Magneto Lives! Well, sort of.

It looks like this guy managed to control the calcium intake of cells using nanomagnets. Their work, for anyone who hasn’t seen X-Men, is the first to prove that such a level of control over cells is possible. They asserted this biomagnetic control by hijacking an immune-system cell that normally mediates allergic reactions (normally, these are the guys who call for the release of histamine). Nanoparticles with iron oxide cores were used to mimic antigens in vitro, and each attached to a molecule that in turn attached to a single receptor on an immune cell. When cells bound with these particles were exposed to a weak magnetic field, the nanoparticles become magnetic and draw together, causing the cell receptors to cluster. This reaction caused the cells to take in calcium. When the magnetic field is turned off, the particles are no longer attracted to each other, the receptors move apart, and the influx of calcium stops.

Abstract: Complex cell behaviours are triggered by chemical ligands that bind to membrane receptors and alter intracellular signal transduction. However, future biosensors, medical devices and other microtechnologies that incorporate living cells as system components will require actuation mechanisms that are much more rapid, robust, non-invasive and easily integrated with solid-state interfaces. Here we describe a magnetic nanotechnology that activates a biochemical signalling mechanism normally switched on by binding of multivalent chemical ligands. Superparamagnetic 30-nm beads, coated with monovalent ligands and bound to transmembrane receptors, magnetize when exposed to magnetic fields, and aggregate owing to bead–bead attraction in the plane of the membrane. Associated clustering of the bound receptors acts as a nanomagnetic cellular switch that directly transduces magnetic inputs into physiological cellular outputs, with rapid system responsiveness and non-invasive dynamic control. This technique may represent a new actuator mechanism for cell-based microtechnologies and man–machine interfaces.

Man-machine interfaces? Not only do these guys want to be Magneto, they want to be cyborgs too. In all seriousness, though, this prospect opens up an incredible amount of doors for advances in medicine. Most medicine relies heavily upon chemical responses in cells — releasing hormones, inhibitors, and all sorts of drugs that cannot be immediately stopped if something goes wrong. However, with an immediate on/off switch (the magnetic field), we won’t have to administer a drug, then wait and see what happens. The allergic reactions or long waiting times would be a thing of the past, if we managed to correctly apply this type of technology.

Ingber’s lab began this project in response to a call by (who else?) the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for new cell-machine interfaces. He acknowledges that his work is in its early stages. In fifty years, however, he expects that there will be devices that “seamlessly interface between living cells and machines.”

“The Principles and Morals of Legislation” (Bentham, 1781)

Reading this text (Principles) by Jeremy Bentham, I am forced to like utilitarianism even less, despite the fact that it is difficult for an atheist with tendencies towards relative morality to refute.

Bentham was born to a wealthy family in London in 1748, and was immediately recognized as a prodigy. Reading large tomes as a toddler, learning Latin when he was three years old, and enrolling at Oxford University at the age of twelve, were early signs of his genius. How, then, can a genius be so unconvincing in his texts?

Chapter 1, “Of the Principle of Utility,” starts out by saying: “Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as determine what we shall do.” He goes on, several pages later, to say: “By utility is meant that property in any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness (all this in the present case comes to the same thing), or (what comes again to the same thing) to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness to the party whose interests are considered.”

This naturally raises the question: when classifying words with wildly different definitions as synonyms (eg, pleasure, advantage, good, happiness), which definition is foremost in the author’s mind? Ignoring this, Bentham moves on to what appears to be an excellent description of how to consider pain and pleasure: 1) Its intensity, 2) its duration, 3) its certainty or uncertainty, and 4) its propinquity or remoteness. He goes on to describe the principles of utilitarianism in ways that make a great deal of sense, and are consistent with a materialistic, atheistic view of the world. It is this that bothers me the most — utilitarianism shares my assumptions, but I fundamentally dislike it. I say “dislike” because I cannot say where I disagree. I may disagree with his definitions (substituting, say, “good” for “pleasure”), but I can’t refute his points because if I follow my own assumptions, I arrive at the same place.

I dislike it because there is no room for honor in this system (excepting the honor atheists bestow upon themselves for accepting the difficult “truth”), no room for a good that is separate from pleasure (arguing that even things that are viewed as good” are done because there is some pleasure to be taken from the feeling you get when you have done something considered “good”), and no way to break out of the mundane properties of the materialistic framework we assume.

A biology/philosophy professor recently told me he had figured out some way to assert Free Will within this materialistic framework. I’m highly skeptical, since I don’t know if this is even possible, but if it is, he has figured out a way around something that has stumped philosophers for centuries. If this is the case, he has found some new, desperately needed ground on which materialists can stand, which may allow us to refute other things, such as utilitarianism. Without some new breakthrough as this, we atheist-materialist-determinists are doomed to the same circles that this leads. It is a fairly mundane existence, knowing everything as we do.

“Is it possible for man to move the earth? Yes, but he must first find out another earth to stand upon” (Bentham 5).

What is this other earth we must find? There is no need for religion, or constructed ideas of good and evil. But whatever we are missing, it is paralyzing us; we atheists/materialists/determinists are consistent when we are utilitarians, but is such consistency really worth it?

More on this later, I’m sure. Next up: JS Mill.

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Bentham, Jeremy. The Principles of Morals and Legislation (1781). Prometheus Books, NY. 1988.