Author Archives: Michael11111

CHECKLIST: SPOTTING THE IMPORTANT JUDGES OF YOUR WORK/CONTRIBUTION

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This checklist is from  my book, How to Ask the SMART QUESTIONS for Winning the Games of Career and Life

Checklist: Spotting the important judges

  • Who are the important judges of how well I’m doing my job? Why are they the key judges, and not others?
  • What criteria are they using to judge me and my contribution?
  • Are these the most appropriate measures? If not, what should be the criteria be, and how can I “educate” them to recognize and judge by the criteria that are truly important?
  • Are the apparent judges the truly important judges? For instance, is my outside client a more important judge than my supervisor? If not, what should I do about it?
  • If I am locked in with inappropriate judges, is there a way to bypass them and get the attention of ones who are more appropriate—or more open to me?
  • Overall, what are the practical implications for me?

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Have a heart? Don’t let it break. Now they can recycle it!

Anti-aging Mind-science techo blog My books Uncategorized No Comments

I came on an intriguing article in MIT Technology Review, “Transplant surgeons revive hearts after death.”

These days, we’re familiar with heart transplants from brain-dead patients into others needing a new, healthy heart.

But in a new experimental breakthrough, successes have been achieved in transplanting the hearts of those not brain dead. Yes, there are procedural and ethical issues involved.

Mind you, this involves actual human hearts, not 3-D printed replacements, or bits of heart tissue grown in labs from human stem cells.

But the possibility raises some issues of medical ethics to be explored: if the donor is not brain dead, when and by what criteria can the heart be removed?

Rather than dig in deeply here, I’ll refer you to the article itself. You’ll see a “reanimated” donated heart actually beating outside the bodies of both donor and recipient.  Here’s the link.

Should a human-pig chimera be treated as a human?

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“Should a human-pig chimera be treated as a human?”–that’s the title of an article I came upon in Aeon.  https://aeon.co/ideas/should-a-human-pig-chimera-be-treated-as-a-person

It’s a variation of a question that I raise early-on in my technothriller,  A REMEDY FOR DEATH. In REMEDY, a researcher tries to implant brain cells from a human fetus into a young chimp. (Not a plot-spoiler: that is only a small part of the story.)

In the Aeon article, the focus is on the pigs that may be used to grow replacement human organs.

“In this case, the scientists take a skin cell from a human and from this make stem cells capable of producing any cell or tissue in the body, known as ‘induced pluripotent stem cells’. They then inject these into a pig embryo to make a human-pig chimera. In order to create the desired organ, they use gene editing, or CRISPR, to knock out the embryo’s pig’s genes that produce, for example, the pancreas. The human stem cells for the pancreas then make an almost entirely human pancreas in the resulting human-pig chimera, with just the blood vessels remaining porcine. Using this controversial technology, a human skin cell, pre-treated and injected into a genetically edited pig embryo, could grow a new liver, heart, pancreas or lung as required.”

So now suppose the human patient has a fresh new pancreas grown in the pig. But, once that pancreas is taken out, what about the pig?  Off to the pork-chop shop?  No! It’s not so simple. “It is not a pig with a human pancreas inserted into it—it is a human-animal chimera . . . This could affect the chimera’s brain.”

In short, maybe, just maybe, that chimera—whether pig or chimp—may have something approaching human brain function or other “characteristics that we usually think of as having moral relevance.”

Seems far-fetched that a pig or a chimp might begin developing human-like brains, but a whole lot of far-fetched stuff  is fast becoming reality in today’s world.

 

FOR MORE on human-animal chimeras and related topics including organ harvesting, growing human body parts, human stem-cells, mice given human brain cells, what is a human?, and others I invite you to check out my blog for A REMEDY FOR DEATH.  http://www.a-remedy-for-death.com/

Indiana Jones, the Nazi Occult Bureau, and The Grail Conspiracies

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I stumbled on the article, “Did Nazis really try to make Zombies? The real history behind one of our weirdest WW II obsessions” by Noah Charney in Salon August 22, 2015.http://www.salon.com/2015/08/22/did_nazis_really_try_to_make_zombies_the_real_history_behind_one_of_our_weirdest_wwii_obsessions/

I almost skipped it because Zombies never have been my thing, but I recognized Noah Charney’s name as a respected and prolific author on art and related history (more on him later) so I took a look.

Glad I did.  I was already familiar with most of the Nazi explorations in the occult and strange science from my own research on various of my thrillers, particularly The Grail Conspiracies.

But for the “normal” person (not so well versed in this stuff!) Dr. Charney provides a brief but fascinating summary of the background on the Abnenerbe, the Nazi Occult Bureau, and some of its operations before and during the war.

(I had forgotten that an organization like the Ahnenerbe appeared in some of the Indiana Jones movies. For that background alone, the article is worth a look if you’re fascinated by these things—or just liked the Indiana Jones movies.)

As to the question posed, Did the Nazis really try to make zombies? Charney’s response ranges over related issues, including the weird experiences  of Dr. Josef Mengele, as well as other research on various chemicals and pills to increase stamina.

There is also a segment on the background on the George Clooney film,  Monuments Men, as the search for stolen art linked in a weird way with corpses apparently hidden away to rise again with the rise of a new Nazism. (Yes, the whole range of Nazi occult obsessions are, collectively, beyond weird!)

Anyway, I recommend the article. As to Noah Charney, Ph.D.: I had first come on his name as I was researching my  thriller, Infinite Doublecross, as he has written several books and articles on art theft and forgery. (Full disclosure: I’ve never met him.)  I think the best overview is via his book list on Amazon:  Noah Charney books

A REMEDY FOR DEATH, Human-Chimp Hybrids,  Chimeras, “Chimphumans”, and “Humanzeees”

Mind-science techo blog My books Technothriller blog No Comments

Plot spoiler warning:  One plot-line in my scientific techno-thriller, A REMEDY FOR DEATH, touches upon the sensitive possibility of creating hybrids combining human and chimp cells and characteristics. But my post here won’t spoil the story, I promise. (Even though, by the way, a “Chimp Donnie appears in some of the scenes.)

But now, in the “real world”, not the world of sci-fi–  Wait! Stop the presses! These days maybe there is scant to little difference between “real” science and “science fictionalizing” what is perhaps just round the corner—for good or bad.

Sorry for the interruption. As I was saying,  David Barash, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Washington, explores some broader implications—and ethical dilemmas—in an article, “It’s Time to Make Human-Chimp Hybrids” in the magazine NAUTILUS.  http://nautil.us/issue/58/self/its-time-to-make-human_chimp-hybrids

Definitely worth reading, whether or not you come to agree with all of his in-favor arguments.

Usefully, early in the article, he clarifies the distinction hybrids and chimeras: “It is unclear whether my own imagined chimphuman will be a hybrid (produced by cross-fertilizing human and non-human gametes), or a chimera, created in a laboratory via techniques of genetic manipulation.”

He uses both “chimphuman” and “humanzee,” by the way.

(In fairness, I’d point out –possible plot-spoiler—that the method developed and being tested by Dr. Doug Daulby, lead character in A REMEDY FOR DEATH, suggests a third way of fusing humans and chimps. And hence brings its own unique ethical and legal issues.)

By the way, this concept of combining different sorts of animals—including even humans with animals—is not really so new, after all. It’s been done with race horses and various farm animals for years. But did you know that nearly a century ago the Russian biologist Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov was working on creating animal hybrids, including “zeedonks” (from combined zebras and donkeys)?

And there’s more! In the late 1920’s, with the support of Stalin, he experimented with injecting human sperm into female chimps, and then the reverse! Apparently nothing came of it.

Enough said here. The link to Dr. Barash’s article in NAUTILUS is above. And let me give a plug for NAUTILUS magazine as well, in which I first came on via this article.  Terms itself “a different kind of science magazine,” and does seem to be precisely that. Fascinating articles, and welcomes new subscribers, in print or e-edition.  The link is http://nautil.us/  (note the exact spelling.)

Just to give a sense of the savvy: this pic below is used to accompany the Barash article in NAUTILUS  Look closely! That one spooky pic conveys so much.

 

There’s another article, by John Ellis, commenting on the Barash piece in PJ MEDIA  https://pjmedia.com/faith/push-make-human-chimp-hybrids/  The title, “The Push to Make Human-Chimp Hybrids”, correctly suggests that he is less enthusiastic about the possibility.

Sample sentences from that article: “Ultimately, what Barash is after is the erasure of the uniqueness of human personhood. His argument for the making of a human-chimp hybrid is built on his rejection of any real distinctions between humanity and the rest of the animal kingdom.”

Professor Barash’s article was adapted from his upcoming book THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY: USING SCIENCE TO SEE OUR SPECIES AS IT REALLY IS.  Coming, summer 2018, Oxford University Press.

And after passing on all these plugs, time for a plug of my own for A REMEDY FOR DEATH. (Available in both p-book and e-book editions at the usual book-sellers, including Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/REMEDY-DEATH-Playing-body-biotech-ebook/dp/B00946XVKW/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1521574977&sr=1-3&keywords=mcgaulley

(Sorry for long link; can’t get the system to work right.)

My blog–in case you arrived here by other means– is www.MichaelMcGaulley.net )