Author Archives: Michael11111

Need a spare $10 Million? Catch an art thief!

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The biggest art theft in history took place at the Isabella Stewart Gardner  Museum in Boston back in the spring of 1990.  Two men, allegedly posing as police, made off with works by, among others, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Degas and Manet.

None of the paintings have ever been found, even though the museum offered a reward of $5 million. But now . . .

Now the reward has been doubled to $10 million. Time to stop thinking about it and start finding those crooks!

For more, see  Nina Siegal’s article in Bloomberg, “Cracking the Biggest Art Heist in History”

The image on the cover is adapted from the painting, “Antibes, Afternoon Effect,” by Claude Monet in 1888. Of this painting, Monet wrote, “I am painting Antibes as a small fortified town glistening golden in the sun, and standing out against the beautiful blue and pink mountains.”
The Château Grimaldi is at the center of the painting. Picasso lived and worked in the Château for a while after World War II. It is now a used as a museum, mainly for the works of Picasso, where an early scene of Infinite Doublecross takes place.
The font used on the cover is Matisse, styled on the work Henri Matisse, 1869-1954, who, like Pablo Picasso, worked in the south of France. “When I realized that every morning I would see this light again,” Matisse wrote when he first came to Nice, “I couldn’t believe how lucky I was.”

Or, if you’re not quite ready to undertake cracking that case yourself, maybe it’s time to read my art-theft thriller,

Infinite Doublecross The South of France: Art theft, art forgery, and artful duplicity

To buy it on Amazon:  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01N0MGTDB?tag=ammbt-20

Synthetic human embryos from human stem cells? Ethical issues on the horizon!

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That’s where it all begins . . .  human life, that is. What you see is a scan of the surface of a human embryonic stem cell.  (Photo credit to David Scharf and Science Source. )

An article by Carl Zimmer  in the NY Times this week raised the prospect that science is on the threshold of creating “synthetic human entities with embryolike features”.  (“Sheefs” in their acronym.)

Hold it right there!  Just what IS a “synthetic human entity with embryolike features”?

“Soon, experts predict, they will learn how to engineer these cells into new kinds of tissues and organs. Eventually, they may take on features of a mature human being.” (Quote from the Times article, my emphasis added.)

“Features of a mature human being”  –– Hmm, and what does that mean?  Does that ( in the not-so far distant future) mean man-made creatures walking around, looking like us, but with “parents” were petri dishes in a lab?

I don’t speak directly of Sheefs or stem cells in my science techno-thriller A REMEDY FOR DEATH, but the problem REMEDY raises is much the same as in the quote–taking on “features of a mature human being”.  (For the record, neither did Michael Crichton in JURASSIC PARK get into this issue of stem cells in bringing about his dinosaurs.)  But something like that had to have been done in both JURASSIC and REMEDY to reach the outcomes.

But REMEDY and JURASSIC PARK  are just science fiction. But the “fiction” is quickly fading as reality pushes up against the “what-if.”  As Paul Knoepfler, a biologist at University of California, Davis, put it, speaking of this and other  related research at the University of Cambridge: “They’ve opened the door to a lot of tough questions.”

Which echoes a warning from the fictional Kate Remington, Ph.D.  in A REMEDY FOR DEATH: “You’re opening very dangerous doorways! Once they’re open, there’s no stopping what may come through from the other side of that doorway!”

A REMEDY FOR DEATH: articles on radical life extension, reversing aging, the quest for human immortality, and regenerative medicine

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As  my technothriller, A REMEDY FOR DEATH, is set in areas including anti-aging methods, bio-engineering, radical life extension, the quest for human immortality,organ regeneration and organ fabrication, regenerative medicine, reversing aging, the quest for eternal youth, and transhumanism, I keep an eye out for articles on these and related topics.

Here are a few of the more intriguing. Normally, I’d like to comment on them and put them into perspective, but the list has grown too quickly recently.  

 

Tech titans’ latest: Project Defy Death. Washington Post, page 1 above the fold, April 5, 2015;

http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2015/04/04/tech-titans-latest-project-defy-death/#

Continue reading → A REMEDY FOR DEATH: articles on radical life extension, reversing aging, the quest for human immortality, and regenerative medicine

Organ harvesting from aborted human fetuses, medical ethics, and the medical techno-thriller, A REMEDY FOR DEATH

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The  method used in my medical techno-thriller, A REMEDY FOR DEATH, depends on human stem cells from adult donors (Induced Pluripotent Cells—IPS cells) rather than tissue from aborted fetuses–a topic very much in the news recently because of a series of videos.

(Want to know more  about Induced Pluripotent Cells? Here’s a link to a basic Wikipedia overview.)

In case the link doesn’t work, here it is in open form:   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_pluripotent_stem_cell

 That said, an alternate research strand is very much in the news these days—fetal tissue research using organs from aborted fetuses.

Reasonable people can—and most definitely do, strongly—disagree on the medical ethics not only of abortion but also of “organ harvesting” from the resulting fetus. The fields of bio-engineering, tissue engineering and regenerative medicine are moving very fast, and  medical ethicists are struggling to keep apace.

I expect you’ve heard about—and perhaps watched—the series of videos made by the Center for Medical Progress, an anti-abortion group recording interviews with Planned Parenthood staffers, as well as shots of the product of abortions induced in Planned Parenthood  facilities.

In A REMEDY FOR DEATH,   I  raised different but related issues involving bio-engineering, organ harvesting and other issues–different because the plot-line does not involve aborted fetuses. But it does  touch upon some of the same issues of medical ethics and biological research ethics as are raised by these videos and resulting discussions.

For  an informative, balanced article on this issue of using aborted human fetal tissue in research, I suggest Sarah Kliff’s piece in VOX: “The Planned Parenthood controversy over aborted fetus body parts, explained”

That link repeated, in case it didn’t come through:  http://www.vox.com/2015/7/14/8964513/planned-parenthood-aborted-fetuses

Stolen Art, Dirty Money, an INFINITE DOUBLECROSS (and an article in the New York Times)

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The New York Times today ran a long article, “Has the Art Market Become an Unwitting Partner in Crime?” It looks at the intertwining roles of the super-rich, art thieves and forgers, money launderers, and shady art dealers–almost sounds like those bad folks got ideas from my international crime thriller, INFINITE DOUBLECROSS.

One pull-out: “The art market is an ideal playing ground for money laundering.”  Another: “Beyond the question of money-laundering, some experts say the anonymity of buyers and sellers hinders their ability to track ownership, a key element in establishing a work’s authenticity.”

Here’s the article: NYTimes February 20, 2017 https://nyti.ms/2lxbFJe

The illustration, from the Times, is Au Lit: Le Baiser, Toulouse-Lautrac