About that *other* Nobel Prize...

[the_archfiend]

I'll be merciful and sidestep the goofiness currently surrounding the Nobel peace prize being awarded to President #44; by now, most people will have become sick and tired of hearing and reading about it. Especially me.

Instead, let me congratulate Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider and Jack Szostak in winning the 2009  Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their efforts "for the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase" (if you can say that three times fast, there's something very wrong with you). There's a bit of a schadenfreude-worthy back story to this, believe it or not.

A few years ago, Dr. Blackburn was a member of the President's Council of Bioethics during The Shrub's reign, and it turns out that the wouldn't be around for long. She got axed from that position in 2004 by a White House directive, largely because of her advocacy of stem cell research and therapeutic cloning (her own position on this is included here) and also because of the efforts of American Enterprise Institute apparatchik and council chair Leon Kass. Kass (no relation to the humdrum Chicago Tribune columnist, not that you'd know the difference) is a long-standing neocon ideologue, but he's especially amusing when he chooses to speak his mind on the insidious subject of eating an ice cream cone:

Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone --a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive.

But there's more!:

I fear I may by this remark lose the sympathy of many reader, people who will condescendingly regard as quaint or even priggish the view that eating in the street is for dogs. Modern America's rising tide of informality has already washed out many long-standing traditions -- their reasons long before forgotten -- that served well to regulate the boundary between public and private; and in many quarters complete shamelessness is treated as proof of genuine liberation from the allegedly arbitrary constraints of manners. To cite one small example: yawning with uncovered mouth.

The remaider of that essay proceeds further downhill and leaves nothing but a trail of goofiness in its wake. Please keep in mind that this sterling example of the intellect eating itself was actually put in charge of a body responsible for making scientific policy on the Federal level, and that's precisely why Blackburn's Nobel win feels especially gratifying.