View from the North 40: Today it's science, all the way down

I’ll ease you into things with a light-hearted science story, but I’m wrapping it up with some serious monkey business, so you might want to sit down.

Scientists have figured out that bees can tell time, but the results are not the most interesting thing about this research.

A scientist put a container of sugar water outside a beehive every day at 4 p.m. and one day he didn’t put the sugar water out, but the bees showed up anyway. Ta-dah, the researcher said, they tell time.

However, peer-reviewers looked at the research and said, nah, it’s just the bees coming over when the sun hits a certain angle. So the scientist figured out a way to do the experiment in the dark. Still, no — the sun’s heat might be influencing the bees. So researchers took the experiment into a salt mine, but this time reviewers claimed influence from the rotation of the earth.

It’s just one thing after another with these gatekeeper people.

That’s when the scientist went to Paris, trained some different bees to come to the sugar water at 4 p.m. Paris time, then flew the bees via airliner to the U.S. The next day, those bees showed up promptly at 4 p.m. — Paris time — looking for sugar water to help them get over their jet lag.

The fact that scientists are ridiculously hard to please should not be under emphasized in this story, but the real takeaway here is that bees get jet lag. Jet lag! I wonder if they ever get tired of their job, every day, buzz buzz buzz, or get a hangover, or get the punchline to a joke.

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Greek mythology gave us the chimera, a female, fire-breathing creature with a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a serpent’s tail.

Modern science, now, has given us a human-monkey chimera starter kit.

Scientists from the U.S. and China looked around at the advancements made to help grow human replacement organs and decided to take the next step in this research evolution, and thought injecting human cells into monkey embryos would be a great place to start. They grew the cells in a lab for 20 days and the scientists found evidence that the human cells were fully incorporating with the monkey cells.

Mission Chimera accomplished.

Which begs the question, do these people not watch movies?

While I deeply appreciate scientists and the advances they bring us helping to make our lives better in countless ways, this clearly looks like the framework for a modern sci-fi-horror flick, with lives lost or changed forever, and dark moral and ethical struggles brought to light in ugly ways.

Cue the scary music, now.

One of the scientists has assured the public in interviews that they had no intention to let the chimeras develop to full term, and even if they do so in the future it will be under strict science ethics guidelines.

Yeah, that’s exactly the opening scene I’d write for this movie: A researcher working confidently, pushing at the boundaries of science and ethics. Then the movie would cut to scene two, with a handful to college kids in the cafeteria talking smack about how they should break into the lab and liberate the chimeras.

But in order to that, they need more people, so they get together their group of old friends from high school, who all bonded together their senior year when they executed their plot to vandalize their high school, and they got away with it.

So these 30-some college students — half of them motivated by the desire to save the makeshift hominids from a science-lab fate worse than death, and one half motivated by an urge to stick it to The Establishment, and another half who want to take selfies with the creatures at the after party — and they execute their ridiculously ill-informed plan. It works.

Until it doesn’t.

Mayhem ensues until the responsible-minded types, who always have to clean up idiot messes like this, come in to save everyone … well, everyone who’s still savable, anyway.

This is a horror sci-fi, after all.

And despite the closure provided by this ending, the other shoe must drop.

The last scene shows two of the human-monkey hybrids commiserating with each other, as a voice-over of the words of Hank Greely, a Stanford University bioethicist who co-wrote an article critiquing this line of research, plays in the background:

“Nobody really wants monkeys walking around with human eggs and human sperm inside them. ... Nobody wants a human embryo inside a monkey’s uterus.”

Fade to black. See you at the sequel.

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The story practically writes itself at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40 .