LINZ, Austria -� Maybe it wasn't coincidental that the Austrian and German debut of South Park last weekend occurred at the same time the Ars Electronica festival began ramping up.
While the locals were thrilled with (and perhaps puzzled by) such dialogue as "Kenny ist tot! Kenny ist tot!", at least one academic noticed how perfectly the two seemingly distinct events meshed.
See also: Scientist Raises Hackles at Ars- - - - - -
Birgit Richard, a professor for New Media at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, projected images from South Park on a 10-foot-high screen throughout her talk on Monday, pointing out how often genetic engineering pops up.
"Practicing genetic engineering is part and parcel of the show," she said. "It offers a dynamic cultural contrast on the negative effect of genetic engineering.
"At school, students learn how to engineer new organisms. The South Park kids find a prehistoric man in a block of ice. They use genetic engineering to reconstruct extinct life."
Richard did not just talk about South Park. She also discussed a central aspect of The Simpsons -- the nuclear power plant where Homer works -- and talked about horror movies.
"Non-female reproduction of the insect type appears to be the ultimate horror," she said.
Security issues: Debate here has often touched on doubts about the security of large databases of genetic information, and experts said those fears would only be exacerbated by a recent Wired News report raising the possibility of a US security agency having a backdoor into Windows 95 and other Microsoft operating systems.
"I was listening to Howard Stern," said Lori Andrews, a professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law. "Someone had hacked into the database of a large pharmaceutical company and was reading the prescriptions of various Hollywood stars."
She laughed at that, then turned serious.
"Law enforcement gets priority over personal privacy. Various bills have been introduced to Congress to extend protection for genetic information, and all have exceptions for law enforcement," Andrews said.
Quotable: "You can have the short form of the gene [that regulates dopamine] and be as happy as Ronald Reagan, or the long form and be as depressed as some people were when Ronald Reagan was president."
-- Dean Hamer,* a National Institute of Health gene specialist, on how genes work, generally speaking.*
