iPod, therefore I am (sorry Mr. Descartes)

Lately I’ve been going through a phase of listening to a bunch of podcasts. What is a podcast? Those of you in the iPod generation (which I am in simply by proxy, because I am a parent and have to keep up with certain technological upgrades or be mercilessly made fun of by my children) already know. Podcasts are radio. Woohoo technology is amazing, someone re-invented radio. I hope Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy are on next.
Okay, that is not quite the extent of it. Podcasts are MP3 programs (don’t ask me what MP3 means, as I said, I am only allowed into the club by proxy) created by anyone from respected journalists like Bill Moyers to Ignatz and Jughead hanging out in their basement broadcasting their most recent arguments as to who would win a battle between Spiderman and Yoda. This is not a paid advertisement for any Apple product but I must say there is a huge selection on iTunes of podcasts and many of them are educated, erudite, funny and thought-provoking. Just because this is not a paid endorsement of Apple I am not above accepting a gratuity from Mr. Jobs or Mr. Wozniak. I’d love one of those really skinny MacBook Airs. They are so cool…end of shameless begging.
I have on my iPod a variety of things: interviews with writers Michael Chabon, Aaron Sorkin, and Dave Barry (not all at once), a PBS program entitled Taxing the Poor, a short funny story told by Malcom Gladwell, The Bugle – hilarious fake news broadcasts from two British guys, and even old radio shows like The Shadow. My favorite one right now is a series from WNYC, public radio from New York, titled Radio Lab. This show looks at science and explains the inner workings of normal everyday things as well as things which sound like whacked out science fiction.
The one I was listening to as I walked to work recently (I’m walking to work in an effort to do my bit for the environment, to save money, and to improve my health, not because I want to) was discussing the idea of genes and what bioengineers are able to do. The mainstream news spends more time with the scary bits of bioengineering, like cloning human beings which could lead to such horrible things as more than one Oprah (shudder). Remember when a group of Scottish scientists cloned a sheep? Nobody talked about the most shocking aspect of that event. There are Scottish scientists?! Other than Montgomery Scott the chief engineer on the Starship Enterprise always ranting about not having enough power, I had no idea Scotland was a treasure trove of scientific minds.
Not all bioengineering is Frankenstinian horror of scientists tinkering with things best left to higher powers (powers like Mr. Jobs and Mr. Wozniak, I’d still like that MacBook if you’re not too busy). A group of undergraduates at M.I.T. had to work with e. coli bacteria in their lab. E. coli smells awful. So they took a gene from a petunia and spliced it with the e. coli genes and made e. coli that smelled like wintergreen mints. I did not make that up.
The marketing people should get to work trying to take the fear factor out of bioengineering with ads touting “Bioengineers – Making the World Smell Better, One Highly Deadly Bacteria at a Time.” Maybe these brainiacs should get to work on things which will make day-to-day life easier. It would be simpler for every day folks to see the benefits of grass which stays green and only grows to one and half inches so you never have to cut it, than to try to explain the concept of splicing genes so we no longer have terrible issues with disease and people who seem compelled to buy non-Apple computer products (ahem, remember that MacBook, ‘kay?)
Here are some other suggestions to make people more forgiving of tinkering with DNA. I’d like a shih tzu with genes from an electric eel – a burglar laughs at the little lap dog patrolling the grounds until he gets 500 volts shot into his ankle by little Bitsy-Poo. How about someone makes cauliflower which doesn’t taste like paper-mache paste? Or maybe just a simple herb that gives me the power of twenty atom bombs for twenty seconds (250 bonus points if you can tell me what cartoon that came from).