Sarah Palin's War on Science »
Posted By techsupport 1 year, 1 month ago in Political NewsIn an election that has been fought on an astoundingly low cultural and intellectual level, with both candidates pretending that tax cuts can go like peaches and cream with the staggering new levels of federal deficit, and paltry charges being traded in petty ways, and with Joe the Plumber becoming the emblematic stupidity of the campaign, it didn't seem possible that things could go any lower or get any dumber. But they did last Friday, when, at a speech in Pittsburgh, Gov. Sarah Palin denounced wasteful expenditure on fruit-fly research, adding for good xenophobic and anti-elitist measure that some of this research took place "in Paris, France" and winding up with a folksy "I kid you not."
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techsupport
Skeptic. Critical thinker. Moderate. Interested in politics, but not blindly partisan.
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techsupport1 year, 1 month ago
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"It was in 1933 that Thomas Hunt Morgan won a Nobel Prize for showing that genes are passed on by way of chromosomes. The experimental creature that he employed in the making of this great discovery was the Drosophila melanogaster, or fruit fly. Scientists of various sorts continue to find it a very useful resource, since it can be easily and plentifully "cultured" in a laboratory, has a very short generation time, and displays a great variety of mutation. This makes it useful in studying disease, and since Gov. Palin was in Pittsburgh to talk about her signature "issue" of disability and special needs, she might even have had some researcher tell her that there is a Drosophila-based center for research into autism at the University of North Carolina. The fruit fly can also be a menace to American agriculture, so any financing of research into its habits and mutations is money well-spent."
I was, admittedly, a rather lousy student of science, back when I studied it. However, after all these years even I remember the term Drosophila melanogaster. Fruit fly research has been vital to our modern understanding of biology. It cannot be overstated how much it has contributed to science, and in turn, our lives. This appalling dismissal on the part of the Republican V.P. candidate is yet another rock-solid reason to steer clear of the McCain/Palin ticket.
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