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Hysteria is in the air

(08/31/04 4:00am)

The Palestinian Solidarity Movement (PSM) is organizing its fourth annual conference, to be held Oct. 15-17 at Duke. As was the case for the previous conferences at Berkeley, Michigan and Ohio State, a shrill disinformation campaign is under way to undercut and derail the Duke conference. A web petition drive for President Brodhead denounces PSM as anti-Semitic, supporting terrorism and advocating the destruction of Israel. Alarmist letters parroting the same accusations were recently published in The Chronicle and similar ones will no doubt continue to appear. These accusations are not based on truth and aim at invalidating and muffling criticism of Israeli policies toward Palestinians.

https://www.dukechronicle.com/article/2004/08/hysteria-air

Art and the transgenic bunny

(11/17/00 5:00am)

Please bear with me through this paragraph, it gets easier later. I make up arbitrary rules to translate an English sentence from the Book of Genesis into the language of DNA, containing only the letters A, G, C and T. The resulting DNA sentence has no biological meaning, it is just a short, random sequence of As, Ts, Gs and Cs. Wait, this is just the beginning! I get a biotech firm to assemble a real piece of DNA with this sequence and a scientist friend to introduce it into bacteria using standard DNA technology. The bacteria are also engineered to contain a jellyfish gene producing a protein that makes them glow green under blue light. This green fluorescent protein called GFP is commonly used in bacteria, fungi, plants and animals to study gene expression. Here, GFP is just for show. And here comes the stroke of genius! In a museum, I place the bacteria under a camera connected to my website. I rig the system so that people from all over the world can look at the cool fluorescent bacteria on their computer screens and activate a UV lamp that irradiates the bacteria in the museum. UV radiation introduces random changes (mutations) in the bacterial DNA including the "genesis" sequence that I cobbled in there. After thousands of random people have e-zapped the bacteria, I let a scientist retrieve the modified "genesis" sequence from the cells and read it to me in A,T,G,C alphabet. I turn it back into English using my translation rules in reverse: The original Bible message returns garbled!

https://www.dukechronicle.com/article/2000/11/art-and-transgenic-bunny