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Links of Interest and other things...
1. We had a Nor'Easter which resulted in heavy rain. I got soaked. From feet to hips and arms. Dang it. Going to and from church for the unconventional bible study group -- Unitarians are interesting. No one in the group is very religious, all are grappling with the religion thing, and while we all sort of believe in God, it's more in a general sense, not a personal sense.
The reading was Matthew 23-38 - "Love thy Enemy", so we spent a good portion of the session discussing what "turn the other cheek meant" and we compared it to the "eye for an eye" bit in Exodus. Realizing that the Eye for an Eye bit in Exodus was really part of the law making and most likely there to provide the people with a reason not to hurt each other -- a sort of deterrant or restraint, not unlike the rules of the Old West. And "Turn the Other Cheek" meant to let go of hate, and to do it with love and kindness -- sort of like the judge and brother of the person killed by the officer did recently -- they hugged the woman upon her conviction.
Hate is the poison you drink that was meant for someone else.
Anyway it was interesting. And helpful. I still feel like I talk too much and get too passionate about things...but alas, this is me. I can come across is really intense at times.
We also decided the passage unlike the one in Exodus was providing people with a choice. Stating -- you can choose how to react in a situation. I'm not telling you what to do -- this is your choice. Your reactions are your own.
What we were struggling with the doormat bit. What's also interesting in the passage, is Jesus states he's more interested in mercy than burnt offerings, which is an echo of the Abraham and Issac story, where God grants mercy and man wants burnt offerings.
2. My Aunt is doing better, and according to my mother, my niece is looking forward to my visit. Hopefully it won't rain the whole time.
3. The Surprising Reason Zebras Have Stripes
Scientists have been puzzling over the role of zebra stripes for more than 150 years. But, one by one, the most commonly proposed explanations have all been refuted. Some researchers have suggested that the stripes act as camouflage—they break up zebras’ outlines or resemble fields of tree trunks. But that can’t be true: Amanda Melin of the University of Calgary recently showed that lions and hyenas can’t even make out the stripes unless they get very close. Another hypothesis says that the black stripes heat up faster than the white ones, setting up circulating air currents that cool the zebras. But a recent study showed that water drums cloaked in zebra pelts heat up just as much as those covered in normal horse skins.
That leaves the fly idea. When it comes to biting insects, zebras are doubly cursed. For one, they’re highly susceptible to a variety of fatal diseases, including trypanosomiasis, African horse sickness, and equine influenza, that are spread by horseflies and tsetse flies. They’re also very vulnerable to insect attacks: Compared with other grazers such as antelopes, the hairs on their coat are unusually short, allowing flies to more easily find blood vessels with their piercing mouthparts.
Stripes, for some reason, seem to help. In 2014, Caro and his colleagues showed that striped horses—three zebra species and the African wild ass with thin stripes on its legs—tend to live in regions with lots of horseflies. And several researchers, over the years, have shown that these flies find it hard to land on striped surfaces. No one, however, had watched the insects trying to bite actual zebras. That’s why Caro’s team went to Hill Livery.
By watching and filming the stable’s horses and zebras, the team confirmed that horseflies were much worse at alighting on the latter. The flies had no problem finding the zebras or approaching them, but couldn’t stick the landing. “You get a quarter as many landings,” Caro said. “The flies just can’t probe for a blood meal with the zebras.”
4. How to Survive Encounters With Dangerous Animals
Most of this seems like common sense, really.
Rattlesnakes
The Book’s Advice: “Leave a snake alone. The bad stuff happens when people don’t. Let the animal pass. Give it a good fifteen feet. Coiled, rattling, and head raised? Give it even more room. If you accidentally step on one and get bitten: keep cool. But seriously, don’t run; getting your heart rate up makes the venom seep into your bloodstream faster. Skip the snakebite kits and tourniquets; that’s outdated advice. Just call Poison Control at 800-222-1222 ASAP. In Arizona or California—where most bites occur—plug this number into your phone.
“And do your best to avoid snakes in the first place. A sunny, 90-degree day is snake weather. Skip the flip-flops, and wear boots instead. Pair them with long, sturdy pants like jeans. (A study actually proved denim’s effectiveness against venom injection.) Don’t use earbuds (you want to hear the rattle). On a mountain bike, be extra cautious. Rattlesnakes are designed to hear the pounding of bison hooves, not the quiet roll of a tire tread. Peek under a log before sitting on it. Shake out your sleeping bag. And if you’ve got to peel off the trail to pee, toss a few pebbles first.”
Real-World Experience: According to one study, most snake bites occur on people’s hands and forearms. What does that tell you? Levin is correct that people get bit when they try to mess around with a poisonous snake. I regularly encounter rattlers, both around my home in Los Angeles and on camping trips throughout the desert Southwest. But neither I nor anyone I know has ever been bitten. Actually, I take that back—I watched a friend of a friend get bitten on Instagram a couple years back after he picked up a snake he found on a trail to pose with it for a photo. Rattlers are typically polite enough to warn you of their presence, making them relatively easy to avoid.
5. Advice on How to Write Mysteries from Mystery Writers...yes, just what we all needed.
6. Here's an Example of the Crazy Lengths NASA goes to Land Safely on Mars
To increase the odds of success, therefore, the Mars 2020 mission will have an added technology called Terrain Relative Navigation, essentially an autopilot. And this autopilot has been meticulously developed. An engineer named Andrew Johnson at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California has spent most of the last 15 years working on the technology that will guide the 2020 spacecraft's flight for just 10 seconds.
"These 10 seconds may make the difference in whether we land safely on Mars or not," said Johnson, who is responsible for the lander's vision system.
How it works
At 4.2km above the surface, as the lander is descending under parachute power, an on-board computer begins to rapidly take pictures of the Martian surface. Each image has a resolution of 6 meters per pixel, and the landing system is looking for features such as craters, cliffs, and large boulders to compare against previously captured orbital imagery. After the on-board computer has made 15 landmark "matches," it switches to a higher-resolution mode to fine-tune the landing positioning. Previously, a lander could estimate where it was on Mars to within about 3km. The new vision system seeks to bring this error down to 40 meters.
There's about a 10-second period in this sequence during which the on-board computer must assess the high-resolution imagery, calculate the expected landing position, compare this location to satellite imagery of the Martian surface, and determine whether to alter the vehicle's course. All of this must be done before the separation of the back shell, after which a rocket-powered diversion of up to 600 meters would no longer be possible.
On Sept. 28, 2019, engineers and technicians working on the Mars 2020 spacecraft at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, look on as a crane lifts the rocket-powered descent stage away from the rover after a test.
Okay. Saving for future information.
7. How Science Has Shifted Our Sense of Idenity
Designs on intelligence
“Methods of scientific precision must be introduced into all educational work, to carry everywhere good sense and light,” wrote the French psychologist Alfred Binet in 1907 (English translation published in 1914 (ref. 2)). A decade earlier, Binet and Théodore Simon developed a series of tests for French schoolchildren to measure what they called ‘mental age’. If a child’s mental age was less than her chronological age, she could receive extra help to catch up. The German psychologist William Stern took the ratio of mental to chronological age, giving what he called the IQ and, theoretically, making it comparable across groups. Meanwhile, Charles Spearman, a British statistician and eugenicist of the Galton school, found a correlation between a child’s performance on different tests. To explain the correlations, he theorized an innate, fixed, underlying quality he called ‘g’, for ‘general intelligence’. Then the American psychologist Henry Goddard, with the eugenicist Charles Davenport whispering in his ear, claimed that low IQ was a simple Mendelian trait. Thus, step by scientistic step, IQ was converted from a measure of a given child’s past performance to a predictor of any child’s future performance.
IQ became a measure not of what you do, but of who you are — a score for one’s inherent worth as a person. In the Progressive era, eugenicists became obsessed with low intelligence, believing it to be the root of crime, poverty, promiscuity and disease. By the time Adolf Hitler expanded eugenics to cover entire ethnic and cultural groups, tens of thousands of people worldwide had already been yanked from the gene pool, sterilized, institutionalized, or both.
Not me
Immunologists took another approach, They located identity in the body, defining it in relational rather than absolute terms: self and non-self. Tissue-graft rejection, allergies and autoimmune reactions could be understood not as a war but as an identity crisis. This was pretty philosophical territory. Indeed, the historian Warwick Anderson has suggested that3 in immunology, biological and social thought have been “mixing promiscuously in a common tropical setting, under the palm trees”.
The immunological Plato was the Australian immunologist Frank MacFarlane Burnet. Burnet’s fashioning of immunology as the science of the self was a direct response to his reading of the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. Tit for tat, social theorists from Jacques Derrida to Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway have leaned on immunological imagery and concepts in theorizing the self in society. The point is that scientific and social thought are deeply entangled, resonant, co-constructed. You can’t fully understand one without the other.
We ignore the past at our peril
Later, Burnet was drawn to new metaphors taken from cybernetics and information theory. “It is in the spirit of the times,” he wrote in 19544, to believe there would soon be “a ‘communications theory’ of the living organism.” Indeed there was. In the same period, molecular biologists also became enamoured of information metaphors. After the 1953 solution of the DNA double helix, as the problem of the genetic code took shape, molecular biologists found analogies with information, text and communication irresistible, borrowing words such as ‘transcription’, ‘translation’, ‘messengers’, ‘transfers’ and ‘signalling’. The genome ‘spells’ in an ‘alphabet’ of four letters, and is almost invariably discussed as a text, whether it is a book, manual or parts list. Not coincidentally, these fields grew up alongside computer science and the computing industry.
The postwar self became a cipher to be decoded. DNA sequences could be digitized. Its messages could, at least in theory, be intercepted, decoded and programmed. Soon it became hard not to think of human nature in terms of information. By the 1960s, DNA was becoming known as the ‘secret of life’.
Many selves
In the late 1960s and 1970s, critics (including a number of scientists) grew concerned that the new biology could alter what it means to be human. The ethical and social issues raised were “far too important to be left solely in the hands of the scientific and medical communities”, wrote James Watson (of DNA fame and later infamy) in 1971.
In 1978, Patrick Steptoe and Robert Edwards succeeded with human in vitro fertilization, leading to the birth of Louise Brown, the first ‘test-tube baby’. By 1996, human cloning seemed to be around the corner, with the cloning of a sheep that Ian Wilmut and his team named Dolly.
Cloning and genetic engineering have prompted much soul-searching but little soul-finding. There has long been something both terrible and fascinating about the idea of a human-made, perhaps not-quite-person. Would a cloned individual have the same rights as the naturally born? Would a baby conceived or engineered to be a tissue donor be somehow dehumanized? Do we have a right to alter the genes of the unborn? Or, as provocateurs have argued, do we have an obligation to do so? The recent development of potent gene-editing tools such as CRISPR has only made widening participation in such decision-making more urgent.
Arguments, both pro and con, around engineering humans often lean on an overly deterministic understanding of genetic identity. Scientism can cut both ways. A deep reductionism located human nature inside the cell nucleus. In 1902, the English physician Archibald Garrod had written5 of genetically based “chemical individuality”. In the 1990s, as the first tsunamis of genomic sequence data began to wash up on the shores of basic science, it became obvious that human genetic variation was much more extensive than we had realized. Garrod has become a totem of the genome age.
By the end of the century, visionaries had begun to tout the coming of ‘personalized medicine’ based on your genome. No more ‘one size fits all’, went the slogan. Instead, diagnostics and therapy would be tailored to you — that is, to your DNA. After the Human Genome Project, the cost of DNA sequencing nosedived, making ‘getting your genome done’ part of mass culture.
Today, tech-forward colleges offer genome profiles to all incoming first-years. Hip companies purport to use your genome to compose personalized wine lists, nutritional supplements, skin cream, smoothies or lip balm. The sequence has become the self. As it says on the DNA testing kit from sequencing company 23andMe, “Welcome to you.”
Boundaries blur
But you are not all you — not by a long shot. The DNA-as-blueprint model is outdated, almost quaint. For starters, all of the cells in a body do not have the same chromosomes. Cisgender women are mosaics: the random inactivation of one X chromosome in each cell means that half a woman’s cells express her mother’s X and half express her father’s. Mothers are also chimaeras, thanks to the exchange of cells with a fetus through the placenta.
Chimaerism can cross the species boundary, too. Human–chimpanzee embryos have been made in the laboratory, and researchers are hard at work trying to grow immune-tolerant human organs in pigs. Genes, proteins and microorganisms stream continuously among almost any life forms living cheek by jowl. John Lennon was right: “I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.”
Even in strictly scientific terms, ‘you’ are more than the contents of your chromosomes. The human body contains at least as many non-human cells (mostly bacteria, archaea and fungi) as human ones6. Tens of thousands of microbial species crowd and jostle over and through the body, with profound effects on digestion, complexion, disease resistance, vision and mood. Without them, you don’t feel like you; in fact, you aren’t really you. The biological self has been reframed as a cluster of communities, all in communication with each other.
These, too, cavort promiscuously beneath the palms. Scientists found that they could use a person’s microbiome to identify their sexual partner 86% of the time7. The communities of greatest similarity in cohabiting couples, they found, are on the feet. The thigh microbiome, by contrast, is more closely correlated with your biological sex than with the identity of your partner.
A body part, a cesspool, a subway car, a classroom — any place with a characteristic community — can be understood as having a genetic identity. In such a community, genetic information passes within and between individual organisms, through sex, predation, infection and horizontal gene transfer. In the past year, studies have shown that the communities of symbiotic microbes in deep-sea mussels become genetically isolated over time, like species. In fungi, genes called Spok (spore-killer) ebb and flow and recombine across species by ‘meiotic drive’, a kind of genomic fast-forward button that permits heritable genetic change to occur fast enough to respond to a rapidly changing environment. The genome, as the geneticist Barbara McClintock said long ago, is a sensitive organ of the cell.
Epigenetics dissolves the boundaries of the self even further. Messages coded in the DNA can be modified in many ways — by mixing and matching DNA modules, by capping or hiding bits so that they can’t be read, or by changing the message after it’s been read, its meaning altered in translation. DNA was once taught as a sacred text handed faithfully down the generations. Now, increasing evidence points to the nuclear genome as more of a grab bag of suggestions, tourist phrases, syllables and gibberish that you use and modify as needed. The genome now seems less like the seat of the self and more of a toolkit for fashioning the self. So who is doing the fashioning?
The reading was Matthew 23-38 - "Love thy Enemy", so we spent a good portion of the session discussing what "turn the other cheek meant" and we compared it to the "eye for an eye" bit in Exodus. Realizing that the Eye for an Eye bit in Exodus was really part of the law making and most likely there to provide the people with a reason not to hurt each other -- a sort of deterrant or restraint, not unlike the rules of the Old West. And "Turn the Other Cheek" meant to let go of hate, and to do it with love and kindness -- sort of like the judge and brother of the person killed by the officer did recently -- they hugged the woman upon her conviction.
Hate is the poison you drink that was meant for someone else.
Anyway it was interesting. And helpful. I still feel like I talk too much and get too passionate about things...but alas, this is me. I can come across is really intense at times.
We also decided the passage unlike the one in Exodus was providing people with a choice. Stating -- you can choose how to react in a situation. I'm not telling you what to do -- this is your choice. Your reactions are your own.
What we were struggling with the doormat bit. What's also interesting in the passage, is Jesus states he's more interested in mercy than burnt offerings, which is an echo of the Abraham and Issac story, where God grants mercy and man wants burnt offerings.
2. My Aunt is doing better, and according to my mother, my niece is looking forward to my visit. Hopefully it won't rain the whole time.
3. The Surprising Reason Zebras Have Stripes
Scientists have been puzzling over the role of zebra stripes for more than 150 years. But, one by one, the most commonly proposed explanations have all been refuted. Some researchers have suggested that the stripes act as camouflage—they break up zebras’ outlines or resemble fields of tree trunks. But that can’t be true: Amanda Melin of the University of Calgary recently showed that lions and hyenas can’t even make out the stripes unless they get very close. Another hypothesis says that the black stripes heat up faster than the white ones, setting up circulating air currents that cool the zebras. But a recent study showed that water drums cloaked in zebra pelts heat up just as much as those covered in normal horse skins.
That leaves the fly idea. When it comes to biting insects, zebras are doubly cursed. For one, they’re highly susceptible to a variety of fatal diseases, including trypanosomiasis, African horse sickness, and equine influenza, that are spread by horseflies and tsetse flies. They’re also very vulnerable to insect attacks: Compared with other grazers such as antelopes, the hairs on their coat are unusually short, allowing flies to more easily find blood vessels with their piercing mouthparts.
Stripes, for some reason, seem to help. In 2014, Caro and his colleagues showed that striped horses—three zebra species and the African wild ass with thin stripes on its legs—tend to live in regions with lots of horseflies. And several researchers, over the years, have shown that these flies find it hard to land on striped surfaces. No one, however, had watched the insects trying to bite actual zebras. That’s why Caro’s team went to Hill Livery.
By watching and filming the stable’s horses and zebras, the team confirmed that horseflies were much worse at alighting on the latter. The flies had no problem finding the zebras or approaching them, but couldn’t stick the landing. “You get a quarter as many landings,” Caro said. “The flies just can’t probe for a blood meal with the zebras.”
4. How to Survive Encounters With Dangerous Animals
Most of this seems like common sense, really.
Rattlesnakes
The Book’s Advice: “Leave a snake alone. The bad stuff happens when people don’t. Let the animal pass. Give it a good fifteen feet. Coiled, rattling, and head raised? Give it even more room. If you accidentally step on one and get bitten: keep cool. But seriously, don’t run; getting your heart rate up makes the venom seep into your bloodstream faster. Skip the snakebite kits and tourniquets; that’s outdated advice. Just call Poison Control at 800-222-1222 ASAP. In Arizona or California—where most bites occur—plug this number into your phone.
“And do your best to avoid snakes in the first place. A sunny, 90-degree day is snake weather. Skip the flip-flops, and wear boots instead. Pair them with long, sturdy pants like jeans. (A study actually proved denim’s effectiveness against venom injection.) Don’t use earbuds (you want to hear the rattle). On a mountain bike, be extra cautious. Rattlesnakes are designed to hear the pounding of bison hooves, not the quiet roll of a tire tread. Peek under a log before sitting on it. Shake out your sleeping bag. And if you’ve got to peel off the trail to pee, toss a few pebbles first.”
Real-World Experience: According to one study, most snake bites occur on people’s hands and forearms. What does that tell you? Levin is correct that people get bit when they try to mess around with a poisonous snake. I regularly encounter rattlers, both around my home in Los Angeles and on camping trips throughout the desert Southwest. But neither I nor anyone I know has ever been bitten. Actually, I take that back—I watched a friend of a friend get bitten on Instagram a couple years back after he picked up a snake he found on a trail to pose with it for a photo. Rattlers are typically polite enough to warn you of their presence, making them relatively easy to avoid.
5. Advice on How to Write Mysteries from Mystery Writers...yes, just what we all needed.
6. Here's an Example of the Crazy Lengths NASA goes to Land Safely on Mars
To increase the odds of success, therefore, the Mars 2020 mission will have an added technology called Terrain Relative Navigation, essentially an autopilot. And this autopilot has been meticulously developed. An engineer named Andrew Johnson at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California has spent most of the last 15 years working on the technology that will guide the 2020 spacecraft's flight for just 10 seconds.
"These 10 seconds may make the difference in whether we land safely on Mars or not," said Johnson, who is responsible for the lander's vision system.
How it works
At 4.2km above the surface, as the lander is descending under parachute power, an on-board computer begins to rapidly take pictures of the Martian surface. Each image has a resolution of 6 meters per pixel, and the landing system is looking for features such as craters, cliffs, and large boulders to compare against previously captured orbital imagery. After the on-board computer has made 15 landmark "matches," it switches to a higher-resolution mode to fine-tune the landing positioning. Previously, a lander could estimate where it was on Mars to within about 3km. The new vision system seeks to bring this error down to 40 meters.
There's about a 10-second period in this sequence during which the on-board computer must assess the high-resolution imagery, calculate the expected landing position, compare this location to satellite imagery of the Martian surface, and determine whether to alter the vehicle's course. All of this must be done before the separation of the back shell, after which a rocket-powered diversion of up to 600 meters would no longer be possible.
On Sept. 28, 2019, engineers and technicians working on the Mars 2020 spacecraft at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, look on as a crane lifts the rocket-powered descent stage away from the rover after a test.
Okay. Saving for future information.
7. How Science Has Shifted Our Sense of Idenity
Designs on intelligence
“Methods of scientific precision must be introduced into all educational work, to carry everywhere good sense and light,” wrote the French psychologist Alfred Binet in 1907 (English translation published in 1914 (ref. 2)). A decade earlier, Binet and Théodore Simon developed a series of tests for French schoolchildren to measure what they called ‘mental age’. If a child’s mental age was less than her chronological age, she could receive extra help to catch up. The German psychologist William Stern took the ratio of mental to chronological age, giving what he called the IQ and, theoretically, making it comparable across groups. Meanwhile, Charles Spearman, a British statistician and eugenicist of the Galton school, found a correlation between a child’s performance on different tests. To explain the correlations, he theorized an innate, fixed, underlying quality he called ‘g’, for ‘general intelligence’. Then the American psychologist Henry Goddard, with the eugenicist Charles Davenport whispering in his ear, claimed that low IQ was a simple Mendelian trait. Thus, step by scientistic step, IQ was converted from a measure of a given child’s past performance to a predictor of any child’s future performance.
IQ became a measure not of what you do, but of who you are — a score for one’s inherent worth as a person. In the Progressive era, eugenicists became obsessed with low intelligence, believing it to be the root of crime, poverty, promiscuity and disease. By the time Adolf Hitler expanded eugenics to cover entire ethnic and cultural groups, tens of thousands of people worldwide had already been yanked from the gene pool, sterilized, institutionalized, or both.
Not me
Immunologists took another approach, They located identity in the body, defining it in relational rather than absolute terms: self and non-self. Tissue-graft rejection, allergies and autoimmune reactions could be understood not as a war but as an identity crisis. This was pretty philosophical territory. Indeed, the historian Warwick Anderson has suggested that3 in immunology, biological and social thought have been “mixing promiscuously in a common tropical setting, under the palm trees”.
The immunological Plato was the Australian immunologist Frank MacFarlane Burnet. Burnet’s fashioning of immunology as the science of the self was a direct response to his reading of the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. Tit for tat, social theorists from Jacques Derrida to Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway have leaned on immunological imagery and concepts in theorizing the self in society. The point is that scientific and social thought are deeply entangled, resonant, co-constructed. You can’t fully understand one without the other.
We ignore the past at our peril
Later, Burnet was drawn to new metaphors taken from cybernetics and information theory. “It is in the spirit of the times,” he wrote in 19544, to believe there would soon be “a ‘communications theory’ of the living organism.” Indeed there was. In the same period, molecular biologists also became enamoured of information metaphors. After the 1953 solution of the DNA double helix, as the problem of the genetic code took shape, molecular biologists found analogies with information, text and communication irresistible, borrowing words such as ‘transcription’, ‘translation’, ‘messengers’, ‘transfers’ and ‘signalling’. The genome ‘spells’ in an ‘alphabet’ of four letters, and is almost invariably discussed as a text, whether it is a book, manual or parts list. Not coincidentally, these fields grew up alongside computer science and the computing industry.
The postwar self became a cipher to be decoded. DNA sequences could be digitized. Its messages could, at least in theory, be intercepted, decoded and programmed. Soon it became hard not to think of human nature in terms of information. By the 1960s, DNA was becoming known as the ‘secret of life’.
Many selves
In the late 1960s and 1970s, critics (including a number of scientists) grew concerned that the new biology could alter what it means to be human. The ethical and social issues raised were “far too important to be left solely in the hands of the scientific and medical communities”, wrote James Watson (of DNA fame and later infamy) in 1971.
In 1978, Patrick Steptoe and Robert Edwards succeeded with human in vitro fertilization, leading to the birth of Louise Brown, the first ‘test-tube baby’. By 1996, human cloning seemed to be around the corner, with the cloning of a sheep that Ian Wilmut and his team named Dolly.
Cloning and genetic engineering have prompted much soul-searching but little soul-finding. There has long been something both terrible and fascinating about the idea of a human-made, perhaps not-quite-person. Would a cloned individual have the same rights as the naturally born? Would a baby conceived or engineered to be a tissue donor be somehow dehumanized? Do we have a right to alter the genes of the unborn? Or, as provocateurs have argued, do we have an obligation to do so? The recent development of potent gene-editing tools such as CRISPR has only made widening participation in such decision-making more urgent.
Arguments, both pro and con, around engineering humans often lean on an overly deterministic understanding of genetic identity. Scientism can cut both ways. A deep reductionism located human nature inside the cell nucleus. In 1902, the English physician Archibald Garrod had written5 of genetically based “chemical individuality”. In the 1990s, as the first tsunamis of genomic sequence data began to wash up on the shores of basic science, it became obvious that human genetic variation was much more extensive than we had realized. Garrod has become a totem of the genome age.
By the end of the century, visionaries had begun to tout the coming of ‘personalized medicine’ based on your genome. No more ‘one size fits all’, went the slogan. Instead, diagnostics and therapy would be tailored to you — that is, to your DNA. After the Human Genome Project, the cost of DNA sequencing nosedived, making ‘getting your genome done’ part of mass culture.
Today, tech-forward colleges offer genome profiles to all incoming first-years. Hip companies purport to use your genome to compose personalized wine lists, nutritional supplements, skin cream, smoothies or lip balm. The sequence has become the self. As it says on the DNA testing kit from sequencing company 23andMe, “Welcome to you.”
Boundaries blur
But you are not all you — not by a long shot. The DNA-as-blueprint model is outdated, almost quaint. For starters, all of the cells in a body do not have the same chromosomes. Cisgender women are mosaics: the random inactivation of one X chromosome in each cell means that half a woman’s cells express her mother’s X and half express her father’s. Mothers are also chimaeras, thanks to the exchange of cells with a fetus through the placenta.
Chimaerism can cross the species boundary, too. Human–chimpanzee embryos have been made in the laboratory, and researchers are hard at work trying to grow immune-tolerant human organs in pigs. Genes, proteins and microorganisms stream continuously among almost any life forms living cheek by jowl. John Lennon was right: “I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.”
Even in strictly scientific terms, ‘you’ are more than the contents of your chromosomes. The human body contains at least as many non-human cells (mostly bacteria, archaea and fungi) as human ones6. Tens of thousands of microbial species crowd and jostle over and through the body, with profound effects on digestion, complexion, disease resistance, vision and mood. Without them, you don’t feel like you; in fact, you aren’t really you. The biological self has been reframed as a cluster of communities, all in communication with each other.
These, too, cavort promiscuously beneath the palms. Scientists found that they could use a person’s microbiome to identify their sexual partner 86% of the time7. The communities of greatest similarity in cohabiting couples, they found, are on the feet. The thigh microbiome, by contrast, is more closely correlated with your biological sex than with the identity of your partner.
A body part, a cesspool, a subway car, a classroom — any place with a characteristic community — can be understood as having a genetic identity. In such a community, genetic information passes within and between individual organisms, through sex, predation, infection and horizontal gene transfer. In the past year, studies have shown that the communities of symbiotic microbes in deep-sea mussels become genetically isolated over time, like species. In fungi, genes called Spok (spore-killer) ebb and flow and recombine across species by ‘meiotic drive’, a kind of genomic fast-forward button that permits heritable genetic change to occur fast enough to respond to a rapidly changing environment. The genome, as the geneticist Barbara McClintock said long ago, is a sensitive organ of the cell.
Epigenetics dissolves the boundaries of the self even further. Messages coded in the DNA can be modified in many ways — by mixing and matching DNA modules, by capping or hiding bits so that they can’t be read, or by changing the message after it’s been read, its meaning altered in translation. DNA was once taught as a sacred text handed faithfully down the generations. Now, increasing evidence points to the nuclear genome as more of a grab bag of suggestions, tourist phrases, syllables and gibberish that you use and modify as needed. The genome now seems less like the seat of the self and more of a toolkit for fashioning the self. So who is doing the fashioning?