The PenOpticon

Three cheers to Denise Faustman, the innovative Diabetes researcher who has found a way to halt the autoimmune process that destroys pancreatic islet cells in Type I diabetics. So far, her work has focused on diabetic mice, but because her approach involves modulating the immune system, there is good chance it may also work in humans. She has succeeded in reversing diabetes in mice by injecting them with Freund’s Complete Adjuvant (FCA), a mixture of water, oil and parts of dead bacteria. Apparently this compound stimulates T cells that attack the pancreas and causes those T cells to self-destruct. Faustman’s research also involved transplanting spleen cells into the mice and she found that these cells differentiated into islet cells, allowing the treated mice to produce their own insulin. The big news this week is that three other labratories have now independently validated the first procedure — the abatement of autoimmune islet destruction. While these labs did not confirm that spleen cells had any effect on producing new islet cells, they did discover that a significant number of tested mice regenerated their own islet cells after the destructive T cells were eliminated. In other words, by teaching the immune system to stop attacking islet cells, these researchers found that many diabetic mice were able to self-repair islet function and produce their own insulin.

This is absolutely fabulous news. A cure for diabetes would make millions of people happy and would free up billions of dollars that could be spent to tackle other diseases and global issues. It just might create an avalanche of good! With significant help from the Iacocca Foundation, Faustman is gearing up for human trials of this treatment. If you would like to help out, please donate a few dollars to help fund Faustman’s work at the Massachusetts General Hospital Diabetes Unit.

It’s important to realize that despite the promise shown in Faustman’s work, her efforts have garnered no interest or money from large pharmaceutical companies or from the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. Some have accused the JDRF of refusing funding due to a political bias that favours stem cell research. If that is the case, Faustman’s work will rely even more on individual donations if it is to continue.

I’ve never been a big fan of computer games. Perhaps it’s because my brother and I were teenagers when the first TV “Pong” game came on the market. We had one, and for a few months we played against each other and against “the box” for hours every day. The games were limiting, but they did help us channel a bad case of sibbling rivalry into a safe, bruise-free virtual space. In any case, once you’ve experienced the monochromatic excitement of a 5-hour Pong marathon, modern 3D games with their billions of polygons and complex shaders just don’t hold much interest. Or maybe it’s just that I truly suck at ‘em. In any case, the video game era has left me in the dust.

And then there was Weboggle.

It’s a great web adaptation of Boggle. It’s simple and elegantly done. It’s fun and it’s free. But the competition is fierce. You can take everyone on or you can play in teams. If you love words, you should PLAY THIS GAME.

Pick a handle and attach it to a sharp pointy idea

There is nothing deep about playing Weboggle, but a while back I was musing over the game handles players were choosing. The freedom to adopt any handle allows WebBoggle users to assert a kind of agency, to link themselves with a political movement, a trend, an emotion or just about anything. The screen on the left is fairly typical: players include “Bush War Devil”, “Kerry is Satan”, “AWOL Bush”, “Go SOX Go Kerry”, etc. Some players log in with web site addresses (hoping other users will visit their URLs). Others use self-disparaging (or aggrandizing) names. Nothing new here — the web has always been about alter egos and virtual (risk free) grandstanding. For me the interesting aspect of using these handles is in linking the player’s message with their skill level. A pro-Bush player who wins consistently seems to mean more than a similar name that languishes in the bottom half of the score box. I don’t really believe this, but it “feels” like it is true. In Colbertian terms, there seems to be a quality of truthiness in Weboggle handles. I could add that it seems as if anti-Bush players seem land in the top five positions more frequently. But this could be my own subjective bias — I am blinded by the truthiness. Perhaps all of this says something about the culture of winning that permeates our world and what it does done to our language. We compress complex sets of ideas into “platforms”, talking points, sound bites, slogans and even single words: flip-flop, AWOL, global test, etc. A picture is worth a thousand words, but a single word can be worth a million votes. Or so it would seem. On the other hand, looking for meaning in Weboggle scores is probably at least as silly the thought that exercising one’s “agency” by playing Weboggle could ever be a meaningful political act.

Ok, it’s a very small chuckle. Rick Mercer of The Mercer Report fame recently challenged anyone with too much time on their hands to create an image that takes Canada’s Prime Minister out of one strange context and insert him in another.

On the left we have the original: Prime Minister Harper poses in Zombie-like fashion with what appears to be either a tin of Plutonium or a lovely cheesecake. It wanted a bit of symbolism, so I placed Harper, a staunch westerner, on a rusty tractor so he could take David Emmerson’s head to market. Not to be confused with Ralph Waldo, this Emmerson is a former Liberal M.P. who crossed the floor to join Harper’s cabinet about 25 seconds after being re-elected. In Canada, some politicians are bought and sold like bushels of wheat. U.S. congress members are a little more expensive, I’m told. This is old news, of course, but it can be legitimately be repeated over and over out of respect for Emerson’s constuents who were kicked in their political pearly whites by his defection.

If I was really trying to be fair (ha!), I would have completed the picture by placing Belinda Stronach in front of the tractor. Harper would be unlikely to brake for a Convervative member who defected to the Liberals and quite a few boomer Tories living in Newmarket, Ontario would be cheering him on.

On the otherhand, at least Belinda had the grace to defect before any votes were actually cast — and she was still elected.

Another gawdawful February has finally run its course — though this Feb was more like a typical southern Ontario Jan and Jan was more like a Mar or an Apr. Clearly someone is mixing up the months. Could it be us? In any case, if you live in a northern climate then I hope this Chestnut-sided warbler gives you some hope for the coming spring. Two years ago I was lucky enough to spend some time around Pt Pelee, Ontario during spring migration. On the day this was taken, two large groups of birders were standing on either side of me, straining to see a fairly rare Golden Wing warbler. They couldn’t understand what I was looking at because I was very close to the Golden Wing and not looking at it. My view of that bird was blocked, but this little guy decided to pose on a branch just a few feet from from me. Bayootifool plumage, wot? Just goes to prove again that the most beautiful things imaginable are often closer to us than we think and that learning how to see is as difficult as it is important. I keep relearning this lesson every time we tramp around the edges of forests, wetlands and lakes looking for birds. Annie Dillard points out in her essay, Seeing: “My eyes account for less than one percent of the weight of my head; I’m bony and dense; I see what I expect”. Bony and dense. She can say that again.