Germline Engineering: Whose Right?

Professor Cohen presents and analyzes a taxonomy of the potential harms of human genetic “germline engineering.” Germline engineering is the process of “artificially” and purposefully changing the genes of an organism such that when it procreates the changes replicate themselves in the next generation and--subject to the laws of genetics—in all future generations. His ultimate argument flows from the outcome of the analysis of the various potential harms alleged to flow from germline engineering. While he finds that there may be minor categories that are problematic, these are no more than quirky--almost bizarre--exceptions to the central case, that is, that germline intervention will yield an enormous improvement in the human lot. Those exceptional instances in which one could imagine germline intervention resulting in harm to the human condition or prospect neither require nor justify any significant restraint or prohibition of germline intervention in general.

The Israeli Lust for Peace: Illusion, Tragedy and Prospect

The wishful thinking of Israelis and Americans has led to a pursuit of peace through negotiation and concilliation. This process has led more nearly to war, terrorism and great human suffering than to peace

Disciplinary Evolution and the Rise of the Transdiscipline

This paper challenges readers to reflect on academic disciplines in a new way, through the lens of the theory of evolution. Indeed, how disciplines came into being has been largely left unexplored. This paper shows how the concepts of evolution can be productively applied to describe the development, creation, and diminishment of disciplines. These concepts include natural selection, speciation, parallel evolution, extinction, and heterosis, among others. The paper concludes that these forces lead to a prediction that a new form of organization, the transdiscipline, is evolving to become perhaps predominant

WiFi Epidemiology: Can Your Neighbors' Router Make Yours Sick?

In densely populated urban areas WiFi routers form a tightly interconnected proximity network that can be exploited as a substrate for the spreading of malware able to launch massive fraudulent attack and affect entire urban areas WiFi networks. In this paper we consider several scenarios for the deployment of malware that spreads solely over the wireless channel of major urban areas in the US. We develop an epidemiological model that takes into consideration prevalent security flaws on these routers. The spread of such a contagion is simulated on real-world data for geo-referenced wireless routers. We uncover a major weakness of WiFi networks in that most of the simulated scenarios show tens of thousands of routers infected in as little time as two weeks, with the majority of the infections occurring in the first 24 to 48 hours. We indicate possible containment and prevention measure to limit the eventual harm of such an attack.Comment: 22 pages, 1 table, 4 figure

Spreading of sexually transmitted diseases in heterosexual populations

The spread of sexually transmitted diseases (e.g. Chlamydia, Syphilis, Gonorrhea, HIV) across populations is a major concern for scientists and health agencies. In this context, both data collection on sexual contact networks and the modeling of disease spreading, are intensively contributing to the search for effective immunization policies. Here, the spreading of sexually transmitted diseases on bipartite scale-free graphs, representing heterosexual contact networks, is considered. We analytically derive the expression for the epidemic threshold and its dependence with the system size in finite populations. We show that the epidemic outbreak in bipartite populations, with number of sexual partners distributed as in empirical observations from national sex surveys, takes place for larger spreading rates than for the case in which the bipartite nature of the network is not taken into account. Numerical simulations confirm the validity of the theoretical results. Our findings indicate that the restriction to crossed infections between the two classes of individuals (males and females) has to be taken into account in the design of efficient immunization strategies for sexually transmitted diseases.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures and 2 table