certain negative impacts of
nanotechnology on environment in many ways, such as increased toxicological pollution on the environment
due to the uncertain shape, size, and chemical compositions of some of the nanotechnology products (or
nanomaterials). It can be vital to understand the risks of using nanomaterials, and cost of the resulting
damage. It is required to conduct a risk assessment and full life-cycle analysis for nanotechnology products at
all stages of products to understand the hazards of nanoproducts and the resultant knowledge that can then
be used to predict the possible positive and negative impacts of the nanoscale products. Choosing right, less
toxic materials (e.g., graphene) will make huge impacts on the environment. This can be very useful for the
training and protection of students, as well as scientists, engineers, policymakers, and regulators working in
the field. Keyword: Nanotechnology, environmental impacts and recent developments.
NOTE: The full paper is included in the google classroom
Nanotechnology 'culture war' possible, study says
https://phys.org/news/2008-12-nanotechnology-culture-war.html retrieved on 4 June 2021 at 5:10PM
https://phys.org/news/2008-12-nanotechnology-culture-war.html
Rather than infer that nanotechnology is safe, members of the public who learn about this novel
science tend to become sharply polarized along cultural lines, according to a study conducted by
the Cultural Cognition Project at Yale Law School in collaboration with the Project on Emerging
Nanotechnologies. The report is published online in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.
These findings have important implications for garnering support of the new technology, say the
researchers.
The experiment involved a diverse sample of 1,500 Americans, the vast majority of whom were
unfamiliar with nanotechnology, a relatively new science that involves the manipulation of particles
the size of atoms and that has numerous commercial applications. When shown balanced
information about the risks and benefits of nanotechnology, study participants became highly divided
on its safety compared to a group not shown such information.
The determining factor in how people responded was their cultural values, according to Dan Kahan,
the Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor at Yale Law School and lead author of the study. "People who had
more individualistic, pro-commerce values, tended to infer that nanotechnology is safe," said Kahan,
"while people who are more worried about economic inequality read the same information as
implying that nanotechnology is likely to be dangerous."
According to Kahan, this pattern is consistent with studies examining how people's cultural values
influence their perceptions of environmental and technological risks generally. "In sum, when they
learned about a new technology, people formed reactions to it that matched their views of risks like
climate change and nuclear waste disposal," he said.
The study also found that people who have pro-commerce cultural values are more likely to know
about nanotechnology than others. "Not surprisingly, people who like technology and believe it isn't
bad for the environment tend to learn about new technologies before other people do," said Kahan.
"While various opinion polls suggest that familiarity with nanotechnology leads people to believe it is
safe, they have been confusing cause with effect."
According to Kahan and other experts, the findings of the experiment highlight the need for public
education strategies that consider citizens' predispositions. "There is still plenty of time to develop risk-
communication strategies that make it possible for persons of diverse values to understand the best
evidence scientists develop on nanotechnology's risks," added Kahan. "The only mistake would be to
assume that such strategies aren't necessary."
"The message matters," said David Rejeski, director of the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies.
"How information about nanotechnology is presented to the vast majority of the public who still know
little about it can either make or break this technology. Scientists, the government, and industry
generally take a simplistic, 'just the facts' approach to communicating with the public about a new
technology. But, this research shows that diverse audiences and groups react to the same information
very differently."
Citation: Nature Nanotechnology (Advance Online Publication December 7, 2008)

doi: 10.1038/NNANO.2008.341
Source: Yale University
SAQ 3.3. Discuss 3 ethical issues (specific illustration with short

explanation) and implications of these issues along Genetically
Modified Organisms and potential future impacts. (30 points)
GENE THERAPY (STEM CELLS)
About stem cells

Retrieved at https://www.healthline.com/health/stem-cell-research#takeaway on 4 June 2021 at
5:21PM
Stem cells are undifferentiated, or “blank,” cells. This means they’re capable of developing into cells
that serve numerous functions in different parts of the body. Most cells in the body are differentiated
cells. These cells can only serve a specific purpose in a particular organ. For example, red blood cells
are specifically designed to carry oxygen through the blood.
All humans start out as only one cell. This cell is called a zygote, or a fertilized egg. The zygote divides
into two cells, then four cells, and so on. Eventually, the cells begin to differentiate, taking on a certain
function in a part of the body. This process is called differentiation.
Stem cells are cells that haven’t differentiated yet. They have the ability to divide and make an
indefinite number of copies of themselves. Other cells in the body can only replicate a limited number
of times before they begin to break down. When a stem cell divides, it can either remain a stem cell
or turn into a differentiated cell, such as a muscle cell or a red blood cell.
Potential uses of stem cells
Since stem cells have the ability to turn into various other types of cells, scientists believe that they can
be useful for treating and understanding diseases. According to the Mayo Clinic, stem cells can be
used to:
• grow new cells in a laboratory to replace damaged organs or tissues
• correct parts of organs that don’t work properly
• research causes of genetic defects in cells
• research how diseases occur or why certain cells develop into cancer cells
• test new drugs for safety and effectiveness
Types of stem cells

There are several types of stem cells that can be used for different purposes.
Embryonic stem cells

Embryonic stem cells come from human embryos that are three to five days old. They are harvested
during a process called in-vitro fertilization. This involves fertilizing an embryo in a laboratory instead of
inside the female body. Embryonic stem cells are known as pluripotent stem cells. These cells can give
rise to virtually any other type of cell in the body.
Non-embryonic (adult) stem cells

Adult stem cells have a misleading name, because they are also found in infants and children. These
stem cells come from developed organs and tissues in the body. They’re used by the body to repair
and replace damaged tissue in the same area in which they are found.
For example, hematopoietic stem cells are a type of adult stem cell found in bone marrow. They make
new red blood cells, white blood cells, and other types of blood cells. Doctors have been performing
stem cell transplants, also known as bone marrow transplants, for decades using hematopoietic stem
cells in order to treat certain types of cancer.
Adult stem cells can’t differentiate into as many other types of cells as embryonic stem cells can.
Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs)

Scientists have recently discovered how to turn adult stem cells into pluripotent stem cells. These new
types of cells are called induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). They can differentiate into all types of
specialized cells in the body. This means they can potentially produce new cells for any organ or
tissue. To create iPSCs, scientists genetically reprogram the adult stem cells so they behave like
embryonic stem cells.
The breakthrough has created a way to “de-differentiate” the stem cells. This may make them more
useful in understanding how diseases develop. Scientists are hoping that the cells can be made from
someone’s own skin to treat a disease. This will help prevent the immune system from rejecting an
organ transplant. Research is underway to find ways to produce iPSCs safely.
Cord blood stem cells and amniotic fluid stem cells

Cord blood stem cells are harvested from the umbilical cord after childbirth. They can be frozen in
cell banks for use in the future. These cells have been successfully used to treat children with blood
cancers, such as leukemia, and certain genetic blood disorders.
Stem cells have also been found in amniotic fluid. This is the fluid that surrounds a developing baby
inside the mother’s womb. However, more research is needed to help understand the potential uses
of amniotic fluid stem cells.
Stem cell research controversy

Adult stem cells don’t present any ethical problems. However, in recent years, there has been
controversy surrounding the way human embryonic stem cells are obtained. During the process of
harvesting embryotic stem cells, the embryo is destroyed. This raises ethical concerns for people who
believe that the destruction of a fertilized embryo is morally wrong.
Opponents believe that an embryo is a living human being. They don’t think the fertilized eggs should
be used for research. They argue that the embryo should have the same rights as every other human
and that these rights should be protected.
Supporters of stem cell research, on the other hand, believe that the embryos are not yet humans.
They note that researchers receive consent from the donor couple whose eggs and sperm were used
to create the embryo. Supporters also argue that the fertilized eggs created during in-vitro fertilization
would be discarded anyway, so they might be put to better use for scientific research.
With the breakthrough discovery of iPSCs, there may be less of a need for human embryos in research.
This may help ease the concerns of those who are against using embryos for medical research.
However, if iPSCs have the potential to develop into a human embryo, researchers could theoretically
create a clone of the donor. This presents another ethical issue to take into consideration. Many
countries already have legislation in place that effectively bans human cloning.
Federal regulations on stem cell research
In the United States, federal policy regarding stem cell research has evolved over time as different
presidents have taken office. It’s important to note that no federal regulation has ever explicitly
banned stem cell research in the United States. Rather, regulations have placed restrictions on public
funding and use. However, certain states have placed bans on the creation or destruction of human
embryos for medical research.
Stem cell policy under former President George W. Bush

In August 2001, former President George W. Bush approved a law that would provide federal funding
for limited research on embryonic stem cells. However, such research had to fit the following criteria:
• The harvesting process, which includes the destruction of the embryo, was started before 9
p.m. on August 9, 2001.
• The stem cells were obtained from an embryo that was created for reproductive purposes
and was no longer needed.
• Informed consent was obtained for the donation of the embryo, and the donation didn’t
involve financial reward.
Stem cell policy under President Barack Obama

In March 2009, President Barack Obama revoked former President Bush’s statement and
released Executive Order 13505. The order removed the restrictions on federal funding for stem cell
research. This allowed the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to begin funding research that uses
embryonic stem cells. The NIH then published guidelines to establish the policy under which it would
fund research. The guidelines were written to help make sure that all NIH-funded research on human
stem cells is morally responsible and scientifically relevant.
Examples of stem cell research

Stem cell research is ongoing at universities, research institutions, and hospitals around the world.
Researchers are currently focusing on finding ways to control how stem cells turn into other types of
cells.
The process of cell differentiation
A primary goal of research on embryonic stem cells is to learn how undifferentiated stem cells turn
into differentiated stem cells that form specific tissues and organs. Researchers are also interested in
figuring out how to control this process of differentiation.
Over the years, scientists have developed methods to manipulate the stem cell process to create a
particular cell type. This process is called directed differentiation. A recent studyalso discovered the
first steps in how stem cells transform into brain cells and other types of cells. More research on this
topic is ongoing.
Cell-based therapies
If researchers can find a reliable way to direct the differentiation of embryonic stem cells, they may
be able to use the cells to treat certain diseases. For example, by directing the embryonic stem cells
to turn into insulin-producing cells, they may be able to transplant the cells into people with type 1
diabetes.
Other medical conditions that may potentially be treated with embryonic stem cells include:
• traumatic spinal cord injury
• stroke
• severe burns
• rheumatoid arthritis
• heart disease
• hearing loss
• retinal disease
• Huntington’s disease
• Parkinson’s disease
•
California’s Stem Cell Agency provides a detailed list of the disease programs and clinical trials
currently underway in stem cell research. Examples of such projects include:
• injecting modified stem cells directly into the brain after a stroke
• using stem cells to replace damaged cells in the inner ear that detect sound, helping to restore
hearing
• altering the genes of stem cells to make them resistant to diseases, such as AIDS, and then
inserting them into people with the disease
• cultivating stem cells to repair the fragile bones of people with osteoporosis
Using stem cells to test new drugs

Researchers are also using differentiated stem cells to test the safety and effectiveness of new
medications. Testing drugs on human stem cells eliminates the need to test them on animals.
The takeaway
Stem cell research has the potential to have a significant impact on human health. However, there is
some controversy around the development, usage, and destruction of human embryos. Scientists
may be able to ease these concerns by using a new method that can turn adult stem cells into
pluripotent stem cells, which can change into any cell type. This would eliminate the need for
embryonic stem cells in research. Such breakthroughs show that much progress has been made in
stem cell research. Despite these advancements, there’s still a lot more to be done before scientists
can create successful treatments through stem cell therapy.
Last medically reviewed on April 6, 2016
NOTE: Read the full article included in the google classroom
The Stem Cell Divide

BYRICK WEISSREPUBLISHED FROM THE PAGES OF NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
MAGAZINE
Retrived from
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/stem -cell-
divide on 4 June 2021 at 5;50PM
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/stem-cell-divide
In the beginning, one cell becomes two, and two become four. Being fruitful, they multiply into a
ball of many cells, a shimmering sphere of human potential. Scientists have long dreamed of
plucking those naive cells from a young human embryo and coaxing them to perform, in sterile
isolation, the everyday miracle they perform in wombs: transforming into all the 200 or so kinds of
cells that constitute a human body. Liver cells. Brain cells. Skin, bone, and nerve.
The dream is to launch a medical revolution in which ailing organs and tissues might be repaired—
not with crude mechanical devices like insulin pumps and titanium joints but with living, homegrown
replacements. It would be the dawn of a new era of regenerative medicine, one of the holy grails
of modern biology.
Revolutions, alas, are almost always messy. So when James Thomson, a soft-spoken scientist at the
University of Wisconsin in Madison, reported in November 1998 that he had succeeded in removing
cells from spare embryos at fertility clinics and establishing the world's first human embryonic stem
cell line, he and other scientists got a lot more than they bargained for. It was the kind of discovery
that under most circumstances would have blossomed into a major federal research enterprise.
Instead the discovery was quickly engulfed in the turbulent waters of religion and politics. In church
pews, congressional hearing rooms, and finally the Oval Office, people wanted to know: Where
were the needed embryos going to come from, and how many would have to be destroyed to
treat the millions of patients who might be helped? Before long, countries around the world were
embroiled in the debate.
Most alarmed have been people who see embryos as fully vested, vulnerable members of society,
and who decry the harvesting of cells from embryos as akin to cannibalism. They warn of a brave
new world of "embryo farms" and "cloning mills" for the cultivation of human spare parts. And they
argue that scientists can achieve the same results using adult stem cells— immature cells found in
bone marrow and other organs in adult human beings, as well as in umbilical cords normally
discarded at birth.
Advocates counter that adult stem cells, useful as they may be for some diseases, have thus far
proved incapable of producing the full range of cell types that embryonic stem cells can. They
point out that fertility clinic freezers worldwide are bulging with thousands of unwanted embryos
slated for disposal. Those embryos are each smaller than the period at the end of this sentence.
They have no identifying features or hints of a nervous system. If parents agree to donate them,
supporters say, it would be unethical not to do so in the quest to cure people of disease.
Few question the medical promise of embryonic stem cells. Consider the biggest United States killer
of all: heart disease. Embryonic stem cells can be trained to grow into heart muscle cells that, even
in a laboratory dish, clump together and pulse in spooky unison. And when those heart cells have
been injected into mice and pigs with heart disease, they've filled in for injured or dead cells and
sped recovery. Similar studies have suggested stem cells' potential for conditions such as diabetes
and spinal cord injury.
Critics point to worrisome animal research showing that embryonic stem cells sometimes grow into
tumors or morph into unwanted kinds of tissues—possibly forming, for example, dangerous bits of
bone in those hearts they are supposedly repairing. But supporters respond that such problems are
rare and a lot has recently been learned about how to prevent them.
The arguments go back and forth, but policymakers and governments aren't waiting for answers.
Some countries, such as Germany, worried about a slippery slope toward unethical human
experimentation, have already prohibited some types of stem cell research. Others, like the U.S.,
have imposed severe limits on government funding but have left the private sector to do what it
wants. Still others, such as the U.K., China, Korea, and Singapore, have set out to become the
epicenters of stem cell research, providing money as well as ethical oversight to encourage the
field within carefully drawn bounds.
In such varied political climates, scientists around the globe are racing to see which techniques will
produce treatments soonest. Their approaches vary, but on one point, all seem to agree: How
humanity handles its control over the mysteries of embryo development will say a lot about who we
are and what we're becoming.
For more than half of his seven years, Cedric Seldon has been fighting leukemia. Now having run
out of options, he is about to become a biomedical pioneer—one of about 600 Americans last year
to be treated with an umbilical cord blood transplant.
Cord blood transplants—considered an adult stem cell therapy because the cells come from
infants, not embryos—have been performed since 1988. Like bone marrow, which doctors have
been transplanting since 1968, cord blood is richly endowed with a kind of stem cell that gives rise
to oxygen-carrying red blood cells, disease-fighting white blood cells, and other parts of the blood
and immune systems. Unlike a simple blood transfusion, which provides a batch of cells destined to
die in a few months, the stem cells found in bone marrow and cord blood can—if all goes well—
burrow into a person's bones, settle there for good, and generate fresh blood and immune cells for
a lifetime.
Propped on a hospital bed at Duke University Medical Center, Cedric works his thumbs furiously
against a pair of joysticks that control a careening vehicle in a Starsky and Hutch video game.
"Hang on, Hutch!" older brother Daniel shouts from the bedside, as a nurse, ignoring the screeching
tires and gunshots, sorts through a jumble of tubes and hangs a bag of cord blood cells from a
chrome pole. Just an hour ago I watched those cells being thawed and spun in a centrifuge —
awakening them for the first time since 2001, when they were extracted from the umbilical cord of
a newborn and donated by her parents to a cell bank at Duke. The time has come for those cells
to prove their reputed mettle.
For days Cedric has endured walloping doses of chemotherapy and radiation in a last-ditch effort
to kill every cancer cell in his body. Such powerful therapy has the dangerous side-effect of
destroying patients' blood-making stem cells, and so is never applied unless replacement stem cells
are available. A search of every bone marrow bank in the country had found no match for Cedric's
genetic profile, and it was beginning to look as if he'd run out of time. Then a computer search
turned up the frozen cord blood cells at Duke—not a perfect match, but close enough to justify
trying.
"Ready?" the nurse asks. Mom and dad, who have spent hours in prayer, nod yes, and a line of
crimson wends its way down the tube, bringing the first of about 600 million cells into the boy's body.
The video game's sound effects seem to fade behind a muffling curtain of suspense. Although
Cedric's balloon-laden room is buoyant with optimism, success is far from certain.
"Grow, cells, grow," Cedric's dad whispers.
His mom's eyes are misty. I ask what she sees when she looks at the cells trickling into her son.
"Life," she says. "It's his rebirth."
It will be a month before tests reveal whether Cedric's new cells have taken root, but in a way he's
lucky. All he needs is a new blood supply and immune system, which are relatively easy to re-create.
Countless other patients are desperate to regenerate more than that. Diabetics need new insulin-
producing cells. Heart attack victims could benefit from new cardiac cells. Paraplegics might even
walk again if the nerves in their spinal cords could regrow.
In a brightly lit laboratory halfway across the country from Cedric's hospital room, three teams of
scientists at the University of Wisconsin in Madison are learning how to grow the embryonic stem
cells that might make such cures possible. Unlike adult stem cells, which appear to have limited
repertoires, embryonic stem cells are pluripotent—they can become virtually every kind of human
cell. The cells being nurtured here are direct descendants of the ones James Thomson isolated
seven years ago.
For years Thomson and his colleagues have been expanding some of those original stem cells into
what are called stem cell lines—colonies of millions of pluripotent cells that keep proliferating
without differentiating into specific cell types. The scientists have repeatedly moved each cell's
offspring to less crowded laboratory dishes, allowing them to divide again and again. And while
they worked, the nation struggled to get a handle on the morality of what they were doing.
It took almost two years for President Bill Clinton's administration to devise ethics guidelines and a
system for funding the new field. George W. Bush's ascension prevented that plan from going into
effect, and all eyes turned to the conservative Texan to see what he would do. On August 9, 2001,
Bush announced that federal funds could be used to study embryonic stem cells. But to prevent
taxpayers from becoming complicit in the destruction of human embryos, that money could be
used only to study the stem cell lines already in the works as of that date—a number that, for
practical reasons, has resulted in about two dozen usable lines. Those wishing to work with any of
the more than a hundred stem cell lines created after that date can do so only with private funding.
Every month scientists from around the world arrive in Madison to take a three-day course in how to
grow those approved cells. To watch what they must go through to keep the cells happy is to
appreciate why many feel hobbled by the Bush doctrine. For one thing—and for reasons not fully
understood—the surest way to keep these cells alive is to place them on a layer of other cells taken
from mouse embryos, a time-consuming requirement. Hunched over lab benches, deftly handling
forceps and pipettes with blue latex gloves, each scientist in Madison spends the better half of a
day dissecting a pregnant mouse, removing its uterus, and prying loose a string of embryos that look
like little red peas in a pod. They then wash them, mash them, tease apart their cells, and ge t them
growing in lab dishes. The result is a hormone-rich carpet of mouse cells upon which a few human
embryonic stem cells are finally placed. There they live like pampered pashas.
If their scientist-servants don't feed them fresh liquid nutrients at least once a day, the cells die of
starvation. If each colony is not split in half each week, it dies from overcrowding. And if a new layer
of mouse cells is not prepared and provided every two weeks, the stem cells grow into weird and
useless masses that finally die. By contrast, scientists working with private money have been
developing embryonic stem cell lines that are hardier, less demanding, and not dependent on
mouse cells. Bypassing the use of mouse cells is not only easier, but it also eliminates the risk that
therapeutic stem cells might carry rodent viruses, thereby potentially speeding their approval for
testing in humans.
Here in the Madison lab, scientists grumble about how fragile the precious colonies are. "They're
hard to get to know," concedes Leann Crandall, one of the course's instructors and a co-author of
the 85-page manual on their care and feeding. "But once you get to know them, you love them.
You can't help it. They're so great. I see so many good things coming from them."
A few American scientists are finding it is easier to indulge their enthusiasm for stem cells overseas.
Scores of new embryonic stem cell lines have now been created outside the U.S., and many
countries are aggressively seeking to spur the development of therapies using these cells, raising a
delicate question: Can the nation in which embryonic stem cells were discovered maintain its initial
research lead?
"I know a lot of people back in the U.S. who would like to move into embryonic stem cell work but
who won't because of the political uncertainties," says Stephen Minger, director of the Stem Cell
Biology Laboratory at King's College in London, speaking to me in his cramped and cluttered office.
"I think the United States is in real danger of being left behind."
Minger could be right. He is one of at least two high-profile stem cell scientists to move from the U.S.
to England in the past few years, something less than a brain drain but a signal, perhaps, of bubbling
discontent.
The research climate is good here, says Minger. In 2003 his team became the first in the U.K. to grow
colonies of human embryonic stem cells, and his nine-person staff is poised to nearly double. He's
developing new growth culture systems that won't rely on potentially infectious mouse ce lls. He's
also figuring out how to make stem cells morph into cardiac, neural, pancreatic, and retinal cells
and preparing to test those cells in animals. And in stark contrast to how things are done in the U.S.,
Minger says, he's doing all this with government support—and oversight.
The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), the government agency that has long
overseen U.K. fertility clinics, is now also regulating the country's embryonic stem cell research. In
closed-door meetings a committee of 18 people appointed by the National Health Service
considers all requests to conduct research using embryos. The committee includes scientists,
ethicists, lawyers, and clergy, but the majority are lay people representing the public.
To an American accustomed to high security and protesters at venues dealing regularly with
embryo research, the most striking thing about the HFEA's headquarters in downtown London is its
ordinariness. The office, a standard-issue warren of cubicles and metal filing cabinets, is on the
second floor of a building that also houses the agency that deals with bankruptcy. I ask Ross
Thacker, a research officer at the authority, whether the HFEA is regularly in need of yellow police
tape to keep protesters at bay.
"Now that you mention it," he says, "there was a placard holder outside this morning …"
Aha!
"… but he was protesting something about the insolvency office."

Thacker politely refrains from criticizing U.S. policy on embryo research, but he clearly takes pride in
the orderliness of the British system. The committee has approved about a dozen requests to create
stem cell lines in the past 18 months, increasing the number of projects to 35. Most were relatively
routine—until a strong-willed fertility doctor named Alison Murdoch decided to ask for permission to
do something nobody had done before: create cloned human embryos as sources of stem cells.
As controversial as embryonic stem cell research can be, cloning embryos to produce those stem
cells is even thornier. Much of the world became familiar with cloning in 1997, when scientists
announced they'd cloned a sheep named Dolly. The process involves creating an animal not from
egg and sperm but by placing the nucleus of a cell inside an egg that's had its nucleus removed.
It's since been used to replicate mice, rabbits, cats, and cattle, among others.
As in many other countries and a few U.S. states, it's illegal in the U.K. to create cloned human babies
(called reproductive cloning), because of concerns that clones may be biologically abnormal and
because of ethical issues surrounding the creation of children who would be genetic replicas of
their one-and-only "parent."
In 2001 the British Parliament made it legal to create cloned human embryos—as opposed to
babies—for use in medical research (called therapeutic cloning). Still, no one on the HFEA was
completely comfortable with the idea. The fear was that some rogue scientist would take the work
a step further, gestate the embryo in a woman's womb, and make the birth announcement that no
one wanted to hear.
But Murdoch, of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, made a compelling case. If replacement
tissues grown from stem cells bore the patient's exact genetic fingerprint, they would be less likely
to be rejected by a patient's immune system, she told the committee. And what better way to get
such a match than to derive the cells from an embryo cloned from the patient's own DNA? Disease
research could also benefit, she said. Imagine an embryo—and its stem cells—cloned from a person
with Lou Gehrig's disease, a fatal genetic disorder that affects nerves and muscles. Scientists might
learn quite a bit, she argued, by watching how the disease damages nerve and muscle cells grown
from those stem cells, and then testing various drugs on them. It's the kind of experiment that could
never be done in a person with the disease.
The HFEA deliberated for five months before giving Murdoch permission to make human embryo
clones in her lab at the Centre for Life in Newcastle, a sprawling neon-illuminated complex of
buildings that strikes a decidedly modern note in the aging industrial hub. But there was a catch: It
takes an egg to make a clone. And under the terms of HFEA approval, Murdoch is allowed to use
only those eggs being disposed of by the center's fertility clinic after they failed to fertilize when
mixed with sperm.
It's not a perfect arrangement, Murdoch says. After all, eggs that have failed to fertilize are almost
by definition of poor quality. "They're not brilliant," she says of the eggs. "But the U.K. has decided at
the moment that these are the most ethical sort to use. So that's really all we can work with." As of
April the group hadn't managed to clone any embryos, despite numerous attempts.
No such obstacle faced Woo-Suk Hwang and his colleagues at Seoul National University in February
2004 when they became the world's first to clone human embryos and extract stem cells from them.
The South Korean government allows research on human embryos made from healthy eggs—in this
case, donated by 16 women who took egg-ripening hormones.
Cloning is an arduous process that requires great patience and almost always ends in failure as cells
burst, tear, or suffer damage to their DNA, but the Koreans are expert cloners, their skills sharpened
in the country's state-funded livestock-cloning enterprise. In Hwang's lab alone, technicians
produce more than 700 cloned pig or cattle embryos every day, seven days a week, in a quest to
produce livestock with precise genetic traits. "There is no holiday in our lab," Hwang told me with a
smile.
But there is something else that gives Koreans an edge over other would-be cloners, Hwang says.
"As you know, Asian countries use chopsticks, but only the Koreans use steel chopsticks," he explains.
"The steel ones are the most difficult to use. Very slippery." I look at him, trying to tell if he's kidding.
A lifetime of using steel chopsticks makes Koreans better at manipulating tiny eggs? "This is not simply
a joke," he says.
Time will tell whether such skill will be enough to keep Korea in the lead as other countries turn to
cloning as a source of stem cells. The competition will be tough. China has pioneered a potentially
groundbreaking technique that produces cloned human embryos by mixing human skin cells with
the eggs of rabbits, which are more easily obtained than human eggs. A few privately funded
researchers in the U.S. are also pursuing therapeutic cloning.
Yet the biggest competition in the international race to develop stem cell therapies may ultimately
come from one of the smallest of countries—a tiny nation committed to becoming a stem cell
superpower. To find that place, one need only track the migration patterns of top scientists who've
been wooed there from the U.S., Australia, even the U.K. Where they've been landing, it turns out, is
Singapore.
Amid the scores of small, botanically rich but barely inhabited islands in the South China Sea,
Singapore stands out like a post-modern mirage. The towering laboratory buildings of its Biopolis
were created in 2001 to jumpstart Singapore's biotechnology industry. Like a scene from a science
fiction story, it features futuristic glass-and-metal buildings with names like Matrix, Proteos, and
Chromos, connected by skywalks that facilitate exchanges among researchers.
Academic grants, corporate development money, laws that ban reproductive cloning but allow
therapeutic cloning, and a science-savvy workforce are among the lures attracting stem cell
researchers and entrepreneurs. Even Alan Colman—the renowned cloning expert who was part of
the team that created Dolly, the cloned sheep—has taken leave of his home in the U.K. and
become the chief executive of ES Cell International, one of a handful of major stem cell research
companies blossoming in Singapore's fertile environs.
"You don't have to fly from New York to San Diego to see what's going on in other labs," says Robert
Klupacs, the firm's previous CEO. "You just walk across the street. Because Singapore is small, things
can happen quickly. And you don't have to go to Congress at every turn."
The company's team of 36, with 15 nationalities represented, has taken advantage of that milieu. It
already owns six stem cell lines made from conventional, noncloned embryos that are approved
for U.S. federal funding. Now it is perfecting methods of turning those cells into the kind of pancreatic
islet cells that diabetics need, as well as into heart muscle cells that could help heart attack patients.
The company is developing new, mouse-free culture systems and sterile production facilities to
satisfy regulators such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. It hopes to begin clinical tests in
humans by 2007.
Despite its research-friendly ethos—and its emphasis on entrepreneurial aspects of stem cell
science—Singapore doesn't want to be known as the world's "Wild West" of stem cell research. A
panel of scientific and humanitarian representatives spent two years devising ethical guidelines,
stresses Hwai-Loong Kong, executive director of Singapore's Biomedical Research Council. Even the
public was invited to participate, Kong says—an unusual degree of democratic input for the
authoritarian island nation. The country's policies represent a "judicious balance," he says, that has
earned widespread public support.
Widespread, perhaps, but not universal. After my conversation with Kong, a government official
offered me a ride to my next destination. As we approached her parked car, she saw the surprise
on my face as I read the bumper sticker on her left rear window: "Embryos—Let Them Live. You Were
Once an Embryo Too!"
"I guess this is not completely settled," I said. "No," she replied, choosing not to elaborate.
That bumper sticker made me feel strangely at home. I am an American, after all. And no country
has struggled more with the moral implications of embryonic stem cell research than the U.S., with
its high church attendance rates and pockets of skepticism for many things scientific. That struggle
promises to grow in the months and years ahead. Many in Congress want to ban the cloning of
human embryos, even in those states where it is currently legal and being pursued with private
funding. Some states have already passed legislation banning various kinds of embryo research.
And federally backed scientists are sure to become increasingly frustrated as the handful of cell
colonies they're allowed to work with becomes an ever smaller fraction of what's available.
Yet one thing I've noticed while talking to stem cell experts around the world: Whenever I ask who
is the best in the field, the answers are inevitably weighted with the names of Americans. The work
of U.S. researchers still fills the pages of the best scientific journals. And while federal policy continues
to frustrate them, they are finding some support. Following the lead of California, which has
committed 300 million dollars a year for embryonic stem cell research for the next decade, several
states are pushing initiatives to fund research, bypassing the federal restrictions in hopes of
generating well-paying jobs to boost their economies. Moves like those prompt some observers to
predict that when all is said and done, it will be an American team that wins the race to create the
first FDA-approved embryonic stem cell therapy.
Tom Okarma certainly believes so, and he intends to be that winner. Okarma is president of Geron,
the company in Menlo Park, California, that has been at the center of the embryonic stem cell
revolution from the beginning. Geron financed James Thomson's discovery of the cells in Wisconsin
and has since developed more than a dozen new colonies. It holds key patents on stem cell
processes and products. And now it's laying the groundwork for what the company hopes will be
the first controlled clinical trials of treatments derived from embryonic stem cells. Moreover, while
others look to stem cells from cloned embryos or newer colonies that haven't come into contact
with mouse cells, Okarma is looking no further than the very first colonies of human embryonic stem
cells ever grown: the ones Thomson nurtured back in 1998. That may seem surprising, he
acknowledges, but after all these years, he knows those cells inside out.
"We've shown they're free of human, pig, cow, and mouse viruses, so they're qualified for use in
humans," Okarma says at the company's headquarters. Most important, Geron has perfected a
system for growing uniform batches of daughter cells from a master batch that resides, like a
precious gem, in a locked freezer. The ability to produce a consistent product, batch after batch,
just as drug companies do with their pills is what the FDA wants—and it will be the key to success in
the emerging marketplace of stem cell therapies, Okarma says. "Why do you think San Francisco
sourdough bread is so successful?" he asks. "They've got a reliable sourdough culture, and they stick
with it."
Geron scientists can now make eight different cell types from their embryonic lines, Okarma says,
including nerve cells, heart cells, pancreatic islet cells, liver cells, and the kind of brain cells that are
lost in Parkinson's disease. But what Geron wants most at this point is to develop a treatment for
spinal cord injuries.
Okarma clicks on a laptop and shows me a movie of white rats in a cage. "Pay attention to the tail
and the two hind legs," he says. Two months before, the rats were subjected to spinal cord
procedures that left their rear legs unable to support their weight and their tails dragging along the
floor. "That's a permanent injury," he says. He flips to a different movie: white rats again, also two
months after injury. But these rats received injections of a specialized nervous system cell grown
from human embryonic stem cells. They have only the slightest shuffle in their gait. They hold their
tails high. One even stands upright on its rear legs for a few moments.
"It's not perfect," Okarma says. "It's not like we've made a brand new spinal cord." But tests show the
nerves are regrowing, he says. He hopes to get FDA permission to start testing the cells in people
with spinal cord injuries in 2006.
Those experiments will surely be followed by many others around the world, as teams in China, the
U.K., Singapore, and other nations gain greater control over the remarkable energy of stem cells.
With any luck the political and ethical issues may even settle down. Many suspect that with a little
more looking, new kinds of stem cells may be found in adults that are as versatile as those in
embryos.
At least two candidates have already emerged. Catherine Verfaillie, a blood disease specialist at
the University of Minnesota, has discovered a strange new kind of bone marrow cell that seems able
to do many, and perhaps even all, the same things human embryonic stem cells can do.
Researchers at Tufts University announced in February that they had found similar cells. While some
scientists have expressed doubts that either kind of cell will prove as useful as embryonic ones, the
discoveries have given birth to new hopes that scientists may yet find the perfect adult stem cell
hiding in plain sight.
Maybe Cedric Seldon himself will discover them. The stem cells he got in his cord blood transplant
did the trick, it turns out. They took root in his marrow faster than in anyone his doctors have seen.
"Everyone's saying, 'Oh my God, you're doing so well,' " his mother says.
That makes Cedric part of the world's first generation of regenerated people, a seamless blend of
old and new—and, oddly enough, of male and female. His stem cells, remember, came from a girl,
and they've been diligently churning out blood cells with two X chromosomes ever since. It's a detail
that will not affect his sexual development, which is under the control of his hormones, not his blood.
But it's a quirk that could save him, his mother jokes, if he ever commits a crime and leaves a bit of
blood behind. The DNA results would be unambiguous, she notes correctly. "They'll be looking for a
girl."
Susan Lim : Transplant Cells, not Organs

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https://bestofink.wordpress.com/2012/07/08/susan-lim-transplant-cells-not-organs/
Nature & nature’s laws lay hid in the night. God said let Newton be and all was light.
If we trace the paths of medical science history in the world, it can be easily noticed that we have
come a long way. The discoveries aided by technological inventions have paved way for mammoth
changes in the way humankind looks at medicine and surgical science today. We have penetrated
deep into our own bodies to understand the mysteries of its functioning and unfold the secrets within,
with the help of centuries of dedicated research.
Dr. Susan Lim is one of the pioneers of liver transplant in Asia. She performed the first successful liver
transplant surgery in Asia and was the first female doctor in the whole world to achieve this. Her
patient still survives, 20 years after the operation and has named Dr Susan as the Godmother of her
14 year old son.
Accolades and victories sound good don’t they? What appears easy to us from outside has a very
different picture on the other side of the coin. For any transplant to happen, the most basic need is a
donor organ which is called ‘the Gift of Life’. It is not a hidden fact that the medical industry is fighting
the gap between donor organ demand and donor organ supply which is very huge. Even after
relaxing the donor rules to a huge extent, the chasm between the number of people who need a
liver and the number of people who can give it is increasing day by day. Every day, more than a
dozen people die because of lack of donor organs. And this issue is also accompanied by moral
controversies of coercion, forced donations and trading of organs for monetary exchange.
The battle didn’t end for Dr. Lim at the doorsteps of these moral dilemmas. She had to collect organs
from prisoners who consented to donate it after their death sentence. Her account of those days are
disturbing to a great extent as she recounts her days to begin with the horrible gut wrenching
experience of walking down the prison aisle and end with extreme happiness at having saved a life
using that organ. She says it took away the sanity of her team. And that was quite likely to happen.
Medicine keeps on changing. Surgery keeps on evolving. The concept of surgery in those days was
shifting from big to small, from wide open incisions to tiny incisions, from whole organs to cells. During
one such series of pancreas operations in the year 1988 at the University of Minnesota, Dr Lim had the
idea of transplanting cells and not whole organs to eradicate this issue of moral controversies
surrounding the gift of life.
They say there is always light at the end of the tunnel if you really want to see it. Dr Lim & many other
doctors saw it. Those were the days of stem cell research. Some groundbreaking discoveries in this
field took place. Scientists were successful in isolating embryonic stem cells from the human embryo.
These stem cells had the ability to develop themselves into any other type of cell in the body, be it
heart cells, cartilage cells, liver cells et al. This was again marred by moral controversies. The stem cells
had to be isolated from the human embryo when it was just 5 days old. This gave rise to research for
stem cells other than embryonic cells. In a very shocking discovery, Dr Lim found out that the adipose
tissues i.e the fat in our body contains stem cells. And there is literally no dearth of fat in the world! But
these cells had a great limiting property. Being adult stem cells, they were mature and couldn’t lend
themselves to much differentiation as the embryonic cells did.
Not losing hope is the moral of every story. And so is this one. While the search was still on for stem cells
other than embryonic cells, in 2007, two scientists made another path breaking discovery. Shinya
Yamanaka of Japan and Jamie Thompson of US found out that the mature stem cells obtained from
fat can be reprogrammed to behave like embryonic stem cells and can be then used to grow other
differentiated cells like heart cells, liver cells, neurons etc. These cells were referred to as iPS cells or
Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells. This milestone discovery captured the imaginations of media and
public alike and there was a horde among scientists to find ways to convert this discovery into a
feasible process. If achieved, this has tremendous scope in curing many of the diseases for which any
cure is not known to mankind yet. We have a hope that a day will come when diseases like Cerebral
Palsy, non-healing bone fractures, Alzheimer’s Disease, Rheumatoid Arthritis & Retinal diseases to
name a few can be cured.
It has not been an easy journey for Dr Lim for any of the scientists involved. A hell lot of commitment,
contribution and curiosity later we can say that we know something about the human body. Those
who have dedicated their life to research and have studied medicine and human body have always
agreed that the body holds many more mysteries that are waiting to be unlocked. Their pioneering
activities are their own stories. Dr Susan Lim has her own story. Hers is a story of her journey from organs
to cells, from saving lives to creating lives, a story of hope in discoveries, a story of brilliance and
compassion. And we are sure, someday there will be brighter light at this end if the tunnel too!
NOTE: The videoclip “Susan Lim: Transplant Cells, not Organs” is available in the google classroom.
The Rise of a New Species of Human Being
Raya Bidshahri / Mar 26, 2017
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Today, what survives on Earth can be determined entirely by human beings. We can alter the genetics
of almost any life form and potentially design entirely new ones. According to renowned physicist
Freeman Dyson, “In the future, a new generation of artists will be writing genomes as fluently as Blake
and Byron wrote verses.”
In their book Evolving Ourselves, Juan Enriquez and Steve Gullans describe a world where evolution is
no longer driven by natural processes. Instead, it is driven by human choices, through what they call
unnatural selection and non-random mutation. As a result, we will see the emergence of an entirely
new species of human beings.
There is no doubt that Enriquez and Gullans describe a powerful tool for accelerating human progress.
We could use it to eradicate genetic diseases, increase our lifespan and design life that can survive
on Mars.
Naturally, there are possible negative applications. To what extent should we allow designer babies?
Should we bring back extinct species? How do we prevent criminals from designing harmful viruses or
bioweapons? Like many other experts, Enriquez and Gullans stress the importance of stimulating an
ethical dialogue around such advancements.
As a science author, researcher and entrepreneur, Juan Enriquez has been studying the widespread
implications of genomics and other life sciences on society. In a conversation with Singularity Hub,
Enriquez painted a radically profound future for humanity.
Your work describes a world in which humanity is altering its genome and controlling its evolution. If
Charles Darwin was alive today, how would he describe this new world?
I think we see two parallel evolutionary structures. There is one evolutionary structure that Darwin and
Wallace discovered that applied for four billion years, where random mutation and natural selection
continue to occur. But then there is a world where the primary determinant of what lives and dies
becomes human beings. This is a world of unnatural selection, because humans would rather have
dogs and cats than snakes and grizzly bears. It’s a world where we deliberately insert genes into
bacteria, plants and animals for specific purposes. This is a form of intelligent design, and has nothing
to do with random mutations.
In your 2009 TED talk, you say “We are becoming a new species, we are becoming Homo Evolutis.”
How exactly do you envision the Homo Evolutis being different from Homo Sapiens?
If you look at the history of humanity in hominids, there have been at least 32 different species of
hominids alive. We coexisted with at least five of them. We interbred with several of them. The normal
and natural state of the planet is to have various species of monkeys, elephants, tigers and also
hominids. Having other species of hominids walking around is not unusual or unnatural. It involves
going back to a normal state.
How long before we see the emergence of Homo Evolutis? Is this something that is already occurring?
Even Darwin had difficulty defining species. We have at least 19 different definitions of the term
species. Depending on which of these definitions we adopt, it could be much earlier or much later.
Already, we are seeing this by controlling our reproduction, which is the core of evolution.
Imagine you were able to get a time machine, sit down your grandparents when they were 17 and
had a “birds and the bees” talk. You would explain a world where it is normal and natural to have sex
and not have a child. That is completely unprecedented in natural history. You would describe a
world where you could artificially freeze sperm and eggs, not requiring physical contact to conceive
a child. You could go on to describe a world where you can have a child fifty years after it was
conceived, separating birth from time.
With these situations, we are basically saying that even the most fundamental aspects of life, that our
grandparents took for granted, are completely different today. Given that, our grandparents would
probably already see us as a different species.
Would you argue that we have a moral imperative to continue to evolve ourselves?
I think it is a decision that various human societies have to make, and we just have to be aware that
they’re making it. There will be societies that say, “Let’s do it all.” There will be other societies that will
say, “Let’s do some of it.” There will be societies that say, “Absolutely not.” Precisely because there
are differences in those areas, we will see some speciation.
Our ability to re-engineer and recreate ourselves will allow us to overcome our biological limitations
and be a major contributing factor to the survival of our species. But do you think there are scenarios
in which it can be detrimental to our progress?
Yes. Most evolution doesn’t work. 99 percent of the species that have ever lived are extinct. Evolution
is actually a continuous set of experiments, many of which fail. It would not be surprising to see some
things go horribly wrong. That is simply what happens in nature.
But if we don’t take those steps forward, then we don’t have a real chance at eventually allowing
our species to live long enough to travel across space. If we don’t do these things, it is likely that we
will not cure cancer or Alzheimers. There is a cost and a risk to acting, but there is certainly a cost and
a risk to not acting.
Human desire and choices can vary across individuals and entire societies. One can imagine there
will be some conflict and debate on what characteristic we should choose to select for. Who gets to
decide what traits we do select for?
I think each society will have its own moral and ethical structures, and will choose. The reason we
have so many different religions is precisely so we can have various options as to where and how we
want to live. As long as people are free to choose and understand the potential risks and benefits,
then they can make an intelligent decision. I don’t believe that any smart person will state a certain
number of rules should apply to the entire world, simply because I’ve seen those rules change so many
times.
What are some human traits you are looking forward to tackling with genetic engineering?
Firstly, there are several horrendous—yet simple—genetic diseases we can get rid of. Cystic fibrosis is
caused by a single letter change among 3.2 billion letters, something we can eradicate with these
advancements. Sickle cell anemia, hemophilia and cancer genes are other examples.
Beyond that, there are traits that may make us more radiation-resistant, and that may be something
we want to do if we ever want to colonize Mars. There are traits that may give us aesthetics or sports
benefits, and the standard of safety for that better be high before we allow it. We take risks every day.
We take risks crossing the street, when we get in the elevator or when we do plastic surgery. As long
as the risks are clear, the procedure is relatively safe and the individual is well-informed, I think that
individuals should be allowed to make these decisions.
So far our conversation has been focused on changing life as we know it, which is based on DNA. But
do you think we can design a completely new and alternative genomic language to DNA?
First of all, there is a whole series of ways in which you can modify gene expression within the DNA
code itself. We can alter the expression of that code. We can modify how the environment interacts
with the code. We can modify the metabolism or the microorganisms that execute on that code. We
already have instruments at many different levels to modify the expression of that DNA, even if it is
written exactly the same way.
That aside, we are starting to see scientists who are able to create heredity using alternative chemical
structures. So we can add or substitute letters to DNA and still have living organisms that inherit in
different ways. This means DNA is not the only solution for life; we could have alternative chemistries
that are not DNA-based. This means the chances of finding life in the universe are very high.
Finally, would you say that you are optimistic about the future of humanity?
I realize how many things can go horribly wrong. I realize how awful leadership can be sometimes. But
within that context, I’m quite optimistic about the future of humanity. We are doing things our
grandparents would see as magical. Our grandkids will take for granted things that surprise, shock
and awe us, because I think this whole thing is accelerating.
It is also one of our moral and social responsibilities of knowing what

SARS-Covid19 in the perspective of Education. In the light of stem cell
research and gene therapy, process the following:
SAQ 3.4.1. Understand medically what SARS-Covid19 in terms of its

morphology (as a virus and not as a bacteria), write or enumerate ALL
them below. (20 points)
SAQ 3.4.2. There are 2 offered ways of detecting the virus from a
suspected patients and these either “Antigen test” and “PCR Test,”
discuss its chemistry. (20 points)
MANDATED TOPICS
“An inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What we
can Do About It” (Al Gore)
Retrieved from https://www.energytoday.net/environmental-health-impact/climate-change/an-
inconvenient-truth-the-planetary-emergency-of-global-warming-and-what-we-can-do-about-it/ on 4 June
2021 at 10:16PM
Excerpts selected by editors of the American Energy Society.
Some experiences are so intense while they are happening that time seems to stop altogether. When
it begins again and our lives resume their normal course, those intense experiences remain vivid,
refusing to stay in the past, remaining always and forever with us.
Seventeen years ago my youngest child was badly – almost fatally – injured. This is a story I have told
before, but its meaning for me continues to change and to deepen.
That is also true of the story I have tried to tell for many years about the global environment. It was
during that interlude 17 years ago when I started writing my first book, Earth in the Balance. It was
because of my son’s accident and the way it abruptly interrupted the flow of my days and hours that
I began to rethink everything, especially what my priorities had been. Thankfully, my son as long since
recovered completely. But it was during that traumatic period that I made at least two enduring
changes: I vowed always to put my family first, and I also vowed to make the climate crisis the top
priority of my professional life.
Unfortunately, in the intervening years, time had not stood still for the global environment. The pace
of destruction has worsened and the urgent need for a response had grown more acute.
The fundamental outline of the climate crisis story is much the same now as it was then. The relationship
between human civilization and the Earth has been utterly transformed by a combination of factors,
including the population explosion, the technological revolution, and a willingness to ignore the future
consequences of our present actions. The underlying reality is that we are colliding with the planet’s
ecological system, and its most vulnerable components are crumbling as a result.
…
On every corner of the globe – on land and in water, in melting ice and disappearing snow, during
heat waves and droughts, in the eyes of hurricanes and in the tears of refugees – the world is
witnessing mounting and undeniable evidence that nature’s cycles are profoundly changing.
I have learned that, beyond death and taxes, there is at least one absolutely indisputable fact: Not
only does human-caused global warming exist, but it is also growing more and more dangerous, and
at a pace that has now made it a planetary emergency.
…
After more than thirty years as a student of the climate crisis, I have a lot to share. I have tried to tell
this story in a way that will interest all kinds of readers. My hope is that those read the book and see
the film will begin to feel, as I have for a long time, that global warming is not just about science and
that it is not just a political issue. It is really a moral issue.
…
The climate crisis is… extremely dangerous. Two thousand scientists, in a hundred countries, working
for more than 20 years in the most elaborate and well-organized scientific collaboration in the history
of humankind, have forged an exceptionally strong consensus that all the nations on Earth much work
together to solve the crisis of global warming.
The voluminous evidence now strongly suggests that unless we act boldly and quickly to deal with the
underlying causes of global warming, our world will undergo a string of terrible catastrophes, including
more and stronger storms like Hurricane Katrina, in both the Atlantic and the Pacific.
We are melting the North Polar ice cap and virtually all the mountain glaciers in the world. We are
destabilizing the massive mound of ice on Greenland and the equally enormous mass of ice propped
up on top of islands in West Antarctica, threatening a worldwide increase in sea levels of as much as
20 feet.
The list of what is now endangered due to global warming also includes the continued stable
configuration of ocean and wind currents that has been in place since before the first cities were
build almost 10,000 years ago.
We are dumping so much carbon dioxide into the Earth’s environment that we have literally changed
the relationship between the Earth and the Sun. So much of that CO2 is being absorbed into the
oceans that if we continue at the current rate we will increase the saturation of calcium carbonate
to levels that will prevent formation of corals and interfere with the making of shells by any sea
creature.
Global warming, along with the cutting and burning of forests and other critical habitats, is causing
the loss of living species at a level comparable to the extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs
65 million years ago. That event was believed to have been caused by a giant asteroid. This time it is
not an asteroid colliding with the Earth and wreaking havoc; it is us.
Last year, the National Academies of Science in the 11 most influential nations came together to
jointly call on every nation to “acknowledge that the threat of climate change is clear and
increasing” and declare that the “scientific understanding of climate changes is now sufficiently clear
to justify nations taking prompt action.”
So the message is unmistakably clear. This crisis means “danger!”

Why do our leaders seem not to hear such a clear warning? It is simply that it is inconvenient for them
to hear the truth?
If the truth is unwelcome, it may seem easier just to ignore it.

But we know from bitter experience that the consequences of doing so can be dire….
As Martin Luther King Jr. said in a speech not long before his assassination:
“We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the
fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being
too late.”
…
But along with the danger we face from global warming, this crisis also brings unprecedented
opportunities.
What are the opportunities such a crisis also offers? They include not just new jobs and new profits,
though there will be plenty of both, we can also build clean engines, we can harness the Sun and the
wind; we can stop wasting energy; we can use our planets plentiful coal resources without heating
the planet.
The procrastinators and deniers would have us believe this will be expensive. But in recent years,
dozens of companies have cut emissions of heat-trapping gases while saving money. Some of the
world’s largest companies are moving aggressively to capture the enormous economic opportunities
offered by a clean energy future.
But there’s something even more precious to be gained if we do the right thing.
The climate crisis also offers us the chance to experience what very few generations in history have
had the privilege of knowing: a generational mission; the exhilaration of a compelling moral purpose;
a shared and unifying cause; the thrill of being forced by circumstances to put aside the pettiness
and conflict that so often stifle the restless human need for transcendence; the opportunity to rise.
When we do rise, it will fill our spirits and bind us together. Those who are now suffocating in cynicism
and despair will be able to breathe freely. Those who are now suffering from a loss of meaning in their
lives will find hope.
When we rise, we will experience an epiphany as we discover that this crisis is not really about politics
at all. It is a moral and spiritual challenge.
At stake is the survival of our civilization and the habitability of the Earth. Or, as one eminent scientist
put it, the pending question is whether the combination of an opposable thumb and a neocortex is
a viable combination on this planet.
Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was released in 2006. Excerpts from the introduction, pp. 8-11.
“The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change” (Al Gore)

Retrieved from https://powerhousearena.com/events/book-launch-the-future-six-drivers-of-global-change-
by-al-gore/ on 4 June 2021 at 10:21PM
We are at the dawn of a “new future.” Ours is a time of revolutionary change that has no precedent in
history. In the past, the future has always appeared before us as an extension of our paced evolution. But
now we are suddenly racing toward it and it is remarkably complicated and different from anything we’ve
seen before. With the same passion he brought to the challenge of climate change, and with his decades
of experience on the front lines of global policy, Al Gore surveys our planet’s beclouded horizon and offers
a sober, learned, and ultimately hopeful forecast in the visionary tradition of Alvin Toffler’s Future
Shock and John Naisbitt’s Megatrends.
In THE FUTURE (Random House; On Sale: January 29, 2013), Gore identifies the six critical drivers of
global change:
1. Earth, Inc. Ever-increasing economic globalization has led to the emergence of what Gore labels “Earth
Inc.”—an integrated, holistic entity with a new and different relationship to capital, labor (outsourcing and
robo-sourcing), consumer markets, and national governments than in the past.
2. Global Mind The worldwide digital communications, Internet, and computer revolutions have led to the
emergence of “the Global Mind,” which links the thoughts and feelings of billions of people and connects
intelligent machines, robots, ubiquitous sensors, and databases.
3. Shift in Balance of Power The balance of global political, economic, and military power is shifting more
profoundly than at any time in the last five hundred years—from a U.S.-centered system to one with
multiple emerging centers of power, from nation-states to private actors, and from political systems to
markets.
4. Growth A deeply flawed economic compass is leading us to unsustainable growth in consumption,

pollution flows, and depletion of the planet’s strategic resources of topsoil, freshwater, and living species.
5. Reinvention of Life and Death Genomic, biotechnology, neuroscience, and life sciences revolutions are
radically transforming the fields of medicine, agriculture, and molecular science—and are putting control
of evolution in human hands.
6. Relationship between Humanity and the Earth There has been a radical disruption of the relationship
between human beings and the earth’s ecosystems, along with the beginning of a revolutionary
transformation of energy systems, agriculture, transportation, and construction worldwide.
From his earliest days in public life, Al Gore has been warning us of the promise and peril of emergent
truths—no matter how “inconvenient” they may seem to be. We’re already in the early stages of the six
emergent drivers of change described in THE FUTURE. They are beginning to transform our planet, our
civilization, the way we work and live our lives, the degradation of self-governance, the fabric of life, the
species with which we share the earth and the physical, mental and spiritual nature of humanity. Gore
writes that we have a choice. We can be swept along by the powerful currents of technological change
and economic determinism into a future that may threaten our aspirations and values or we can build the
capacity for collective decision-making on a global scale that allows us to shape the future in ways that
protect human dignity and reflect the aspirations of people and nations throughout the world. Mapping
the future is a risky undertaking but perhaps the only thing riskier is doing nothing.
About AL GORE:
Former Vice President Al Gore is a co-founder and chairman of Generation Investment Management. He
is also a senior partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and a member of Apple Inc.’s board of
directors. Gore spends the majority of his time as chairman of The Climate Reality Project, a nonprofit
devoted to solving the climate crisis. Gore was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives four times
and the U.S. Senate twice. He served eight years as vice president. He authored the bestsellers Earth in
the Balance, An Inconvenient Truth, The Assault on Reason, and Our Choice. He is a co-recipient of the 2007
Nobel Peace Prize.
What Are the Drivers of Global Change? An excerpt from “The Future: Six Drivers of
Global Change.”
by Al Gore, on March 7, 2013
Retrieved from https://www.sciencefriday.com/articles/what-are-the-drivers-of-global-change/ on 4
June 2021 at 10:33 PM
Like many fulfilling journeys, this book began not with answers but with a question. Eight years ago,
when I was on the road, someone asked me: “What are the drivers of global change?” I listed several
of the usual suspects and left it at that. Yet the next morning, on the long plane flight home, the
question kept pulling me back, demanding that I answer it more precisely and accurately—not by
relying on preconceived dogma but by letting the emerging evidence about an emerging world
take me where it would. The question, it turned out, had a future of its own. I started an outline on my
computer and spent several hours listing headings and subheadings, then changing their rank order
and relative magnitude, moving them from one category to another and filling in more and more
details after each rereading.
As I spent the ensuing years raising awareness about climate change and pursuing a business
career, I continued to revisit, revise, and sharpen the outline until finally, two years ago, I concluded
that it would not leave me alone until I dug in and tried to thoroughly answer the question that had
turned into something of an obsession.
What emerged was this book, a book about the six most important drivers of global change, how
they are converging and interacting with one another, where they are taking us, and how we as
human beings—and as a global civilization—can best affect the way these changes unfold. In order
to reclaim control of our destiny and shape the future, we must think freshly and clearly about the
crucial choices that confront us as a result of:
The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change
• The emergence of a deeply interconnected global economy that increasingly operates as a fully
integrated holistic entity with a completely new and different relationship to capital flows, labor,
consumer markets, and national governments than in the past;
• The emergence of a planet-wide electronic communications grid connecting the thoughts and
feelings of billions of people and linking them to rapidly expanding volumes of data, to a fast
growing web of sensors being embedded ubiquitously throughout the world, and to increasingly
intelligent devices, robots, and thinking machines, the smartest of which already exceed the
capabilities of humans in performing a growing list of discrete mental tasks and may soon surpass us
in manifestations of intelligence we have always assumed would remain the unique province of our
species;
• The emergence of a completely new balance of political, economic, and military power in the
world that is radically different from the equilibrium that characterized the second half of the
twentieth century, during which the United States of America provided global leadership and
stability—shifting influence and initiative from West to East, from wealthy countries to rapidly
emerging centers of power throughout the world, from nation states to private actors, and from
political systems to markets;
• The emergence of rapid unsustainable growth—in population; cities; resource consumption;

depletion of topsoil, freshwater supplies, and living species; pollution flows; and economic output
that is measured and guided by an absurd and distorted set of universally accepted metrics that
blinds us to the destructive consequences of the self- deceiving choices we are routinely making;
• The emergence of a revolutionary new set of powerful biological, biochemical, genetic, and
materials science technologies that are enabling us to reconstitute the molecular design of all solid
matter, reweave the fabric of life itself, alter the physical form, traits, characteristics, and properties
of plants, animals, and people, seize active control over evolution, cross the ancient lines dividing
species, and invent entirely new ones never imagined in nature; and
• The emergence of a radically new relationship between the aggregate power of human
civilization and the Earth’s ecological systems, including especially the most vulnerable—the
atmosphere and climate balance upon which the continued flourishing of humankind depends—
and the beginning of a massive global transformation of our energy, industrial, agricultural, and
construction technologies in order to reestablish a healthy and balanced relationship between
human civilization and the future.
This book is data-driven and is based on deep research and reporting—not speculation, alarmism,
naive optimism, or blue-sky conjecture. It represents the culmination of a multiyear effort to
investigate, decipher, and present the best available evidence and what the world’s leading
experts tell us about the future we are now in the process of creating.
Excerpted from The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change by Al Gore. Copyright © 2013 by Al Gore.
Excerpted by permission of Random House, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No
part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
“ Changing the Atmosphere: Anthropology and Climate Change” (NCAR)
Retrieved from https://s3.amazonaws.com/rdcms-
aaa/files/production/public/FileDownloads/pdfs/cmtes/commissions/upload/GCCTF-Changing-the-
Atmosphere.pdf on 4 June 2021 at 10:38PM
NOTE: The full article is found in the google classroom
Legarda’s “Buhos” Climate Change Documentary Launched

September 11, 2010
Retrieved from https://lorenlegarda.com.ph/legardas-buhos-climate-change-documentary-

launched/ on 4 June 2021 at 10:41 PM
SENATOR LOREN LEGARDA ON MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2010 WILL LAUNCH “BUHOS” – A
DOCUMENTARY ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE AT THE CINEMA 3 OF SM MALL OF ASIA.
For her intense passion to protect the environment and raise awareness on the issue of climate
change, Senator Loren Legarda is seeking every possible venue to push this advocacy and move
Filipinos into purposeful action.
Legarda, who grew up in flood prone Malabon, made the worsening flood situation central to the
theme of her new documentary on climate change, entitled Buhos (Downpour).
The senator collaborated with acclaimed Filipino filmmaker and 2009 Cannes Best Director Brillante
Mendoza, who lent artistic credence to produce a visually interesting, informative, and most
importantly, moving documentary.
Produced and presented by Legarda, Buhos successfully demystifies global warming by bringing it
down to the level of day-to-day living, offering easy to understand scientific explanations of
greenhouse gases and climate change, as well as realistic ways of addressing this clear and present
danger, in the context of Filipino living.
As chairperson of the Senate Standing and Oversight Committees on Climate Change, Senator
Legarda principally authored and sponsored landmark environmental laws—the Climate Change Act
of 2009, the Environmental Awareness Education Act, the Ecological Solid Waste Management Act
and the Clean Air Act, among others.
Legarda, a UNEP laureate for environment and United Nations champion for disaster risk reduction
and climate change adaptation for Asia and the Pacific, has been the voice of climate-vulnerable
nations like the Philippines and has called for “climate justice” for developing countries in various
international fora.
Beyond her call of duty, Legarda runs a nationwide awareness and education campaign on climate
change. She produced the docu-drama Ulan sa Tag-araw, children’s animation movie Ligtas Likas,
and a United Nations documentary Now is the Time. Legarda implements an extensive tree planting
program through Luntiang Pilipinas and mobilizes humanitarian aid to disaster-affected and poverty-
stricken communities through Lingkod Loren. Last year, she reached out to thousands of families left
homeless by typhoons Ondoy and Pepeng through her missions.
“Buhos” is launched with the support of SM Cinema and will be attended by representatives from the
diplomatic corps, academe, student leaders, environmentalists, NGO’s and local government
officials. There will be special screenings in select theatres and schools and universities in the coming
months.
Buhos is an eye-opener
Retrieved from https://www.philstar.com/entertainment/2010/09/15/611860/buhos-eye-opener on 4
June 2021 at 10:46PM
The Philippine Star

September 15, 2010 - 12:00am
MANILA, Philippines - Buhos is one video its producer won’t mind getting pirated. In fact, Sen. Loren
Legarda will smile from ear to ear if the viewer replicates it for all the world to see.
“You can show it anywhere. You can burn it and I won’t call you pirates,” she tells the audience at
the presscon. It included not just the media, but local government and school officials.
After all, Buhos is not a film starring today’s young loveteams. Instead, the star of the 30-minute
documentary is climate change, with the senator as annotator and Cannes Best Director Brillante
Mendoza as the man calling the shots behind the camera.
Mendoza and his cameraman trailed Legarda all over the country — in Marikina, Laguna,
Pangasinan, etc. — while she went on medical and feeding missions after Typhoons
Ondoy and Pepeng struck.
The color brown is everywhere — on the mud Legarda and her team walk on, the broken houses, the
leaves that fell from trees after the storm shook its very roots.
Putik might have been another apt title for the video Legarda produced with money from her own
pocket. But the word carries negative connotations. So Buhos, or downpour it is — for the surfeit of
rain — and headaches — the twin typhoons gave the country around this time last year.
“Government has no funds,” Loren adds. “This is my gift to the people.”
As everyone knows, the environmentalist in her has sounded the alarm years
before Ondoy and Pepeng. Legarda is a United Nations champion for disaster risk reduction and
climate change adaptation for Asia and the Pacific. Her speeches in the Philippine Senate and
abroad have called for “climate justice” for developing countries.
Buhos, therefore, is vintage Loren. Unlike her other green projects, like the docu-drama Ulan sa Tag-
Araw, the children’s animation movie Ligtas Likas and the United Nations docu Now is the Time,
Buhos is climate change 101. It’s back to the basics. Legarda talks about how global warming affects
day-to-day life, offers easy-to-grasp scientific explanations of greenhouse gases and climate change.
It just doesn’t sit there and does nothing. It gives solutions: Living a simple life, saving on power and
water, recycling, waste segregation.
The technique is to let the public know first. Then they will move in the right direction..
The bosses at SM malls agree. The giant shopping center is showing Buhos every third Monday and
Tuesday of the month on its big screens. Legarda crows that over 230,000 public school children have
seen the video over the past few months.
She’ll be jumping up and down for joy if the numbers jump to the nth power.
“Buhos (which is in Filipino) has English subtitles for our foreign guests to understand,” she relates.
“Teachers can use it for their classes. If they cannot burn it, my staff can burn it for them.”
She is grateful to her director, who could have charged astronomical fees, but asked for a
“reasonable fee” instead.
They met for breakfast one day and agreed a documentary is the best way to tackle climate change
because “it’s more real, with the victims and their plight out there for people to see.”
Legarda, a TV producer for 20 years, with awards under her belt, could have dictated on her director.
But she didn’t.
“I consulted my friends at the United Nations and my staff. I previewed it 10 times. But I gave director
Brillante a free hand,” she reveals.
Looks like Legarda will again give him a free hand in the sequel to Buhos.
“This,” she points out, “is just an appetizer.” The next one will be more intense to the point of scaring
people enough to leave the comfort of their homes and do something, now.
That’s because climate change could easily be our biggest nightmare.
“It robs us of livelihood, makes food scarce, affects our health,” says Loren. “I talked to farmers who
said they have turned into fishermen because their rice fields have become part of Laguna de Bay,
They don’t know anymore when to plant, when to harvest.”
But Legarda knows what else she can do.
“Trimming Buhos down to 60 seconder infomercials is a good idea,” she muses. Legarda can always
tie up with a TV station to air the vignettes.
This would speak well of the station’s image the way Buhos screenings in SM is further boosting the
mall’s reputation for social responsibility.
Most of all, it will serve everyone — Mother Earth especially — very well.
The Tragedy of the Commons by Garrett Hardin

Science 13 Dec 1968:
Vol. 162, Issue 3859, pp. 1243-1248
DOI: 10.1126/science.162.3859.1243
Retrieved from https://science.sciencemag.org/content/162/3859/1243.full on 4 June 2021 at 10:55
PM
Abstract
The population problem has no technical solution; it requires a fundamental extension in morality.
At the end of a thoughtful article on the future of nuclear war, Wiesner and York (1) concluded that:
"Both sides in the arms race are ...confronted by the dilemma of steadily increasing military power and
steadily decreasing national security. It is our considered professional judgment that this dilemma has
no technical solution. If the great powers continue to look for solutions in the area of science and
technology only, the result will be to worsen the situation."
I would like to focus your attention not on the subject of the article (national security in a nuclear
world) but on the kind of conclusion they reached, namely that there is no technical solution to the
problem. An implicit and almost universal assumption of discussions published in professional and
semipopular scientific journals is that the problem under discussion has a technical solution. A
technical solution may be defined as one that requires a change only in the techniques of the natural
sciences, demanding little or nothing in the way of change in human values or ideas of morality.
In our day (though not in earlier times) technical solutions are always welcome. Because of previous
failures in prophecy, it takes courage to assert that a desired technical solution is not possible. Wiesner
and York exhibited this courage; publishing in a science journal, they insisted that the solution to the
problem was not to be found in the natural sciences. They cautiously qualified their statement with
the phrase, "It is our considered professional judgment... ." Whether they were right or not is not the
concern of the present article. Rather, the concern here is with the important concept of a class of
human problems which can be called "no technical solution problems," and, more specifically, with
the identification and discussion of one of these.
It is easy to show that the class is not a null class. Recall the game of tick-tack-toe. Consider the
problem, "How can I win the game of tick-tack-toe?" It is well known that I cannot, if I assume (in
keeping with the conventions of game theory) that my opponent understands the game perfectly.
Put another way, there is no "technical solution" to the problem. I can win only by giving a radical
meaning to the word "win." I can hit my opponent over the head; or I can drug him; or I can falsify the
records. Every way in which I "win" involves, in some sense, an abandonment of the game, as we
intuitively understand it. (I can also, of course, openly abandon the game--refuse to play it. This is what
most adults do.)
The class of "No technical solution problems" has members. My thesis is that the "population problem,"
as conventionally conceived, is a member of this class. How it is conventionally conceived needs
some comment. It is fair to say that most people who anguish over the population problem are trying
to find a way to avoid the evils of overpopulation without relinquishing any of the privileges they now
enjoy. They think that farming the seas or developing new strains of wheat will solve the problem--
technologically. I try to show here that the solution they seek cannot be found. The population
problem cannot be solved in a technical way, any more than can the problem of winning the game
of tick-tack-toe.
What Shall We Maximize?

Population, as Malthus said, naturally tends to grow "geometrically," or, as we would now say,
exponentially. In a finite world this means that the per capita share of the world's goods must steadily
decrease. Is ours a finite world?
A fair defense can be put forward for the view that the world is infinite; or that we do not know that it
is not. But, in terms of the practical problems that we must face in the next few generations with the
foreseeable technology, it is clear that we will greatly increase human misery if we do not, during the
immediate future, assume that the world available to the terrestrial human population is finite. "Space"
is no escape (2).
A finite world can support only a finite population; therefore, population growth must eventually equal
zero. (The case of perpetual wide fluctuations above and below zero is a trivial variant that need not
be discussed.) When this condition is met, what will be the situation of mankind? Specifically, can
Bentham's goal of "the greatest good for the greatest number" be realized?
No--for two reasons, each sufficient by itself. The first is a theoretical one. It is not mathematically
possible to maximize for two (or more) variables at the same time. This was clearly stated by von
Neumann and Morgenstern (3), but the principle is implicit in the theory of partial differential
equations, dating back at least to D'Alembert (1717-1783).
The second reason springs directly from biological facts. To live, any organism must have a source of
energy (for example, food). This energy is utilized for two purposes: mere maintenance and work. For
man, maintenance of life requires about 1600 kilocalories a day ("maintenance calories"). Anything
that he does over and above merely staying alive will be defined as work, and is supported by "work
calories" which he takes in. Work calories are used not only for what we call work in common speech;
they are also required for all forms of enjoyment, from swimming and automobile racing to playing
music and writing poetry. If our goal is to maximize population it is obvious what we must do: We must
make the work calories per person approach as close to zero as possible. No gourmet meals, no
vacations, no sports, no music, no literature, no art. ... I think that everyone will grant, without argument
or proof, that maximizing population does not maximize goods. Bentham's goal is impossible.
In reaching this conclusion I have made the usual assumption that it is the acquisition of energy that
is the problem. The appearance of atomic energy has led some to question this assumption. However,
given an infinite source of energy, population growth still produces an inescapable problem. The
problem of the acquisition of energy is replaced by the problem of its dissipation, as J. H. Fremlin has
so wittily shown (4). The arithmetic signs in the analysis are, as it were, reversed; but Bentham's goal is
still unobtainable.
The optimum population is, then, less than the maximum. The difficulty of defining the optimum is
enormous; so far as I know, no one has seriously tackled this problem. Reaching an acceptable and
stable solution will surely require more than one generation of hard analytical work--and much
persuasion.
We want the maximum good per person; but what is good? To one person it is wilderness, to another
it is ski lodges for thousands. To one it is estuaries to nourish ducks for hunters to shoot; to another it is
factory land. Comparing one good with another is, we usually say, impossible because goods are
incommensurable. Incommensurables cannot be compared.
Theoretically this may be true; but in real life incommensurables are commensurable. Only a criterion
of judgment and a system of weighting are needed. In nature the criterion is survival. Is it better for a
species to be small and hideable, or large and powerful? Natural selection commensurates the
incommensurables. The compromise achieved depends on a natural weighting of the values of the
variables.
Man must imitate this process. There is no doubt that in fact he already does, but unconsciously. It is
when the hidden decisions are made explicit that the arguments begin. The problem for the years
ahead is to work out an acceptable theory of weighting. Synergistic effects, nonlinear variation, and
difficulties in discounting the future make the intellectual problem difficult, but not (in principle)
insoluble.
Has any cultural group solved this practical problem at the present time, even on an intuitive level?
One simple fact proves that none has: there is no prosperous population in the world today that has,
and has had for some time, a growth rate of zero. Any people that has intuitively identified its optimum
point will soon reach it, after which its growth rate becomes and remains zero.
Of course, a positive growth rate might be taken as evidence that a population is below its optimum.
However, by any reasonable standards, the most rapidly growing populations on earth today are (in
general) the most miserable. This association (which need not be invariable) casts doubt on the
optimistic assumption that the positive growth rate of a population is evidence that it has yet to reach
its optimum.
We can make little progress in working toward optimum population size until we explicitly exorcize the
spirit of Adam Smith in the field of practical demography. In economic affairs, The Wealth of
Nations (1776) popularized the "invisible hand," the idea that an individual who "intends only his own
gain," is, as it were, "led by an invisible hand to promote . . . the public interest" (5). Adam Smith did
not assert that this was invariably true, and perhaps neither did any of his followers. But he contributed
to a dominant tendency of thought that has ever since interfered with positive action based on
rational analysis, namely, the tendency to assume that decisions reached individually will, in fact, be
the best decisions for an entire society. If this assumption is correct it justifies the continuance of our
present policy of laissez-faire in reproduction. If it is correct we can assume that men will control their
individual fecundity so as to produce the optimum population. If the assumption is not correct, we
need to reexamine our individual freedoms to see which ones are defensible.
Tragedy of Freedom in a Commons

The rebuttal to the invisible hand in population control is to be found in a scenario first sketched in a
little-known pamphlet (6) in 1833 by a mathematical amateur named William Forster Lloyd (1794-
1852). We may well call it "the tragedy of the commons," using the word "tragedy" as the philosopher
Whitehead used it (7): "The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity
of the remorseless working of things." He then goes on to say, "This inevitableness of destiny can only
be illustrated in terms of human life by incidents which in fact involve unhappiness. For it is only by
them that the futility of escape can be made evident in the drama."
The tragedy of the commons develops in this way. Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected
that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an
arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and
disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land.
Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social
stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates
tragedy.
As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. Explicitly or implicitly, more or less
consciously, he asks, "What is the utility to me of adding one more animal to my herd?" This utility has
one negative and one positive component.
1) The positive component is a function of the increment of one animal. Since the herdsman receives
all the proceeds from the sale of the additional animal, the positive utility is nearly +1.
2) The negative component is a function of the additional overgrazing created by one more animal.
Since, however, the effects of overgrazing are shared by all the herdsmen, the negative utility for any
particular decision-making herdsman is only a fraction of –1.
Adding together the component partial utilities, the rational herdsman concludes that the only
sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another; and another... But
this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is
the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit--in
a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best
interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin
to all.
Some would say that this is a platitude. Would that it were! In a sense, it was learned thousands of
years ago, but natural selection favors the forces of psychological denial (8). The individual benefits
as an individual from his ability to deny the truth even though society as a whole, of which he is a part,
suffers.
Education can counteract the natural tendency to do the wrong thing, but the inexorable succession
of generations requires that the basis for this knowledge be constantly refreshed.
A simple incident that occurred a few years ago in Leominster, Massachusetts, shows how perishable
the knowledge is. During the Christmas shopping season the parking meters downtown were covered
with plastic bags that bore tags reading: "Do not open until after Christmas. Free parking courtesy of
the mayor and city council." In other words, facing the prospect of an increased demand for already
scarce space. the city fathers reinstituted the system of the commons. (Cynically, we suspect that
they gained more votes than they lost by this retrogressive act.)
In an approximate way, the logic of the commons has been understood for a long time, perhaps
since the discovery of agriculture or the invention of private property in real estate. But it is understood
mostly only in special cases which are not sufficiently generalized. Even at this late date, cattlemen
leasing national land on the western ranges demonstrate no more than an ambivalent
understanding, in constantly pressuring federal authorities to increase the head count to the point
where overgrazing produces erosion and weed-dominance. Likewise, the oceans of the world
continue to suffer from the survival of the philosophy of the commons. Maritime nations still respond
automatically to the shibboleth of the "freedom of the seas." Professing to believe in the "inexhaustible
resources of the oceans," they bring species after species of fish and whales closer to extinction (9).
The National Parks present another instance of the working out of the tragedy of the commons. At
present, they are open to all, without limit. The parks themselves are limited in extent--there is only one
Yosemite Valley--whereas population seems to grow without limit. The values that visitors seek in the
parks are steadily eroded. Plainly, we must soon cease to treat the parks as commons or they will be
of no value to anyone.
What shall we do? We have several options. We might sell them off as private property. We might
keep them as public property, but allocate the right to enter them. The allocation might be on the
basis of wealth, by the use of an auction system. It might be on the basis of merit, as defined by some
agreed-upon standards. It might be by lottery. Or it might be on a first-come, first-served basis,
administered to long queues. These, I think, are all the reasonable possibilities. They are all
objectionable. But we must choose--or acquiesce in the destruction of the commons that we call our
National Parks.
Pollution
In a reverse way, the tragedy of the commons reappears in problems of pollution. Here it is not a
question of taking something out of the commons, but of putting something in--sewage, or chemical,
radioactive, and heat wastes into water; noxious and dangerous fumes into the air, and distracting
and unpleasant advertising signs into the line of sight. The calculations of utility are much the same as
before. The rational man finds that his share of the cost of the wastes he discharges into the commons
is less than the cost of purifying his wastes before releasing them. Since this is true for everyone, we are
locked into a system of "fouling our own nest," so long as we behave only as independent, rational,
free-enterprisers.
The tragedy of the commons as a food basket is averted by private property, or something formally
like it. But the air and waters surrounding us cannot readily be fenced, and so the tragedy of the
commons as a cesspool must be prevented by different means, by coercive laws or taxing devices
that make it cheaper for the polluter to treat his pollutants than to discharge them untreated. We
have not progressed as far with the solution of this problem as we have with the first. Indeed, our
particular concept of private property, which deters us from exhausting the positive resources of the
earth, favors pollution. The owner of a factory on the bank of a stream--whose property extends to
the middle of the stream, often has difficulty seeing why it is not his natural right to muddy the waters
flowing past his door. The law, always behind the times, requires elaborate stitching and fitting to
adapt it to this newly perceived aspect of the commons.
The pollution problem is a consequence of population. It did not much matter how a lonely American
frontiersman disposed of his waste. "Flowing water purifies itself every 10 miles," my grandfather used
to say, and the myth was near enough to the truth when he was a boy, for there were not too many
people. But as population became denser, the natural chemical and biological recycling processes
became overloaded, calling for a redefinition of property rights.
How To Legislate Temperance?

Analysis of the pollution problem as a function of population density uncovers a not generally
recognized principle of morality, namely: the morality of an act is a function of the state of the system
at the time it is performed (10). Using the commons as a cesspool does not harm the general public
under frontier conditions, because there is no public, the same behavior in a metropolis is unbearable.
A hundred and fifty years ago a plainsman could kill an American bison, cut out only the tongue for
his dinner, and discard the rest of the animal. He was not in any important sense being wasteful. Today,
with only a few thousand bison left, we would be appalled at such behavior.
In passing, it is worth noting that the morality of an act cannot be determined from a photograph.
One does not know whether a man killing an elephant or setting fire to the grassland is harming others
until one knows the total system in which his act appears. "One picture is worth a thousand words,"
said an ancient Chinese; but it may take 10,000 words to validate it. It is as tempting to ecologists as
it is to reformers in general to try to persuade others by way of the photographic shortcut. But the
essense of an argument cannot be photographed: it must be presented rationally--in words.
That morality is system-sensitive escaped the attention of most codifiers of ethics in the past. "Thou
shalt not . . ." is the form of traditional ethical directives which make no allowance for particular
circumstances. The laws of our society follow the pattern of ancient ethics, and therefore are poorly
suited to governing a complex, crowded, changeable world. Our epicyclic solution is to augment
statutory law with administrative law. Since it is practically impossible to spell out all the conditions
under which it is safe to burn trash in the back yard or to run an automobile without smog-control, by
law we delegate the details to bureaus. The result is administrative law, which is rightly feared for an
ancient reason--Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?--"Who shall watch the watchers themselves?" John
Adams said that we must have "a government of laws and not men." Bureau administrators, trying to
evaluate the morality of acts in the total system, are singularly liable to corruption, producing a
government by men, not laws.
Prohibition is easy to legislate (though not necessarily to enforce); but how do we legislate
temperance? Experience indicates that it can be accomplished best through the mediation of
administrative law. We limit possibilities unnecessarily if we suppose that the sentiment of Quis
custodiet denies us the use of administrative law. We should rather retain the phrase as a perpetual
reminder of fearful dangers we cannot avoid. The great challenge facing us now is to invent the
corrective feedbacks that are needed to keep custodians honest. We must find ways to legitimate
the needed authority of both the custodians and the corrective feedbacks.
Freedom To Breed Is Intolerable

The tragedy of the commons is involved in population problems in another way. In a world governed
solely by the principle of "dog eat dog"--if indeed there ever was such a world--how many children a
family had would not be a matter of public concern. Parents who bred too exuberantly would leave
fewer descendants, not more, because they would be unable to care adequately for their children.
David Lack and others have found that such a negative feedback demonstrably controls the
fecundity of birds (11). But men are not birds, and have not acted like them for millenniums, at least.
If each human family were dependent only on its own resources; if the children of improvident parents
starved to death; if, thus, overbreeding brought its own "punishment" to the germ line--then there
would be no public interest in controlling the breeding of families. But our society is deeply committed
to the welfare state (12), and hence is confronted with another aspect of the tragedy of the
commons.
In a welfare state, how shall we deal with the family, the religion, the race, or the class (or indeed any
distinguishable and cohesive group) that adopts overbreeding as a policy to secure its own
aggrandizement (13)? To couple the concept of freedom to breed with the belief that everyone born
has an equal right to the commons is to lock the world into a tragic course of action.
Unfortunately this is just the course of action that is being pursued by the United Nations. In late 1967,
some 30 nations agreed to the following (14): The Universal Declaration of Human Rights describes
the family as the natural and fundamental unit of society. It follows that any choice and decision with
regard to the size of the family must irrevocably rest with the family itself, and cannot be made by
anyone else.
It is painful to have to deny categorically the validity of this right; denying it, one feels as
uncomfortable as a resident of Salem, Massachusetts, who denied the reality of witches in the 17th
century. At the present time, in liberal quarters, something like a taboo acts to inhibit criticism of the
United Nations. There is a feeling that the United Nations is "our last and best hope," that we shouldn't
find fault with it; we shouldn't play into the hands of the archconservatives. However, let us not forget
what Robert Louis Stevenson said: "The truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the
enemy." If we love the truth we must openly deny the validity of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, even though it is promoted by the United Nations. We should also join with Kingsley Davis (15)
in attempting to get Planned Parenthood-World Population to see the error of its ways in embracing
the same tragic ideal.
Conscience Is Self-Eliminating
It is a mistake to think that we can control the breeding of mankind in the long run by an appeal to
conscience. Charles Galton Darwin made this point when he spoke on the centennial of the
publication of his grandfather's great book. The argument is straightforward and Darwinian.
People vary. Confronted with appeals to limit breeding, some people will undoubtedly respond to the
plea more than others. Those who have more children will produce a larger fraction of the next
generation than those with more susceptible consciences. The difference will be accentuated,
generation by generation.
In C. G. Darwin's words: "It may well be that it would take hundreds of generations for the progenitive
instinct to develop in this way, but if it should do so, nature would have taken her revenge, and the
variety Homo contracipiens would become extinct and would be replaced by the variety Homo
progenitivus" (16).
The argument assumes that conscience or the desire for children (no matter which) is hereditary--but
hereditary only in the most general formal sense. The result will be the same whether the attitude is
transmitted through germ cells, or exosomatically, to use A. J. Lotka's term. (If one denies the latter
possibility as well as the former, then what's the point of education?) The argument has here been
stated in the context of the population problem, but it applies equally well to any instance in which
society appeals to an individual exploiting a commons to restrain himself for the general good--by
means of his conscience. To make such an appeal is to set up a selective system that works toward
the elimination of conscience from the race.
Pathogenic Effects of Conscience
The long-term disadvantage of an appeal to conscience should be enough to condemn it; but has
serious short-term disadvantages as well. If we ask a man who is exploiting a commons to desist "in the
name of conscience," what are we saying to him? What does he hear? --not only at the moment but
also in the wee small hours of the night when, half asleep, he remembers not merely the words we
used but also the nonverbal communication cues we gave him unawares? Sooner or later,
consciously or subconsciously, he senses that he has received two communications, and that they
are contradictory: (i) (intended communication) "If you don't do as we ask, we will openly condemn
you for not acting like a responsible citizen"; (ii) (the unintended communication) "If you do behave
as we ask, we will secretly condemn you for a simpleton who can be shamed into standing aside
while the rest of us exploit the commons."
Everyman then is caught in what Bateson has called a "double bind." Bateson and his co-workers
have made a plausible case for viewing the double bind as an important causative factor in the
genesis of schizophrenia (17). The double bind may not always be so damaging, but it always
endangers the mental health of anyone to whom it is applied. "A bad conscience," said Nietzsche, "is
a kind of illness."
To conjure up a conscience in others is tempting to anyone who wishes to extend his control beyond
the legal limits. Leaders at the highest level succumb to this temptation. Has any President during the
past generation failed to call on labor unions to moderate voluntarily their demands for higher wages,
or to steel companies to honor voluntary guidelines on prices? I can recall none. The rhetoric used on
such occasions is designed to produce feelings of guilt in noncooperators.
For centuries it was assumed without proof that guilt was a valuable, perhaps even an indispensable,
ingredient of the civilized life. Now, in this post-Freudian world, we doubt it.
Paul Goodman speaks from the modern point of view when he says: "No good has ever come from
feeling guilty, neither intelligence, policy, nor compassion. The guilty do not pay attention to the
object but only to themselves, and not even to their own interests, which might make sense, but to
their anxieties" (18).
One does not have to be a professional psychiatrist to see the consequences of anxiety. We in the
Western world are just emerging from a dreadful two-centuries-long Dark Ages of Eros that was
sustained partly by prohibition laws, but perhaps more effectively by the anxiety-generating
mechanism of education. Alex Comfort has told the story well in The Anxiety Makers (19); it is not a
pretty one.
Since proof is difficult, we may even concede that the results of anxiety may sometimes, from certain
points of view, be desirable. The larger question we should ask is whether, as a matter of policy, we
should ever encourage the use of a technique the tendency (if not the intention) of which is
psychologically pathogenic. We hear much talk these days of responsible parenthood; the coupled
words are incorporated into the titles of some organizations devoted to birth control. Some people
have proposed massive propaganda campaigns to instill responsibility into the nation's (or the world's)
breeders. But what is the meaning of the word responsibility in this context? Is it not merely a synonym
for the word conscience? When we use the word responsibility in the absence of substantial sanctions
are we not trying to browbeat a free man in a commons into acting against his own interest?
Responsibility is a verbal counterfeit for a substantial quid pro quo. It is an attempt to get something
for nothing.
If the word responsibility is to be used at all, I suggest that it be in the sense Charles Frankel uses it (20).
"Responsibility," says this philosopher, "is the product of definite social arrangements." Notice that
Frankel calls for social arrangements--not propaganda.
Mutual Coercion Mutually Agreed upon

The social arrangements that produce responsibility are arrangements that create coercion, of some
sort. Consider bank-robbing. The man who takes money from a bank acts as if the bank were a
commons. How do we prevent such action? Certainly not by trying to control his behavior solely by a
verbal appeal to his sense of responsibility. Rather than rely on propaganda we follow Frankel's lead
and insist that a bank is not a commons; we seek the definite social arrangements that will keep it
from becoming a commons. That we thereby infringe on the freedom of would-be robbers we neither
deny nor regret.
The morality of bank-robbing is particularly easy to understand because we accept complete

prohibition of this activity. We are willing to say "Thou shalt not rob banks," without providing for
exceptions. But temperance also can be created by coercion. Taxing is a good coercive device. To
keep downtown shoppers temperate in their use of parking space we introduce parking meters for
short periods, and traffic fines for longer ones. We need not actually forbid a citizen to park as long as
he wants to; we need merely make it increasingly expensive for him to do so. Not prohibition, but
carefully biased options are what we offer him. A Madison Avenue man might call this persuasion; I
prefer the greater candor of the word coercion.
Coercion is a dirty word to most liberals now, but it need not forever be so. As with the four-letter
words, its dirtiness can be cleansed away by exposure to the light, by saying it over and over without
apology or embarrassment. To many, the word coercion implies arbitrary decisions of distant and
irresponsible bureaucrats; but this is not a necessary part of its meaning. The only kind of coercion I
recommend is mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon by the majority of the people affected.
To say that we mutually agree to coercion is not to say that we are required to enjoy it, or even to
pretend we enjoy it. Who enjoys taxes? We all grumble about them. But we accept compulsory taxes
because we recognize that voluntary taxes would favor the conscienceless. We institute and
(grumblingly) support taxes and other coercive devices to escape the horror of the commons.
An alternative to the commons need not be perfectly just to be preferable. With real estate and other
material goods, the alternative we have chosen is the institution of private property coupled with legal
inheritance. Is this system perfectly just? As a genetically trained biologist I deny that it is. It seems to
me that, if there are to be differences in individual inheritance, legal possession should be perfectly
correlated with biological inheritance--that those who are biologically more fit to be the custodians
of property and power should legally inherit more. But genetic recombination continually makes a
mockery of the doctrine of "like father, like son" implicit in our laws of legal inheritance. An idiot can
inherit millions, and a trust fund can keep his estate intact. We must admit that our legal system of
private property plus inheritance is unjust--but we put up with it because we are not convinced, at
the moment, that anyone has invented a better system. The alternative of the commons is too
horrifying to contemplate. Injustice is preferable to total ruin.
It is one of the peculiarities of the warfare between reform and the status quo that it is thoughtlessly
governed by a double standard. Whenever a reform measure is proposed it is often defeated when
its opponents triumphantly discover a flaw in it. As Kingsley Davis has pointed out (21), worshippers of
the status quo sometimes imply that no reform is possible without unanimous agreement, an
implication contrary to historical fact. As nearly as I can make out, automatic rejection of proposed
reforms is based on one of two unconscious assumptions: (i) that the status quo is perfect; or (ii) that
the choice we face is between reform and no action; if the proposed reform is imperfect, we
presumably should take no action at all, while we wait for a perfect proposal.
But we can never do nothing. That which we have done for thousands of years is also action. It also
produces evils. Once we are aware that the status quo is action, we can then compare its
discoverable advantages and disadvantages with the predicted advantages and disadvantages of
the proposed reform, discounting as best we can for our lack of experience. On the basis of such a
comparison, we can make a rational decision which will not involve the unworkable assumption that
only perfect systems are tolerable.
Recognition of Necessity
Perhaps the simplest summary of this analysis of man's population problems is this: the commons, if
justifiable at all, is justifiable only under conditions of low-population density. As the human population
has increased, the commons has had to be abandoned in one aspect after another.
First we abandoned the commons in food gathering, enclosing farm land and restricting pastures and
hunting and fishing areas. These restrictions are still not complete throughout the world.
Somewhat later we saw that the commons as a place for waste disposal would also have to be
abandoned. Restrictions on the disposal of domestic sewage are widely accepted in the Western
world; we are still struggling to close the commons to pollution by automobiles, factories, insecticide
sprayers, fertilizing operations, and atomic energy installations.
In a still more embryonic state is our recognition of the evils of the commons in matters of pleasure.
There is almost no restriction on the propagation of sound waves in the public medium. The shopping
public is assaulted with mindless music, without its consent. Our government is paying out billions of
dollars to create supersonic transport which will disturb 50,000 people for every one person who is
whisked from coast to coast 3 hours faster. Advertisers muddy the airwaves of radio and television
and pollute the view of travelers. We are a long way from outlawing the commons in matters of
pleasure. Is this because our Puritan inheritance makes us view pleasure as something of a sin, and
pain (that is, the pollution of advertising) as the sign of virtue?
Every new enclosure of the commons involves the infringement of somebody's personal liberty.
Infringements made in the distant past are accepted because no contemporary complains of a loss.
It is the newly proposed infringements that we vigorously oppose; cries of "rights" and "freedom" fill the
air. But what does "freedom" mean? When men mutually agreed to pass laws against robbing,
mankind became more free, not less so. Individuals locked into the logic of the commons are free
only to bring on universal ruin; once they see the necessity of mutual coercion, they become free to
pursue other goals. I believe it was Hegel who said, "Freedom is the recognition of necessity."
The most important aspect of necessity that we must now recognize, is the necessity of abandoning
the commons in breeding. No technical solution can rescue us from the misery of overpopulation.
Freedom to breed will bring ruin to all. At the moment, to avoid hard decisions many of us are tempted
to propagandize for conscience and responsible parenthood. The temptation must be resisted,
because an appeal to independently acting consciences selects for the disappearance of all
conscience in the long run, and an increase in anxiety in the short.
The only way we can preserve and nurture other and more precious freedoms is by relinquishing the
freedom to breed, and that very soon. "Freedom is the recognition of necessity"--and it is the role of
education to reveal to all the necessity of abandoning the freedom to breed. Only so, can we put an
end to this aspect of the tragedy of the commons.
“Scientists tackle mystery of thunderstorms that strike at night” (NCAR)
Retrieved from https://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=135046 on 4 June 2021 at 11:06 PM
News Release 15-057

Scientists tackle mystery of thunderstorms that strike at night
Researchers will spend six weeks this summer probing nighttime thunderstorms on the Great Plains
PECAN scientists are studying nighttime thunderstorms.

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May 20, 2015

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Thunderstorms that form at night, without a spark from the sun's heat, are a mysterious phenomenon.
This summer, scientists will be staying up late in search of some answers.
From June 1 through July 15, researchers from across North America will fan out each evening across
the Great Plains, where storms are more common at night than during the day.
The effort, co-organized by numerous collaborating institutions, will use lab-equipped aircraft,
ground-based instruments and weather balloons to better understand the atmospheric conditions
that lead to storm formation and evolution after sunset.
What the scientists find may ultimately help improve forecasts of these sometimes damaging storms.
The Plains Elevated Convection at Night (PECAN) field campaign will involve scientists, students and
support staff from eight research laboratories and 14 universities.
The $13.5 million project is largely funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), which
contributed $10.6 million. Additional support is provided by NASA, the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the U.S. Department of Energy.
Aloft in the night

Thunderstorms that form during the day are less puzzling than nighttime storms.
The sun heats the surface of Earth, which in turn warms the air directly above the ground. When that
warm air is forced to rise, it causes convection--a circulation of warm updrafts and cool downdrafts-
-and sometimes creates a storm.
But the formation of thunderstorms at night, when the sun is not baking the land, is less well
understood.
"At night, the entire storm circulation is elevated higher off the ground," said National Center for
Atmospheric Research (NCAR) scientist Tammy Weckwerth, a PECAN principal investigator.
"This makes observations of the conditions leading to nighttime thunderstorms much more
challenging because that part of the atmosphere is not well covered by the network of instruments
we normally rely on."
The vast array of instruments available to PECAN researchers will allow them to collect data higher in
the atmosphere.
The data will help scientists characterize the conditions that lead to individual storm formation as
well as to the clustering and organizing of these storms into large-scale systems, which can result in
significant precipitation.
"Nighttime thunderstorms are an essential source of summer rain for crops, but are also a potential
hazard through excessive rainfall, flash flooding and dangerous cloud-to-ground lightning," said Ed
Bensman, a program director in NSF's Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences, which
funded the research.
"Weather forecast models often struggle to accurately account for this critical element of summer
rainfall on the Great Plains," said Bensman. "The PECAN field campaign will provide researchers and
operational forecasters with valuable insights into thunderstorms at night and improve our ability to
model them more accurately."
Deploying in the dark

The campaign, based in Hays, Kan., will begin each day at 8 a.m. when a crew of forecasters starts
developing a nightly forecast.
At 3 p.m., the scientists will use the forecast to determine where across northern Oklahoma, central
Kansas or south-central Nebraska to deploy their mobile resources.
Moving dozens of people around the Great Plains each night will be a challenge for PECAN, but it's
also what distinguishes it from past field projects.
"Previous severe weather campaigns focused mostly on daytime storms, for largely practical
reasons, as it's more difficult to set up instruments in the dark," said Bart Geerts, an atmospheric
scientist at the University of Wyoming (UW) and a PECAN principal investigator.
"But the large thunderstorm complexes traveling across the Great Plains at night really are a different
beast."
Scientists believe that several factors may interact to contribute to nocturnal storm formation and
maintenance: a stable layer of air at the surface; a strong wind current above that layer, known as
a low-level jet; and atmospheric waves, some of which are called "bores," that ripple out from the
storms themselves.
"But we don't really know how they interact," Geerts said. "That's what PECAN is about."
A better understanding of these storms will have relevance for areas beyond the Great Plains.
Clustered nighttime thunderstorms are common in regions scattered across the globe.
Adds Howie Bluestein, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Oklahoma who is participating in
PECAN, "Thunderstorms that occur during the middle of the night over the central Plains in the late
spring and early summer have been enigmatic. Data collected during PECAN will help us better
understand and predict these rain systems."
A fleet of instruments
PECAN will use three research aircraft, two of which--a UW's King Air and NASA's DC-8--will fly in clear
air away from storms.
Only the third, a NOAA P-3, which is widely used in hurricane research and reconnaissance, will be
able to fly into the trailing regions of storms.
The researchers also will rely on a number of ground-based instruments, known as PECAN Integrated
Sounding Arrays, or PISAs.
Six PISAs will operate from fixed locations around the study area and four will be mobile, allowing
them to be repositioned each night depending on where storms are expected to form.
The instruments within each PISA vary, but collectively they will give each array the ability to
measure temperature, moisture and wind profiles, as well as launch weather balloons.
Among the instruments are several that were developed at NCAR's Earth Observing Laboratory,
including one that uses an innovative laser-based technique to remotely measure water vapor, and
an advanced wind profiler.
Finally, the scientists will have a fleet of mobile and fixed radars.
In all, PECAN researchers will have access to more than 100 instruments brought to the effort by
partner institutions.
"PECAN will be using mobile radars, traveling weather stations on vans and trucks, and other systems
to probe inside severe nighttime storms," said scientist Karen Kosiba of the Center for Severe
Weather Research, a PECAN participant.
"We want to understand more about when, where and why winds, hail and flooding rains occur,"
Kosiba said. "That will allow us to better forecast these damaging events."
Please answer the following essay items. Limit your answers to 5

sentences per item.
SAQ 3.5.1. Identify 5 factors causing climate change. Give short

explanation for each. (15 points)
SAQ 3.5.2. Give at least 5 issues in the videoclip “BUHOS by Loren

Legarda” and give ways how to combat these issues (vis-à-vis 1-1 issue
and ways). (30 points)
REFERENCES:
The Historical Timeline of Traditional to New Media

https://stnicholascom.wordpress.com/2017/11/22/the-historical-timeline-of-traditional-to-new-
media/ retrieved on 3 Jun 2021 at 11:49AM

retrieved from https://www.greenpapermusic.com/a-college-essay-sample-about-a-day-without-
technology/ on 3June 2021 at 6:45PM
I Survived a Day without Technology

https://medium.com/@jennifermonahan_28426/i-survived-a-day-without-technology-1037113cfe66 on
3 June 2021 at 10:00 PM
Jennifer B. Monahan
Timing your Technology

retrieved from https://www.gwern.net/Timing on 3 June 2021 at 6:58 PM
The Use of Technology by the Elderly

https://www.hsj.gr/medicine/the-use-of-technology-by-the-elderly.php?aid=3614 retrieved on 3
June 2021 at 7:06PM
"How We Decide"
By Jonah Lehrer '03CC (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).
Retrieved from https://magazine.columbia.edu/article/review-how-we-decide on 3 June
2021 at 7:21PM
Information: The New Language of Science (Hans Christian von Baeyer) retrieved from
https://sites.google.com/site/pdfnew2017/download-information-the-new-language-of-science-
book-pdf on 3 June 2021 at 4:40PM
Germ Catcher (David J. Ecker, Scientific American, 2014) retrieved from

file:///C:/Users/LATITUDE%20E5440/Desktop/stela%20sts/Germ%20catcher%206-
14%20page%2050%20(1).pdf on 3 June 2021 at 8:50PM
Physics of the Future: How science will shape human destiny and our daily lives by the year 2100
(Michio Kaku, Doubleday, 2011) retrieved from https://issues.org/br_elliott/ on 3 June 2021 at 9:09 PM
Evolution and biodiversity Ecoscience-Biodiversity: an overview retrieved from

https://www.ohio.k12.ky.us/userfiles/1139/Classes/25630/chapter4%20opt3.ppt on 3 June 2021 at
9:22PM
“The Politics of Golden Rice” (Dubock, Adrian GM Crops & Food. JulSep2014, Vol5 Issue 3 p 210-222
13p.) retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5033200/ on 3 June 2021 at
9:30PM
“Ethics in Research with Vulnerable Populations and Emerging Countries: The Golden Rice Case.”
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1&article=1978&context=ncilj on 3 June 2021 at 9:39 PM
Agroecology: What it is and what it has to offer? Is this the future of farming?
Retrieved from https://pubs.iied.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/migrate/14629IIED.pdf on 3 June 2021 at
9:45PM
Ray Kurzwell on “How Technology Will Transform Us” retrieved from

file:///C:/Users/LATITUDE%20E5440/Desktop/stela%20sts/Ray%20Kurzweil_%20How%20Technology%20
Will%20Transform%20Us%20_%20The%20TEDxClassroomProject.html on 4 June 2021 at 4:10PM
Nanoscience + Ethics = Nanoethics; Societal and Ethical Implications (SEI)

David W. Mogk, MONT Project, Montana State University
Rertrieved at https://serc.carleton.edu/msu_nanotech/nano_ethics.html on 4 June 2021 at 4:25PM
“Environmental Impacts of Nanotechnology and Its Products” (Zhang et. Al Proceedings of the 2011
Midwest Section Conference of the American Society for Engineering Education, 2011) retrieved at
https://faculty.atu.edu/cgreco/ASEEmw_2011/ASEE_2011_Proceedings/Peer_Reviewed_Papers/ASE
E-MIDWEST_0030_c25dbf.pdf on 4 June 2021 at 4:36PM
Nanotechnology 'culture war' possible, study says

https://phys.org/news/2008-12-nanotechnology-culture-war.html retrieved on 4 June 2021 at 5:10PM
About stem cells

Retrieved at https://www.healthline.com/health/stem-cell-research#takeaway on 4 June 2021 at
5:21PM
The Stem Cell Divide

BYRICK WEISSREPUBLISHED FROM THE PAGES OF NATIONAL
GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE
Retrived from
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/stem -cell-
divide on 4 June 2021 at 5;50PM
Retrieved from https://bestofink.wordpress.com/2012/07/08/susan-lim-transplant-cells-not-organs/ on
4 June 2021 at 6:01 PM

Raya Bidshahri / Mar 26, 2017
Retrieved from https://singularityhub.com/2017/03/26/the-rise-of-a-new-species-of-human-being/ on
4 June 2021 at 9:43PM
“An inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What we can Do About
It” (Al Gore)
Retrieved from https://www.energytoday.net/environmental-health-impact/climate-change/an-
inconvenient-truth-the-planetary-emergency-of-global-warming-and-what-we-can-do-about-it/ on
4 June 2021 at 10:16PM
What Are the Drivers of Global Change? An excerpt from “The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change.”
by Al Gore, on March 7, 2013
Retrieved from https://www.sciencefriday.com/articles/what-are-the-drivers-of-global-change/ on 4
June 2021 at 10:33 PM
“ Changing the Atmosphere: Anthropology and Climate Change” (NCAR)

Retrieved from https://s3.amazonaws.com/rdcms-
aaa/files/production/public/FileDownloads/pdfs/cmtes/commissions/upload/GCCTF-Changing-the-
Atmosphere.pdf on 4 June 2021 at 10:38PM

September 11, 2010
Retrieved from https://lorenlegarda.com.ph/legardas-buhos-climate-change-documentary-
launched/ on 4 June 2021 at 10:41 PM
Buhos is an eye-opener
Retrieved from https://www.philstar.com/entertainment/2010/09/15/611860/buhos-eye-opener on 4
June 2021 at 10:46PM
The Tragedy of the Commons by Garrett Hardin

Science 13 Dec 1968:
Vol. 162, Issue 3859, pp. 1243-1248
DOI: 10.1126/science.162.3859.1243
Retrieved from https://science.sciencemag.org/content/162/3859/1243.full on 4 June 2021 at 10:55
PM
“Scientists tackle mystery of thunderstorms that strike at night” (NCAR)

Retrieved from https://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=135046 on 4 June 2021 at 11:06
PM
VIDEOCLIPS (YouTube file)
TEDTalk: Julian Assange on “Why the World Needs Wikileaks”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNOnvp5t7Do&t=381s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvgbthJBQN4&t=68s
Ray Kurzwell on “How Technology Will Transform Us”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nt9zQyrsmY8&t=2s
Science Friction: Stem Cell Research

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPy7NFkJ-TQ&t=38s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJtS2YH4Ny0&t=111s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNcLKbJs3xk
Michio Kakus: 10 Predictions for the Future

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auyEhpJ71Ys&t=240s
“An inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What we can Do About
It” (Al Gore)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-T-yqlH67_4&t=262s
Al Gore: The Case of Optimism on Climate Change TED Talk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVfgkFaswn4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcMruvH8AfY

Module 3

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The Science education students, shall attain the following objectives here in Module 3,

1. STS in information age

SAQ 3.1. The present situation is pampered by information which

THE INFORMATION AGE (GUTENBERG TO SOCIAL MEDIA)

Drawings in Caves (38000 BCE). Communication began as

Punch Cards ( ). A punched card or punch card is a piece of

Codex (-300 BC). A book constructed of a number of sheets of paper,

Telegraph (1770). Telegraphy is the long-distance transmission of

Typewriter (1846). A typewriter is a mechanical or electro-mechanical machine

Vitascope (1900). Edison Vitascope was on public debut in New York,

Transmitter (1946). James Lindenberg, an American engineer began

Packard (1969). Packard Bell is a Dutch-based computer manufacturing

Apple 1 (1980). Apple Computer 1, also known later as the Apple I, or

Laptop (1986). A laptop, often called a notebook or “notebook computer”,

Bulletin Board System (1993). A computer running software that

First Smartphone (1999). A refined version was marketed to

Live journal, Blogs (2003), It is a Russian (originally American) social

Skype (2004). Skype is an instant messaging app that provides online

Youtube (2006). YouTube is an American video-sharing website

Twitter (2008). Twitter is an online news and social networking service

Netbook (2013) Netbook is a generic name given to a category of small,

TEDTalk: Julian Assange on “Why the World Needs Wikileaks”

LET’S WATCH THIS!!!

A day without Technology

I Survived a Day without Technology

TIMING TECHNOLOGY: LESSONS

The Use of Technology by the Elderly

Material and Method

Figure 1: Distribution of the sample according to the use of electrical device.

Figure 2: Use of electrical appliances by gender

Germ Catcher (David J. Ecker, Scientific American, 2014) retrieved from

Read the article on Germ Catcher that is included in this module.

Germ Catcher (David J. Ecker, Scientific

The Human Future

BIODIVERSITY AND THE HEALTHY SOCIETY

Evolution and biodiversity Ecoscience-Biodiversity: an overview retrieved from

The Politics of Golden Rice

Ray Kurzwell on “How Technology Will Transform Us” retrieved from

Why the sudden transformation?

Well this sounds truly amazing; why am I so terrified?

Nanoscience + Ethics = Nanoethics; Societal and Ethical Implications (SEI)

Oh brave new world! The nanotechnology

• Nanotechnology is addressing societal and ethical implications (SEI) up front, and as an

• address tomorrow's needs and aspirations'

“Environmental Impacts of Nanotechnology and Its Products” (Zhang et. Al Proceedings of

Environmental Impacts of Nanotechnology and Its Products

NOTE: The full paper is included in the google classroom

Citation: Nature Nanotechnology (Advance Online Publication December 7, 2008)

SAQ 3.3. Discuss 3 ethical issues (specific illustration with short

GENE THERAPY (STEM CELLS)

About stem cells

Types of stem cells

Embryonic stem cells

Non-embryonic (adult) stem cells

Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs)

Cord blood stem cells and amniotic fluid stem cells

Stem cell research controversy

Stem cell policy under former President George W. Bush

Stem cell policy under President Barack Obama

Examples of stem cell research

Using stem cells to test new drugs

The Stem Cell Divide