Terminators: Wordplays for Ideas & Insights
No Man is Almost an Island
Asilomar is on the Monterey Peninsula. "Peninsula" comes from the Latin 'pen'
meaning "almost" and 'insula' meaning "island." Peninsula, a piece of land
surrounded on three sides by water, is "almost an island." In the Boundary
Waters Canoe Area of northern Minnesota, Lake Insula is famous for its maze of
islands.
'Insula' is also where we get the words insulate, insular, and insulin.
Insulin is a protein hormone that regulates blood sugar. The protein is
produced in the pancreas, in tissues called the Islets of Langerhans. Hence,
insulin. Also, human insulin was the first product of recombinant DNA
technology, produced commercially since 1982 by lab microbes given a copy of
the human gene for insulin. Perhaps you know someone with diabetes who takes
insulin daily. My Dad does. Human insulin from microbes instead of from
cadavers is a good case to test the ethics of cloning human genes and
patenting products from cloned human genes.
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