NATURAL SCIENCE

HANS-DIETER SUES, Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology, Carnegie Museum of Natural History, January 24, 2003
CZIKOWSKY: My first thought when I saw the drawing of the four winged dinosaur was: I’m glad one of those never got into my house. Has there been just one example of this four winged dinosaur found or several? How much information do you have so far, as to how large they got and what their various physical characteristics are, and how much is educated speculation?
SUES: I agree-you would not want to have one of these little predators fluttering around your house. There were meat-eating dinosaurs after all, and even this three foot long animal probably would have tried to bite you. The new fossil is the first of its kind, but I would not be surprised if there were other similar creatures yet to be discovered.
We know a lot about this ancient creature because the fossil is exquisitely well preserved-a skeleton with surrounding feather impressions. The only thing that is pure speculation is the color: color pigments are generally destroyed during fossil-formation. Microraptor was about three feet long from the tip of the snout to the tip of the tail.

NOEL SCHWERIN, “Bloodlines” Writer, June 10, 2003
CZIKOWSKY: You have grabbed my attention. Would you please tell us more about the patent application for a half chimp/half human? What exactly are they proposing to do to achieve this, and is science getting close enough to accomplish this, if such research would be permitted?
SCHWERIN: The technique for making chimeras has been in the literature for some time, and there is a very active debate right now about mouse/human chimeras to test for the pluripotency of stem cells. I am not a scientist so this will be simplistic (but hopefully not too off base): embryos can be combined at very early stages—when they are still small balls of undifferentiated cells—and coaxed to “cooperate” and be implanted in the womb of a surrogate animal to grow to term. The cells coexist and together make the whole organism, so that every cell in the organism’s body would be from one of the other organism (different from transgenic or hybrid animals.) When and if it reproduced, it would only give rise to one species. Geeps, from sheep and goats, were made as early as the 1980s.

ROBERT SULLIVAN, author, April 12, 2004
CZIKOWSKY: If rats are indeed our most unwanted inhabitants, are they beneficial in any way? Do they fit into the balance of nature in any positive way, or are they a creature that has no benefit to humans?
SULLIVAN: Ecologically speaking rats are rodents and rodent’s great contribution to life on the planet is they gnaw and burrow. Rodere is the root of rodent and it means “to gnaw” in Latin. That is how they fit into the balance of nature.
Sometimes I wonder what it matters if rats or anything else benefit humans, especially since humans often don’t go out of their way to benefit other things.