What is it about Hardware stores? I really like them. I walk into a somewhat sharp, yet clean smell and gaze in rapture at all the yummy little tools, half of which I have never seen before and have no idea what to use them for. So I name them: Things I Can Fix Other Things With, or Weird But Somehow Useful or even Never in A Million Years. And then there are the funky and cool little home decorations that you would NEVER expect to find in an Ace (is the Place), like the owner's wife just *had* to cute it up. I never particularly thought of myself as handy. I still don't, but I really like to use the neon colored razor blades to scrape things with, or replace the exact right kind of screw with the right kind of screwdriver. It sounds absurd, but it feels like using grammar properly. Everything has a reason, even the smallest and most insignificiant of marks. This is my awful secret. I am a closet hardware whore, and my guilty pleasure is smelling the sawdust, all the while pretending to be an intellectual. Someday yuou will find me on the side of the road with a sign: "Will work for paint chips.

Last weekend Jonny Quest was on one of the cartoon channels. These are always on at my house. Jonny has long been a fave of mine and I happily settled in to do some paperwork as it was on in the background. This was feature length made in 1995, called Jonny Quest and the Cyber-insects. Already cool. Of course, the mad scientist wanted to steal some research and use it to his own gain. The scientist involved warned him of cloning these insects. She claimed they were “the most dangerous insects there are. They have a killer instinct.” This made me laugh. And then an interesting thing happened. The evil genius asked her if they were so dangerous, why was she studying them. Self-righteously she said “I was doing medical research.” Wow. So, this makes the results less dangerous? More legitimate? What? The results can still be used for good or evil. This is no different than what is going on in the biomedical world today. Can we legitimize research on the basis of medicine? Far-reaching consequences need to be understood as possibilities so that ethical considerations can be addressed. Ethics by their very definition are value produced. Pure research implies a neutral value. That is, research for its own sake is argued as “agenda-less,” and yet we discover that nothing is in fact value free. Currently, the motivation behind the study provides the only agenda for the data. As such, ethical guidelines need to be taken into consideration when conducting research without denying academic freedom and intellectual curiosity. If we acknowledge that conflicts of interest are omnipresent in this type of research, then we must also admit that there will be times when the research should not be done until such time that a conflict is not present. Okay, yeah, but who gets to decide this? No Bush and his abortion hating stem cell frighten cronies. Social scientists need to get involved with this.