essay forbidden life patenting should

Sweetness was meant to be irresistible.We are born with a sweet tooth. Babies drink in sugar with their mother’s milk. Sweetness represents an instant energy boost, a fuel that kept our ancestors going in a harsher world where taste buds evolved to distinguish health-giving ripeness and freshness from the dangers of bitter, sour, toxic foods. Sugar gives us drug-like pleasures – lab rats deprived of their sugar-water fix exhibit classic signs of withdrawal. When things are going well, we blissfully say, “Life is sweet.”And now sweetness is linked with death and disease. Sugars are themselves toxins, some researchers suggest, that cause obesity, diabetes, hyper- tension and Alzheimer’s disease. Sugar has joined salt and fat on the list of dietary evils. Governments and health experts are urging people to cut back their daily intake.And because of its sweetness, once they had tasted it, they could scarcely get enough of it. Albert of Aachen, circa 1150How did we get ourselves into this unhappy state? Anything sweet was once considered precious and exploited with the kind of ingenuity you’d expect when brute survival was elevated into pure pleasure – through sap from the maple tree and the date palm, cooked-down pulp from carrots and beets, pressed syrup from figs and sorghum, raisiny grapes, regurgitated flower nectar transposed from nature’s tree-stumps to the beekeeper’s hives and, of course, the processed juice from the reedy sugar cane.Our modern moralizing about sugar’s destructive nutritional emptiness takes on meaning only in a culture where appetite has been disconnected from physical labour, most consumption is surplus to our needs, and sweetness is segregated into a separate world of danger, indulgence and anxiety.Today, when we denounce sugar, we are defying our nature. Sex was once the classic example of the good thing gone wrong – a gift of the gods ruined.
All day long, people have been telling me about an article headlined: “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior.” And I’ve had enough! I’m posting my reaction so that I don’t have to keep talking about it. Getting to the point: the piece is crap. But its writer, Yale Law School Professor Amy Chua, is also a marketing genius. Let me explain. The article ran in this morning’s Wall Street Journal. It’s an excerpt from her memoir, which hits book stores on Tuesday. With everyone in the Asian American community jabbering about it, she and publisher Penguin Press are getting tons of free publicity for “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.” If, like me, you’ve never heard of this woman, don’t worry. The Wikipedia.org entry about her is oh-so-current. Yes, it just happens to have a link to today’s shrewdly-timed Journal article. Hmmm. As for the actual piece, all I can say is that Chua is a narrow-minded, joyless bigot. Don’t waste your money on the book. I’ll even spare you the drudgery of reading her essay by giving you highlights from the Journal excerpt: Chua begins by explaining that the reason “Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids” is because the children are totally controlled. She doesn’t let her kids do sleepovers, have playdates, be in school plays, watch TV or mess with computer games. Her two daughters are also forbidden from choosing their own extracurricular activities. They have to be the top students in every subject except gym and drama. They must bring home A’s. Kids need to be relentlessly drilled to achieve. “What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you’re good at it,” she writes. By the way, taking piano and violin lessons are a must. This overachieving — and overreaching — author writes about the time her father inspired her to excellence by telling her that she was “garbage.” A proud product of her upbringing, she once.
Preface For more than a century, J. C. Ryle was best known for his clear and lively writings on practical and spiritual themes. His great aim in all his ministry was to encourage strong and serious Christian living. But Ryle was not naive in his understanding of how this should be done. He recognized that, as a pastor of the flock of God, he had a responsibility to guard Christ's sheep and to warn them whenever he saw approaching dangers. His penetrating comments are as wise and relevant today, as they were when he first wrote them. His sermons and other writings have been consistently recognized, and their usefulness and impact have continued to the present day, even in the outdated English of the author's own day. Why then should expositions already so successful and of such stature and proven usefulness require adaptation, revision, rewrite or even editing? The answer is obvious. To increase its usefulness to today's reader the language in which it was originally written needs updating. Though his sermons have served other generations well, just as they came from the pen of the author in the nineteenth century, they still could be lost to present and future generations simply because, to them, the language is neither readily nor fully understandable. My goal, however, has not been to reduce the original writing to the vernacular of our day. It is designed primarily for you who desire to read and study comfortably and at ease in the language of our time. Only obviously archaic terminology and passages obscured by expressions not totally familiar in our day have been revised. However, neither Ryle's meaning nor intent have been tampered with. Tony Capoccia  All Scripture references are taken from the HOLY BIBLE: NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION (C) 1978 by the New York Bible Society, used by permission of Zondervan Bible Publishers. This updated and revised manuscript is.
When my parents were raising me, there was one parenting style: Keep Your Child Alive. That was it. If a given activity could kill my brothers or me, like riding our bikes off the garage roof (even though we were holding an umbrella!), it was forbidden. If an activity kept us occupied for more than five minutes, my folks invested large sums of money in making sure that activity (books, LEGOs, Nintendo) was available to occupy our attention spans all day. Peter M. Fisher/Fuse/Fuse/Getty Images We didn't have iPads, but we made do, dammit. My mom even organized a Nintendo Kids Club with our classmates. In this way, her sons' favorite activity had a ripple effect throughout the community, allowing neighborhood parents more time to sleep, iron, and watch General Hospital. (It was the 1980s. Everyone ironed their clothes while they watched General Hospital, and then they slept. I think this was called Reaganomics, but I also have no idea what that term means.) My mother -- hero to local parents, enemy of Ganon. Today there are a variety of parenting styles. There are Tiger Moms, who are strict. There are Helicopter Parents, who hover over their kids' activities. At the opposite end of the spectrum there are the Free-Range Parents, who raise their children to become chickens. Image Source/Digital Vision/Getty Images Some prefer the Veal Method. Bestsellers have been written about these styles, and articles about how to parent are Internet catnip. Framing the perennial debate about parenting styles is the widely held assumption that parenting matters at all -- the worry that if a father misses his daughter's second bassoon recital, she will someday twerk all up on Robin Thicke. The importance of nurturing is woven into the social fabric by pop culture, religion, the media, families, and Big Greeting Card. Yet there's an obvious question that rarely gets asked during the.
essays Court rulings on scientific patents are usually arcane and boring and of interest only to specialists. Not so this week. On Monday, the European Court of Justice made a landmark ruling banning any patents on scientific techniques that involve embryonic stem cells. It is a ruling that could endanger research into new therapies for incurable and life-threatening diseases and one that defies basic tenets of logic, morality and justice. The case began in the 1990s when German neurobiologist Oliver Brüstle developed a method for turning human embryonic stem cells into neurons. The cells of an adult human are highly specialised – under normal circumstances a liver cell will always stay a liver cell, and a skin cell can never become anything else. Stem cells, however, can develop into any kind of tissue – liver, skin, nerve, heart. The best source of such stem cells are tiny embryos, a few days old, called blastocysts. Researchers hope that by growing specific tissue from these cells, it may be possible to repair damaged organs in patients suffering from conditions such as dementia or blindness. Because such tissue can be grown using the patients’ own DNA, so problems of tissue rejection, so often the bane of transplants, can be sidestepped. Professor Brüstle himself was on the verge of transplanting lab-grown brain tissue into patients with Parkinson’s disease. In 1997, Brüstle obtained a patent for his technique of creating neurons. The environmental group Greenpeace challenged that patent in court. Brüstle’s work, it claimed, was ‘contrary to public order’ because embryos had been destroyed to gather the stem cells. The case wound its way through various national courts in Germany before finally ending up at the European Court of Justice. There has in recent years been considerable debate about the attempts by biotech corporations to patent natural processes or.