New research has pointed to stomach bacteria as an indicator of whether someone is fat or thin. The stomach contains trillions of bacteria, some that make bacteria and some that digest foods. This research was led by an experiment involving human stomach bacteria and mice. The stomach bacteria from obese people was placed in mice, and the mice became fat. When the bacteria from skinny people was placed into the mice, they remained lean. 

Scientists like Dr. Jeffrey I. Gordon of Washington University in St. Louis, want to isolate the bacteria that is responsible for this phenomenon, ideally leading to a method in which the beneficial bacteria is transplanted to obese people. This would hopefully lead to a bacteria that promotes thinness. 

The mice experiment also revealed that proper dieting can lead to a change from the "fat" bacteria to the "lean" stomach bacteria. This suggests that people do not have a predetermined type of bacteria in their stomachs.

Dr. GOrdon believes that the process of isolating the correct bacteria "could take many decades." 

Responses to Embryos article & Genetically Modified Food article

I really think that the author of the Human Rights for Embryos did a good job organizing her stance on the issue into a brief article. The lead was strong, and brought up the impending decision on this political and medical decision right away. Even though it was an opinion piece, I felt like most of the statements that were made were backed up by some sort of scientific research, or expertise. However, there was one sentence that came off as a little bit too harsh. It was the one where Caplan says one of the advocates "has no idea what she is talking about". If it was up to me, I would say that this is great, and provides emotion to the piece. Writing an opinion article opens up the opportunity of bashing people like this. However, if I was an editor, I might have taken out that sentence and worded it a different way, simply because the general public could find it aggressive. Also, there were a few paragraphs in the middle that seemed to reiterate the same point over and over again. This point being that fertilized eggs only have a 50% chance of developing into humans. Overall, it was a very strong opinion piece.

I found the GW food article to start out very strong, only to get jumbled in later paragraphs. The first paragraph told a story of people destroying parts of a rice plant, which did a good job showing the public opinion of GM food. The next paragraph summed up the public opinion with numbers. However, the article never really went into detail about the process in which GM food is made. Also, the article made quick transitions into other topics, without introducing them, and there was a weak correlation between them. For example, after setting up the stage for a discussion about animal mistreatment, the article jumps to plant diseases. That confused me. It then goes into a completely unnecessary paragraph about the author's trip to Switzerland. Overall, I think the author has chosen a good topic, and has a lot of good material, but it was not organized correctly. A lot of different points were brought up, but the author never went into extensive detail about anything.