A lawyer for the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, which was an intervener in the case, was disappointed that the Supreme Court decision did not go further.
"My client's position is that the criminal law is a harsh tool that should be reserved for the most morally blame-worthy cases," said Michael Feder.
"What you're talking about here is a vulnerable, marginalized group of people who are going to be forced to go around volunteering to anyone with whom they're going to have sexual contact, that they belong to that vulnerable, marginalized group," he said.
Richard Elliott, the executive director of the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network, which also intervened in the case, said the decision was not a good one for people living with HIV.
His group's position is that either a low viral load or the use of a condom should be the required test to avoid being prosecuted, but not both, as the top court said in Friday's ruling.
"We know from the science now that if either you use a condom or you have a low viral load, the risk of transmission is extraordinarily small," he said.
Jessica Whitbread, who contracted HIV from a former boyfriend more than a decade ago, said she thought Friday's ruling was a step forward — at first. But upon closer examination, she said this ruling could make her the criminal.
"I can still have a vindictive lover say that I did or didn't use a condom," she told CBC News. "It still becomes 'he said, she said. he said, he said.' …That can still play a very important role in the courts."
Imagine what it’s like for a microbe in Mono Lake, or in the lab of a particularly sadistic scientist. You’re drowning in arsenate, and in order to stay alive, to keep growing, you need to grab the precious few phosphate molecules drifting by.
Dan Tawfik, an expert on protein function at the Weizmann Institute in Israel, and his colleagues have uncovered some of GFAJ-1′s secrets to survival. GFAJ-1 and other bacteria absorb phosphate through their outer membrane, into a sandwiched layer of fluid called the periplasm. Once there, the phosphate is grabbed by so-called phosphate binding proteins, which then deliver the phosphate to the interior of the microbe. Tawfik and his colleagues examined these proteins in unprecedented detail to see how they work.
The scientists offered the proteins a mixture of arsenate and phosphorus. Even when they raised the ratio to 500 molecules of arsenate to every phosphate molecule, the proteins still managed to pluck out phosphate over half the time. The scientists then examined the proteins to figure out how they make such fine discriminations. When the proteins encounter a molecule of phosphate, they enfold it in a tight pocket, which ties down the phosphate with 12 different hydrogen bonds. When arsenate falls into that pocket, it doesn’t quite fit in, and the bond between one of the oxygen atoms in the arsenate and one of the hydrogen atoms in the protein gets twisted. It gets pushed to such an uncomfortable angle that the arsenate drops out.
This finding suggests that ordinary microbes are well-adapted to picking out phosphates when they’re scarce, using their fussy phosphate binding proteins to reject abundant arsenate. GFAJ-1 is stuck in a place where phosphate is always scarce and arsenate is always dangerously copious. Tawfik and his colleagues found that one form of their phosphate binding proteins is spectacularly fussy, preferring phosphates by a factor of 4,500. What’s more, GFAJ-1 produces many copies of this super-fussy protein. As a result, GFAJ-1 can thrive in Mono Lake. In fact, it can handle arsenate-to-phosphate ratios up to 3,000 times higher than found in the lake.
Together with Audrey Dussutour from the CNRS in France, [Chris Reid from the University of Sydney] found that Physarum strongly avoids ground that it has already laced with slime. “We have been researching the problem-solving abilities of the slime mould for a few years, and we had noticed that it seemed to avoid areas it had been before,” says Reid.
He proved this reticence by providing Physarum with a Y-shaped arena, where one arm was covered in slime and another was not. It almost always chose to forge new ground. This isn’t a reflex – it’s more of a choice. If there aren’t any slime-free options available, then Phsyarum will willingly re-tread a slimy path.
Next, Reid and Dussutour confronted the slime mould with a U-shaped trap – a challenge commonly used to test autonomous robots. Physarum starts at the top of a jelly-filled Petri dish, and its mission is to reach a goal at the bottom. The goal is rich in sugar, which diffuses through the jelly and creates a gradient that Physarum can track. But in the way, there’s a U-shaped barrier. If the plasmodium heads straight to its goal, it will get stuck. It needs to navigate around the U, and it can do so if it uses its slime to avoid areas it has been to before. Without the slime, it wanders blindly.
Reid and Dussutour placed the slime mould on different Petri dishes—some had blank jelly and others had jelly already coated with slime, which masked Physarum’s own trails. In the blank-jelly dishes, almost all the slime moulds eventually reached their goal, in an average time of just under 60 hours. By contrast, in the pre-slimed dishes, just a third of the moulds reached the goals, and those that did took around 75 hours. Unable to sense their own trails, they spent more than 10 times as long going over places they had previously travelled.
When we think about navigating the world, we might initially think of our own maps, or of the impressive migrations undertaken by familiar animals. But navigation can happen without much brainpower. Social insects like ants can create efficient trails linking their nests and sources of food, by laying down trails of pheromones in their wake. As more of them reach the food, they add their own pheromones, making the routes even more attractive to other ants. If the trails aren’t reinforced, the pheromones evaporate. That’s exactly like human hikers, whose collective feet trample effective trails into the landscape, while allowing boring or inefficient trails to overgrow.
The slime mould takes these ideas even further – it can navigate without a brain at all, using chemicals that it deposits onto the environment.
Engineers have hit upon similar solutions when trying to programme independent robots that can find their own way around. It’s too complicated to equip the bots with a pre-constructed map, or to programme them to build such maps as they explore. At the other end of the complexity scale, if the robots simple react to their local environment, they can move about easily enough but often get trapped by obstacles, like a fly buzzing at a window. But add a simple imperative to “avoid the past” and suddenly these machines become much better at skirting round obstacles, and navigating complicated environments.
The slime mould achieves the same feat by secreting slime, and then avoiding it. Reid suspects that such external memories preceded internal ones, and ancient creatures used them to solve problems, in a similar way to slime moulds, long before neurons and brains evolved. “This has been hypothesised before, but no one has been able to provide any evidence to support the theory, until now,” he says.
Over the past several weeks, politicians connected with billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili’s opposition Georgian Dream coalition have whipped up anger among crowds of Batumi supporters with allegations that President Mikheil Saakashvili’s ruling United National Movement Party is allowing “Turkish expansionism” that threatens Georgian culture and Georgian jobs. And even the country’s sovereignty itself.
They claim that the open-armed welcome for Turkish tourists and investors is ruining Batumi with growing prostitution and “the smell of Turkish donar [kebabs]” sold by street vendors.
While Ivanishvili himself has repeatedly stated that he does not support xenophobia, some Georgians see Turkey as an “acceptable” common enemy to target, commented Beka Mindiashvili, an expert at the Public Defender's Office’s Tolerance Centre.
“[The opposition] can’t say [the enemy] is the West or America,” Mindiashvili said, since most Georgians eagerly desire friendship with those powers. “It has to be connected to the opinions in society, and our history with Turkey is one of war…”
The Ottoman Empire controlled western Georgia from the late 16th century until 1878, when Achara, among other territories, was ceded to the Russian Empire, Georgia’s then suzerain. Turkey attempted to retake Achara in 1918, toward the end of World War I, but was repulsed. A second failed attempt came when the Red Army invaded the Democratic Republic of Georgia in 1921.
Memories of that history, often colored by suspicions of Islam and wariness of foreigners, still run strong. The anti-Turkey rhetoric does “not come from an empty space . . .” Mindiashvili said.
Few residents in Batumi were willing to go on the record about their feelings toward Turks, but some claimed that, despite Georgians’ traditional love of guests, the Turks are wearing out their welcome.
“There shouldn’t be so many Turks coming to Batumi…they don’t have any respect for our culture,” complained 57-year-old driver Giorgi Tkemaladze, annoyed by what he described as Turkish men publicly consorting with prostitutes. “When they are good and nice, let them come.”
[. . .]
Turkish investment stood at $43 million for the first two quarters of 2012, nearly half of its total of $75 million for all of 2011. According to Turkey’s Batumi consulate, Turkish companies have created jobs for 6,000 locals in Achara alone. Georgian government figures were not available.
The country also ranks, along with Russia, as a top destination for Georgian labor migrants. Georgians can enter Turkey visa-free, but now, like other foreign nationals, face tighter restrictions on long-term stays; part of a bid to curb illegal migration. The deportation of 142 Georgian migrants in August under the rules fueled popular resentment of Turkey for being “unfair.”
Mindiashvili, however, predicted that the influx of Turks with cash to spend means that “primitive Turkophobia” will not take root in Batumi or Achara, where official unemployment stands at 18 percent. Public Defender’s Office has not recorded any acts of violence toward local Turkish investors or visitors, he added.
“[T]his type of . . . xenophobia will not be accepted because people live better than they lived before this …” he said. “[O]pen commercial ties go only to the improvement of the economic lives of Georgians.”
The Turkish consulate in Batumi also has no record of violence against visiting Turks. Turkish Consul Engin Arıkan described the anti-Turkish rhetoric as “not good,” but stressed that it is limited to a “marginal group.”
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