Quote:
Scientists have collaborated to create engineered microbes to make recyclable plastics that can replace the current non-recyclable products made by petrochemicals.
The research on recyclable plastics performed at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Molecular Foundry, the Joint BioEnergy Institute and the Advanced Light Source was published in the peer-reviewed publication Nature Sustainability. Scientists said they had successfully created microbes to make biological alternatives for the starting ingredients in an infinitely recyclable plastic known as poly(diketoenamine), or PDK.
PDKs can be used for adhesives, flexible items like computer cables or watch bands, building materials, along with rigid plastics made through a curing process.
Researchers needed four years during which collaborators manipulated E. coli to turn sugars from plants into some of the starting materials, which included a molecule known as triacetic acid lactone, or bioTAL, and produced a PDK with roughly 80% bio-content.
The left is anti-biology and anti-naturalism in various ways because biology and naturalism tend to question or refute the left’s doctrines of socio-economic determinism and social reconstructionist utopian fantasies. The religious right is also anti-biology and anti-naturalism because of its supernatural theology, its opposition to evolutionary science, and its strictures against “playing God” with stem cell research, genetic research and engineering, euthanasia, etc.
Related to the religious right’s denial of nature, I read Hitch’s essay in Slate from September 2010, “The taming and domestication of religion is one of the unceasing chores of civilization.” It was linked in the Facebook group Christopher Hitchens Fan Club.
Romney appears in the preview image by way of this sentence Hitch wrote there…
“Thus, to the extent that we view latter-day saints as acceptable, and agree to overlook their other quaint and weird beliefs, it is to the extent that we have decidedly limited them in the free exercise of their religion.”
I commented there to the post…
“The taming and domestication…” But also, unfortunately, the apologies we then make for religious faith and the sugar-coating of it after it’s been mostly tamed, domesticated, defanged or detoxified.
Good Hitchens article. One thing I’d disagree with you on is that genetic engineering is a good thing, at least with todays scientists.
Engineering DNA so that human embryos can be developed without female chromosomes is pretty “anti-natural”, if you ask me.
But some religions - Islam is a case in point - are a threat to all non adherents. How far should they be tolerated by the threatened?
“The organized rape of children” - most commonly, it seems of boys - is not Catholic doctrine, but certainly the practice of numerous Catholic priests. Bringing them to trial in the secular courts would not be interfering with the practice of their religion.
It’s an article that someone ought to have written long before 2010, because it should be evident to any reasonable person, of whatever faith or no faith, that many religious practices are barbaric and not to be tolerated in a humane society. ‘Free exercise’ of religion needs to be held to account for any such inhumane excesses. I generally want to give wide latitude to parental rights in such matters, but I feel like even the teaching of eternal damnation in hell to young children can be seen as mental cruelty. The parents believe it, even though it makes their notion of a loving God untenable.
I think the way Hitchens distinguishes between the ‘tamed and domesticated’ and other religions is a fair and useful one.
I have to agree with you there. Every religion is a bad thing, which I know was also Hitch’s view. As he said, “religion poisons everything” in the subtitle of God Is Not Great.
