Credited to Shaw in the lead in to the mockumentary C. The Confederate States of America and other recent works, but this or slight variants of it are also sometimes attributed to W. Fields , Charlie Chaplin , and Oscar Wilde. It's the funniest joke in the world. If you are going to tell people the truth, you'd better make them laugh. Otherwise, they'll kill you. If you're going to tell people the truth, you'd better make them laugh. A combination of my beauty and your brains would startle the world," but he replied: Madam, would you sleep with me for a million pounds? My goodness, Well, I'd certainly think about it Shaw: Would you sleep with me for a pound?
What kind of woman do you think I am?! Madam, we've already established that.
George Bernard Shaw
Now we are haggling over the price. Similar remarks are also attributed to Winston Churchill , Groucho Marx and to Mark Twain I have always held the religion of Muhammad in high estimation because of its wonderful vitality. It is the only religion which appears to me to possess that assimilating capability to the changing phase of existence which can make itself appeal to every age. The world must doubtless attach high value to the predictions of great men like me. I have prophesied about the faith of Muhammad that it would be acceptable to the Europe of tomorrow as it is beginning to be acceptable to the Europe of today.
The medieval ecclesiastics, either through ignorance or bigotry, painted Muhammadanism in the darkest colours. They were in fact trained both to hate the man Muhammad and his religion. To them Muhammad was Anti-Christ. I have studied him — the wonderful man, and in my opinion far from being an Anti-Christ he must be called the Saviour of Humanity.
I believe that if a man like him were to assume the dictatorship of the modern world he would succeed in solving its problems in a way that would bring it the much-needed peace and happiness.
As a man thinketh. By James Allen.
But to proceed, it was in the 19th century that honest thinkers like Carlyle , Goethe and Gibbon perceived intrinsic worth in the religion of Muhammad, and thus there was some change for the better in the European attitude towards Islam. But the Europe of the present century is far advanced.
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It is beginning to be enamoured of the creed of Muhammad. A portion of the statement also appears quoted in The Islamic Review , Vol. Misattributed [ edit ] The United States and Great Britain are two countries separated by a common language. Widely attributed to Shaw begin31 ning in the s, esp. Otis] was quite English, and was an excellent example of the fact that we have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language" from Oscar Wilde's short story "The Canterville Ghost".
The English and the Americans are two peoples divided by a common language. If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas. George Bernard Shaw never said these words, but Charles F.
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Irish history is something no Englishman should forget and no Irishman should remember. You can't make a man a Christian unless you first make him believe he is a sinner. Gene drives are just the latest attempt at biological control systems. In the past, biologists have introduced natural enemy species to control pests. For instance, a fungus has been used to tamp down gypsy moth incursions in the northeastern United States.
They go by other names, such as jumping genes, transposable elements, biased gene converters or meiotic drivers. Selfish elements live in a wide variety of organisms including humans , and have devised a variety of methods for getting themselves passed on. What they have in common is the ability to circumvent the normal rules of inheritance, first described by Gregor Mendel in the s. Under Mendelian rules, a gene has a shot at being passed from a parent to an offspring. They manipulate the system to get inherited by more than 50 percent of offspring, even if it means harming the organism.
In , Burt proposed harnessing some of these selfish entities for the greater good. Next, a copy of the homing endonuclease gene with its surrounding DNA inserts itself into the gap as the cell heals the breach. Once inserted into one chromosome, the gene snips and pastes itself into the matching chromosome inherited from the other parent.
So when the organism mates and divides its genetic material, both chromosomes will carry the editing machinery. This repetitive editing allows the selfish element to drive itself into nearly every organism in a population. Gene drives could speed through a population like wildfire blazing across grasslands.
This approach has special appeal for weakening the disease-carrying dexterity of mosquitoes. A gene drive carried by 1 percent of mosquitoes in a population can be inherited so efficiently that in about 20 generations, 99 percent of all the mosquitoes will carry it, Burt calculates. Humans might be able to direct gene drives to kill only female mosquitoes the ones that bite and spread disease , or render the insects incapable of carrying malaria, dengue or other diseases. It took years, but in , Burt and colleagues announced in Nature that they had created a homing endonuclease that could find and cut a gene in mosquitoes.
That experiment showed that building a gene drive in mosquitoes is possible. But gene drives that will get rid of mosquitoes or hinder their ability to transmit malaria are in the works SN Online: In addition to homing endonucleases, scientists have been tinkering with two artificial protein systems as programmable gene-editing tools.
Those tools, called zinc finger nucleases and TALENs short for transcription activator-like effector nucleases , link a cutting enzyme to a protein that binds DNA in specific spots. Those molecules have enabled scientists to make precision edits to a menagerie of genomes SN: RNA is very easy to program. The process takes days, as opposed to weeks or months for other technologies. Researchers have wholeheartedly embraced CRISPR and used the technology to easily manipulate the genomes of many organisms in ways that would have taken years to achieve, if ever. In January, Esvelt and colleagues reported online at bioRxiv.
In March, researchers from the University of California, San Diego reported online in Science that they had created a gene drive in fruit flies. Those researchers, biologists Valentino Gantz and Ethan Bier, were looking for a way to easily make mutations in Drosophila fruit flies. He devised a piece of DNA carrying the gene that produces the Cas9 protein along with DNA that produces guide RNAs, which direct the drive to cut and plunk itself in the yellow gene, breaking it. A broken yellow gene jaundices the flies, which are normally tan with dark stripes.
The yellow gene is on the X chromosome. Female flies, which have two copies of the X chromosome, can inherit one copy of the broken yellow gene and retain their normal coloring. Two copies turns them golden. But males have only one X chromosome, and therefore just one copy of the gene, so any disruption will turn them yellow. When an altered X chromosome is passed down to female offspring, Gantz reasoned, the gene drive should convert the normal X from the other parent into one with a broken yellow gene.
Every female would be yellow.
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When the researchers bred female flies containing the yellow gene drive to normal males, 95 to percent of both male and female progeny were yellow. In 4 percent of cases, female flies were born with patches of normal cells and patches of yellow cells. One female was only half yellow.
Clearly, some X chromosomes managed to outrun the drive. Still, the system worked with remarkable efficiency. If others can achieve the kind of efficiency that Gantz and Bier did, researchers could make a giant leap in wiping out insect-borne diseases. Theoretically, even one gene-drive—engineered organism could crash an entire population.
That possibility terrified some people when they learned about the yellow fruit fly experiment. If a gene-drive—containing organism were to escape from the lab and start breeding with its wild counterparts, it could irrevocably alter the wild population. Maybe even wipe it out. In July, 27 scientists Gantz and Bier among them issued guidelines in Science for working with gene drives in the laboratory. The researchers want to keep their gene-drive experimental insects and other animals contained to protect wild populations , but also safeguard the potential humanitarian benefits of the technology.
He fears an accidental breach could damage malaria eradication and other much-needed public health measures. The whole purpose of a gene drive is to spread. Some people speculate that rapidly removing an invasive species could shock that system and have unknown costs. Even getting rid of disease-carrying mosquitoes might have consequences: Bats, birds and other critters that eat insects could lose a valuable food supply.
Scientists are also unclear whether gene drives could spread to closely related species. For Anopheles mosquitoes, many of which carry malaria, the answer could be yes, Besansky says. Eight species known as the Anopheles gambiae complex of mosquitoes in Africa became separate species less than 5 million years ago, and they sometimes still interbreed, producing fertile hybrids.
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Gene drives might pass from one species to another through this interbreeding. But given that all but a couple of those species can carry malaria, spillover from one species into another might actually be desirable, Besansky says. Still, many people are uncomfortable with the idea of gene drives that have the potential to eradicate entire species.
Some researchers, including James of UC Irvine, prefer an approach that would prevent mosquitoes from spreading disease without reducing their numbers. In , James and colleagues reported that they had engineered Anopheles stephensi mosquitoes with genes that produce antibodies against malaria parasites. The antibodies prevented Plasmodium falciparum parasites from making sporozoites, the stage of the malaria life cycle that is infectious to humans.
Getting the gene drive into the mosquitoes proved tricky; only two males out of more than 25, that were screened carried the drive. But once the drive was in the insects, males passed it to progeny with about 99 percent efficiency. Females, however, passed it to their offspring only slightly more often than Mendelian rules would suggest.
While this gene drive will not work in the wild because of the problems with female inheritance, James expects that gene-drive—carrying mosquitoes resistant to malaria will help form a front line against the disease. Any wild mosquitoes entering a zone made disease-free with a gene drive would quickly be assimilated. She doubts, for instance, the suggestion that weeds could be gene-drive engineered to eliminate herbicide resistance. Scientists have a number of technical hurdles to overcome. One of the biggest barriers to making gene drives of any kind is getting them into the organism.
That is harder in mosquitoes than it is in fruit flies or other lab animals. Few labs have perfected the technique, James says. When creating the antimalaria antibody gene drive, the researchers had to inject Cas9, guide RNAs and bits of DNA containing the gene drive into the egg. Cas9 appears to be toxic to mosquitoes, so the team also included a separate piece of RNA to dampen the amount of Cas9 produced.
That reduced the toxicity of the enzyme, but also squelched initial insertion of the gene drive. Just as some human guides give better tours than others, some guide RNAs are better than others at shepherding Cas9 to the proper spot. Guide RNAs targeting five different Aedes aegypti mosquito genes varied in efficiency from 24 to 90 percent, Adelman and colleagues reported in March in the P roceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Another problem is that researchers know little about the biology of most disease-carrying critters, pests and invasive species, Burt says. That makes it hard to know which gene or genes to disrupt to sterilize or otherwise incapacitate a pest. Even with these obstacles, CRISPR technology is moving so fast that human reaction times may not be enough to cork the bottle before the genie escapes. This article appears in the December 12, , issue of Science News with the headline, "Gene drives unleashed: