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All Friday Reports are posted at www.vardaman.com/friday.phpVardaman Virtual Forestry CompanyFRIDAY REPORT OF 06/30/06The Most Direct, Frequent Link to Knowledge Workers in the Eastern Forest EconomyQUOTATIONS FROM LIBERATION BIOLOGY BY RONALD BAILEY“Before rushing out to inject performance-enhancing genes, athletes would be well advised to heed the results of experiments in which the EPO gene, which promotes the production of red blood cells, was injected into the legs of eight rhesus monkeys. It is well known that boosting red blood cells, which carry oxygen to the muscles, improves an athlete’s stamina. Infamously, many East German Olympic athletes had red blood cells injected into them just before competition. In the EPO gene experiment, half of the monkeys overproduced red blood cells. This would have turned their blood to sledge, causing them to die of strokes, had they not had their blood thinned every two weeks. The other half of the monkeys mysteriously suffered from a fatal anemia in which the production of red blood cells was completely shut down. With these cautions in mind, few doubt that such enhancements will certainly one day work. So would gene doping be cheating?… “The plain fact of the matter is that athletes are already more genetically gifted than most of us, and some even more so than others. For example, Finnish cross country skier Eero Maentyranta won two gold medals at the 1964 Winter Olympics. Certainly he trained hard, but Maentyranta had an advantage: he was born with a variant of the EPO gene that cause him to produce 25 to 50 percent more red blood cells than the average person… “FINALLY WINNING THE WAR ON CANCER“Gene therapy targeted at cancer cures is especially promising. After all, cancer is a genetic disease in the sense that it is often caused by the genes that normally trigger the processes that tell damaged cells to kill themselves going awry. “University of California, Berkeley cancer and antiaging researcher Judith Campisi says, ‘I can make the following statements about ninety percent of cancer cells. Number one, they have some problem with the p53 gene. The cancers may not have a direct mutation in the p53 gene, but somewhere in the p53 pathway, meaning the upstream regulators or the downstream factors there is a problem. It may even be as high as 100 percent.’ P53 is a tumor-suppressor gene that makes a protein that tells a damaged cell to stop dividing. When it mutates or is somehow repressed and thereby becomes ineffective, damaged cells divide uncontrollably and form tumors.. “BIOTECH FORESTS“Modern biotechnology has a lot to offer forestry as well. For example, the American chestnut was devastated by an introduced fungal disease that killed more than 3.5 billion trees in the first half of the twentieth century. These majestic trees, which could reach one hundred feet in height and five feet in diameter, had been the dominant hardwood species throughout the Appalachian Mountains. An enterprising squirrel, we are told, could travel from Maine to Georgia without touching the ground through the interlinked branches of chestnut trees. Now scientists at the University of Georgia and the State University of New York are investigating ways to insert blight-resistant genes from the Chinese chestnut into American chestnut artificial seed embryos. If successful, the American chestnut could be restored to the forests from which it has been missing for more than two generations. “Other projects have genetically modified trees to produce less of the tough, stiff fiber lignin. This would make them better for making paper. Other trees have been modified to grow faster and straighter, to produce higher-quality lumber. Genetically improved trees growing faster on tree plantations would reduce the need to harvest wild trees and thus preserve natural forests. ‘The environmental benefit in a shift to planted from wild is that you could get all the wood the world needs pretty much from five, ten or twenty percent of the land used now,’ says Steve Strauss, professor of forest genetics and biotechnology at Oregon State University. In other words, plantation forestry would enable humanity to leave 80 percent of the forests wild. “EARTH HOTTEST IT’S BEEN IN 400 YEARS OR MORE, REPORT SAYS”
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