The Dish

Jeff Jacoby listens closely to Condi Rice. I have a feeling that when history is finally written, the realism of Bush’s second term will be re-evaluated.

An idea whose time has almost come?

It sounds gross, but it’s potentially ground-breaking:

Decellularization is the process of removing all of the cells from an organ — in this case an animal cadaver heart — leaving only the extracellular matrix, the framework between the cells, intact.

After successfully removing all of the cells from both rat and pig hearts, researchers injected them with a mixture of progenitor cells that came from neonatal or newborn rat hearts and placed the structure in a sterile setting in the lab to grow.

A science blogger responds:

I wonder about whether the new organ actually works. They say that it starts pumping, but does it really function?

Their idea is predicated on the premise that the cells differentiate on the new scaffold into a relatively functional state. They mention in the abstract that the cardiac function of the new heart is reduced: "equivalent to about 2% of adult or 25% of 16-week fetal heart function." Thus, whether a fully functional organ can be created is still speculation.

That being said, if this works out the applications are essentially limitless. All solid organs have an ECM scaffold of some kind. If this technology could be paired with embryonic or adult stem cells, we could create a nearly limitless supply of replacement human organs using the scaffolds of some related species like pigs. For that reason, this is some brilliant work.

A reader writes:

You wrote:

"I don’t think she’s more experienced in any relevant way; I do think she is more emotionally and psychologically tested for the presidency."

Some of us think this is *the* most relevant strength of Clinton’s candidacy, given what the next (presumably Democratic) president is going to face in office from the anti-change forces. We aren’t convinced Obama has the stamina to overcome these forces; we don’t think he realizes how powerful their assault is going to be. We don’t think he’s prepared to do what will be required, and we doubt he has what it takes to summon from within himself the ability to do it.

In a sense, these may be admirable facets of his character. The question is whether we can afford to put him in the lions’ den.

The campaign is putting that to the test, as it should.

Keyboard porn.

Musical history was made: William Shatner sang "Rocket Man" at the Science Fiction Awards Show. No I’m not embedding it.

A former skeptic examines the data from New Hampshire and finds strong evidence that, controlling for all other variables, the voting machines seemed skewed in a big way:

To my complete (and continuing) amazement, the "diebold effect" on Hillary’s votes remains after controlling for any and all of those demographic variables, with a p-value of <.001: that is, there are less than 1:1000 odds for this difference occurring through chance alone, and that’s after adjusting for variability in Hillary’s votes due to education, income, total population, and population density.

While this "diebold effect" varies in magnitude depending on the exact covariates used, it seems to center around an additional 5.2% of votes going for Clinton from Diebold machines. The same analysis shows a Diebold disadvantage for Obama of about -4.2%, significant with a p<.001, using the same covariates.