Truck Driving in the Age of Instant Gratification

Alvaro and I follow Interstate 40 east as it carves a wedge-shaped gap through the Smokey Mountains. He has just spent the last five hundred miles of our trip telling me how stressful long haul truck driving can be. Tight deadlines, an erratic sleep pattern, short-tempered shippers, traffic, weather—his work involves navigating myriad contingencies in order to do one thing: be on time. After several hours of talking about stress, I ask, “what brings you back to the job?” “I like the rush,” he replies. “Like when you’ve been driving all night, and pushing and pushing, and you get there, and your body and your hands are shaking, and your vision is just like….” He can’t find the words to describe his feelings, so he gestures forward with both hands to make the image of a narrowing passage: “I love that feeling.”

Alvaro is one of dozens of American truck drivers I talked to and rode alongside over the last three years as part of a larger study on time pressure, stress, and busyness in the American workplace. Like many drivers I met, Alvaro has a unique knowledge of the limits of his body. I would argue that, because of this specialized knowledge, he has a “professionalized body.” Those two words do not often appear together when we talk about work today. A professional is more often thought of as a knowledge worker. He or she has specialized knowledge of concepts and procedures gained through formal training that instills a deep commitment to work as a “calling.”

My experiences with truck drivers, however, have shown me that what appears on the surface to be “unskilled” labor actually relies on a professional attitude toward the body that calls on workers to cultivate highly specialized forms of corporal expertise. To have success in the industry, drivers must develop an understanding of their body rhythms—sleep, attention, motivation, and adrenaline—and learn to manipulate these rhythms in order to facilitate the flow of freight. However, the very institutions within the industry that require the professionalization of drivers’ bodies—motor carrier firms, shipping and receiving departments within the nation’s companies, and the federal agencies that oversee driver safety—do not acknowledge drivers’ specialized knowledge and their corporal commitment to the job. Drivers’ professionalized bodies are thus an important but largely invisible foundation upon which the contemporary logistics system is built. To put a finer point on it—when you click the “Place Your Order” button at Amazon.com, for example, you are probably unaware that you have remotely clicked on a truck driver’s body. Because of this invisibility, many drivers I talked to feel misrecognized. They must find sources of dignity within a system that simultaneously relies on and denies their expertise.
Time and Space

The central dynamic that calls on drivers to professionalize their bodies is the relationship between time and space in their work environment. Most American truck drivers are paid by the mile but regulated by the hour. They are paid either a certain number of cents per mile driven or a percentage of the freight bill upon delivery. Either way, only a moving truck “pays the bills.” Time is money for truck drivers only insofar as it relates to space. In fact, it is probably more accurate to say that, for them, space is money. The commodification of distance encourages drivers to move freight quickly from origin to destination. However, if left unchecked, pay-by-the-mile also encourages drivers to drive more miles in a day than their bodies can safely handle. Thus, even though their livelihoods are geared more to space, drivers need some set of regulations on their time. If the industry is to be both productive and safe, drivers cannot work “on their own time.” Hence, the industry has developed the Hours of Service Regulations (HOS).

The HOS are drafted by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA). Based on dozens of commissioned laboratory studies of driver fatigue and sleep, they set precise limits on the maximum number of hours drivers may work and the minimum number of hours they must sleep in order to prevent fatigue-related accidents. These rules are known as the “14-hour rule,” “11-hour rule,” “10-hour restart,” and “sleeper berth provision.”

by Benjamin H. Snyder, Hedgehog Review |  Read more:

Image: Fred Roswold

Jesús Perea, Abstract composition 77
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Magnus Thierfelder, All of this and nothing, 2011

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Oregon Football Complex Is Glittering Monument to Ducks’ Ambitions

The Football Performance Center at the University of Oregon features rugs woven by hand in Nepal, couches made in Italy and Brazilian hardwood underfoot in the weight room that is so dense, designers of this opulent palace believe it will not burn.

This is Oregon football. There is a barbershop with utensils from Milan. And a duck pond. And a locker room that can be accessed by biometric thumbprints. And chairs upholstered with the same material found in a Ferrari’s interior. And walls covered in football leather.

Nike football leather, naturally.

The Football Performance Center, which was unveiled publicly this week, is as much country club as football facility, potentially mistaken for a day spa, or an art gallery, or a sports history museum, or a spaceship — and is luxurious enough to make N.F.L. teams jealous. It is, more than anything, a testament to college football’s arms race, to the billions of dollars at stake and to the lengths that universities will go to field elite football programs.

The performance center was paid for through a donation from Phil Knight, a founder of Nike, an Oregon alum and a longtime benefactor of the university. During a tour of the facility Wednesday, university officials declined to give a dollar figure, even a ballpark one, insisting they did not know the total cost of a football center where even the garbage cans were picked with great care to match the overall design. (Early design estimates placed the facility cost at $68 million, which, based on the tour, seemed conservative.)

The tour lasted more than three hours and covered the full 145,000 square feet of the facility (with 60,000 additional square feet of parking). Nike and its relationship with Oregon is obvious early and throughout. One small logo outside the Ducks’ locker room featured the university’s mascot, wearing a top hat adorned with a dollar sign. Oregon football is often viewed through that lens by outsiders, who derisively have christened Oregon as Nike University.

“We are the University of Nike,” said Jeff Hawkins, the senior associate athletic director of football administration and operations. “We embrace it. We tell that to our recruits.”

by Greg Bishop, NY Times |  Read more:

Images: Cliff Volpe for The New York Times

P1000016 by gzammarchi on Flickr.
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How to Teach Language to Dogs

After a long day of being a dog, no dog in existence has ever curled up on a comfy couch to settle in with a good book. Dogs just don’t roll like that. But that shouldn’t imply that human words don’t or can’t have meaning for dogs.

Chaser, a Border Collie from South Carolina, first entered the news in 2011 when a Behavioral Processes paper reported she had learned and retained the distinct names of over 1,000 objects. But that’s not all. When tested on the ability to associate a novel word with an unfamiliar item, she could do that, too. She also learned that different objects fell into different categories: certain things are general “toys,” while others are the more specific “Frisbees” and, of course, there are many, many exciting “balls.” She differentiates between object labels and action commands, interpreting “fetch sock” as two separate words, not as the single phrase “fetchsock.”

Fast forward two years. Chaser and her owner and trainer Dr. John Pilley, an emeritus professor of psychology at Wofford College, appeared again in a scientific journal. This time, the study highlighted Chaser’s attention to the syntactical relationships between words, for example, differentiating “to ball take Frisbee” from“to Frisbee take ball.”

I’ve been keeping an eye on Chaser, and I’ve been keeping an eye on Rico, Sofia, Bailey, Paddy and Betsy, all companion dogs whose way with human language has been reported in scientific journals. Most media reports tend to focus on outcomes: what these dogs can — or can’t — do with our words. But I think these reports are missing the point. Learning the names of over 1,000 words doesn’t just happen overnight. What does the behind-the-scenes learning and training look like? How did Chaser develop this intimate relationship with human language?

by Julie Hecht, Scientific American | Read more:
Image: uncredited

King Marko, Ivan Milev (1897-1927), 1926.
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Two protozoan parasites, Trypanosoma brucei, are shown infecting the liver of a mouse. T. brucei is the causative agent of African sleeping sickness in humans. Image by Gilles Vanwalleghem, Daniel Monteyne, Etienne Pays, and David Pérez-Morga, Université Libre de Bruxelles.

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Jurors and the Internet

I have been having a rather jam-packed week...But I dont want to forget a case that made the news a couple of days ago -- the one about the two month prison sentence given to a juror who researched the case he was hearing at home in the evening on the internet.

Now I dont want to comment on the rights and wrong of this case (brief newspaper reports never give you enough information to decide what you think about the fairness, or otherwise, of the sentence). But as soon as I heard about it, it reminded me of a conversation I had had on a train a few months ago.

The man opposite me happened to be a judge, and we fell to talking about the nature and the problems of jury trial. At one point in the conversation, I said that I reckoned -- that if I were a juror (and I never have been) -- I really could see myself doing a bit of googling in the evening. I would know that I shouldn't, and I wouldn't tell my fellow jurors, and I would feel rather guilty and shifty about it (and get paranoid that the judge would haul my laptop in for examination), and all the rest. But I just knew in my bones that after a curious day in court, with nothing to think about but the oddities of the case (and/or all the work of my own that wasnt getting done), and after have a bottle of Pinot Grigio over supper, I probably wouldn't be able to resist the temptation of a quick internet trawl.

He came down on me like a ton of bricks -- as, I know, was absolutely right and proper. That would be contempt, it would overturn some of the fundamental principles of British justice, it could land me in prison, etc etc.

And indeed that is exactly what happened to my namesake (the man sent down for two months was also called Beard -- no relation so far as I am aware).

But I still cant help wondering if we have to think a bit more radically about jury behaviour in "the internet age".

by Mary Beard, TLS |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

The Exploding Harpoon

In April this year a sperm whale appeared in Oban Bay and remained there for nine days, long enough for word to spread and various experts to pronounce. That it wasn’t set upon, tortured and speared to death, as would have been the case not so long ago, surely marks a sea-change in human sensibility. On the contrary, if anyone had harassed the creature, well, they’d have been the one flensed.

I happened to be passing through Oban en route to Mull so I joined the small group assembled behind the pizza parlour and public toilets on the pier. Fishing boats were tied up, and across the bay the island of Kerrera lay in the first spring sunshine. The whale had chosen a spot just outside the Kerrera marina, so it was in full view, and its behaviour was predictable. Every 45 minutes or so it surfaced for a couple of minutes, blew, then dived again. The group I joined consisted in Easter holidaymakers, workmen in overalls and an elderly lady perched elegantly on a capstan, who perhaps knew this would be her only chance to see a great whale. Or maybe she’d seen hundreds and was coming back for more. They are a bit addictive. Some people preferred to gaze over the water in silence as they waited, others were inclined to show off their knowledge. I overheard phrases: ‘When we were in New Zealand,’ ‘When we were in Cape Town.’ ‘Of course, sperm whales are usually well out into the Atlantic.’

It’s true that sperm whales are deep-sea animals and it’s highly unusual to have one arrive, as it were, on the doorstep. Local newspapers kept up reports but thankfully didn’t give the whale a silly name. The creature might have been resting following an injury or illness; it didn’t seem unduly stressed. It was echo-locating nicely and knew its own situation. The best policy was simply to leave it alone. The alternative would have been to try to shoo it back out to sea, but how do you shoo a whale? The attitude that arose was part protective, part laissez-faire. CalMac diverted their ferries around the beast’s haunt, people came and went on the pier, and the whale remained in the bay until the next very high tide, when, buoyed by the extra water, it swam away.

I didn’t see the whale from the pier. I had to leave for the ferry before it appeared but the ferry terminal windows overlook the same waters so I kept an eye out while queuing to board. Then there it was! Like a range of low grey hills, with sunlight gleaming on its flanks. A sperm whale! In Oban Bay! Having surfaced it sent up a satisfying bush of spray two or three times. I couldn’t contain myself. ‘Look!’ I said to the woman next to me. ‘Look! There’s that whale!’ But she didn’t look. She just turned away, saying: ‘I am not a whale watcher, thank you.’ (...)

Barely a ‘nature book’ is published today without homage to J.A. Baker, or Gilbert White, or stern collectors like the 18th-century surgeon John Hunter, who dissected everything, including any hapless whale that wandered into the Thames. Much is fresh, though. When we reach New Zealand, the discussion turns to the relationship between the Maori and whales. And the Moa, the giant, now extinct, bird. And Te Pehi Kupe, a warrior richly adorned with facial tattoos, who in 1824 blagged a lift to Liverpool on a merchant ship. It’s testament to Hoare’s skill as a writer and companion that his work, a crammed treasure chest, doesn’t irritate. He isn’t a show-off. In The Sea Inside, you can go with the flow.

All the lore and wonders are fascinating, but in New Zealand, as in the Azores, as in Provincetown, it’s the cetaceans who steal the show. It’s just typical of us as a species to invent the exploding harpoon long before we came up with scuba-diving gear. Now, though, it’s possible to swim among dolphins and whales. What they think of it we can only speculate, but it’s certainly not the worst thing we’ve done to them. The book’s most original sections are Hoare’s accounts of doing just that, diving with whales, an experience he calls ‘truly dreamlike’. In the Azores, he swims among a pod of sperm whales. Despite their size, the animals flit from view. ‘Like birds that vanish in mid-air, they seem to disappear in the sea. It’s an impossible feat of prestidigitation. Over the waves I can see the whale, quite clearly close; under the water, nothing. Then suddenly there it is – a big beautiful animal held in the surf, stilled within the surge as I am flailing.’ He says later: ‘Nothing else matters. I feel nothing bad can happen if I’m with a whale. As if its grey mass insures against all the other evils.’

In New Zealand, it’s dusky dolphins, a super-pod of at least two hundred. He is in the water.

I look round and see dozens of dolphins heading straight at me, like a herd of buffalo. For a moment I think they are going to swim right into me. A ridiculous notion. They, like the whales, register my every move, my every dimension, both inside and out, my density, my temperature, what I am and what I am not. A dolphin’s sonar, which can fire off two thousand clicks a second, is able to discern something the thickness of a fingernail from thirty feet away. At the last minute the animals swerve aside, under my legs, by my side, past my head … I feel the sensual power of their bodies as they race past.

I wonder if it was this cetacean sensuality the Oban woman registered and refused.

by Kathleen Jamie, LRB |  Read more:

Image: Austral International via:

In the Violent Favelas of Brazil

One night in Rio, Walter Mesquita, a street photographer, took me to a baile funk, a street party organized by the drug dealers, in the unpacified favela of Arará. It was an extraordinary scene: at midnight, the traficantes had cordoned off many blocks, turning the favela into a giant open-air nightclub. One end of the street was a giant wall of dozens of loudspeakers, booming songs and stories about cop-killing and underage sex. Teenagers walked around carrying AK-47s; prepubescent girls inhaled drugs and danced. On some corners, cocaine was being sold out of large plastic bags. Everybody danced: grandmothers danced, children danced, I danced. It went on until eight in the morning.

Although such parties are officially prohibited in the pacified favelas because of their multiple breaches of the law, ranging from noise violations to exhortations to murder—even the music played there is called baile funk proibidão—the state and its forces were nowhere to be seen. The rival gangs were a bigger threat than the police. The three gangs that control much of Rio have remained more or less stable for the last couple of decades: the Red Command, the Third Command, and Friends of Friends. According to a top police official I spoke to, in a city of just over six million there are some thirty to forty thousand people in the gangs.

The day after the baile funk, I was flying in a police helicopter over Rio. It took us over Ipanema, a beach for the well-to-do, and the newly pacified favela of Rocinha. I asked if we could fly over Arará. The pilot pointed it out in the distance, and said he could not fly directly over it. He was concerned about getting shot down. A couple of years ago, the traficantes had brought down a police helicopter with antiaircraft guns. So the police cannot safely enter a large part of Rio by land or by air. This, too, is the future of many megacities in the developing world, from Nairobi to Caracas. There is a de facto sharing of power between the legitimate organs of the state and the gangs, the militias. Many people will die as the exact contours of this power-sharing are negotiated.

My friend Luiz Eduardo Soares told me a story about power in the favelas. He is an anthropologist who was the national secretary for public security in 2003. He also wrote the book Elite da Tropa (Elite Squad), a study of police brutality and corruption that was made into the most popular film in the history of Brazilian cinema. He made many enemies among corrupt politicians and police. In 2000, security forces found detailed plans to kill Luiz and his daughters—there were notes on when and where they would be going to school, and at what times. The planners were corrupt police officers. Luiz had to flee with his family, first to the US, and then when he returned to Brazil, to a state in the south of the country.

One night Luiz had a call from a man named Lulu, one of the top traficantes in Rio. Lulu was now old for the drug trade—in his thirties. He wanted to surrender; he wanted to give up the gangs and live to see his children grow up.

Luiz said that if Lulu came to see him he’d have to arrest him. Then he would be put away in a jail like Carandiru, where after a 1992 riot the police opened the gates and sprayed the inmates with gunfire, massacring 111 of them. Luiz hoped for the best for Lulu, but his prospects did not seem good. He was wanted both by the police and by rival gangs.

A little later, Luiz was in the far north of the country, in a traditional temple where they worship old gods, the ones who were here before the Portuguese. Luiz was praying when he felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned around and saw Lulu smiling at him.

“What are you doing here?” Luiz asked.

“I’m here to see my mother. I got away.”

Soon after that meeting, the Rio police found Lulu. It was stupid of him: the first place a wanted man runs to is his mother. Men came up in a jeep and, without arresting him, took him back to Rio, to his favela, to the police station.

According to Luiz, the chief of the local police appealed to Lulu: “We want you back. It’s been hell since you left. You kept the peace among the gangs. And besides, I need your money for my political campaigns. You have to get back to work, or else.”

So Lulu went back to work, selling coke and meth to the rich kids in the nightclubs of Copacabana and Ipanema. But he had tried to break away; the boys on the corner didn’t trust him, didn’t respect him as they used to. He couldn’t make the 300,000 reais the cops demanded each week.

So one day they came again for Lulu. The cops, Luiz told me, sat him down in a stone chair in an open area of the slum and, with the whole favela watching, shot him in the head. He was useful to the police only when he had power to share. Powerless, he was dead.

by Suketu Mehta, NY Review of Books |  Read more:

Image: Walter Mesquita

An Ancient Japanese Hand-Dyeing Technique Makes a Comeback

Perhaps in response to the ubiquity of digital prints, hand-dyeing techniques have been regaining popularity, and none more so than shibori. It’s the Japanese answer to tie-dye, but a whole lot older — it’s said to date to the eighth century. The pattern is created by folding or twisting fabric, wrapping it around a pole or stitching it. The results are patterns that are once geometric and organic.

Shibori is traditionally done in shades of indigo, but contemporary designers have been practicing the ancient technique in an array of colors, as seen everywhere from Etsy shops to major department stores. Designers from Band of Outsiders to Diane von Furstenberg have used it in their collections on shorts and dresses. On the home front, Rebecca Atwood and West Elm have used shibori prints to decorate throw pillows, duvet covers and curtains.

The Brooklyn-based designers Kalen Kaminski and Astra Chastka of the line Upstate discovered shibori while looking for the perfect fabric for a scarf. They taught themselves the technique partly by watching YouTube videos. “One of our favorite things about it is the irregularities that can happen,” Kaminski said. “We love the mix of art and science, even though for us the dye process is less about exact science and more about embracing the variety of results."

by Marisa Meltzer, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: NY Times

Jieun Park, memory-lyon

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Jean Tinguely, “Homage to New York," 1960

Jean Tinguely was asked in 1960 to produce a work to be performed in the Sculpture Garden of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. … [H]e produced a self-destroying mechanism that performed for 27 minutes during a public performance for invited guests. In the end, the public browsed the remnants of the machine for souvenirs to take home. (source)

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The Best Little Checkpoint in Texas

The dog’s name was Blackie, and I knew right away she was trouble. I had two beautiful marijuana buds in a plastic vial in my shaving kit inside a suitcase in the trunk of the car—and the nosey mutt sniffed them out from ten feet away. She promptly squatted, the signal to her handler that the vehicle smelled suspicious. He nodded to the Border Patrol agent standing beside my car, a stern young man in crisp green fatigues, who put his hand on his sidearm, opened my door, and said the words you never want to hear: “Please get out of the car, sir.”

I sighed and got out. Several agents surrounded my car and popped the trunk. I watched helplessly as Blackie jumped in and ferreted out my little stash faster than I could have gotten to it myself. One of the agents held up the plastic vial, and another made a gesture like a football referee signaling a personal foul. The agent beside me tapped my elbow and said, “Come with me, sir.”

It was your basic pothead screwup. I was at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection inspection station on Interstate 10 near Sierra Blanca, a nearly invisible town about two thirds of the way from El Paso to Van Horn. The station has been there since 1974, stopping everyone traveling east on the transcontinental highway. I had passed through it many times over the years without any problems, and that made me careless last summer. I should have known better.

Willie Nelson put the Sierra Blanca checkpoint on the map when he was busted there in November 2010, and touring musicians have been following his lead ever since. Snoop Dogg (a.k.a. Snoop Lion), Fiona Apple, Nelly, Armie Hammer (the actor who plays the new Lone Ranger)—all made news after their vehicles were searched at the checkpoint and dope was discovered. Last year the Hollywood Reporter called it “the checkpoint of no return.” The Internet is full of dire warnings about the place, directions to back roads that avoid it, and videos showing the real-time experience of passing through the checkpoint successfully, which is best achieved by not having pot in the trunk of your car.

But those buds had been so pretty—dense yet fluffy, with the tiny purple hairs that promise perfect ripeness. A green-thumb friend in Southern California had graciously given them to me before my trip to Texas. Which is how, one day last August, I ended up driving right into the most famous dope-busting trap in the whole United States, holding. Classic.

by Al Reinert, Texas Monthly |  Read more:

Image: Jennifer Boomer

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Outgrowing the Traditional Grass Lawn

The history of the lawn begins at least 900 years ago in Great Britain and Northern France, both of which have maritime climates with relatively mild winters and warm humid summers that are ideal for many different grasses. In its inception, the word ‘lawn’ may have referred to communal grazing pastures—clearings in the woods where sheep and other livestock continually munched wild grass into submission. Even today, some place names retain the memory of these early lawns: Balmer Lawn in England, for example, encompasses 500 acres of grass pasture. Soon enough, people found other uses for grasses: aesthetics, sport and leisure. King Henry II (1113 to 1189) had gardens at Clarendon Palace that boasted ‘a wealth of lawns’ and Henry III (1216 – 1272) ordered laborers to slice up tracts of naturally occurring turf and transplant them to his palace. The world’s oldest bowling green, in Southampton, England, has been maintained since at least 1299.

In ancient times, lawns were not always expanses of unbroken green, however. Some medieval paintings of gardens depict carpets of turfgrass stippled with various flowers, such as lily of the valley, poppies, cowslips, primroses, wild strawberries, violets, daisies, and daffodils. People walked, danced and relaxed on these flowery meads, which were meant to imitate natural meadows. In the 15th and 16th centuries, Europeans used white clover, chamomile, thyme, yarrow, self-heal (Prunella vulgaris) and other low-growing meadow and groundcover plants—sometimes mixed with grasses—to create lawns and pathways on which to walk and mingle. In the early 1900s, a weed known as cotula (Leptinella dioica) began invading bowling lawns in New Zealand. When the groundsman of the Caledonian Bowling Club tried to get rid of the weed by scarifying the lawn, he only quickened its spread. Rugby players noticed, however, that they ran faster and played better on the tightly knit, smooth carpet formed by the weed than on grass. By 1930, Caledonian Bowling Club replaced all its grass with cotula; other clubs did the same.

For most of history, however, mixed plant lawns and non-grass lawns have been the exception, in part because a smooth, well-kept, lush grass lawn became as much a symbol as a functional part of one’s property. In the early 19th century, vast grass lawns surrounding manors were not only aesthetically pleasing—providing unobstructed views of an estate—they were also further proof of wealth. To keep their lawns neat and trim, British aristocrats and landed gentry had to look after grazing animals—most commonly a flock of sheep—or hire laborers to slice through overgrown grass with scythes.

Eventually, the idea of a grass lawn migrated to America, where it has evolved in its own way. At first, early colonists planted gardens of edible and medicinal plants, not having the time or money to maintain a lawn. Grasses native to America were generally too unruly to make neat lawns anyhow. Some wealthier citizens wanted to imitate the lawns that surrounded abbeys and mansions in Britain, however, and suitable turfgrasses were imported from Europe and Asia. English engineer Edwin Beard Budding changed lawncare forever when he invented the lawn mower in 1830—although it was a bulky wrought iron contraption that often dug up the soil. Others improved this first mower, making it lighter and sleeker. People on either side of the Atlantic could now mow modest-sized lawns themselves instead of requiring dozens or hundreds of workers or a flock of sheep.

Michael Pollan has pinpointed the 1860s as a pivotal moment in the history of American lawn: in that decade, landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted designed the suburban community of Riverside, Illinois. Olmsted forbade fences and walls and ran a seamless ribbon of green lawns in front of each row of houses. Around the same time, influential landscape designers such as Andrew Jackson Downing and Frank J. Scott published popular books advocating the lawn as a necessity for any respectable homeowner. “A smooth, closely shaven surface of grass is by far the most essential element of beauty on the grounds of a suburban house,” Scott wrote. “Let your lawn be your home’s velvet robe, and your flowers its not too promiscuous decoration.”

by Ferris Jabr, Scientific American |  Read more:

Image: Ferris Jabr

Patent Life: How the Supreme Court Fell Short

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia admitted he doesn’t really understand it. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote an entire court opinion implying—unconvincingly, to scientists—that he does. And, as of right now, there’s still nothing stopping you from filing patents on it. Meet complementary DNA (cDNA), the confusing molecule at the heart of the recent Supreme Court ruling on DNA patents.

The case, ruled upon in june, was hailed as a victory over efforts to turn the human genome into corporate property. But the ruling may not be the smackdown of gene patents that it appeared to be, and cDNA is where much of the uncertainly lies. Big questions remain: What is cDNA actually being used to do? Why does it matter who owns it? And what do scientists think this debate is really about?

Steinbeck Without the Turtle

On a functional level, cDNA really isn’t all that different from plain old DNA. In fact, it’s just a slimmed down copy -- the Reader’s Digest Condensed Book version. DNA is made of up of paired sequences of nucleotides. Some of those sequences—exons—are critical to making a functioning, living thing. They provide the coding instructions that tell cells how to make proteins, and proteins do everything: muscle is made from proteins, proteins help cells communicate with one another, and they do the chemistry that turns food into energy.

Other sequences in the DNA, though—introns—just sort of sit there. You could snip them out and still make a protein, just like you could cut the chapter about a turtle crossing the road out of The Grapes of Wrath without losing any important parts of the plot. (Insert angry Steinbeck fans here.)

Essentially, that’s all cDNA is: Steinbeck without the turtle. DNA without the introns.

In the Supreme Court case, a company called Myriad Genetics attempted to patent genes known as BRCA1 and BRCA2. Mutations in these genes have been linked to an increased risk of breast cancer. Myriad developed a test to look for those mutations. But the Court threw out the company's claim of ownership over BRCA1 and 2, ruling that Myriad couldn’t patent the naturally occurring DNA that made up those genes.

But here's the catch: The BRCA genes code for proteins. In fact, that’s what makes mutations on those genes a cancer risk. Healthy BRCA genes make a protein that repairs damaged DNA, and destroys cells whose DNA can’t be fixed. Mutations prevent that protein from being made, thereby allowing damaged cells to grow unchecked. Like all protein-making genes, you don’t need the introns from BRCA1 and BRCA2 to make a functional protein. When you’re looking for potentially deadly mutations, only the exons matter. The Court said that Myriad can’t patent the DNA that contains both introns and exons, but the company can patent the exon-only cDNA.

In fact, it already claims that patent.

by Maggie Koerth-Baker, Boing Boing |  Read more:

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Leon Ferrari, Civilización Occidental y Cristiana
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