John Kerry and the Spirit of Innovation

John Kerry recently declared his vision for the future of science and innovation under his administration.

It is wrong to tell scientists that they can’t cross the frontiers of new knowledge. It is wrong morally and it is wrong economically. When I am president, we will change this policy – and we will lead the world in stem cell research.

Or to put it another way: Anything goes!

Once again, today America needs a President who believes in science as John Kennedy did. The American people deserve a President who understands that when America invests in science and technology, we can build a stronger economy and create jobs for the 21st Century. But George Bush has turned his back on the spirit of exploration and discovery.

But is science really "building a stronger economy?" A brighter future? I occasionally like to check up on the boys in the lab to seek what's cooking, and what I often find, quite frankly, has me a little nervous.

Scientist Teaching Bacteria to Eat Coffee Plant's Caffeine

Good God, man. Why?

"One of the reasons that coffee has a lot of caffeine is that coffee plants synthesize caffeine very quickly, but they break it down very slowly," said Justin Gallivan, a chemist at Emory University in Atlanta.

But one of the reasons we like coffee is that it has a lot of caffeine.

"We would like to develop bacteria that can break down caffeine quickly. To do this, we wanted to make the bacteria depend on the breakdown product of caffeine for their survival," he explained.

This is exactly the kind of science that comes back and bites us in the ass in a few years.

So is this...

Monkey brains control robot arms

Rhesus monkeys have been taught to control a robot arm using brain signals alone.

Oooh... I can see that turning nasty.

And if the unholy monkey-robot alliance doesn't alarm you, try to imagine swarms of sheep hopping around, their long tongues lashing out to snatch morsels of food.

Frog glue repairs damaged cartilage

A sticky substance secreted from glands on the back of two little-known species of burrowing Australian frog has been used to repair torn cartilage in the knees of sheep.

John Kerry says

It is wrong to take hope away from people. Hope is what gave us the polio vaccine and other breakthroughs in medicine.

But hope is also what gave us a race of telepathic super-monkeys and their army of bloodthirsty automata. And artificial urine. Which tastes a little like decaffinated coffee, I've been told.

Update: In what I can only describe as a troubling development, the super-monkeys may have found an ally in their quest for global domination.