And each one is individual... ahhh

Today has seen (for me) the heaviest snow fall in my life. Having experienced the panic that sets in on Londoners when two or three flakes fall in as many minutes, the searing stoppages of public transport and the siege hysteria that comes into effect in the national media, having to help dig your girlfriends car out of the snow at the supermarket has a somewhat surreal quality to it. In weather that would have stopped even the most determined Jehovah's Witness from knocking at your door, it was almost detached to be loading food shopping in the boot of the car whilst being swamped by large flakes of snow. And hat's off to M for driving in it, ridiculing other drivers for bad behaviour (she is nothing short of a righteous demon of law abiding when she gets behind the wheel) and making my first venture out into an Arctic wilderness (well, Loblaw's food store in Kingston) a funny and memorable event.

These little beauties were taken from M's flat balcony when it was at it's worst. By comparison, you should be able to see all the way to the water - 8-9 blocks away, but all you get here is about 2 blocks. And it was falling hard. The wind has also just ripped off the balcony divider between M's place and the students next door. At least the building is not buckling again in the cold... :-(


On another note, we have just finished watching the documentary film The Corporation. It is excellent. My brother, G, bought me a book a couple of Christmas' ago about the corporation but it was just when I was applying for Uni here in Canada so I never got round to reading it. I believe it is now back with its purchaser, happily sitting away on his shelves and making him look good when visitors come over. Anyway, back to the point in hand; The Corporation. Constituted legally as individuals in their own right, they have what can only be termed a psychopathic personality. The US has - yet again - come out to be the whore to business that we all know it to be with some absolutely crazy legal decisions. The most onerous being that US patent office (of all places!) was the final bastion against a predatory chemical company that wanted to patent an actual genetic sequence because, and only because they had mapped its DNA sequence first. The patent office was finally defeated in the US supreme court which argued the the corporation did have the right to patent it. What this means is that in the near future - read about 8-15 years - the gene for breast cancer, prostate cancer, variations of the flu virus, etc, will be the property of a company. "So what?" I hear my global readership ask: so, it means that apart from the scenario that some company could sue you for 'getting' their patented disease (hey, stranger things have happened...) it means that ANY medicine that deals with that gene sequence will have to pay a royalty to the company because it is using their 'patented product'. Imagine that: the cure for cancer would need the permission from one of big bio-techs to actually be marketed.

Grassroots action is the way to go, I am beginning to believe; grassroots action is the way to go.

On a final note, M's friend Derek has linked to my blog so I am returning the favour (I have met the guy, by the way :-) ). Despite being in the natural sciences, he and his wife Jane are incredibly nice people. You'd hardly guess they do 'proper science' at all. (I shall have to see if my link is removed after this!)