January 19, 2004
The contrasts in the news continue to amaze me. Take 3 recent items. 1) Along the Andes Indians agitate for political clout, 2) Once a breadbasket Zimbabwe today can't feed itself, 3) This robot can design, perform and interpret a genetic experiment.
(All of these articles are from the Wall Street Journal in recent editions. I most often quote from the Wall Street so I can't be accused of left leaning prejudices.)
Item 3 details the way a newly designed robot alters fairly routine experimentation. The objective, to find the functionality of each of 6000 cells in yeast. The robot is built with basic biology and biochemistry and then programmed to make logical deductions from the observations obtained and then go on to infer the function of the missing gene. Because we are being increasingly drowned in data such apparati are becoming essential to make sense of the information we have.
Yet at the same times our minds can work out such intricate machines the Indians along the Andes are fighting to throw off their political marginalization and political shunning that came about as a result of the Spanish conquest years ago. "In the last 4 years Indian led movements have helped topple governments and are bedeviling US policies promoting free markets and eradicating coca producing regional instability" The movement highlights the unfairness produced by the side effects of globalization when the rights of all effected are glossed over.
In Zimbabwe currently, "proportionally at least, the neediest recipient of food aid in the world.today is home to the same factors, natural and man made, that are propelling an increase in the number of hungry people world wide.scorching drought, and politics." Land reform confiscated 4500 farms but today only about 200 are fully functioning.
How can the church ignore the conditions in the whole world? Minds that can create such a robot if freed from greed and me first can solve these problems. And the solving of such problems is the only long-term solution to terrorism. We must begin now. As Patrick O'Brian has Jack Awbry say repeatable, "There is not a moment to lose."
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