It’s been said that we are witnessing nothing less than a new Gold Rush, where the territory is the human body. Human eggs are used in huge numbers for the stem cell technologies— – over 2,000 in one recent case. Roughly one-fifth of all human genes have been patented by biotechnology companies. Women’s tissue is worth more than men’s, but both sexes are vulnerable. The fact is, we don’t own our bodies in law.

Donna Dickenson is Emeritus Professor of Medical Ethics and Humanities at the University of London. Her career has been distinguished and varied, taking in activities including ethics committees, academia and authorship and in 2006 she was awarded the prestigious Spinoza Lens award, an International award awarded bi-annually to an illustrious thinker in ethics and society, for her contribution to the public debate on ethics. Most recently, Donna is the author of Body Shopping: The Economy Fuelled by Flesh and Blood, an important investigation into the increasing commercialisation of human body tissues. All welcome to join us for a what promises to be a fascinating and controversial discussion with Donna covering all these issues and many more.

Date: 22nd July
Time: 8am PDT, SLT (West Coast time), 4pm BST (London time)
Location: Second Nature Island

All details are on the website and one and all are very welcome. See you there!

Enhancing Me: The Hope and Hype of Human Enhancement

Pete Moore, author of Enhancing Me is coming to Second Nature today to give a talk about how we can enhance our brains and bodies, how we’ll be able to in the future and whether we should really want to anyway.

Date: 15th July
Time: 10am PDT, SLT (West Coast time), 6pm BST (London time)
Location: Second Nature Island

All details are on the website and one and all are very welcome. See you there!

Last but not least in my most efficient afternoon of blogging ever, advance notice of another event coming up in Second Life in a couple of weeks.

Pete Moore, author of Enhancing Me% will be coming to Second Nature to give a talk about how we can enhance our brains and bodies, how we’ll be able to in the future and whether we should really want to anyway.

It’s a week on Tuesday, 15th July, and all details are on the website.

Countering Jen’s positive impression of Second Life, a slightly more skeptical view here. Last week, Jon Udell talked to Jean-Claude Bradley, Drexel chemistry professor and Second Life science supremo about open notebook science, including a discussion about Second Life.

Jean-Claude has been using Second Life in a variety of ways since long before we ever got into it, but Jon is more skeptical of its value, and one of his specific points is to ask whether most things done in Second Life couldn’t be done more effectively using another medium. The whole interview is worth listening to and I actually agree with Jon to a greater extent – we’ve said time and time again, we’re not going to make Nature papers available in Second Life because it’s just pointless. Who wants to read a whole paper in Second Life, when that’s what PDFs are perfectly designed for? We also made some of our podcasts available in Second Life as a trial but the same applies: why would people come into Second Life to listen to them when they could just listen to them in their iTunes? Now, if we had a weekly playing of the podcast, followed by a chat with the presenter or contributors, that might be different…

I think Second Life is valuable when it plays to its strengths – helping people communicate. I’m sure that’s why Science Friday works, by having an intereactive audience, not simply asking people to listen to the same show in a different location.

Anyway, Jon and Jean-Claude have agreed that to see how SL is actually useful to people, Jean-Claude will take Jon on a tour to make a video in Second Life of all the science-y highlights and different ways it can be used. More news on that when I have it.

Couple of interesting points of view on Second Life last week: firstly, Jen McCabe Gorman from Health Management RX came to the 23andMe presentation on Second Nature as a newcomer to Second Life and seemed impressed by it

Jen lists five things that make Second Life a worthwhile place for collaborative learning, all of which I agree with, but I was especially interested by:

More Interesting Q&A: People asked wackier questions and really pushed the envelope during the post-chat Q&A portion. Interesting questions = more valuable, revealing answers.

I think that certainly was true for the 23andMe presentation, the questions were certainly very robust and also varied. I think possibly having to write down your question forces conciseness and really thinking about what you want to know. It obviously also helps people who are not confident of their spoken English. But I wonder if it goes further than that: does Second Life really loosen the tongue and let you ask things you wouldn’t ask in person? And if it does, it is because of the pseudonymity? There’s been a big discussion over at Henry Gee’s blog about pseudonymity in blogs, and I wonder if the same applies in Second Life, even though you are actually “with” the other people, not protected by a time lapse and a chance to think about your answer.

Far, far too late with this but have been away, sorry. Just a quick report on the 23andMe presentation in Second Life: it went really, really well, the presentation was great and the discussion afterwards was really varied and at times quite forceful!

Berci has a much fuller report on his blog, and of course you can go along to Second Nature to see the slides, so I won’t describe any more here, but thanks again to Berci and to Erin and Joyce from 23andMe for coming. You can see their verdict on their blog – they seemed to enjoy it and didn’t seem at all fazed by the horned blue monsters in the audience!

Little bit of news on our next SciFoo Lives On guests 23andMe: California’s Department of Public Health has ordered 13 personalised genetics companies, including 23andMe, to suspend trading.

See the Medicine and Health forum for details and discussion.

Never one to pass up an opportunity to talk about endearingly furry animals, I present a sleeping panda bear:

He is one of a series of animals featured in a new exhibition at the gallery at the bottom of the Oxo Tower on the South Bank. Photographer Roger Hooper is a long term WWF supporter and has put together Endangered Wildlife Exposed, a few dozen beautiful photos of a wide variety of endangered species.

Not nearly so many images and more cat-heavy, but definitely recommended for anyone passing by who enjoyed the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition. Open until the end of the month.

So, as we all think conferences in SL are such a good idea, I have very exciting news: the next guests in the SciFoo Lives On series will be 23andMe.

23andMe is a personalised genetics company: customers can provide a sample of their DNA via a saliva sample produced at home and sent back through the post. 23andMe then uses a genotyping process which looks at 600,000 SNPs to characterise the genome. They put put this online (in a secure location!) and you can use their various tools to look at questions like your predisposition to certain conditions, your global ancestry or the inheritance of characteristics down your family tree.

This is a very simplified description of what is a fascinating and potentially very powerful tool. Please do take a look at their website and all are welcome to come along and hear them speak.

SciFoo Lives On is a series of events held on Second Nature as an extension of the SciFoo conference. The speaker gives a short talk with presentation and then leads a discussion with the audience. We can’t claim any credit for this – this session was organised by Bertalan Mesko, who will also live blog the whole event, so check out his blog for more details.

Date: Tuesday 24th June

Time: 10am PST (Second Life time), 6pm London time

Location: SFLO area, Second Nature island

Hello all and apologies for being absent for so long – I have been travelling all over the place in the last few weeks. I got back from Boston last week where I was at the Society for Scholarly Publishing conference. Boston is an absolutely beautiful city, I’d never been before, but it was incredibly sunny every single day and I’ve never seen so many parks in such a small area.

The conference was good too, met lots of new Nature colleagues and took part in a session called ”Second Life and beyond: should Publishers care about virtual worlds?”. The panel consisted of me, Linden Lab’s education and healthcare expert John Lester and Ben Sawyer from Digital Mill. Unsurprisingly, our conclusion was “yes”. Perhaps more surprisingly, lots of people came up to me afterwards to say they were really interested in what we were doing and were thinking of doing similar things themselves. I’ve done similar talks many times but this one really felt like the first time the audience reaction had moved from “how cool! Now for those of us with real jobs…” to “how cool! How can we use this?”.

For one answer to that question, I point you in the direction of an interesting article in the current issue of EMBO Reports.

Scientific discourse 2.0. Will your next poster session be in Second Life

The ability to modify online worlds and to create customized objects and virtual rooms could have a positive impact on the presentation of data and information. Traditional poster sessions, for example, only present research findings in a static format with the investigator standing next to the poster to answer questions. Similar poster presentations within virtual worlds such as Second Life® could not only effectively simulate the spacing, timing and methods of presentation sessions, but also allow the expansion and modification of the conference space as needed. In addition, users would be able to add information to and edit their posters based on other participants’ questions and feedback, and interact with other avatars in a similar manner to real life. Poster presenters would not even have to be online for the whole event in order to answer queries because they could use a mobile phone as an effective bridge between the virtual and real worlds (Kelly, 2007). Furthermore, entire sessions could be saved and the virtual space preserved for future perusal by attendees and those who were absent.

It’s a long (and not entirely accurate) article, but has some interesting thoughts on holding posters sessions and conference add-ons in virtual worlds. Little snippet above, but the whole article is recommended.