Ms. Chen has managed to place a tissue-engineered human liver into a mouse. Into more than one mouse, in fact, and nearly 100% of the mice live. This is so innovative because drug companies the world over want to test how a drug candidate is absorbed, distributed, metabolized and excreted, and to date they’ve been hamstrung into using non-human models to do this before they get into clinical trials, which are toxically expensive and often dangerous. And though we’re genetically similar to mice, our livers work very differently.

So Ms. Chen had the idea, God bless her, to engineer a human liver in a lab mouse, since the liver is where so much of the body’s dealing with a drug works or doesn’t. I felt like Homer Simpson hearing about it. Doh! Why the heck didn’t I think of that? In retrospect it’s so stunningly obvious. And it’s going to be huge.

No big surprise that Alice is sinking her $30,000 Lemelson-MIT Collegiate Student Prize money into a start-up company she’s formed with some colleagues. It’s called Sienna Labs. Sounds to me like a decent investment.

Clearly, we need innovative thinking like this all over America, in technology, medical devices and life science.

This growth continues even in face of the recent round of attacks and threats against Facebook’s privacy policy. A policy that, at 5,830 words, is longer than the United States Constitution.

Disgruntled Facebook users – or maybe people with a stake in another social networking site – have started ‘movements’ such as, QuitFacebookDay and FacebookProtest, which ask Facebook users to make a commitment to either delete their account or not use the site on a certain day. However, the combined the membership to these two groups is miniscule compared to Facebook’s user base.

Ironically, the movement with the most members is a Facebook group that has been set-up to protest Facebook’s privacy policies (speaking of the Constitution, if that isn’t democracy, I don’t know what is).

Not surprisingly, the privacy concerns have created a competitive resurgence in the social networking market. Competitors smell blood and they’re scrambling to get up and running in order to take advantage. A recent New York Times article cited nine social networks that are trying to take advantage of the privacy backlash by providing more private social networking alternatives.

I don’t think I’m going out on a limb by saying that none of these alternatives will be successful. At least not in the way their founders would like them to be.

But where they may succeed is by reminding Facebook that it – like other businesses – needs to serve customer demand. Competition – regardless how minor – may help Facebook evolve and provide a better privacy solution.

In the meantime however, there are ways to make sure your information is secure on Facebook. By going to the site ReclaimPrivacy.org, you can use a tool that helps simplify Facebooks 170 (yes, 170) privacy options into just 5 or 6 shortcuts.

Though, like all online information, the best thing you can do is to simply put more thought into what you put online. Assume everything will be public and go from there. Don’t forget that Facebook is a company, just like Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Coca-Cola. They don’t owe you anything and they are not your friends. And, as always, the only real protection you have is your own judgment.

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This post was featured as a social media dream segment of the May 27th edition of This Week In Social Media.

Kevin Smith is an Account Supervisor at PJA Advertising & Marketing. Follow him on Twitter: @Mr_KevinSmith

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