The submission below was posted on Slashdot today. Forgot to mention parallels to 12 Monkeys, but the submission was mercifully edited down to a more digestible form anyway. Got correctly dinged for excessive links (sorry) and appearing judgmental in my description of Varmus. If the submission ran, I was planning on forwarding to him being a (significantly) junior colleague that he knows. Actually meant to tease him about his new part-time vocation as a sci-fi movie reviewer. Hmmm ... hope this doesn't hurt my tenure prospects. Anyway, here's the original submit ...

In case you missed it, Harold Varmus, Nobel prize winning retrovirologist and cancer biologist, former NIH director, and current head of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, has written a review of "28 Days Later" in this weekend's New York Times. One would think that his time is more valuably spent running important medical institutions, searching for new cancer insights/cures, etc, but the dude's also an English lit major and has a penchant for sci-fi. "28 Days Later" is the new flick from director Danny Boyle ("Shallow Grave", "Trainspotting", etc.) about a virus termed "rage" that is advertently released from a Cambridge primate research facility and goes on to devastate much of merry old England more rapidly than the dragons did in "Reign of Fire". Although Varmus appears to go out of his way to be even handed, it's clear that he has a problem suspending disbelief on a topic (virology) that is near and dear to him. This is perhaps why Varmus views the "rage" virus as a metaphor. It not only represents our collective anxieties of weaponized anthrax + HIV + SARS, but because it operates outside the tenets of molecular biology. Varmus also draws the obvious parallels to "Night of the Living Dead", but also points out that "28 Days Later" succeeds with a more vivid psychological conveyance of horror in part by tapping into these current anxieties of modern day microbial plagues. Having seen the movie with minimal expectations, I enjoyed it and was able to put aside reservations about instantaneous viral transformation of the host after exposure - by definition some suspension of disbelief is necessary for anything in the science fiction genre (otherwise it's not fiction, right?). But then again, I liked "Resident Evil", a movie with significant similarities to "28 Days Later" and one that the critics panned and I suspect Varmus skipped or likely never heard of (28DL may be better than RE, but also aims for a slightly different audience). Reviews from professional movie critics on "28 Days Later" have been mixed, but Ebert and another NY Times reviewer were into it. Good, clean summer fun ... aside from 'the "scenes of maiming, dismemberment, clubbing, shooting, bayoneting and shoplifting'".

(The final quote is lifted from the second, cited NY Times review.)

Got posted today! Michael accepted an article I submitted late last nite. Current Slashdot thread is ...

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/11/27/139214

Full text of the original post is below (which was edited a bit by /. copy-editors after my submission).

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Subject: From the Island of Dr. Moreau ...

There is a remarkable story by Nicholas Wade in the early morning edition of the New York Times about a discussion to create human-mouse hybrid organisms (http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/27/science/27CELL.html). Mice are currently the most genetically malleable mammalian organisms for a wide range of techniques. One of these techniques involves the introduction of genetically altered mouse embryonic stem (ES) cells (e.g. with genes 'knocked-out' or replaced) into a developing mouse blactocyst to create progeny hybrid organisms. Typically, these progeny organisms are then bred to unaltered mice to see if the genetic alteration has gone germline or is heritable. If heritable, mice can be bred and animals which are homozygous for the altered gene can be phenotypically examined as long as the manipulation is not homozygous lethal or cause sterility in a single copy state. The obvious expectation of injecting human ES cells into a developing mouse blactocyst would be that this would result in a non-viable organism. There's many different reasons to expect this as the genetic differences between the organisms are quite large and many critical developmental interactions would probably never take place. Moreover, unless using blastocysts from immunologically crippled mice, there would most likely be a recognition of non-self by murine immune cells not educated (which haven't seen during their development) to the human cells that would wipe them out. Even someone from the National Conference of Catholic Bishops states that he may not be too concerned if there are likely to be very human cells seeded in the developing organism. Nonetheless, it's amazing that it's being contemplated due to the ethical implications of such an experiment. What if it were viable? What if there were more than just a few human cells? Could it be sacrificed? .... or even experimented on further if part 'human'? Suppose this is taken one step further and human ES cells in the future are introduced into a developing Rhesus macaque blastocyst (almost a logical future step)? Obviously, some, such as Irv Weissman of Stanford and StemCells Inc (make your own judgment), will argue that there are benefits we will derive down the road in combating genetic disease or in possibly developing viable human organs for implantation by initiating these experiments. However, in a series of experiments that will possibly given rise to an organism part human, part something else, one would hope that we behave cautiously and deliberately down a road that may bring up more questions than we have answers to. Perhaps these types of experiments are best relegated to little known, deserted islands far away from the reaches of civilization (or perhaps regulation) ...