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BUIES, ARTHUR (baptized Joseph-Marie-Arthur Buie), journalist, man of letters, and office holder; b. 24 Jan. 1840 in Côte-des-Neiges (Montreal), son of William Buie, a banker of Scottish descent, and Marie-Antoinette-Léocadie d'Estimauville; d. 26 Jan. 1901 at Quebec.
William Buie was living in New York at the time his son Arthur was born, but in 1841 he and his wife moved to Berbice (Guyana), where from 1842 to 1855 he held the office of postmaster. They left their son and their daughter Victoire, born in New York in 1837, in the care of two maternal great-aunts who resided at Quebec. Arthur Buies attended the Collège de Sainte-Anne-de-la-Pocatière from 1849 to 1854, the Séminaire de Nicolet in 1854–55, and the Petit Séminaire de Québec in 1855–56. When he was 16, he went to Berbice at the request of his father, who within a few months sent him to Dublin, agreeing to pay for his education there provided he pursued it in English. Young Arthur rebelled and went off to study on his own in Paris. From 1857 to 1859 he was a student at the Lycée Saint-Louis, intending first to complete his baccalauréat in science and later to study law at the Université Laval. He had four failures on his baccalauréat examinations.
Arthur's break with paternal authority may have stimulated his taste for revolt against any kind of authority. From a financial standpoint it had serious consequences, for he had to live in straitened circumstances, which inevitably affected his studies. In addition, according to Abbé Thomas-Étienne Hamel, it was in Paris that Buies "got ideas," and he was "quite capable of choosing the most perverse ones." He abandoned all religious observance at that time and did not return to it until 1879.
In 1860, hounded by his creditors, Buies gave Latin and English lessons in Palaiseau, on the outskirts of Paris, and then went to Sicily, where he joined Garibaldi's army. According to French journalist Ulric de Fonvielle, it was a comic-opera campaign, and Buies's main activity was enjoying the food. In September he returned to Paris, where he eked out a living until in late 1861 or early 1862 he decided to come home to Canada, after an absence of six years.
Buies was no sooner back than he joined the Institut Canadien. He gave lectures, took part in debates, and served as vice-president in 1865 and corresponding secretary in 1868. He wrote for Le Défricheur, a newspaper recently established by Jean-Baptiste-Éric Dorion* and published in L'Avenir, and for Montreal's Le Pays, of which Édouard-Raymond Fabre* had been co-founder. He threw himself into polemics, at which he came to excel.
In 1864 he had published in Montreal two Lettres sur le Canada . . . , which were an attack on the French Canadian clergy. In his view, "The clergy are everywhere, they preside over everything, and no one can think or wish anything except what they allow . . . they seek not the triumph of religion, but the triumph of their own dominance." These letters (he would publish a third, in 1867) were meant also to denounce the backwardness of French North America in comparison with the English-speaking community of the continent and appeal to youth to shake off the apathy prevalent in French Canada. The author's anticlericalism still left room, however, for a Christianity with more affinity to Protestantism than to liberal Catholicism: "I believe in God and in the sublime truths of Christianity, but I will not have you usurping my conscience, . . . I want to seek the truth that God himself has declared difficult to find." Buies fully intended to carry on the radical tradition of the Institut Canadien and of "the brilliant pleiad of 1854 . . . the red pleiad," as he would call it in his Réminiscences; Les jeunes barbares . . . (Québec, [1892]), the tradition of Joseph Papin*, Jean-Baptiste-Éric Dorion, Gonzalve Doutre*, Louis-Antoine Dessaulles*, and others.
In 1864 Buies also published two articles in Le Pays entitled "Le progrès," which sang the praises of science. He took up his pen again many times the following year, writing, among other things, about the United States, which he defended against conservative attacks, and about the French language. In a series entitled "Barbarismes canadiens," he pointed out numerous incorrect expressions current in the spoken language and the newspapers. "The unique character of each language must be preserved," he urged, "and violence must not be done to it by introducing foreign expressions when it has words of its own that convey better the idea to be expressed."
In "L'instruction," written in 1866, Buies called for a twofold reform of the French Canadian educational system. He considered it essential for science to be taught at a much more advanced level in the schools. He also believed a non-denominational school system on the American model had to be established. He was firmly convinced that French Canadians would never rise above their inferior position until they had at least as much schooling as their English-speaking neighbours.
During this time, like some of his liberal friends, Buies fought against the proposed confederation of British North America, which finally came into being in 1867. That year he left Canada again, intending to settle permanently in Paris and make a career for himself there as a journalist. Having departed from Montreal on 29 May, he arrived in Brest by way of New York on 12 June. He published an article against confederation in a French magazine, became friends with geographer Pierre-François-Eugène Cortambert, and met George Sand. But, like Balzac's Rubempré, Buies encountered fierce competition and once again experienced serious financial difficulties. His initial enthusiasm gave way to discouragement and by January 1868 he had returned to Montreal.
Buies was more active than ever in the Institut Canadien, where he continued to be preoccupied by educational issues. He also called for the abolition of the death penalty. Eager to continue the struggle against clericalism, he founded La Lanterne canadienne, patterned directly on La Lanterne, the Parisian newspaper of Henri Rochefort. From 17 Sept. 1868 to 18 March 1869, he wrote every week, on his own, some 15 vitriolic pages into which all his rage and his wit were poured. He had absolute freedom of speech since he was no longer speaking in the name of a party but in his own. He denounced not only his enemies, but also his friends, whom he considered too servile. "The only rogues are the decent people," he remarked. The campaign Buies had embarked on was not aimed solely at clericalism and at the Montreal papers Le Nouveau Monde and La Minerve. In the third issue he proclaimed, "I can rest neither content nor easy in my mind as long as I see wicked men, fools, and cowards triumphing all around me." This vast program enabled him to fire broadsides at the Conservative press, which, as a matter of fact, was no more indulgent with him. He sought to make people laugh with him rather than at him, but this approach did not prevent him from returning to the subject of education, which was particularly close to his heart. Denouncing the existing system, he asserted that "the young people come out of school crammed with pretensions but ignorant of science."
Various pressures were brought to bear on the distributors of La Lanterne and soon the readership began to drop. That Buies held out for 27 weeks was indeed an accomplishment, for he was always alone despite an urgent invitation to young people to join him. He would retain a special affection for La Lanterne, and the paper assuredly has an important place in the annals of Quebec journalism. In fact, it remained a symbol of intellectual and moral courage at a time when many people had capitulated. In this sense, it was to inspire many talented journalists, for example Jules Fournier*, Olivar Asselin*, and Jean-Charles Harvey*.
Profoundly discouraged by the lack of support from his compatriots, Buies planned to go into exile again, first to Paris and then to New York. He went to Paris, but though by nature easily discouraged, he was also quick to take hope, and the following year, in Montreal, he founded L'Indépendant. Bilingual at the outset and later unilingual, the paper advocated Canadian independence and a republican form of government. "We all," he wrote, "understand that we can have influence in North America only by personifying the French idea." The experiment was of short duration, no more than a few months, and he moved permanently to Quebec, where he became a correspondent for Le Pays.
In later life Buies would reminisce nostalgically about these years of struggle. "We saw the last days of the old Montreal," he said, "and we were the last of the old-style students. We were the final link between a dying society and a new one coming into being, of utterly different tastes, spirit, and kind." In fact, they were years of intellectual and professional training. Giving lectures and writing articles enabled him not only to develop his talents as an orator and journalist, but also to clarify his vision of French Canadian society, which he thought would flourish only with universal schooling and strong scientific and technical education. In his opinion, the integrity of French Canadian culture depended on a thorough knowledge of French, which was threatened in Canada by the élites – lawyers, politicians, businessmen, journalists, writers – who were all doing their utmost to corrupt the language. Finally, true to the ideology of the time, like all Quebec intellectuals he believed that colonization would not only end emigration to the United States but also complete occupation of the land by French Canadians, thereby minimizing the effects of British immigration to Canada and making possible the exploitation of its vast natural wealth.
It was in 1871 that Buies began his career as a columnist, first with Le Pays, then with Le National (Montréal), and on occasion with La Minerve and L'Opinion publique (Montréal). Feature columns played an important role in the newspapers of that time. They were a mixture of current comment, news items, and personal titbits, all written in a bantering and humorous style. The columnist's task was to entertain, to make readers smile, or even laugh. Buies's spontaneous, ironic, and sometimes sarcastic wit was admirably suited to this kind of writing. He saw such a feature as "a weekly offering, suitably seasoned, more or less humorous, filling perhaps two columns on the page, sufficiently well done to help the reader relax and enable him to take in the formidable arguments of the other columns drawn up in battle array with all their cannon thundering." But the feature had a more serious side, which could provide substantial food for thought about society, and for this kind of article Buies had a quite different definition: "What indeed is a feature but a day-by-day account of events seen at close range, intimate occurrences in which one is involved or which take place before one's eyes, a fleeting and piquant glimpse of those little facets of the history of one's time that historical criticism, to be serious, can now no longer do without?"
Buies published, at Quebec, three collections of his columns covering the period 1871–78: Chroniques, humeurs et caprices (1873), Chroniques, voyages, etc., etc. (1875), and Petites chroniques pour 1877 (1878). Ranging from election campaigns to seaside resorts, from philosophical meditations to accounts of travels, the contents of the three volumes are too diverse to summarize. The Chroniques lend themselves to random browsing in the mood of the moment. Perhaps more than conventional literary works, they remain irreplaceable as a documentary on the rapidly changing province of Quebec. Chroniques, voyages includes "Deux mille deux cents lieues en chemin de fer," an account of a trip that Buies made to San Francisco in June and July of 1874.
It was during this period that Buies established himself as the leading columnist in the province. He regretted, however, that the genre gave him a reputation as a writer lacking in serious intent, superficial and unable to produce thoughtful works. Much later he would note in annoyance: "I know very well that you [the reader], at least, will not commit the excruciating banality of calling me 'one of our wittiest columnists.' For more than 20 years I have been harassed with this platitude. Upon my word, I have had to be a very witty columnist indeed (but not 'one of our wittiest') in order not to have as yet been intoxicated by that decoction of commercial aloe and adulterated myrrh at the hand of neophyte journalists."
This was also the period when the Liberals came to power in Ottawa, and, as a faithful defender of the party for many years, Buies expected to be given a sinecure and to join his journalistic and literary colleagues who had already moved to the federal capital. But his attitude was not to the liking of the party élite and he had to persist in a profession that, by all reports, is one of the most thankless, both financially and professionally. As he later observed, "The French Canadian journalist is truly a wage-slave, a beast of burden, a convict at hard labour, a rock breaker, a cleaner of underwater cables."
Certainly in September 1875, when Buies delivered a lecture published at Quebec under the title Conférences: la presse canadienne française et les améliorations de Québec . . . , he was still bent on reforming a vehicle he considered fundamental to the progress of French Canadian society. Indeed, as an heir to Étienne Parent*, he was convinced that men of letters had a mission to tackle, and that they would accomplish it through the medium of the press. Hence he attacked all those who, in his view, betrayed their mission and made the French Canadian press the most mediocre to be found in any western country. This mediocrity stemmed from ignorance of the language, which precluded debate about ideas, quickly reducing it to insults and slander. "And here is perhaps the greatest misfortune of our press," he exclaimed, "that one is not allowed to express a free opinion in it without being immediately accused of heresy by a band of hacks as ignorant as narrow-minded and pretentious."
The abolition of the Department of Public Instruction the following year by the Conservative government of Charles-Eugène Boucher* de Boucherville, with the consent of the Liberal mlas, infuriated Buies, and in May he founded Le Réveil. His fighting spirit of the 1860s revived and he rebelled against the legislation, which put education under the exclusive control of the Catholic Church. He made a violent attack on the clergy as a result of which the paper was condemned by Archbishop Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau*. But Buies also denounced the opportunism of the Liberal party, "the party that represents nothing, that means nothing, that has not one principle expressed in any program, and whose motto, in power or in opposition, is invariably: Concessions, evasiveness, equivocation, indirection, temporizing, hypocrisy." Forced to leave Quebec, the newspaper moved to Montreal in September and ceased publication in December. Le Réveil was Buies's last attempt at independent journalism and some may think that his radicalism ended with it. It would be more accurate to say that, when he had to assume a lower profile in public life, he none the less remained true to his ideal of non-denominational education.
Buies's activities during the period immediately after his return to Le National as a columnist in 1877 are not altogether clear. His correspondence with his friend Alfred Garneau indicates that in 1879, following a severe physical and mental breakdown, he again became a practising Catholic. "At last," he explained, "I am out of the mire. I have not had such a feeling of relief [as I have had] from the day I received communion again, for the first time in 23 years."
In June 1879, on the recommendation of curé François-Xavier-Antoine Labelle*, Buies was invited by the commissioner of crown lands, Félix-Gabriel Marchand*, to join his department. So began his career as a "colonizer." In truth, his first article, entitled "Colonisation" and published in Le Défricheur on 19 Nov. 1863, had declared that "agriculture . . . is the essential foundation of our prosperity." But his interest in colonization was inseparable from his enthusiasm for geography, which he described in 1875 as "the most indispensable science for anyone involved in writing for the newspapers"; from 1878 he was secretary of the Geographical Society of Quebec.
His appointment to the Crown Lands Department gave Buies an opportunity to write his first "geographical" work, Le Saguenay et la vallée du lac St-Jean; étude historique, géographique, industrielle et agricole (Québec, 1880). This kind of work corresponded perfectly to his ideal of "national literature." As he often repeated, French Canadian writers must stop imitating French authors, and must choose subjects that are "Canadian" and, above all, useful. A few years later he would explain to François-Xavier Garneau*'s grandson Hector that "a literature that is not useful, that is not instructive, is a literature gone astray." Thus he did not feel he was betraying his vocation as a writer by turning out monographs for his department or, later, for the Department of Agriculture and Colonization.
In 1881, after a visit to Boston where he met Francis Parkman*, Buies made plans to leave for New Orleans, but he delayed his trip because of the postponement of his marriage, which was eventually called off. That year he travelled through Quebec's northern townships and the Ottawa valley, and published a series of articles in Le Nord (Saint-Jérôme). These activities did not prevent him from contributing to La Nouvelle-France, a bimonthly literary and scientific magazine founded in May at Quebec by his friend Jacques Auger. In his article, addressing himself to young people, he urged: "Study, study; knowledge is power. Be ready for all the discoveries, for all the elucidations of modern science. It is because we were caught unprepared by the prodigious development of science that we have remained on the sidelines, and outsiders have taken our place."
The following year was marked by his contribution to Les Nouvelles Soirées canadiennes, a literary review founded at Quebec by Louis-Hyppolite Taché, Edmond Lortie, and Elzébert Roy. Buies also spent three weeks in December at Notre-Dame Hospital in Montreal, apparently because of alcoholism. Shortly afterwards, he was dismissed from his position by the Conservative premier, Joseph-Alfred Mousseau*. Commenting on the incident, Buies himself remarked, "I also tried to lead the government aside into undertakings that were at the very least uncertain, but after being knee-deep at the trough for two years, doing nothing, I was dismissed, along with some 30 other dolts whose services, after a long trial period, were considered unnecessary." He was then forced to resume writing his columns, and his byline appeared on a regular basis in La Patrie (Montréal).
In the summer of 1883 Buies left for western Canada. He wrote an account of this journey in "Lettres du Nord-Ouest," which appeared in La Patrie from August to November and this account was republished in 1890, at Quebec, under the title Récits de voyage. . . . In 1884 he reissued the 1873 collection of Montreal columns, under the new title Chroniques canadiennes, humeurs et caprices, and a new edition of his 1868–69 weekly, La Lanterne canadienne, under the title La Lanterne. He also proposed to reissue his two further collections of columns, but nothing came of his plans. In 1885 the Riel affair [see Louis Riel*] prompted him to publish the newspaper Le Signal (Montréal), which was intended to be "progressive." Only one issue came out and in it he asserted, "Out of the Riel question will arise 'unrest' about many other questions that only recently still seemed impossible to discuss, and that will soon emerge as the natural and, in a way, inevitable corollary of it." In 1886 La Lanterne was condemned by Archbishop Taschereau, who intervened personally with the Institut Canadien at Quebec to have a lecture by Buies cancelled.
A confirmed bachelor, Buies fell in love, and on 8 Aug. 1887 he was married at Quebec, in Notre-Dame basilica, to Marie-Mila Catellier, a daughter of Ludger-Aimé Catellier, the deputy registrar general of Canada. They would have five children. In May 1888 Premier Honoré Mercier* appointed curé Labelle assistant commissioner in the Quebec Department of Agriculture and Colonization. The following month Buies, who now had family responsibilities, became a colonization agent, a position he held until he was dismissed from his duties by the Conservatives in July 1892.
Buies had been a regular contributor to L'Électeur (Québec) since 1887, and in 1889 he finally published, at Quebec, L'Outaouais supérieur, a work begun at the start of the decade. Then four volumes came out in rapid succession at Quebec: Les comtés de Rimouski, Matane et Témiscouata . . . , a collection of three reports, and La région du lac Saint–Jean, grenier de la province de Québec . . . in 1890; Au portique des Laurentides; Une paroisse moderne; Le curé Labelle in 1891; and finally Réminiscences; Les jeunes barbares in 1892. This feverish activity went on despite the fatal illness of his first child and the death of Labelle.
In a remarkable article entitled "Le coup d'état Angers et la chute de Mercier," published in La Patrie on 6 Aug. 1892, Buies attempted to explain the fall of the Mercier government. The former premier's friends would never forgive him for his assertion that Mercier "had the best prospects that ever fell to the lot of a Canadian statesman: he had an entire people behind him and a glorious role to play: his vanity, his selfishness, his total lack of any moral sense spoiled it all."
During the 1890s three children were born to Buies and his wife, two of whom died in infancy. His own health, which was in a delicate state, continued to deteriorate. Financial difficulties mounted, and he had to apply for assistance to the provincial secretary's office, which bought a number of his books from him. After 1896 he also sought the support of his Liberal friends who were then in power in Ottawa.
His disappointments, however, did not get the better of his verve, and to those cherishing any illusion that they might see him disappear into the background in public life, he was scathing. His anticlericalism came out strongly in "Interdictions et censures," an article published in 1893 in Canada-Revue (Montréal). "Let us bear in mind," he urged, "that for more than 40 years the French Canadian people have suffered from an incredible outburst of ecclesiastical pretensions. Never has a lauding of such intolerance been witnessed." In 1895 he briefly resumed his career as a columnist for La Revue rationale (Montréal) and published his last works on colonization, including a new edition of Le Saguenay et la vallée du lac St-Jean, under the title of Le Saguenay et le bassin du lac Saint-Jean; ouvrage historique et descriptif (Québec, 1896); Le chemin de fer du lac Saint-Jean (Québec, 1895); La vallée de la Matapédia . . . (Québec, 1895; 1896), and two commissioned works, one for the Department of Agriculture in Ottawa, Les poissons et les animaux à fourrure du Canada (1900), and the other for the Quebec Department of Agriculture, La province de Québec (1900). He had not lost his literary interests, however, and in Reminiscences; Les jeunes barbares he had condemned a number of young writers who, in his opinion, were taking it upon themselves to write without adequate knowledge of the French language, and he had made yet another attack on the educational system and the anti-intellectual climate in the province: "We are the most backward people in the world. . . . Any man in our little province who has succeeded in achieving genuine worth and a serious fund of knowledge has done so only by his own painful efforts, without any assistance, indeed, in spite of everything, and by overcoming all the obstacles heaped in his path."
After an illness of several years, Arthur Buies died on 26 Jan. 1901. His remains were buried on 29 January in the cemetery of Notre-Dame de Belmont in Sainte-Foy, near Quebec. He was remembered as a kind and intelligent man who had spent his life trying to help his compatriots. From a literary point of view, he is considered among the best stylists of his time. He undoubtedly had one of the most inquiring and progressive minds in Quebec. He was convinced that the French-speaking community in North America ought not to live turned in upon itself but should be open to the great political, cultural, and economic currents of the day. His courageous attitude, his talent for polemics, and his critical mind were an inspiration to a great many intellectuals. Through his Chroniques and La Lanterne, he remains one of the outstanding figures of the Canadian literary and intellectual scene in the last quarter of the 19th century.
[Some of the correspondence of Arthur Buies is held at ANQ-Q, P-18, and has been copied in a typescript available in the Fonds M.-A. Gagnon at the Bibliothèque de la Ville de Montréal, Salle Gagnon. Two other important collections of his correspondence are currently in the possession of Arthur Buies Jr, Quebec (corr. with his wife and others), and Suzanne Prince, Quebec (corr. with Alfred Garneau). There is also correspondence in the following collections: AAQ, 31-17 A; ANQ-BSLGIM, fonds Ulric-Joseph Tessier (P-1); ANQ-M, fonds de la famille Papineau (P-7); ANQ-Q, fords François-Xavier-Antoine Labelle (P-124/217); Arch. de l'Univ. du Québec à Montréal, Fords C.-A. Dansereau (classification in progress); Arch. du Séminaire de Nicolet, Qué., F004 (J.-A.-I. Douville), succession; ASJCF, BO-78-28; ASQ, in the voluminous correspondence of Louis-Jacques Casault* and Thomas-Étienne Hamel (Univ., 39); AUL, P121, P137, and P209.1; Centre de Recherche en Civilisation Canadienne-Française (Ottawa), P 6/1/3 and P 263 (not classified); NA, fonds Louis Fréchette (MG 29, D40), fonds Alphonse Lusignan (MG 29, D27), Ponds famine Papineau (MG 24, B2), and fonds Benjamin Sulte (MG 29, D5); and the holdings of Francis Parmentier, Hull, Que. (copies of letters from Buies to Alfred Duclos De Celles, 26 Nov. and 29 Dec. 1898).
The author has published an annotated edition of Arthur Buies's Chronigues . . . (2v., Montréal, 1986–91) and his Correspondance (1855–1901) (Montréal, 1993). f.p.]. AC, Québec, État civil, Catholiques, Saint-Jean-Baptiste (Québec), 29 janv. 1901. ANQ-M, CE1-51, 12 févr. 1840. ANQ-Q, CE1-1, 8 août 1887. DOLQ, vol.1. Raymond Douville, La vie aventureuse d'Arthur Buies ([Montréal, 1933]). Alfred Duclos De Celles, "Arthur Buies," La Presse, 16 févr. 1901: 4. J.-C. Falardeau, "Arthur Buies, l'anti-zouave," Cité libre (Montréal), no.27 (mai 1960): 25, 32. M.-A. Gagnon, Le ciel et l'enfer d'Arthur Buies (Québec, 1965). C.-H. Grignon, "Arthur Buies ou l'homme qui cherchait son malheur," Académie Canadienne-Française, Cahiers (Montréal), 7 (1963): 29–42. Charles ab der Halden, Nouvelles études de la littérature canadienne française (Paris, 1907), 49–184. Léopold Lamontagne, Arthur Buies, homme de lettres (Québec, 1957). Edmond Lareau, Histoire de la littérature canadienne (Montréal, 1874), 463–66. Laurent Mailhot, Anthologie d'Arthur Buies ([Montréal], 1978). Francis Parmentier, "Arthur Buies et la littérature nationale" and "Arthur Buies et la critique littéraire," in Rev. d'hist. littéraire du Québec et du Canada français (Ottawa), 7 (hiver–printemps 1984): 57–59, and 14 (été–automne 1987): 29–35, respectively. Virgile Rossel, Histoire de la littérature française hors de France (Lausanne, Suisse, 1895), 328–331. Marcel Trudel, L'influence de Voltaire au Canada (2v., Montréal, 1945), 2: 101–30, 152–60. J.-P. Tusseau, "La fin édifiante d'Arthur Buies," Études françaises (Montréal), 9 (1973): 45–53. G.-A. Vachon, "Arthur Buies, écrivain," Études françaises, 6 (1970): 283–95.
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Francis Parmentier, "BUIES, ARTHUR," in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 13, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, accessed February 29, 2024, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/buies_arthur_13E.html.
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Author of Article: | Francis Parmentier |
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Publication Name: | Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 13 |
Publisher: | University of Toronto/Université Laval |
Year of publication: | 1994 |
Year of revision: | 1994 |
Access Date: | February 29, 2024 |


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Glaciers Are Melting Slowly but Surely
Most of the world's glaciers are retreating more slowly than the few that are shrinking fast. But new research confirms that almost all of them are losing mass.By Tim Radford, Climate News NetworkThis article first appeared at Climate News Network.
LONDON — Forget, for the moment, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets: what about all the other stuff? What kind of difference does the melting of glaciers in Scandinavia, or Alaska, or the Himalayas make to the ocean levels?
Alex Gardner of Clark University, Massachusetts, and 15 colleagues from the US, Canada and Europe decided to take a closer look: their answer is that shrinking glaciers lost 259 billion tonnes (259 gigatonnes) of mass in the form of meltwater every year between 2003 and 2009, give or take 28 gigatonnes, an amount equal to around 30% of observed sea level rise.
This equals the combined losses from the permanent ice sheets that blanket, in layers thousands of metres thick, the two vast land masses of Greenland and Antarctica.
The scientists report their findings in the journal Science. They used both measurements on the ground – necessarily selective – and measurements from orbiting satellites, which naturally give a bigger picture, but also a more imprecise one.
The satellites carried instruments specifically designed to study ice loss: one was called GRACE, short for gravity recovery and climate experiment, and the other was called ICEsat – an ice, cloud and land elevation satellite. The first measured tiny changes in gravity as the ice melts away. The second used lasers to measure changes in height, and therefore volume.
The scientists also consulted an authoritative store of geographical data, the Randolph Glacier Inventory, which defines 19 glacier regions with a total area under flowing ice of 729,400 square kilometres. They chose the dates under study because for those six years, ICEsat and GRACE were both in orbit, and sending back data, and thus providing a record of both seasonal and overall ice loss during that time.
Long-term concern
The conclusion was that although the 300 most closely-observed glaciers, the ones that have caused the most alarm, are indeed losing mass at a disturbing rate, this is not the whole picture. The other 160,000 glaciers distributed across the planet are losing ice overall at a slower rate.
This sounds like relatively good news, considering that global anxiety about retreating glaciers was based mostly on direct measurements of famous or easy-to-observe ice flows. But the research confirms the big picture: that glaciers are in retreat almost everywhere.
And this spells problems in the long run everywhere: glaciers store winter water for summer irrigation, city water supplies and hydroelectric power. They keep rivers navigable, and they maintain mountain ecosystems.
If they shrink, that's not good news for mountain creatures or the people, forests, plains and settlements downstream. The largest losses were from Arctic Canada, Alaska, coastal Greenland, the southern Andes and the high peaks of Asia. There was little loss from Antarctica's glaciers.
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subset: commoncrawl


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I created a Tumblr account today. I didn't particularly want a Tumblr account, but I needed one to ask Matt Fraction a question on his blog, which is a Tumblr. Since I've got one now, why not hook it to the POSSE setup and have this blog push to it (which is exactly the opposite of what Fraction and many others do; I'm my own dude.)
With any luck this will push over there, and then I will never think about the fact that I have a Tumblr again.


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True blue
What's the meaning of the phrase 'True blue'?
Loyal and unwavering in one's opinions or support for a cause.
What's the origin of the phrase 'True blue'?
'True blue' is supposed to derive from the blue cloth that was made at Coventry, England in the late middle ages. The town's dyers had a reputation for producing material that didn't fade with washing, that is, it remained 'fast' or 'true'. The phrase 'as true as Coventry blue' originated then and is still used (in Coventry at least). The town's standing was recorded in 1670 by John Ray in the first edition of A Compleat Collection of English Proverbs:
"Coventry had formerly the reputation for dying of blues; insomuch that true blue became a Proverb to signifie one that was always the same and like himself."
There are other theories as to the origin of 'true blue'; for example, the representation in paintings of the Virgin Mary in blue clothing, the purity of lineage of the Spanish nobility (see also blue blood), or the blue aprons worn by butchers.
These derivations are unlikely as they aren't supported by documentary evidence that link them to 'true blue'. The Coventry story also has the added credence of closely matching the 'steadfast, unwavering' meaning of the phrase.
The change from the literal 'fast' coloured cloth to the allusory 'steadfast' loyal supporters came around the time that Ray was writing his book of proverbs. The Covenanters were a group of 17th century Scottish Presbyterians who swore to uphold the National Covenant and oppose the rule of James IV of Scotland. They wore blue as their badge and those who unequivocally supported the cause were called 'true blue'. Samuel Butler referred to this denomination in the satirical poem Hudibras, 1663:
For his Religion it was Fit
To match his learning and wit;
'Twas Presbyterian true blue
The Covenanters are no longer politically active, although the name survives as the nickname of the Reformed Presbyterian Church. Conservative politics has also maintained an association with the phrase and blue was adopted as the colour of the Tory Party in England (later called the Conservative Party). Staunch Conservative supporters, those whom Margaret Thatcher would have called 'one of us', are known as 'true blue' Tories.


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This thing is so cool it almost looks fake. But [Matt Richardson] isn't a hoaxster. He actually built what might be called a heads-down display for your bicycle. He refers to it as a headlight because it borrows a similar function. It mounts on the handlebars and shoots light off the front of the bike. But it's more than just a battery and a bulb, this uses a pico-projector to give that light some meaning. In the video after the break he shows it off on the streets of NYC.
So far he's only displaying information that has to do with the speed of travel, but the proof is there just waiting for a brilliant new use. Feeding the projector is a Raspberry Pi board. For this prototype [Matt] mounted it, along with the portable cellphone charger which plays the role of the power source, on a hunk of hardboard strapped inside the bike frame.
If you're thinking of doing this one yourself beware of the BOM price tag. That projector he's using runs upwards of $400. We wonder if you could hack together a rudimentary replacement with an old cellphone screen and this diy film projector?


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Tempest (2010), The
The Tempest was William Shakespeare's last play. Some say you can see the concerns of an old man in its text. The plight of Prospero, the isolated wizard, who spends the play going over the past and restoring a sense of order to the lives who helped and harmed him may be the Bard looking back at his own work. There is a sense of summation to a few of the plotlines, of going over worn ground. There is also an added element of the fantastic--a wizard, a fairy, a monster. Perhaps the author was dreaming of what lay beyond the flesh.
Filmmaker and stage director Julie Taymor certainly knows a thing or two about the fantastic. She's the one who successfully put The Lion King on Broadway and is in the midst of a spectacular failure trying to do the same with Spider-Man. Her films have had varying success, too. She brought art to life in Frida, but ruined the Beatles in Across the Universe. Her most popular film is arguably her other Shakespeare adaptation, the audacious Titus. Fitting then that she return to the Globe Theatre to take on The Tempest and harness that magic again.
For her new version, Taymor has switched the gender roles of two of the main characters. Prospero is now Prospera, and she is played with strength and knowing wisdom by Dame Helen Mirren; Ariel the sprite, who could really be cast as either gender, but who is often played by a girl, is portrayed here by the sinewy Ben Whishaw (Bright Star). Ariel is a servant of Prospera on the island where she lives in exile with her daughter, Miranda (Felicity Jones, Cemetery Junction). Ariel is looking for his freedom, but his relationship with Prospera is still somewhat friendly. The sorceress' other servant, the monstrous Caliban (Djimon Hounsou), is not as cooperative. Prospera wrestled the island from his mother, herself a witch.
The story of The Tempest takes place over a short period of time. Prospera uses her magic to whip up a storm and strand passing sailors on her island. Amongst their numbers are the men who did her wrong: the king who usurped her power (David Strathairn), his treacherous brother (Alan Cumming), and Prospera's own brother, Antonio (Chris Cooper), who led the coup that sent her packing. The king's son (Reeve Carney) is also on board, and Prospera encourages his romance with Miranda, who left Naples so young, she doesn't remember ever meeting a man before. Also on the island now are two drunkards--the comic relief, as it were. They are played with gusto by Alfred Molina and Russell Brand, who far and away are the most memorable things in the movie even if their jokes don't really hit modern funny bones. It's their delivery and the physical comedy that shine through. They have a subplot where they get Caliban drunk--schtick that Hounsou is surprisingly good at. The three of them light up the screen whenever they appear.
That is, when Taymor isn't lighting it up with her dazzling visuals. Though not nearly as outlandish as Titus in terms of its story content, The Tempest still gives her much to play with. She uses digital effects to create the storm and Prospera's magic, toying with painterly realism to create something just the right side of unbelievable. Her portrayal of Ariel is a lot of fun. She never shows him as a solid being, he is a part of the elements. He appears all over the island, growing in size and even multiplying in number. Whishaw has a good time with it, cutting a Peter Pan-like figure, though a Pan who has maybe grown weary of Neverland. He still enjoys mischief, but there is an underlying melancholy that reinforces his desire to be free.
Taymor also makes great use of the island, building Prospera's hideaway into the rocky cliffs and letting nature work its own magic on the shipwreck victims. The only time her effects team fails her, actually, is when she tries to create living creatures out of nothing. There are some fiery devil dogs that, even if they look fake by design, are distractingly fake. Also, a great gag with Brand and some frogs fails to come off because the animated frogs aren't well integrated into the scene.
All in all, Taymor's production of The Tempest is very well done. I've only ever seen the play performed once before, and that was a local college production earlier this year. By any comparison, that was a very bad production, full of wooden acting, odd staging choices, and an unrelenting sluggishness. Unfortunately, seeing a better staging of The Tempest has made me realize that the sluggishness is actually a fault of the material, the collegiate troupe wasn't entirely to blame (though they certainly didn't help). There are too many characters, too many subplots, and Shakespeare takes forever getting those plots going. The story follows a rigid structure of plot 1, plot 2, 3, 4, and so on. Lather, rinse, repeat. Taymor does nothing to alleviate or streamline this, and so there are long stretches of her movie that just plod along. It's practically half over before you realize who all the players are and what their relation is to one another. (She could have also cut the songs, including the sappy music video between the teenage lovers, but that's a whole other point.)
What this means is The Tempest is a well-executed movie, but one that executes material that doesn't speak to me. It's hard to impugn Shakespeare, his work continues to inspire new generations for a reason, and I'd be curious to hear what someone who likes The Tempest's source text thinks of what Taymor has done. The adaptation is certainly worth a look for her vivacious aesthetic, if nothing else.
Jamie S. Rich is a novelist and comic book writer. He is best known for his collaborations with Joelle Jones, including the hardboiled crime comic book You Have Killed Me, the challenging romance 12 Reasons Why I Love Her, and the 2007 prose novel Have You Seen the Horizon Lately?, for which Jones did the cover. All three were published by Oni Press. His most recent projects include the futuristic romance A Boy and a Girl with Natalie Nourigat; Archer Coe and the Thousand Natural Shocks, a loopy crime tale drawn by Dan Christensen; and the horror miniseries Madame Frankenstein, a collaboration with Megan Levens. Follow Rich's blog at Confessions123.com.
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HHS Distributes $150M to Health Centers for 'Obamacare' Enrollment
Health centers across the country will start receiving grant money to help people enroll for health insurance as part of the Affordable Care Act, or "Obamacare." The $150 million will be used by 1,159 centers in all 50 states to hire new staff or set up enrollment stations in public places.
"Investing in health centers means that people in neighborhoods and towns across the country have one more resource to help them understand their insurance options and enroll in affordable coverage," HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said on a Wednesday press call announcing the new grants.
The money will not only be used to help people sign up for health insurance in the new government subsidized health care exchanges for those without employer provided health insurance. It will also be used to help people sign up for Medicaid (a government health insurance program for the poor) and SCHIP (a government health insurance program for children).
The main parts of the ACA are scheduled to go into effect on Oct. 1, but the rollout of the new law has, thus far, not gone smoothly.
Last week, President Barack Obama decided to delay implementation of the employer mandate to provide health insurance to employees for a year. The employer mandate was intended to be a key component of the law's efforts to offset the other parts of the law that are expected to increase the costs of health care.
Additionally, new rules released by HHS show that the government subsidies will rely upon self-verification, which could lead to increased fraud and drive up the costs of the new law. And health insurance companies may not be able to charge some smokers more, as was planned, due to a computer glitch.
Sebelius said that she will be traveling to health centers across the country, beginning Wednesday in Phoenix, Ariz., to highlight the work that these health centers will be doing on behalf of the new health care law.


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Saturday, April 30, 2011
Win an LG Quantum Windows Phone 7
Posted by Jason Dunn in "Windows Phone Events" @ 10:00 AM
Just a quick reminder that we're running a free phone give-away: there's an unlocked LG Quantum up for grabs. It's fast and easy to enter; all you need is a YouTube account. Check out this post for more details.


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This hairstyle will be easiest right after washing the hair because then it's nice and wet and easy to work with.
Grab your rat-tail come and section out a pentagon shape right in the middle of the head. Make sure all five sides are equal and have straight lines and then tie the hair inside the pentagon into a ponytail.
Now from each corner of the pentagon you'll make a part straight out to the hairline. Do this on ever corner and you will end up with 5 individual sections.
Tie each off with an elastic close to the pentagon shape.
Create two braids out of each of the elastics and then pull the braids all up into the center ponytail and combine it all with another elastic.
You'll now have one single ponytail and you'll want to brush it all out until it's smooth. Now make a Messy Bun with the ponytail and spray it all with hairspray.
Just add a ribbon to finish it off.


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Our friends @Fifty24SF open My So Called Life featuring over 50 photographs from SF based Andrea Sonnenberg aka Teen Witch documenting portrait, graffiti, landscape, action, and day in the life photography. Opening Thursday, Nov 3rd @7pm. 218 Fillmore St.
Building off the unique lineage of street photography in San Francisco, Sonnenberg's unfiltered, raw, and often humorous work has made her an active documentarian of a new generation of SF youth culture. Her intimate portraits of her friends and of herself are often candid, revealing a truth about both the city and the personalities that exist inside. The photos present a world of unbridled optimism and a carefree rebirth of homegrown bohemian culture in the midst of a city preoccupied by technological innovation. -complete show details


text: phalen orion wrote: > What better way to celebrate Cinco de Mayo (aka the 5th of May) than by > getting together with a bunch of people and making a cacophonous noise?!? > > The Little Engines - 100% improvisational, audience-is-performer >sound-art > performance, May 5, 2001 at AAA Electra 99 art gallery, museum and > performance space. BRING YOUR OWN INSTRUMENT: things like toys, simple > instruments, found-object percussion... the wilder the better... try to > think outside the box :) > > There will be a mixer available for electronic instruments to plug into, >but > please only bring non-standard instruments and/or just processors. You >must > bring your own cables/mics if you will require them. > > Information on The Little Engines: http://www.littleengines.org/ > Information & directions to AAA Electra 99: http://www.aaaelectra99.com/ > > Bring friends, bring lovers, bring enemies, but bring something that >makes > noise: $5 non-members, $2 members. > > Best, > phalen180 > > P.S.: Please forward this email to local email lists you participate in >and > to anyone else you know who might be interested. Thanks! er, where exactly in the universe is this? :-) lance g.


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Genetic snip and snap
Molecular biologist Jacob Corn on editing genes and tackling diseases with CRISPR technology
This is Up Close, the research talk show from the University of Melbourne, Australia.
I'm Dr Andi Horvath, thanks for joining us. Today we bring you up close to the world of cutting edge gene manipulation technology and in particular, one called CRISPR. Whilst it sounds like a kitchen appliance for deep frying, it's actually a revolutionary precision tool for genetic engineering, useful in both disease research and therapy. Adding to the soup of acronyms, we need to include Cas9, which is a protein that, as we'll hear, has supercharged the power and utility of CRISPR.
Advances in genetic engineering up till now have allowed for the manipulation of genes, but translation from the lab to human gene therapy has proven elusive. Meanwhile, gene editing has been really slow to go from the lab to the clinic, but now we have the awkwardly named CRISPR, which stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. CRISPR harnesses a natural process found in bacteria, which have for eons been doing their own splicing of foreign genes and DNA self-repair. It is, in fact, bacteria's way of dealing with virus attacks. If a bacterium survives a virus attack, it can better its chances in future attacks and it does this by tucking away a virus gene sequence into its own bacterial genome, amongst the palindromic sequences, like a photo ID catalogue of bad guys to avoid in the future. Next time the virus attacks, clusters of so-called Cas proteins associated with CRISPR pick up a photo ID RNA and slice the virus.
But as we'll hear, CRISPR-Cas9 applications go beyond that, including the potential to therapeutically swap out genes that trigger diseases. Its power has been well demonstrated in laboratories with agricultural and human trials now getting underway. But while technologies using CRISPR-Cas9 look to have a bright future, they bring with it a number of ethical and regulatory complexities.
Joining us to slice and dice the topic of CRISPR-Cas9 is Professor Jacob Corn, who is the scientific director and principal of the innovative Genomics Institute at UC Berkeley, where he leads the Corn Lab in development of next generation genome editing technologies. Jacob is in Melbourne as a guest of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research. Welcome to Up Close, Jacob.
Thanks very much.
Jacob, tell us about these Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. How can you describe it for those of us who aren't geneticists?
I think you did a great job of introducing the idea behind CRISPR and how bacteria use these systems. The whole idea is that bacteria needs some way to fight off viruses and what they do is they grab little pieces of invading viral genomes and stuff them into their own bacterial genomes and then use these Cas proteins to make little pieces of RNA off the viral DNA and re-recognise the invading virus. So you might be asking yourself, well what does this have to do with genetic engineering and the key understanding here is if these Cas proteins are using pieces of RNA to recognise some other foreign piece of DNA, that other piece of DNA can be anything. So the connection here is that you can engineer a genome by inducing a cut inside of it.
That seems kind of weird. How does making a cut let you engineer something? It's because of something called DNA repair. All organisms, whether yourself, trees, anything, has DNA repair enzymes and we have to have them because when you walk down the street on a beautiful sunny day like it is here, you get UV damage as your cells are copying themselves, they accumulate damage and if we didn't have ways to repair that damage, then we'd be in big, big trouble. In fact, that's one of the ways that cancer accumulates, is when we don't repair that damage. So our bodies contain a whole host of ways to repair damage and one of the types of damage they repair is cuts in genes.
So the way genome editing works is you get a Cas protein to target a certain place and it induces a cut and then DNA repair takes care of it. How does that lead to editing? Well there are two ways that the repair can go on. The first one is you can get error-prone repair, so the cell tries to repair it and does a kind of bad job at it, adds in a little bit of sequence, takes out a little bit of sequence and that breaks whatever happens to be there. So if that cut is in a desert, in the middle of nowhere, nothing really happens. If it's in the middle of a functional sequence, then that sequence gets broken. So that's really useful from a research point of view, because very often during research the way we figure out what cells do, the way they work, is a little bit like taking a car engine apart. You have a car engine, you want to know how that car engine works, you take out a piece, a single piece and you say, okay, what happened. You've got the catalytic converter, you take the catalytic converter out and you say, this engine now doesn't work, why doesn't that work, what does a catalytic converter do in that engine? Same thing with cells; they've got millions and millions of pieces, you break one piece and then say, okay, the cell no longer works, why does it no longer work, what did that part do, because we don't know what all the parts are.
But where do you get to therapy from this? Obviously it's very hard to make therapies that have to do with breaking genes all over the place, that's tough. So the other way that cells can repair DNA damage uses things called templates of other pieces of DNA. Normally during DNA repair a cell will use its own bits of DNA to repair the damage, so you've got multiple copies of chromosomes, maybe one of them gets broken and then you repair off the one that didn't get broken. But as researchers and clinicians, we can add in our own pieces of DNA that we want to put in and that can be useful because let's say someone has a genetic disease and the genetic disease is a single, small point mutation, one base out of the billions of bases is wrong. If we put in a template that contains the base that does not contain that mutation, the cell can use that, copy off of it and now the cell no longer has the disease causing mutation.
Right, so it's sort of like a car that can repair itself, but except what happens is the Cas9 protein is kind of like the mechanic that goes in and says, hey, that bit's not working and then other proteins say, well we're going to fix that because the Cas9 has just removed the broken bit. But what we're doing as scientists is that we're giving those other proteins, hey, put in this bit into the car because it'll work better with this particular broken bit.
Exactly right. I mean I might even say that the cell is sort of a team of technicians. Think about when you're watching Formula 1 and all of those technicians are coming in to help repair that car. Cas9 is the thing that sees the broken thing and points out to all those cellular technicians this is the thing you need to fix and here's the way you need to do it and then the cell is responsible for taking care of it. That's the big challenge actually, because if you think about all those technicians, we don't actually totally understand all the ways that cells repair DNA. So one of the challenges for genome editing right now is it works in many cases, but there are other cases where it doesn't work and we don't actually know why. So better understanding of the way cells repair DNA will help us make this a more reproducible, more efficacious process for curing diseases.
Sure. So we can actually give those other proteins, say, hey insert this good DNA instead of that bad bit. So tell us the difference then between gene editing and what CRISPR technology actually sounds like, which is kind of like a gene therapy, because you're replacing the bad with the good.
Yeah, so there is really a place for gene editing in gene therapy. Gene therapy is where you take a virus and it contains a gene payload and you deliver that to a patient and that gene is now integrated into their genome but it does so randomly. That's useful because let's say that you have someone with severe combined immunodeficiency, it's also known as bubble boy disease, you've probably seen movies and heard about patients like this, they're lacking an immune system. They're lacking an immune system because they're lacking a functional version of the protein. What gene therapy does is it introduces a functional copy of that protein, but it does so randomly and so there can sometimes be problems because what if you add in the good gene but it goes into a bad place? Gene editing can actually help gene therapy because now instead of putting the good gene randomly and sometimes goes in a bad place, you know exactly where it's going to go every single time.
So gene editing actually helps complement gene therapy, but it also adds this new capability of being able to not only put in whole big things like genes, you can actually change little point mutations. That's really important because a lot of the human mutations that cause disease are not big, huge things that break a lot of stuff, they're little tiny problems. Let's say you have a broken gene, but it's broken in one little place. Rather than try to take the whole big thing and put it randomly, let's just change the one little bit that's broken and leave everything else alone.
Okay Jacob, let's talk about the case study of sickle cell anaemia. How has CRISPR demonstrated its power in that particular condition?
So sickle cell anaemia is a really interesting and in some ways a very medically frustrating case. So sickle cell anaemia is a genetic disease and it's caused by a single mutation. The frustrating thing is we've known the cause of this mutation since 1949, is when it was first described. We've known not only how it's caused, we've known even the mutation since 1949 and yet most of the way that we treat this disease is by giving patients painkillers because it's a genetic disease; there's no cure for genetic diseases. So the promise of gene editing is the ability to actually go into the genome itself and rather than try to address symptoms, e.g. with painkillers and things like that, to treat the disease.
Now gene editing itself is actually not a new concept. Gene editing has been around since the '90s using other types of tools. People have tried to do gene editing for sickle cell using other tools, they've had some success but the efficacy has been somewhat limited. So the hope would be that gene editing using CRISPR could maybe have some sort of benefit. So my lab as well as a couple of other labs have now been trying to use CRISPR to go after sickle cell disease and to do that, you have to go after these certain types of cells in your bone marrow called hematopoietic stem cells. It's really important because sickle cell disease is a disease of the red blood cells, causes them to curve up, causes them to clog in capillaries. But red blood cells have no nuclei; they have no DNA in them. You can't edit them, there's nothing to edit. So what you have to do is you have to go all the way back to the stem cells that make the red blood cells. So you edit those hematopoietic stem cells in the bone marrow, that should then give some sort of lasting benefit. So what we and a couple of other labs have shown is that CRISPR can be used to take the certain point mutation that causes sickle cell disease and change it back.
Now are you talking about cells in a petri dish, or are you talking about injecting a whole animal, like a mouse? Also, whilst you're saying you're editing the genes of the hematopoietic stem cells, how many of those are going to actually make an impact and isn't there also a cluster of hematopoietic stem cells that haven't been edited? So is it a numbers game? How does it actually work?
That's actually a really deep question. So first off, you're asking a difference between two things that we scientists call ex vivo editing and in vivo editing. Ex vivo editing means you take bone marrow stem cells out of someone, edit them ex vivo, that is out of the body, and then put them back in. So that's where we're going right now and the reason that's very attractive is that it's basically just a bone marrow transplant, but you're letting patients be their own bone marrow donors. Instead of taking bone marrow from someone else that's healthy and putting it into someone with the disease, you take the patient's own bone marrow, take it out, edit it so that it now no longer has the disease and then put it back in.
So you're taking out all the bone marrow, essentially.
You take out as much as you can, you try to expand it.
Have we actually done this with mice or with humans yet?
Sadly we've not done it with humans. We have done ex vivo editing using tissue from people with sickle cell disease, we've put it into mice, we've not done so at these huge scales. So that's actually something that we're working towards right now. One of the things we're working towards right now is taking some of the initial successes that we've seen in the lab, which are exciting but still relatively small scale and try to expand them to full clinical scale, billions and billions of cells and very importantly, we need to do so under conditions that are appropriate for safety and quality recording that you might use in a clinical trial. So some of the work that's going on right now is really just trying to take the things we've already done in the lab and do it again, but in sort of big-league mode to practice before we start trying to enroll people in clinical trials.
So these clinical trials are going to happen soon as we speak, in 2017?
It's hard to say exactly when they're going to start because a lot of it will be driven by the data. We're very optimistic that within the next couple of years we would be able to get to a clinical trial. I think there are a couple of groups that have said, we want to be in patients by X date. My philosophy personally is to say, well, we need to do the work, we don't know what the result is going to be, so let's do the experiment, let's try to do the scale up, let's see how it goes. Optimistically, I would like to say yes, we could be there in a couple of years, but we have to see how the work goes.
If you are your own donor, that means you no longer need transplants from other human beings and there won't be problems of rejection. But, as you say, there are still questions of safety to iron out.
Yeah, so not rejecting the graft is one of the big benefits. There are a couple of problems with getting a bone marrow transplant from someone else. Number one, graft versus host disease means the thing that you get fights your body and then of course you yourself see the graft as foreign. So people go on immunosuppressants, etcetera, etcetera, it's a complicated procedure. So our hope is that doing this type of ex vivo editing will get around some of those things and make them safer. But we do need to make sure that the act of editing the bone marrow stem cells doesn't cause problems itself. So there are going to be clear safety benefits that editing will help get us around, but we need to make sure that we're not introducing new safety problems at the same time.
Sickle cell anaemia is part of a class of ailments that are caused by a single gene, but what about multi-gene disorders and other syndromes where the disease is due to a number of genes, does CRISPR have capacity there?
I think that the jury is still out on that. In the culture dish, people have been able to edit multiple genes simultaneously and one group has even managed to edit multiple, many, many, many locations in pigs, so things have looked okay, but obviously editing in pigs where if something goes wrong, you can just breed that out and breed healthy pigs against edited pigs, or just look for more pigs that are healthy, that's a luxury you don't necessarily have when you're working with patients. So I think there's a lot of promise for working with multi-gene disorders and certainly CRISPR is nice because it gives you the flexibility to reprogram very quickly and look at a lot of different things. I think there's promise there, but a lot of that promise is really in the lab and on paper and I think the next couple of years are going to be really exciting because we'll find out can you actually go for multi-gene disorders.
I'm Andi Horvath and you're listening to Up Close. In this episode, we're talking about the revolutionary gene editing technology known as CRISPR-Cas9 with molecular biologist, Jacob Corn.
Now I believe scientists are also excited about using CRISPR-Cas9 - can we just call it CRISPR - as a cell model for disease. Tell us about that.
I'm really, really excited about the promise of CRISPR-Cas9 - CRISPR - for treating genetic disease. But I think that really some of the biggest effects that are going to come out of this are actually the use to model disease and to do basic research. This is where we get into sort of unanticipated, new realms of discovery. CRISPR itself, it's a completely fundamental curiosity driven thing. CRISPR is this weird antiviral immune system. No one was looking for a gene editing tool when they found CRISPR systems and yet it turns out that this thing, discovered purely by scientific curiosity, actually is going to have a huge impact on human health. So imagine what's going to imagine now when people take this new tool and they start asking new scientific questions that they just couldn't ask before. I think there's going to be a huge amount that's going to come from this.
Last time I looked, there were thousands of papers that were starting to use CRISPR, most of them are not looking for genetic disease, they're using it as a tool to say, how does this system, work, how does that system work. As an example, maybe someone uses CRISPR to look at some little crustacean, maybe like some weird little crab that lives in the ocean. You might say, oh what's the point of that? But what if this crab actually can regenerate its limbs really well and we have no idea how that happens and using CRISPR lets us understand that better. Doing that gives us ways to perhaps look at better ways to heal wounds, maybe to help veterans coming back from combat situations to heal wounds and to repair damage from that. These are totally unanticipated discoveries that could have new benefit for human health. I think it's really important that we're able to use these new tools to ask these kinds of questions.
Wow, this would also have insights into areas like cancer and oncology.
Absolutely, I mean I think that goes multiple ways. Of course you can use CRISPR to ask how does cancer cause all these cells to start dividing too quickly, but remember, CRISPR itself is a process of DNA repair: you're cutting genes, you're inducing DNA repair. One of the hallmarks of cancer is problems in DNA repair because cells go crazy, they don't repair their genomes, problems accumulate and so not only can we use CRISPR to ask questions about how do cells go wrong during cancer, the very act of doing CRISPR is fundamentally giving us insight into one of the primary mechanisms by which cells become cancerous.
Jacob let's go in another direction. CRISPR-Cas9 has broader applications than just human health. Tell us about how these have been used in mosquito populations to help control the spread of malaria.
So what you're describing is a technology called gene drives and I really want to stress a gene drive is not something that is being used in the wild just yet, in fact when people are using gene drives, they're doing so in very, very safe, high quote-unquote biosafety level containment. They're not doing this because there's any sort of disease associated with it, they're doing it because they want to be very, very conservative and make sure nothing happens. So what a gene drive is, is a way of taking a trait and making it spread through a population very, very quickly. So what might this be useful for? In mosquitoes, they get infected by the parasite that causes malaria and one of the problems is, well how do we combat malaria? We can combat it in people but one way we could combat it is by trying to keep the mosquitoes from passing along malaria. So what if you could make a trait that prevented mosquitoes from getting malaria in the first place and then spread that through the mosquito population. It would be very powerful, there would still be mosquitoes around, bats would still have something to eat, it wouldn't be a problem, but the mosquitoes just wouldn't carry the parasite anymore.
So it's an exciting technology, but people are being conservative because of course we're talking about taking traits and introducing them not in the lab, not in the patient, but spreading them entirely throughout a wild population, so people are get a little worried about it. Now I want to point out that actually gene drives are natural things. There's this weird thing called a P element that right around the '50s spread through all fruit flies in the entire world, completely spread through, it's a natural gene drive. So gene drives happen in nature, they're not this totally human synthetic thing, but when we start talking about making our own gene drives as people, we want to be very careful about how we design them and how we put them together. So there's actually a lot of both experimental work as well as just purely theoretical population genetics work trying to understand how they spread, how we can control them, as well as once we put them in, people have started to devise ways to turn them back off again.
Are there other things beyond insects in which CRISPR can be used for?
Well it's interesting because New Zealand has recently suggested that they might use gene drive technologies to try to take control of rodent populations that are out of control.
Sure, which are introduced animals.
Exactly, so invasive species, so it is possible that gene drives could be used to control other invasive species. I think that's an area where we have to be a little cautious because there's a long history of trying to control invasive populations by introducing manmade other populations and sometimes those have gone okay and sometimes they've really backfired. So I think that it's a really interesting idea and I think it's probably better than, say, spraying poison everywhere that will then enter into the food chain. But we do need to be careful about introducing a genetic tool that could spread through a population to control another one, but it's one of those things that we need to try first in a controlled environment before we put it into the wild.
I can see CRISPR technology is also going to be helpful for broader global issues like food security or even the realm of biofuels. What's going on in that field?
I think there are a couple of really important things happening in CRISPR for agriculture. Using CRISPR in plants and animals I think is going to be a huge area for the world. As an example, back at my home in California, there's someone trying to use CRISPR to figure out how a plant called cassava gets attacked by a virus. Now cassava is a major food source for 80 per cent of Africa, it's a huge, huge source of calories for most of the continent and yet it's really susceptible to a certain type of virus called the brown streak virus. People really don't know how does this virus get spread, is it possible to combat it and instead of combating the virus, which of course is going to be constantly evolving and trying to get away from anything you do, people have talked about instead what if we can make cassava that's resistant to the virus and then we can just grow that cassava. The virus is still going to be out there, but we'll be able to have cultivated types of cassava. It's one example in which there's a lot of food security benefit there.
There is even benefits just for stuff that might make your life nicer at the dinner table. Someone has recently shown that you can take mushrooms and keep them from turning brown all the time, just by making a simple change with CRISPR. The use of CRISPR in agriculture ranges everything from totally critical security, keeping food sources around, to just making the products that are on your dinner table more appealing, taste better, last longer. But one thing to remember about using CRISPR in agriculture is that what we're talking about here is actually not something really new, plant breeders do this all the time. When you take two plants and breed them together to make a better tomato or a tastier piece of corn, what you're really doing is you're swapping genetic information.
So when people are using gene editing in agricultural species, they're doing the exact same thing the plant breeders would do, they're just doing it faster and in fact they're doing it less randomly. Usually what people do when they breed is they take two plants, they put them together, bunches and bunches of stuff happens and it takes years to sort out everything that happened. What we're hoping with CRISPR is we can say, look, we want this plant to do X, we need it to grow faster so that farmers can get more yield, we want it to be more frost resistant, for example. We know how to do that and let's just implement that as opposed to breed two things together and then spend the next years trying to sort out all those random junk that happened.
Concerning agriculture, genetically modified organisms have caused huge societal concerns. How will using CRISPR be different, if at all?
I think when people think about genetically modified organisms they're very often thinking about cases in which people take a gene from one place, totally different place and they put it into another organism. But it turns out that's not the way you have to do things and in fact, when you take two plants and you breed them together, what you're typically doing is you take one plant that has some random differences in itself and another plant that has some random differences in itself, they have some traits you like and you put them together. There's a way with CRISPR to rather take some gene from some totally other organism, but instead to just put in the little change that you think would be good. So instead of trying to breed these two plants together, you instead just get what you wanted out of it in the first place.
Right, so it's not a hybrid.
Exactly, it's not a hybrid, you're not introducing foreign genetic material. The mushroom browning is a great example. There's a mushroom that has been made that does not brown and what they do is they take an enzyme that's made by the mushroom that causes it to brown and go bad. All they do is they just turn off that gene. They're not introducing something foreign, they're just doing something that over time the mushroom will accumulate genetic errors and you might get that browning randomly by chance, but instead of waiting for a million years for it to happen, you just do it right then.
I think that right now there's a really big discussion among a lot of different countries about what is going to constitute GMO and what is not going to constitute GMO. So in Europe and in the United States, they have decided that making these types of small changes like you do with the mushroom are not regulated as GMO because they're changes that could happen naturally, we're just going to do them ourselves. But what will stay GMO is, say, taking a gene from a bacterium and putting it into a plant, that will stay GMO. But things that would just happen randomly that instead we're doing with CRISPR, will not be regulated as GMO. Other countries have decided that that's not going to be the case and using CRISPR will be GMO. Now I think there's a danger to the latter. This is the so-called process versus product debate. If you regulate the way you make the thing, then you're saying, well look the method you use to get there, however long it took, is what matters, not the final thing that ends up on the dinner table. I think a lot of the rest of the world is saying, look however you got there, whether it took you 20 steps or whether it took you one step, what matters is where you got to. Whether you got there by conventional breeding or whether you got there by CRISPR, what matters is where you got.
I favour the product because I think there are all sorts of different ways of getting there. We may invent some brand new technology in five years of doing it in half a step that's even faster than CRISPR, who knows? If we start regulating the process, we're constantly playing catch up with technology and we're constantly trying to figure out what's going to happen down the pipe and what we need to think, I think, instead about is what are we comfortable with in terms of the agricultural product in the end. Since the things that are coming out the other side are completely indistinguishable from what you would get from normal breeding, which we've been doing for thousands and thousands of years, to me it makes sense that we regulate it the same way we regulate normally bred agricultural products.
Jacob what are the risks here? Is there the equivalent of the overuse of antibiotics that might lead to the creation of hardier pathogens and pests?
In terms of gene editing itself, it's pretty flexible, however there is one niche problem that might happen. So when you're making a gene edit, you're using a protein that's going to go in and it's going to change something in the genome, but it's a foreign protein and so it's possible that after you've made that edit, your body is going to raise antibodies against it. So if you did that, you wouldn't be able to make a second edit. Let's say someone has two genetic diseases, you would only be able to edit both genetic diseases simultaneously, you could never edit one and then come in a second time and edit the second disease because after you edit the first, they're going to raise antibodies against the CRISPR protein that you used to edit them the first time. So think that there's not really any sort of idea of making too many changes in the genome is going to cause any sort of toxic side effects, but there is this complication where we have a limited number of times that we can use this.
I'm Andi Horvath and our guest today is molecular biologist, Professor Jacob Corn. We're talking about the power of CRISPR gene editing technology here on Up Close.
Jacob, do you see a future where the technology becomes so commonplace that we'll be using it for things like cosmetic purposes and that becomes the norm?
Editing for cosmetic reasons has a lot of barriers to it. I don't know if we're ever going to see it be used to, say, make people taller and anything like that for a variety of scientific reasons. Number one, we have absolutely no idea what makes people tall. There is actually a paper written about that a bit ago and it turns out that it's this huge number of genes that influence these things. So it's totally unclear whether the technology will ever be able to do that. I think also it's really hard to envision the use of something so invasive for something so trivial. People have talked about using gene editing for more science fiction type things. As an example, there are people talking about trying to send people in very long space missions, are there ways to use gene editing to maybe increase radiation resistance to tolerate those missions, to reduce bone loss, things like that.
So enhancements to the human body to allow space travel.
Yeah, people have been talking about those sorts of things. That sort of stuff, at the moment, again, it's very science fiction and in some ways it's a little bit putting the cart before the horse. We're having these long arguments about should we do this thing that we can't do? I think it's important to look ahead, but if the technology is 15 years away from now, it's unclear whether our views of it will change in the next 15 years.
Jacob I notice that scientists are often cautious to say they're funding is for somatic cells and not the germ cell lines and germ cell lines, of course, means alternating the genetics of our offspring. So why can't we just edit out some diseases out of history altogether? This means editing the germlines and that would affect the future generations, permanently altering them. So can we and should we do it?
I think that question that you just raised, that's the key question: not can we, but should we. I think that theoretically, on paper, we might be able to do it. No one has done it yet, but theoretically we might be able to do it. The question really is, should we do it? Should we try? I think there are certain diseases where patients have asked for that kind of germline editing. A good example is Huntington's disease. In Huntington's disease, as generations progress, the disease actually gets worse from generation to generation. Your kids will have it worse than you did, their grandkids will have it even worse. So people say, let's stop this right where it is, let's not just treat every single generation over and over and over again. But I think that doing that has rightly raised a lot of ethical questions and, frankly, scientific questions among people. Ethical because now we're starting to mess with our own evolution and scientific because we really don't understand human evolution all that well; we don't know why some traits are around, why others have been lost and so the idea of starting to introduce changes that will be passed down over time has people questioning do we really know enough to start doing this.
I think that for certain diseases, it is very tempting to want to do that, but frankly, for the vast, vast, vast majority of genetic diseases, there's no reason to do germline editing. For things like muscular dystrophy, sickle cell anaemia, any of these things, they're completely addressable in a somatic way. Now if you did a germline, it wouldn't be passed on to offspring, but there is a possibility, if your children had that genetic disease, they could get somatic therapy. So I think at this point we do need to stop, take count and say, we have the capability of doing somatic editing, do we want to expand that on to germline editing.
In fact, very recently there were discussions from the National Academy of Sciences and the National Institute of Medicine in the United States talking about germline editing, talking about whether or not it's appropriate. At the moment they've really called for, one, no federal funding to be used for it and two, let's try to put a moratorium, let's try to put a halt on it. There are some independent funders that have said, we will look at germline editing and part of the reason they've said that is in very certain cases. So I want to introduce the research uses of germline editing. We think of germline editing as this is the way that you're going to cure diseases and that's totally possible, but there are also certain scientific questions for human health that could only be addressable if asked in a germline setting.
So for example, there is a woman in the UK who is trying to understand why so many in vitro fertilisations fail. A very, very large number of in vitro fertilisations just don't work and it's very frustrating for the families that are trying to conceive that way and we have no idea why that is. So what this woman is trying to say is, well let's take some of these cases where they're failing and try to use gene editing as a research tool in those cases, not to take those edited zygotes to term, but they're already failing anyway, let's try to use CRISPR to ask why are they failing. We're not going to do anything with those zygotes, we're going to say what is going on scientifically and that will hopefully make IVF better.
Now I think if one were to put a complete ban on germline editing, that would be throwing up our hands and saying, we will never answer this question in this way. I think if we want to do that, we have to be comfortable with that outcome, we have to say we're going to draw a line in the sand and therefore we're never going to know. I think that there are a lot of people who are not comfortable drawing that line in the sand and right now what I think is happening is a lot of people are discussing very vigorously where the line is going to be. But I think that it's really important to think deeply about this because when we start talking about genome editing, it's very, very easy to conflate somatic editing and germline editing into the same sentence, into the same idea and I think in doing so, we start mixing in the murky, complicated ethical questions of germline editing with the very cut and dry single person editing of somatic.
I think that's really important to take to heart because somatic editing does not get passed on, it cures just the person that has the problem and has none of the ethical quandaries. So I think when we start talking about regulations and ethical discussions and things like that, we need to be very careful about how we put those together and very careful about how we talk about these. We really need to think about them in a regulatory framework very, very differently and that's really important because we don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. If we make any type of ethical or regulatory considerations about germline editing, we need to make sure that we're not preventing cures for patients that are suffering right now from diseases that could be addressed with somatic editing, which would not be passed on through the germline.
Jacob my knowledge of CRISPR is now so much clearer, or crisper, if you like. Thanks for being our guest on Up Close.
Thank you very much. It's my pleasure.
We've been speaking about the power and the promise of CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology with Professor Jacob Corn, Scientific Director of the Innovative Genomics Institute at University of California Berkeley. You'll find a full transcript and more info on this and all our episodes on the Up Close website. Up close is a production of The University of Melbourne. Australia. This episode was recorded on 15 February 2017. Producer was Eric van Bemmel, audio engineering by Gavin Nebauer. I'm Dr Andi Horvath, cheers.
You've been listening to Up Close. For more information, visit upclose.unimelb.edu.au. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook. Up Close is licensed under Creative Commons, copyright 2017, The University of Melbourne.
Molecular biologist Professor Jacob Corn describes how gene editing is carried out with CRISPR-Cas9 and why this technology has the potential to revolutionise the treatment of diseases like sickle cell anaemia and malaria.
Besides human health, CRISPR-Cas9 can also contribute to improving agriculture and, consequently, food security. Jacob also discusses the potential ethical challenges posed by the widespread application of gene editing,
"Instead of taking bone marrow from someone else that's healthy and putting it into someone with the disease, you take the patient's own bone marrow . . . edit it so that it now no longer has the disease and then put it back in," says Professor Corn.
"No one was looking for a gene editing tool when they found CRISPR systems and yet it turns out that this thing, discovered purely by scientific curiosity, actually is going to have a huge impact on human health."
Episode recorded: 15 February 2017
Up Close producer: Eric van Bemmel
Audio engineer: Gavin Nebauer
Banner image: National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI)/Wikimedia Commons
Subscribe to Up Close through iTunes, SoundCloud or RSS.


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Nearly all organisms contain pieces of DNA that do not really belong to them. These "transposable elements", so called because they are capable of moving around within and between genomes, generally represent a drain on the host's resources and in certain cases may lead directly to disease, e.g. when they insert themselves within an essential host gene. The factors that govern the spread of transposable elements within a population are broadly understood but many of the finer points remain unclear. New work at the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna (Vetmeduni Vienna) may pave the way to a more profound knowledge of the intracellular battle that is constantly being played out between the host and invading DNA.
Robert Kofler and Andrea Betancourt in Schlötterer's group at the Vetmeduni Vienna's Institute of Population Genetics used new sequencing technologies to examine the variation in transposable elements within a population of fruit flies. Similar investigations had been undertaken previously but the scientists incorporated a number of refinements to ensure that their analysis considered both known and previously unknown sites of insertion. For the first time, the researchers were able to catalogue all the transposable elements in a population of flies. And importantly they were also able to determine how frequently transposable elements occur at each particular site of insertion.
The findings were dramatic. The flies contain transposable elements at a large number of sites in the genome, although many insertion sites are affected in relatively few individuals. These are presumably sites of recent insertion and only the future will tell whether the elements are maintained there. Some older insertion sites are widespread but the majority seem not to be "fixed" in the population. In other words, most transposable elements are somehow purged before they become established. Schlötterer sums up the results by stating that "the genome is like a record of past wars between hosts and the parasitic DNA. There have been waves of attacks and the majority of them have been repelled, with only few transposable elements managing to survive and spread throughout the population."
Even more surprisingly, the scientists found about a dozen sites of insertion that were more frequent in the population than would be expected from their age (assessed via a different method). It seems, then, that there is positive selection for transposable elements at these sites, suggesting that insertion has a beneficial effect on the host. Such an effect had previously been shown for two insertions that give increased resistance against insecticides and these cases were refound by Schlötterer's analysis. The functions of the genes closest to the remaining insertions are highly diverse, so how the transposable elements may benefit the flies is unclear. As Schlötterer puts it, "perhaps we shouldn't really think of transposable elements as parasites at all. They represent a way for organisms to increase their genetic repertoire, which may be advantageous in helping them meet future challenges." Source : University of Veterinary Medicine -- Vienna


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The ultimate skewer of barbecued beef? Perhaps.
Around five in the afternoon charcoal smoke begins to rise from dozens of grills, scenting the air all over Siem Reap. Cambodians love a barbecue, it seems -- there's an entire street devoted to restaurants serving up charred protein (chicken, beef, offal, seafood), sides and beer. Locals call it "Khmer Pub Street", after Pub Street, an infamous downtown strip of dance clubs and bars in which young foreign travellers pass their evenings.
A couple evenings ago we dipped our toe into the local BBQ scene at a corner joint on the non-Pub Street side of the river. Picture it: a middle-aged woman seated on a stool behind a long low grill crowded with skewers of red meat. A packed house every single night, from five-thirty onward. An intoxicating scent -- smoky, sweet, meaty -- that begins to tickle your nose when you're still half a block away.
The meat on those skewers is local beef and beef liver, marinated in beef stock and perhaps Cambodian palm sugar. The strips of beef are alternated with bits of pork fat to keep the meat moist, and both it and the liver are skewered in such a way that they form waves along the wooden stick rather than lying flat. The result, for the beef at least (we passed on the liver) is that while some parts of the meat become black and charred and crispy-crusty, others cook no further than medium or medium-rare. Each piece of beef is a bit like a bite of a thick char-grilled steak, a mix of textures and donenesses. It's brilliant.
That's not all. After the skewers come off the grill they're annointed with a mixture of (I'm guessing here) soy sauce and with palm sugar -- a little salt, a little sweet (and I do mean "a little" -- palm sugar isn't as sweet as cane sugar), a little extra smoky caramel flavor to further play up the sweet smokiness the grill gives the meat.
For liver lovers only
All well and delicious, but what truly qualifies this barbecued beef as The Bomb is its accompaniment: a sweet-sour pickle-salad of thick cucumber slices, finely shredded green papaya and ginger. There's all kinds of ways to eat the two together, but we like to mix a spoonful of fresh red chili sauce in with our salad-pickle and alternate mouthfuls: smoky-meaty, tangy-sweet-spicy. Another option: snag a mini baguette hot off the grill -- be sure to wave off the smear of rank margarine -- and stuff it with meat and pickle for the ultimate grilled beef sandwich.
This isn't the only BBQ beef skewer place in town, but it's certainly one of the busiest. Already heaving at five, it was still doing the business on our first visit around 7:30. Go early; unlike the full-service barbecue restaurants these places tend to close up shop by 9 or so.
Beef (and beef liver) skewers, a ten-minute walk from Psar Chas / Old Market: cross the bridge in front of the market and veer right (south) at the circle, past the Hip Hop Club. It's on your left, a corner place directly opposite the sign for the Golden Banana Guest House and Boutique Resort (which, by the way, is a great place to stay). To see the place on a google map go here. Order skewers in multiples of 5. On our first visit 15 skewers (beef), 5 or 6 plates of pickle-salad and two orders of bread cost us less than U$5. On our next visit 2 pickles and 5 skewers (no bread) cost 5,000 riel.