Our youngest daughter, Mary, had her baby! Her name is Elizabeth:

So fair! So delicate!

In a jaw-dropping medical breakthrough, scientists have found a way to re-program adult cells, turning them into cells that have a completely different function. This does not involve stem cells, but regular cells. Excerpts from Scientists Reprogram Adult Cells’ Function - washingtonpost.com:

Scientists have transformed one type of fully developed adult cell directly into another inside a living animal, a startling advance that could lead to cures for a variety of illnesses and sidestep the political and ethical quagmires associated with embryonic stem cell research.

Through a series of painstaking experiments involving mice, the Harvard biologists pinpointed three crucial molecular switches that, when flipped, completely convert a common cell in the pancreas into the more precious insulin-producing ones that diabetics need to survive.

The experiments, detailed online yesterday in the journal Nature, raise the prospect that patients suffering from not only diabetes but also heart disease, strokes and many other ailments could eventually have some of their cells reprogrammed to cure their afflictions without the need for drugs, transplants or other therapies.

“It’s kind of an extreme makeover of a cell,” said Douglas A. Melton, co-director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, who led the research. “The goal is to create cells that are missing or defective in people. It’s very exciting.”

The work was hailed as a welcome development even by critics of research involving embryonic stem cells, which can be coaxed to become any tissue in the body but are highly controversial because they are obtained by destroying embryos.

“I see no moral problem in this basic technique,” said Richard Doerflinger of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, a leading opponent of embryonic stems cell research. “This is a ‘win-win’ situation for medicine and ethics.”

Researchers in the field, who have become accustomed to rapid advances, said they, too, were surprised by the advance.

“I’m stunned,” said Robert Lanza, chief scientific officer of Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester, Mass., a developer of stem cell therapies. “It introduces a whole new paradigm for treating disease.”

Destroying unborn infants for their stem cells is now unnecessary and obsolete. I suspect that opposition to that practice, including the restrictions enforced by the Bush administration, played a role in causing scientists to pursue alternatives that turned out to be so much better!

We’re hitting the road today and will be gone for the whole labor day weekend. See the top post for why. So I’m sure I’ll miss John McCain’s announcement about his vice-presidential nominee. And since I won’t be taking my computer, I won’t even be able to comment on it. Since we’ve been making the vice-presidential office a big deal on this blog, we have got to talk about it.

So I’m turning the commentary over to you. Leaks will likely abound all day. The first person who hears who it is, tell us about it in a comment on this blog. If it’s before the official announcement, that’s better yet. We’ll see if we can scoop the world. If you’re wrong, someone else can get the credit for announcing the right one before anyone else.

Then discuss the choice. I know a lot of people are waiting to see who McCain picks before being willing to vote for him. Will he shore up his conservative credentials, which many question, with a conservative VP? Will McCain damage his pro-life credentials by picking a pro-death VP? We’ll know soon.

But I’m leaving this topic up to you to handle.

Victor Davis Hansen, riffing on Obama’s prop of a classical temple for his big speech, shows how a knowledge of ancient literature and history can help us understand contemporary politics:

Why and how did McCain catch up? Let us count the ways: the disastrous European victory lap of Obama’s; the uninspired professorial pontificating to Rick Warren; the deer-in-the-headlights serial responses to the Georgia crisis; and the McCain ads that were as cleverly effective as they were derided as childish by outraged liberals.

But perhaps the greatest consideration is Obama’s Hellenic hubris, which is different than simple arrogance. Hubris is a sort of fit, a haughtiness steeped in delusions of grandeur and divinity that takes over a weak individual, and soon encourages recklessness and overreaching (atê), all culminating in ruin and divine retribution (nemesis).

Go figure: Obama/Oedipus goes to Berlin. There he speaks in front of a grandiose Victory Column commemorating Prussian arrogance (after begging in vain to have a JFK/Reagan presidential moment at the grander Brandenburg Gate). He reviews American sins, revises the history of the Berlin Airlift, and claims (falsely) he’s the first black high official Germany has dealt with before. Then to hysterical applause from 200,000 Berliners, eager for subsequent free music and beer, he prances home, convinced that this was a success rather than an Apollonian trap.

Meanwhile an Ethel in Tulare turns on the TV and sees thousands of Europeans (who habitually make fun of her country) applaud Obama—and makes the logical assumption that they apparently think he is one of them, rather than one of us.

Next, drunk with pride, Obama thinks that such a losing paradigm (again, really a warning from the gods) apparently was not only successful, but will work again in Denver. So he transfers his speech to an outdoor forum, where tens of thousands of raving fans can watch him apotheosize in front of a faux Doric temple and accept nomination.

Isn’t there one sane person on his staff who can stop this divine madness, a single henchman who can whisper in his ear as puts on his golden crown not Vero possumus (”Yes! We can!”), but as was true of returning heroes during  Roman Triumphs—”Respica te, hominem te memento” (”Watch behind you; remember you’re just a man!”)?

So what did you think about Barack Obama’s speech? This take sees two different–and clashing–motifs:

Listen closely to the 46-minute address, however, and you heard two speeches crushed somewhat jarringly together.

The first half, one suspects, was the speech that Obama felt he had to give: a traditional partisan appeal that, for all his sonorous cadences, read like it could have been stitched together randomly from speeches delivered on any given day from rank-and-file Democrats on the floor of the House of Representatives.

There were denuciations of outsourced manufacturing jobs and promises to save Security Security and frequent baiting of John McCain for being the candidate of the rich and a weakling against Osama bin Laden.

The second half sounded like the speech Obama wanted to give: a plea for a new brand of politics, one in which politicians don’t attack each other’s motives or character, and Washington calls a ceasefire in such drearily familiar fights as abortion and gun control.

Obama did not acknowledge the two halves of his address—the partisan top and the post-partisan close—much less try to reconcile them.