Two minutes into Intro, just as I announced that a quiz would follow the lecture, Angelica Merndevel screamed. Everyone laughed, thinking she was making a joke. But Angelica kept screaming, a high pitched, banshee wail. She grabbed her forearm and began to slide out of her chair, twisting and turning, trying to escape the pain in her arm. I was stunned; they don’t prepare you for this in grad school. It wasn’t until she hit the floor that I started to move.

Someone beat me to her. Kathy Greer was kneeling next to Angelica as I got there. She had come all the way from the back of the room to the front row before I could move the five feet that separated me form Angelica. She must have started moving the moment Angelica screamed. Kathy wrenched the girl onto her back and swore. Under Angelica’s finger, I could see the mobile-tat flashing and pulsating. With each twist and pulse of light, it shook itself out of its natural shape and spread through her skin. Kathy looked up at me an ordered, “Hold her.”

I dropped down and pinned Angelica’s legs. The boy sitting next to her — a Legacy whose name I can never remember, Bob or Biff or Wellington — shook himself, slid out of his chair and reached for Angelica. “Arms,” Kathy instructed, and he pinned Angelica’s arms to her sides. Kathy looked down at Angelica for a moment and then pulled a knife out of her back pocket.

She paused, then slashed. Angelica screamed even louder, but Kathy slashed again, peeling the infected skin off in sure, quick slices. BobBiffWellington turned grey and Angelica nearly kicked my ribs out, but we held on until Kathy had completed her surgery.

And then it was done. Twenty minutes later, the departmental first aid kit had been fetched, Angelica’s would had been cleaned and bandaged, paramedics had wheeled her out and the three of us, Kathy, BobBiffWellington, and me were leaning on my desk, watching the police put the finishing touches on our statements. BobBiffWellington broke the moment. “That was amazing, dude.”

Kathy smiled. It looked out of place on her gaunt, angular face. “Yeah, when I was on patrol in Caracas once, the guy next to me got grazed by a sniper. It busted his mobile-tat and he reacted like he’d been gut shot. The corpsman did just what I did. He told us later that if the chems and stuff hadn’t been cleared out, they could’ve burned his skin away.” She shook her head. “Shame, too, it was a real nice tat. Stars and Stripes rippling across his bicep like it was blowing in a Georgia breeze.”

“I thought that those things were safe,” I said.

“Well, if ya go to a legit place. The cheaper guys just use whatever junk they get their hands on. It’s okay as long as it stay in the tubing, but if it gets out your in trouble.” She pushed up her sleeve to reveal a rather impressive Marine Corps tattoo done in red and black ink. “That’s why I stick with ink.”

BobBiffWellington had apparently just caught the Caracas reference. “Caracas, huh? Wow, you are old.” The moment he said it, his eyes widened and he turned beat red. “I .. I .. I mean you look good for your age.”

She shook her head. “Aww, you say the nicest things.”

BobBiffWellington turned even redder and I took pity on him. “Why don’t you go and ask the department secretary to get someone in here for me to clean up that blood?” He nodded and practically ran off.

“Thanks, Prof. Why did you tell the cops the knife was yours, though?”

“School policy forbids weapons on the campus. I can get away with since I can claim I need it for my lab work.”

She grinned. “I didn’t realize bi-ops and nano factories were so violent.” She stood up, patted her pockets theatrically and announced “I am off to find a smoke.”

“On campus?” I snorted. “Good luck.”

“That’s why I intend to go looking in a bar.”

So those are today’s lessons: cigarettes can be found in bars and stick with plain old ink for your tattoos. Now you can never say that you never learned anything useful in school.

The Political Officer visited my Advanced Genetic Engineering class today, for the third time in six weeks.

That is not his official job title, of course, but an honorarium this particular assistant dean has earned. When he visits your class to “observe”, you and the students had better hope that you stick to the approved topics. This is a bit of a problem for the tele-students.

Tele-students are the pride and joy of the University. Once the telcos were forced to reinstate network neutrality as the price of government laid fiber, some clever bugger in the IT department figured out that we could make money off all the new bandwidth by offering internet based video classes. Doing it through the internet would allow the students to interact in practically real time. Not wanting to be accused of poaching local stundents by other universities, the administration decided to offer this to just overseas students. It has been a huge hit. My AGE class has a row of two-way television screens off to one side, so that the students can see me and the rest of the class. The interaction really is excellent – it is like the students are sitting here in real time and the time difference doesn’t seem to bother anyone.

And I can mute the tele-students. Would that I could do that to all the students.

The program has been a big success in India in particular. All my tele-students are Indian, and I think the number is something like 95% university wide. India is rich, growing, and English speaking. It is also much more democratic than the US, which brings me back to the problem of the political officer. The Indian students can sometimes prove distressingly unwilling to let go of topics that American students know to downplay or soft pedal.

I could never express that sentiment

I can see you smiling; I can feel the amusement radiating through the fiber and washing through the room. “Political Officer. Silly lefty academic with his silly paranoia.” I wish it was paranoia, but it is not. My state has an Academic Bill of Rights. That means anyone can complain that my teaching offends them and is political indoctrination. Topics such as evolution and its affects on our field and the contributions of stem cells to the science have to be dealt with very, very carefully if I want to avoid hassles. The Political Officer is more than willing to hand over a recording of my class to disgruntled students or off campus “student rights” organizations. I have tenure, so I cannot lose my job, but it still an irritant.

More importantly, though, is that I work in a lab and a field that has the potential to do a great deal of harm. The government is well aware of that. The security restrictions on us are, while not overpowering, certainly present, like are a slight smell that you get used to and ignore, until something brings it back to your attention. And Joseph Padilla died in a US Navy prison, having never been tried, and Enrique Martinez is still in one, along with who knows how many other people. The power is there, even if it is not used very much. The government would prefer that only patriots of its definition work with this material. The Political Officer is more than happy to point out where a professor’s definition of patriotism and the government’s differ but even so much as an unguarded comment or slight frown of disapproval.

It is important to investigate such things, the Political Officers swear, because we cannot have terrorist infiltrators gaining access to such dangerous information and materials. Loyalty must be assured.

He didn’t say anything, but he never does. He came in the middle of the class, silently oozing into a chair at the back where he could take careful notes on each participant. I think I handled it well enough. This has become something of a routine. I take a larger role in the discussion, guide it more. Come, follow me, students, away from the discussion of the benefits of fetal stem cells in our engineer, away from the questions of morality and ethics that you will have to grapple with every damn day of your professional career. Ignore the spider in the back; I will lead you out of the web. Maybe next session we can go back to being teacher and students.

Maybe.

Doctor Janice Merek died two days ago in a terrorist attack in Kurdistan. Two nights ago, someone walked into the lobby of her hotel, where she and a few others were apparently sharing drinks at the lobby bar. They were probably celebrating the end of a successful mission. They had brought with them new genetic treatments developed in Europe and the US meant to counter the nasty bugs that are the most deadly legacy of the War of Secession. Children, in particular, have been hard hit by some of them. And these are nasty bugs — the best money could buy, specially designed to turn your immune system against your internal organs. In those with weak immune systems, the young and the very old, I am told that your organs can liquefy in a matter of hours. Dr. Merek’s group had been an unqualified success. The new treatments had more than lived up to their expectations, and the training of the local doctors had been completed. As I type this, people all over Kurdistan are getting the first course of a treatment that will forever eliminate their vulnerability to the bugs from a ten year old war.

And a man walked into her hotel, past the security guards and the bio-sensors, and detonated a small bomb that released a genetically crafted virus into the air. It was a poor virus, garage work of the cheapest, most useless kind. But Dr. Merek was old, and tired from injecting lines of children eighteen hours a day for a week and a half, and standing close to the detonation point. The bug did its job and her and stopped her heart. She was the only casualty, except for the terrorist.

Of course, the government of Kurdistan does not list the Dr. as a victim of terrorism. This was a private killing gone wrong, according to them. There is no terrorism in Kurdistan. There are no Turkmen or Arabs upset at Kurdish independence. There are no Turks or Iranians enraged at Kurdish support for their violent brothers across the borders. The government of the Islamic Republic of Iraq has no interest in keeping Kurdistan destabilized. No, all is love and light and good-fellowship. There is no terrorism, just an unfortunate, though temporary, up tick in violent crime due to the recent world-wide recession. It is a tragedy, and the government of the Republic of Kurdistan sends it most heartfelt condolences for this death that is in no way connected to the terrorism that does not exist.

Dr. Merek was to take over our lab on her return from Kurdistan. She delayed her ascension to the post in order to make one last trip, to see this project through to the end. I only met her once, briefly, during the hiring process. Junior professors are not consulted on personal decisions. But when she was hear, the Doctor made a point of meeting with everyone associated with the lab, including technicians and junior members of the team. She was charming in an old money way, sure of her positions and status and using the surety as a reason to treat everyone as if they where important. She was unusual in that in academia. She was the only candidate for the position to ask to meet with me. The world lost a good person at a time when we can not afford those kinds of losses. Next to that, my regret at not being able to work with her seems small and meaningless.

But I regret it still.

I love my new eReader. Not only does is it smart enough to automatically download my magazine subscriptions through the community Wi-Fi (thank you, Mayor Fernandez and city council) and put them in categories automatically, not only does it store every single one of the texts I use in lectures and the associated teacher’s guides, not only does is it light as a feather and has a display that actually look like real paper, it also comes standard with an interface to every piece of blogging software imaginable. Plus it has a spell check. And I really need a spell check. Sony/IBM hit a home run with this one.

So, I can hear you asking over the ether, if I can blog to anything, then why I am using WordPress? And, for that matter, why I aren’t I using a template to blog with like everyone else in the civilized world? I like the fact that Worpdress has managed to stay open source and independent through the last two decades while the other players have all been swallowed whole. I think that AOL, Google and Microsoft own enough of the internet, don’t you?

The odd choice of equipment is a function of practicality. My template is now showing the Worst Class Imaginable the third problem on their not-so-surprise quiz – which I am guessing 50% of the class will fail. This has to be the worst class it has ever been my misfortune to teach. I cannot confirm this, but I suspect the Dean put every single legacy and winner of the prestige “daddy bought a new lab” scholarship in this room. They whine constantly, don’t do the readings, fail to understand the most basic of concepts, and hardly ever do the work.

I hate these little rotters. I can say that; I have tenure. Though never let anyone tell you tenure is the ticket to the easy life on campus. Tick off the Dean, and she will give you an intro class filled with escapees from the set of a zombie vid. I think just being in this room is making me dumber.

Which, in a round about way, explains why I am blogging. I need something to keep my brain cells from dying when I am “teaching” this collection of cretins (Okay, tenure does have its advantages. As does psuedonymity). I have decided that my only hope of getting anything into their overly distracted skulls is to make them do the work. So there are lots of in-class assignments and short quizzes. If nothing else, I bet I can get the worst and the laziest among them to quit. And hey, maybe one or two of them will learn something. But while they are doing that, I get bored. And now I am going to generously allow you to share in that boredom.

So why a textblog? With sound dampening microphones, I could do a vid-aud blog without the students hearing anything I am saying. Aside from the nightmare that would be if just one student could read lips – or recorded me and showed the vid to a lip reader – textblogs are just better. If you look around, the most popular blogs and enduring blogs are text blogs. Places like Atrios have been around sine the dawn of blogtime, and are still going strong. Text gives you an intimacy that other forms don’t. it is easy to steal a moment when the kid are playing or the meeting has slipped into the twilight zone of corpspeak, or when a group of over privileged brats are failing a simple announced quiz (Their tablets are tied to the room’s network, which is feeding my reader. You should see these answers. Ugh.) . Text allows you to fill in the details of the blogger and text resonate in your mind when you read, staying with you on a deeper level than more ephemeral, flashy styles. We started out with words around fires built to keep the sabertooth away, and we return to words like we return to old friends and lovers.

And before that little love letter to type gives anyone the wrong idea, I am not a professor of English. I am a Professor of Bio-Engineering at a well know college in the Northeast, so there will be lots of shop talk. I will try to keep it in lay terms. These are fun times to be in my field; stem cells are finally starting to live up to their promise, gene engineering is coming into its own, and neurologists are making new discoveries about how the brain works almost every day it seems. We are helping people get better; we are helping people become faster, stronger, smarter; we are helping the biosphere recover from the last two decades of climate change; and we are helping to stay ahead of the bio-terrorists. Like I said, 2025 is a good year to be a bio-engineer.

So here is to a new blog, a new start, and enough readers to make me famous and influential enough to get Sony/IBM to comp me a top of the line eReader.

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