HIV/AIDS has left its mark on mankind.   Millions of people have been lost to a disease that seems so uniquely designed to tear down our defenses and ruin us, the Barbarians to our Roman Empire. An almost unrivaled effort in the scientific community has been bent on cracking the code of HIV since the 1980’s, and although we have discovered much about the virus, and its action inside the body, we have yet to develop a vaccine or adequate long term treatment.

The difficulty with HIV is multifaceted, but there are a few that hinder our progress most significantly. HIV is a rapidly mutating virus, and therefore there are countless strains of HIV which makes one vaccine, with broad action protection, nearly impossible to formulate.

In exploring some of the biological issues surrounding selfishness and altruism, invariably the philosophical issue of selfishness surfaces. Ayn Rand has argued that selfishness is a virtue because it is the rational and principled concern with one’s own well-being and is necessary to lead a healthy, purposeful, and fulfilling life. It isn’t my intent to deal with Ayn Rand, but rather to examine the sense that many people have regarding these concepts.



The only problem with Ayn Rand’s definition is that the meaning of “selfishness” was manipulated to become “self-interest”. According to the dictionary definition, “selfishness” is “extreme or exclusive self-interest” which is also the commonly understood form of the word.

In 1988, Günter Wächtershäuser published a remarkable idea that excited tremendous interest, even being featured in a Scientific American article. It ran counter to prevailing ideas about the origin of life, and suggested new experimental approaches involving mineral interfaces. Wächtershäuser is a patent lawyer in Munich, Germany who enjoys fabricating intricate and novel approaches to the origin of life, then challenging others to test them. He is greatly influenced by the philosopher Karl Popper, who made the point that explanations are useless unless they are falsifiable.

Pulsars are superdense neutron stars, the remnants left after massive stars have exploded as supernovae. Their powerful magnetic fields generate lighthouse-like beams of light and radio waves that sweep around as the star rotates. Most rotate a few to tens of times a second, slowing down over thousands of years.

You're sitting in a room filled with a gazillion air molecules - how likely is it that most of those air molecules will spontaneously end up in the corner of the room opposite of where you're sitting?

Most likely you're not too concerned about this scenario, because something like that, a massive fluctuation in the distribution of air molecules in the room, is extremely unlikely, to put it mildly.

When you have zillions of air molecules bouncing around in a room (zillions here being on the order of 10^28 molecules of the various gases that make up air), the fluctuations away from the average distribution are miniscule.

A class of drugs already approved as cancer treatments might also help to beat alcohol addiction. That's the conclusion of a discovery in flies of a gene, dubbed happyhour, that has an important and previously unknown role in controlling the insects' response to alcohol. Animals with a mutant version of the gene grow increasingly resistant to alcohol's sedative effects, the research shows. The researchers report further evidence that the gene normally does its work by blocking the so-called Epidermal Growth Factor (EGF) pathway. That EGF pathway is best known for its role in cancer, and drugs designed to inhibit the EGF receptor, including erlotinib (trade name Tarceva) and gefitinib (trade name Iressa), are FDA-approved for the treatment of non-small cell lung cancer.