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mxliv-oftheendless · 4 years

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Ruining KISStory: A Filthy, Filthy Story About Benjamin Franklin

So in celebration of surviving my French midterm (my anxiety over it was through the roof for some damn reason), I decided I would post this crazy little thing for y’all! So in like, actual real life, Shane for a while did his own show called Ruining History, which I totally recommend for you guys to actually watch. So this is a spinoff of my KISS Unsolved AU, appropriately named Ruining KISStory (a name I’m super fucking proud of actually XD), in which our resident Queen of the Trolls Paul Stanley gives us his own creative spin on historical events. And yes, it’s going to be just as chaotic as Unsolved lol. Here’s the link to the original episode if you want to watch that first.

And now, without further ado, enjoy!

Tag list: @cosmicrealmofkissteria @ashestoashesvvi @kategwidt @retronova

[camera opens on Paul, who is sitting at a panel. A map of the world is hung up behind him. The sound of tuning violins plays in the background]

PAUL: Some people think history is boring. But I think Benjamin Franklin might have been in some weird sex parties!

[intro, then title card. Grand orchestra music plays in the background]

[cuts back to the panel; the shot has been widened so the entire panel is visible. From left to right: Vinnie, Gene, Paul, Eric C., Tommy. Labels showing their names come up on screen]

PAUL: So what do you guys know about Ben Franklin?

VINNIE: … Kites!

ERIC: Ethics?

TOMMY: Oh! He used the kite and a key and discovered electricity!

GENE: Oh yeah, we learned about that in school.

PAUL: Pretty sure every school tells that story.

GENE: He also helped Nicholas Cage find treasure.

PAUL: [gives him a withering look before turning away] Okay. [Tommy laughs]

[screen cuts away to a title card:

CHAPTER I:

THE AMERICAN OVERACHIEVER

screen then cuts to animations as Paul narrates, while inspiring music you would hear in a film set during the American Revolution plays in the background]

PAUL [voiceover]: Born in 1706, Benjamin Franklin is often thought of as the model American citizen. Throughout his life, he was… well, he was a lot of things. Seriously, a lot of things.

[a list of text boxes appears on screen next to a picture of a statue of Benjamin Franklin:

POLITICIAN

AUTHOR

SCIENTIST

CIVIC LEADER

POSTMASTER

MEDIA MOGUL

INVENTOR

DIPLOMAT

I COULD KEEP GOING BUT YOU GET IT]

PAUL [voiceover]: Beyond all that, though, he seems like the kind of guy you wouldn’t mind having a drink with. But, if you did spend some quality time with Ben Franklin, things might get weird.

[cuts back to panel; Vinnie looks intrigued]

VINNIE: By weird, do you mean [waggles his eyebrows] weird or just eccentric-weird?

PAUL: I mean [waggles his eyebrows] weird.

ERIC: [looks a little nervous] Oh no… I really liked Ben Franklin as a kid.

GENE: Well, he’s gonna ruin the history books for ya, Eric.

TOMMY: Oh is that why it’s called Ruining History?

PAUL: Yep!

TOMMY: Nice, I like that.

PAUL: Thank you. [cuts back to animation sequence]

PAUL [voiceover]: In the years during and after America’s fight for independence, Franklin spent much of his time serving as a diplomat in Europe. And it’s a good thing he did. Author Walter Isaacson has argued that America wouldn’t have won the war without Franklin’s excellent diplomacy in France. It wasn’t all politics, though. At the time, Paris was regarded as one of the most cosmopolitan cities at that time in history. And a wave of cultural enlightenment paired with a strong economy gave the upper class the means to… well… [music intensifies] have many crazy, crazy, crazy… crazy nights…

But we’ll get to that in a second! Franklin seemed to find himself right at home in this environment. To give an idea of his bohemian life abroad, here’s a curious morning routine he picked up during his time in France.

GENE: I bet it was, powder on the balls. [Eric laughs]

PAUL: [snickering] Powder the wig, powder the balls.

TOMMY: Powder the balls, get out on the street, and do something! [Vinnie laughs]

PAUL [voiceover]: While writing to a friend of his, Franklin described his habit of taking what he called “air baths.” Quote, “I rise almost every morning and sit in my chamber without any clothes whatever, half an hour or an hour, according to the season, either reading or writing. The practice is not in the least bit painful, but on the contrary, agreeable.”

[cuts to the left side of the panel. Gene looks uncomfortable, while Vinnie just gives a raised eyebrow]

GENE: I don’t know what it was about how people wrote during this time, but describing sexual acts in this kinda language makes it dirtier than it actually is.

PAUL: There’s nothing sexual about this.

VINNIE: There’s no sexuality here, Genie, your mind is just dirty.

TOMMY: Yeah, he’s just sitting around his house naked.

VINNIE: I mean if the hand just happens to fall…

GENE: Vinnie, I can’t believe I’m saying this to you, but guys—we don’t just jerk off on accident!

ERIC: I mean… I have no idea how to respond to that.

PAUL: I think some guys do.

TOMMY: Peter does.

PAUL: [raises an eyebrow at him while they all turn to stare at Tommy] … How do you know that?

ERIC: I could’ve gone my whole life without hearing that. [cuts back to the animation sequence]

PAUL [voiceover]: Franklin’s social calendar in Europe was full of invites to gluttonous but incredibly classy all-night ragers, where his status as an American statesmen made him a pretty interesting guy. The women of France allegedly couldn’t get enough of him. One account describes hundreds of women surrounding him, placing a beautiful wreath upon his head, and lining up to kiss him.

ERIC: That didn’t happen… right?

PAUL: [shrugs] I dunno, it could have happened.

VINNIE: That sounds like something you would do to your old grandpa, though.

[silence. Everyone on the panel turns to stare at Vinnie in confusion]

TOMMY: What?

GENE: So you’re saying, at family gatherings—

VINNIE: No! I’m just saying, that doesn’t seem like something you’d do to someone you wanna get with. Like, would you put a funny hat on them? No. [silence] I’m just saying, you guys!

[cuts back to animation sequence]

PAUL [voiceover]: Ben’s home life was, according to accounts, equally spicy. When famous painter Charles Willson Peale paid Franklin a surprise visit one afternoon, he spied the elderly diplomat with a young woman seated on his lap. [cuts to a sketch showing a man with a woman on his lap] This sketch of his is believed to depict the two. Kinda weird that he would sketch that, but hey.

[cuts to the panel; everyone is looking at their own copies of the sketch]

GENE: She seems to have a pretty good grip on his balls.

TOMMY: That’s a, a vice-like grip there.

VINNIE: They’re still wearing pretty much everything.

ERIC: Did you guys notice their eyes? Their eyes are open and they’re just staring at each other.

PAUL: Yeah, their eyes are pretty striking.

VINNIE: Yeah…

ERIC: They’re kissing, but it’s, it’s a little unnerving. Wonder why the guy would sketch this…

PAUL [voiceover]: Some historians have evaluated Ben Franklin’s habit of charming the elite women of Europe as a strategic ploy, suspecting that he hoped that they would speak favorably of Franklin and his case for American liberty to their policy-making husbands. But many others argue that he was just a vulgar old man. Author Albert Henry Smith wrote that Franklin’s, quote, “animal instincts and passions were strong and rank.”

VINNIE: [looks mildly disgusted] Well that’s descriptive.

GENE: [snickering]: Y’know, good old animal Ben.

PAUL: An animal…

GENE: Hey, hey: I’m an animal.

PAUL: [stares for a second, then smiles] Ah!

GENE: Ah! [high-fives Paul]

ERIC: Wait, if he was born in… when was he born?

PAUL: 1706.

ERIC: If he was born in 1706… then how old was he when all this was happening?

PAUL: He would have been… probably between his late 60s and early 70s.

[Eric’s face looks very shocked, slowly contorting into disgust]

TOMMY: Oh man, he was as old as my grandpa!

GENE: [shrugs] Hey, if it still works… [cuts back to animation sequence]

PAUL [voiceover]: Based on Franklin’s party-animal-rock-star lifestyle, it makes sense that he would be in the same social circles as some of Europe’s more notorious scoundrels; and so he was. So let us now turn our attention to a man whose life would soon intersect with Franklin’s: Sir Francis Dashwood.

VINNIE: [snickering] Very English name. [mock British accent] Sir Francis Dashwood!

[screen cuts away to a title card:

CHAPTER II

THE FANCY ENGLISH SEX MAN

lighthearted music plays]

PAUL [voiceover]: Born in 1708, Sir Francis Dashwood was the only heir of a wealthy merchant. He’s perhaps best summed up by one author’s description: “An enormously rich man with a genius for obscenity.” Dashwood’s primary interests were seemingly set in stone when in his formative years, he embarked on his Grand Tour, a traditional rite of passage during which wealthy young men traveled through Europe on a cultural odyssey. As Dashwood’s tutor put it, he, quote, “fornicated his way across Europe.” In one instance, he even seduced the Empress of Russia while claiming to be Charles the Twelfth of Sweden, a man who was, at that point, dead.

TOMMY: Wait, did she not know Charles the Twelfth was dead?

PAUL: I mean, if she got fooled by this guy, I’m pretty sure she had no idea.

VINNIE: This was the era before email and the Internet, so word traveled pretty slowly. Also, [laughs] I love how his tutor says he pretty much fucked his way across Europe.

GENE: Wonder how he got her to sleep with him…

ERIC: I don’t think we need to know the details, Gene.

GENE: Maybe you don’t.

PAUL [voiceover; tense music plays]: These travels also inspired Dashwood’s fascination with sacred rituals of the past. He wasn’t really a fan of the religious institutions of his day, but he was simultaneously fascinated with Europe’s rich history. So when he wasn’t womanizing, he was sauntering through dusty catacombs lined with mummified corpses, or sitting in old Roman ruins imagining the orgies of the past. So it’s this odd mutual appreciation for debauchery and sacred history that would lead to Dashwood’s crowning achievement and ultimately his friendship with Ben Franklin: the Friars of St. Francis of Wycombe. Or, as it was more popularly known…

[music reaches a climactic peak as the name appears on screen over burning flames. Paul reads the name]

THE HELLFIRE CLUB!

GENE: Oh shit.

VINNIE: That sounds awesome.

PAUL [voiceover]: Dashwood’s Hellfire Club was meant to attract the most depraved and intellectual men of the time. And over the course of its history, its lineup would allegedly include such notable men as the Prime Minister of England, the Lord Mayor of London, several of England’s greatest artists and poets, the Prince of Wales, and possibly, as evidence would strongly suggest, Ben Franklin. See, Dashwood was publicly known to sympathize with the cause of the American rebels, and he had exchanged letters with Franklin many times. Furthermore, Franklin actually visited Dashwood’s estate at West Wycombe for an extended period in July of 1772, and during his stay, there is a record of a club meeting taking place. According to one author, quote, “there seems to be no reason why Franklin should have gone to Wycombe at this special time unless he was a member. Only club members were allowed at Dashwood’s estate during club meetings.” So, keeping in mind Franklin’s likely involvement, let’s look at what he would have encountered during his visits with the Friars of St. Francis of Wycombe.

The members of the club reportedly donned white monk’s robes, and were each allowed to invite along, quote, “a lady of a cheerful, lively disposition, to improve the general hilarity.” These women also dressed up, wearing nun’s robes and masks to avoid an embarrassing run-in with a husband or acquaintance.

GENE: This is some freaky stuff.

VINNIE: [looks enthralled] This is awesome.

TOMMY: Eyes Wide Shut…

PAUL: [nods] Yep.

PAUL [voiceover]: The first location of the Hellfire Club was on the shores of an island in the Thames River. Shrouded in a thick grove of elm trees, the island was the perfect location for the not-monks to spend an evening with their dates away from the prying eyes of the public. It was also ideal because it was home to the crumbling remnants of an old medieval ruin built in 1160 known as Medmenham Abbey. Dashwood actually set about reconstructing the site, but since he had a flair for the dramatic, he asked that it still resemble a creepy old ruin. But he did install a few upgrades:

A series of stained glass windows depicting the club members in, quote, “indecent poses.”

A brilliant pornographic fresco that John Wilkes, who wasn’t known to shy away from vulgarity himself, described as, quote, “unspeakable.”

And an expansive library stocked with classical literature as well as, quote, “the finest collection of pornographic books in Great Britain.”

PAUL: So to help us get more immersed in what went down at a club meeting, I’ve provided for all of you the proper tools.

[everyone looks under the table and takes out boxes. In the boxes are black robes, 1700s-style hats, some with feathers sticking out, and Venetian masquerade masks that are black and a different color. Vinnie has black and gold, Gene has black and red, Paul has black and purple, Eric has black and orange, and Tommy has black and blue]

GENE: [as they’re all putting on their costumes] Man, you really went all out, didn’t you?

PAUL: Oh, just wait.

ERIC: I will say, I do feel more immersed in the experience now.

TOMMY: This is pretty awesome.

PAUL: Okay, now that we’re all dressed up, let’s get into the juicy stuff!

VINNIE: [looks incredibly excited] I can’t wait.

GENE: [laughs] You look so excited.

VINNIE: Because I am. [bangs rhythmically on the table] Get to the juicy stuff, Paulie!

[screen cuts to a title card:

CHAPTER III

THE DEBAUCHERY BEGINS

slow, tense music plays and animations show events as Paul narrates]

PAUL [voiceover]: In the cover of night, the hooded monks and their dates would arrive to the island on a red gondola. Stepping ashore, they were greeted by the far-off drone of the abbey’s organ and the ringing of a ghostly church bell. Outside the abbey, they’d come upon an ominous statue of Harpocrates, the Egyptian god of silence. [a statue of Harpocrates is shown with a finger over his lips, and a voice that sounds like Paul’s whispers “Shhhhhhut the fuck uuuup…”]

Once inside the abbey, Dashwood would pour his guests a special cocktail of brandy and brimstone, and they’d all raise their glasses in a toast to the powers of darkness.

VINNIE: This sounds fucking a-ma-zing! I love theme parties, and this is just, just fucking amazing. I wouldn’t stay for the sex, though.

GENE: You’d just be there for the theme part?

VINNIE: Yeah, I’d do all this, then when they start doin’ it, I’d just duck out.

PAUL: Also, before we continue, I was actually able to, to make this more immersive… [reaches under the table and pulls out a bottle of wine]

VINNIE: Ooooh, nice!

TOMMY: Is it the brandy and brimstone cocktail?

PAUL: [laughs] Heh, no, it’s not, it’s just wine. I also have… [reaches under the table and pulls out five silver ornate goblets] these babies! [passes them out]

ERIC: [looks over his in fascination] Wow, these are awesome! Where’d you get these?

PAUL: [laughs] The Wizarding World of Harry Potter. [Eric laughs]

GENE: Oh yeah, you took Erin there for her birthday a while ago.

PAUL: Yep, and I got these. [they all pour wine into their goblets and raise them in a toast] To Ben Franklin and the Hellfire Club!

PAUL [voiceover]: With the striking of a gong, the monks would move further into the abbey and file into the chapel. Here, it is suspected they practiced a black mass, in which a woman laid naked on the altar and the monks proceeded to drink sacrificial wine from her navel.

ERIC: We’re not doing that, are we?

PAUL: Oh no, we’re not doing that.

ERIC: Okay…

GENE: [laughs] Disappointed, Eric?

ERIC: No, I just—fuck you, man.

TOMMY: Would’ve been interesting.

PAUL [voiceover]: Now I should say, since I know you’re all wondering, it’s generally thought that the members weren’t actual Satanists, despite all these weird rituals. Some members actually found this aspect pretty boring. John Wilkes actually found the rituals so dull, that he once dressed up a baboon as a demon… bear with me… he locked it in a trunk, and he stowed it in the abbey. Then, when the members called upon Lord Satan to appear, Wilkes pulled a string to release the frightened animal. For a moment, the members stared in disbelief…

… And then they lost their minds.

[music grows chaotic as the animation shows the baboon leaping over terrified figures while screams are heard] The terrified baboon leapt onto Lord Sandwich—yes, that Lord Sandwich, the guy who invented the sandwich—causing him to allegedly shout, “Spare me, gracious devil! I never knew that you’d really come or I’d never have invoked thee!”

[cuts back to the panel, all of them laughing]

VINNIE: I love how, even among this weird society, there was that one guy who was like, “This society is dull!”

PAUL: Also, after this happened, the baboon jumped out the window, and they weren’t able to catch it.

GENE: [laughing] That’s hilarious.

ERIC: [laughs and waves] Bye, suckers!

TOMMY: Bye, Felicia!

PAUL [voiceover]: As the alcohol continued to flow, the monks and their guests might share dirty stories, or read from the era’s more popular works of pornographic literature.

PAUL: I’ve provided you all with a piece of pornography. These are all from a piece published in 1740 called, “A Dialogue Between a Married Lady and a Maid.” So without further ado, [gestures to Vinnie for him to begin] Vinnie?

[dramatic piano music plays as Vinnie starts to read, looking like he wants to laugh]

VINNIE: “There is between the thighs, just at the bottom of the belly, a piece of flesh… Underneath, hangs in a bag, or purse, two little balls, pretty hard, and the harder the better. They call them stones, and in them is contained that white thick liquor.” [he wheezes, then bursts out laughing, joined by Tommy]

GENE: “He took hold of that place which distinguishes us from men. At the same time he cried out, ‘O! I have a maid! A virgin to my share!’”

VINNIE: I love that they seemed to not know the exact words. [laughs]

PAUL: Well, it was a different time. They were more prudish, I think.

VINNIE: True. I’ve seen some stuff online that’s pretty vulgar. There’s this one person online who likes pugs that writes some naughty, naughty stuff. [looks at the camera smirking] You know who you are. I see you.

ERIC: Okay, my turn. “His member was stiff and hard as a horn. Just as he had finished…” oh God, why? “… my mother, who had heard me shriek, came into the room.”

TOMMY: “‘What a happy girl you are!’ said she. ‘Pluck off this smock, which I will keep for a relick, since it is stained with thy virgin’s blood.’”

GENE: [to Vinnie] I feel like we got the lesser of the four passages.

VINNIE: I dunno…

ERIC: You did! Mine and Tommy’s were pretty explicit. You just got a playful description of balls!

VINNIE: Hey, that’s pretty tame compared to some of the smut that’s out there today.

GENE: Fifty Shades of Grey? [Paul frowns and glares at Gene as the rest of the panel silently stares at him] … What?

PAUL: How dare you. [Tommy laughs] How dare you bring that crap into my show. [cuts back to the animations]

PAUL [voiceover]: With bellies full of drinks and minds full of smut, guests would start to pair off and retreat to any of the private cells, which were prepared and stocked with the, quote, “proper objects for lascivious activities.”

[cut back to the panel. Eric is slumped over the desk]

PAUL: [looks over in slight amusement] You okay there, Eric?

ERIC: I just… I don’t even want to know what they got up to.

VINNIE: [grinning and trying not to laugh] It seems pretty obvious to me what they got up to.

ERIC: I don’t want to—

VINNIE: [still grinning] They got some of that dirty rhythm.

GENE: [also grinning] They indulged in some sweet pain.

ERIC: Gene, no—

TOMMY: [just assume everyone is grinning widely] They went for a rocket ride.

PAUL: They rocked hard all night.

GENE: Took each other down below.

ERIC: Guys, c’mon—

VINNIE: Got some tough love.

TOMMY: Pulled the triggers of their love guns.

PAUL: Put the X in—

ERIC: STOOOP!

PAUL [voiceover]: After operating in secret for many years, the details of the Hellfire Club at Medmenham Abbey were recounted in a popular novel in 1760. It captivated the public’s imagination, to the point that tourists would line the shores to try and spot the sex monks arriving. But, not wanting to give up his elaborate sex parties, Dashwood bounced back by having an elaborate system of caves dug on his own private property a few miles away from the abbey, and it was here that the monks of the Hellfire Club continued to have their parties in total privacy. This new location, and the fact that it was gated from the public and accessible only to club members, lends further plausibility to Ben Franklin’s participation. As he once wrote in a letter, “The exquisite sense of classical design, charmingly reproduced at West Wycombe, is as evident below the earth as above it.” Author Daniel Mannix argues that Franklin’s letter must be referring to the underground caves, and also adds that, quote, “Franklin would have been shortsighted if he hadn’t joined the club. He was a diplomat trying to help his country, and the club gave him the entrée to some of the most influential men in England.”

But as the guest lists for secret societies are kind of hard to figure out, we will never know for sure if Ben Franklin really did attend the Hellfire Club. But his documented friendship with Dashwood and his time spent at the estate puts it well within the realm of possibility. And, if you’re left wondering if a sex club fits with Franklin’s moral compass, then let’s take one last look at the man’s true character with some passages from an infamous piece penned by Franklin himself titled, “Advice to a Young Man on the Choice of a Mistress.” This is a letter in which Ben Franklin encourages his friend to go after older women. It was written in 1745, a copy of it sits in the Library of Congress, and it’s kind of gross.

PAUL: And here to read us the letter, through the magic of theatre… [he turns and gestures off camera] Mr. Benjamin Franklin!

[the panel applauds and whoops, then they all start laughing as Ace walks in with a chair, dressed in 1700s style clothing with a wig that is long grey hair sewn to a bald patch, but we can still clearly see his real hair underneath. A text box appears on him as he sits down between Paul and Eric:

NOT A LICENSED BEN FRANKLIN IMPERSONATOR]

ACE/BEN: Tis I, Benjamin Franklin! Who by some extraordinary means, has come to a strange future time!

VINNIE: [has a hand over his mouth while he’s laughing] This is amazing.

PAUL: So, Ben, we’ve learned a lot about you and some possible details concerning your personal life.

ACE/BEN: Okay.

PAUL: But we still have a few questions. Guys?

VINNIE: Why did you enjoy the company of older women?

ACE/BEN: [reads from his paper] “Because as they have more knowledge of the world and their minds are better stor’d with observations, their conversation is more improving, and more lastingly agreeable.” Wouldn’t you say?

VINNIE: [shrugs and nods] Yeah, I guess.

GENE: Wasn’t he like, 70 years old when he wrote this later? How is he so young right now?

ACE/BEN: “Because the sin is less—”

PAUL: No, wait—

ERIC: [bursts out laughing]

PAUL: You have to ask him. He’s—He’s an old man.

ACE/BEN: I’m old.

GENE: Ben?

ACE/BEN: Go ahead, son.

GENE: Why do you prefer the company of older women?

ACE/BEN: “Because the sin is less,” my dear boy. “The debauching a virgin may be her ruin, and make her for life unhappy.”

ERIC: Huh.

GENE: Deep.

TOMMY: Do you have any more reasons?

ACE/BEN: Uh, yeah. [takes out another sheet of paper while Tommy and Eric silently laugh] “Because in every animal that walks upright, the deficiency of the fluids that fill the muscles appears first in the highest part. The face first grows lank and wrinkled; [cut to the left side: Gene is doubled over silently laughing while Vinnie is listening thoughtfully] then the neck; then the breast and arms; the lower parts continuing to the last as plump as ever. So that covering all above with a basket, and regarding only what is below the girdle, it is impossible of two women to know an old from a young one.”

PAUL: So… you’re saying, when you put a basket over their heads…

ACE/BEN: Yeah. I don’t know. [panel bursts out laughing]

VINNIE: You don’t know?! You wrote it!

ACE/BEN: History will tell. History will tell.

PAUL: I, uh, I think history has told. Do you have any final thoughts?

VINNIE: It was a different time, maybe stuff happened that you couldn’t do nowadays.

TOMMY: He got pretty freaky.

ERIC: I mean, it would be a pretty cool movie, but I wouldn’t really want to hang out with him.

PAUL [voiceover]: Well, there you have it, people! Ben Franklin; a surprisingly multi-faceted individual. History: it’s never that boring if you know where to look. That’s been Ruining History. Thanks for learning with us!

#kiss unsolved #ruining kisstory #this episode was short enough that i could post it all at once without having to break it up into parts #which is great because i really don't like having to do that #but anyway #yep #I thought of this like way back in december but never got around to writing it until quite recently #there's also one on darius the great that i really wanted to do but thought it would make more sense to do the pilot episode #also Ash if you're reading this: yes that was a callout XD #hope you guys enjoyed this crazy thing #because i really enjoyed writing it lol #all those sex jokes had me cracking up #kiss au writing #my writing #thanks for reading!

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weerd1 · 5 years

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Star Trek DS9 Rewatch Log, Stardate 1909.17: Missions Reviewed, “Inquisition,” “In the Pale Moonlight,” and “His Way.”

In “Inquisition,” Bashir is repairing Chief’s shoulder after a kayaking accident (again) and preparing to go to a medical conference. When he wakes up for his trip he is remarkably groggy and matters are made worse when he is called to ops because Starfleet Internal Affairs, led by a Director Sloan, has come to investigate DS9’s senior staff as someone has been leaking information to the Dominion.

After some time confined to quarters, Julian is just briefly questioned by Sloan, but all seems well. Returning to his quarters, he finds they have been searched, and he receives a cryptic message from O’Brien that Miles had been questioned for two hours, and ONLY about Julian. In a second interrogation, Sloan reveals that he believes Bashir was actually turned during his time in a Dominion prison, and has sublimated all memories of this, making him the perfect spy. Sloan admits that Bashir’s motivation is to save lives, hence using the genetically engineered think tank from “Statistical Probabilities” to try and convince the Federation to surrender. Bashir continues to deny, but Sloan, seemingly with no accountability to anyone but himself begins to raise the stakes. Things just become difficult when Julian is suddenly whisked away in a transporter, and finds himself with Weyoun on a Dominion vessel. The Vorta tells him that in fact he HAS been working for the Founders, but now he has been compromised. Bashir, still simply can’t remember any such programming. Soon after though the Defiant arrives, and Kira and Worf beam over to rescue Bashir. When he’s back on the Defiant though, he is treated as a prisoner. The crew has turned against him. When even O’Brien literally turns his back on Bashir, Julian reaches out to turn Miles back to him, and realizes that O’Brien doesn’t have the shoulder injury he just treated the day before. Everything disappears and a black-clad Sloan is standing with Julian in a holodeck. Sloan explains to Bashir that he runs a branch of Starfleet intelligence called “Section 31” and all of this has been to confirm Bashir’s loyalty for recruitment into the covert organization.

Sloan promises Bashir will see him again. Back on DS9, Bashir realizes he’s been gone since the morning he woke up (which was actually after just an hour’s sleep to keep him off balance). Sisko makes inquiries to Starfleet about Section 31, and the admiralty will neither confirm nor deny their existence. Sisko and Bashir decide they want to infiltrate this organization, so if 31 comes calling again, Sisko advises Bashir to join.

The introduction of something that will become a major plot point throughout the rest of Star Trek. Section 31 will of course continue to appear in DS9 for the rest of the show, we will find out they were already operating in the Earth Starfleet in the 2150s during “Enterprise.” Section 31 is responsible for thawing Khan and trying to provoke a war with the Klingon Empire in “Star Trek Into Darkness.” And finally, the existence and actions of S31 play heavily into the second season of “Discovery.” The Kafka-esque feel of this entire episode is perfect, even if it seems like this is something they would generally do to Miles for the annual “let’s screw with O’Brien” episode. Bashir is a perfect choice though- well placed, genetically engineered, has already made friends with men like Garak, and someone who replicates espionage on the holosuite. Can’t overstate how perfect William Sadler is as Sloan either. It’s a pointed discussion. A utopia like the Federation may not be able to exist without someone behind the scenes doing the wrong things for the right reasons. At least one of out main crew would never do that, right?

“In the Pale Moonlight,” is told entirely as a personal log entry from Benjamin Sisko. He is talking about how “it all went wrong” when he posted a casualty report; the Federation/Klingon alliance is not doing well against the Dominion. Talking with Dax, he realizes they need to get the Romulans to break their non-aggression pact with the Dominion and come into the Alpha Quadrant alliance. Sisko is convinced that the Founders plan to invade Romulus when the main war is done, but will need proof to get the Romulans to act. He approaches Garak to see if anyone can get such records off of Cardassia, but Garak reports back that the Dominion has killed every operative he still as contact with on Cardassia.

Garak suggests faking the proof; he can get a blank Cardassian data rod, and he knows a forger who could build a holo program to demonstrate the “briefing” regarding turning toward Romulus. Sisko is resistant…until another casualty report comes, and Sisko realizes perhaps the ends do justify the means. They proceed with the plan which keeps having moral red flags pop up, but finally convince a Romulan senator to stop at the station and see the “evidence.” The senator analyzes the data and discovers the forgery. He leaves, potentially to tell his government that the Federation tried to trick them into the war, likely leading them to join the Dominion. The senator’s shuttle explodes on the way home, and the Romulans discover the forged rod, believing it to be real and the reason the Dominion destroyed the shuttle. Sisko knows it was Garak who killed the senator (and the forger on the side) and had really planned this from the beginning. But when the Romulans attack the Dominion, Garak tells Sisko they may have saved the Alpha Quadrant, and all it cost was one senator, one criminal, and the self-respect of one Starfleet Officer.

Sisko closes out the dictation of his log:

“So… I lied. I cheated. I bribed men to cover up the crimes of other men. I am an accessory to murder. But most damning of all… I think I can live with it… And if I had to do it all over again… I would. Garak was right about one thing – a guilty conscience is a small price to pay for the safety of the Alpha Quadrant. So I will learn to live with it…Because I can live with it…I can live with it. Computer – erase that entire personal log."

I know I say this more than once during this show but: Holy shit. First there’s Avery Brooks’ performance throughout the episode. As he dictates the log he is just mesmerizing to watch. Andrew Robinson as Garak of course is fantastic. This is of course the origin of the internet meme “It’s a FAAAAKE!” from Senator Vrenek.

And the moral conundrum is really captivating. This is an episode a lot of DS9 detractors use to point out how antithetical they believe DS9 is to “Gene Roddenberry’s vision.” I would argue they forget that classic Trek had many of the same tropes. Watch “Errand of Mercy” and how quickly Kirk and Spock are willing to risk the lives of what they believe to be simple peasants in order to stymie the Klingons. Or “A Private Little War” where Kirk provides rifles to a stone age tribe so the can fight a proxy war against a side supported by the Klingons. Kirk referring to himself as a “soldier” or his line from “A Taste of Armageddon,” “We can admit that we’re killers, but we will not kill today.” Yes, Trek offers a positive view of humanity’s future, but it also uses its science fiction setting to examine the human condition without ever saying humans are perfect. There is no way to examine the human condition without examining what we as a species are willing to do in war. As someone who still periodically has to assess what I did defending my county (and more than once found myself not meeting my own ethical standards) I appreciate Trek asking us to do that, asking us to take a look at ourselves, what we have done, and what we can live with. I can live with it. I will learn to live with it.

Will you?

“His Way” introduces us to Bashir’s new holosuite program, a swinging 60’s Vegas club and lounge singer named Vic Fontaine. The AI in the program is remarkably astute and quickly sums up everyone Bashir introduces to “Vic.” Even Odo becomes intrigued when Vic looks at he and Kira, begins to ask about their status but shies away. Odo begins to go the holosuite to ask Vic for advice on Kira.

They run through a series of exercises to help Odo learn to be “smooth,” and eventually program another 60s character, a torch singer based on Kira. Vic actually on his own reaches out to Kira to tell her to be in the holosuite to have dinner with Odo, and tells Odo that they are working with the hologram again. The two are having a wonderful date when Odo begins to lament that this isn’t the real Kira. When he find out it is he storms out. The two of them meet on the promenade and begin to argue about whether or not they should try it again. “Well then after dinner, I suppose I should try to kiss you then!” Odo shouts. “Maybe!” Kira counters. “Why wait, maybe I should just kiss you now!” “Maybe you should!” and he does. After five years of mooning over her, Odo and Kira have finally come together.

Oh. MY. GOD. How frickin’ sweet. This episode is simply adorable, and the whole scene with them on the promenade is just lovely. Always good to see your OTP (that’s internet talk- “one true pairing”) made canon. It is just about damn time, and their joining is perfectly executed. Also, my sincere and heartfelt thanks to whomever on the DS9 writing staff decided we needed to see Kira in a slinky 60s dress perform “Fever” while laying coquettishly across the piano Odo was playing. I just can’t thank you enough for that.

From the larger Trek standpoint though, we are beginning to deal with questions on the sentience of AI. Yes, The Doctor over on “Voyager” would seem to have been “awake” long enough to gain a self-awareness, but is Vic simply a hologram, or are these “lightbulbs” a new lifeform as much as Data was on TNG? There are some big SF philosophical questions going on behind this delightfully romantic episode.

NEXT VOYAGE: Ancient Bajoran prophecy comes back into play as it is Prophet vs. Pah-Wraith in “The Reckoning.”

#star trek #star trek: Deep Space Nine #ds9 rewatch

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drjeandoddspethealthresource · 6 years

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The Numerous Scientific Applications of the Word Chimera

Chimera. The word’s unusual origin stems from Greek mythology and refers to a fire-breathing she-monster that has a lion's head, a goat's body, and a serpent's tail. Nowadays, scientists and medical professionals apply the word chimera more broadly. The research around chimeric therapies is exploding, complicated, vast and controversial.

Individuals Who Are Chimeras

By definition, a chimera is a single organism that contains at least two distinct sets of DNA. Each DNA code could create separate organisms. Oftentimes, one set of DNA is found in the blood and the other set in the tissues.

One form of chimerism, fraternal twin absorption in the womb, is considered rare. One could actually rebuke this assertion. Chimeras are usually not visibly different, unless there is a developmental anomaly in one of cell lines. Heterochromia, the condition of having two distinct eye colors, quite common in certain dog breeds, could be a result of chimerism, melanin concentration in the eye or another genetic condition called mosaicism. Essentially, you could be a chimera and not even know it until thorough genetic testing is done.

The same applies to dogs and cats. If you search the internet for “chimera dog” or “chimera cat”, you may be surprised by the headlines stating, “Mixed Breed Dog with Unusual Coat Might Be a Chimera.” This may be true, but it may lead one to assume that all mixed breed dogs and cats are chimeras. Remember, a dog or cat would have had to absorb a twin in utero in this instance. So, a mixed breed dog or cat could or could not be a chimera – the same applies with a full-bred dog or cat.

Two other known forms of chimerism can occur and are recognized at this time: bone marrow transplant recipients and fetal microchimerism.

Bone marrow transplants are commonly used to treat leukemia, one type of blood cell cancer. A recipient’s bone marrow – that is destroyed through radiation or chemotherapy – is replaced with healthier bone marrow from a species-matched donor. Red blood cells are then produced by the bone marrow’s “mother” stem cells. So, a recipient will have all blood cells that are genetically identical to those of the donor for life or a mix of his blood cells and that of the donor.

Fetal microchimerism is another condition whereby cells from a fetus travel into a woman’s bloodstream and to her other organs. It is unknown how long the cells will last in the body and the situation is likely case-specific. One research study involved analyzing the brains of women who had passed away between the ages of 32 and 101 -- 63 percent had traces of male DNA from fetal cells in their brains; the oldest of these microchimeric women was 94 years of age.

A 2013 study banked whole blood from female Golden Retrievers who had had at least one male in their litters from three months to eight years before the whole blood collection. It turned out, that 36% of the mothers had positive Y-chromosome bands. Further, there was no correlation between the time of blood analysis after the litter and Y-chromosome band intensity.

Chimeric Vaccines

Chimeric protein are created by joining together several proteins to form a single hybrid protein. To make a chimeric protein, the DNA sequences that encode the desired segments to be included are “recombined” into a piece of DNA referred to as a “recombinant”.

One example is a Lyme Disease vaccine for dogs. It is currently marketed as a chimeric protein vaccine to protect dogs from a broader spectrum of the outer surface proteins that the bacteria, Borrelia burgdorferi, may produce in the body. Prior to this vaccine, many of the Lyme Disease vaccines only protected against outer surface protein A (OspA) and possibly one outer surface protein C (OspC). So, this vaccine contains not only protection against OspA, but also a chimera of OspC. The chimeric OspC component consists of seven OspC types that have been demonstrated to stimulate antibody production in mammals.

Chimeric DNA vaccines are the next generation of DNA vaccine advances to help protect or fight infectious diseases, cancer, and autoimmune conditions. Researchers were finding that naked DNA (meaning no proteins attached) induced humoral as well as cellular immune responses with high efficiency, such that their potency in human clinical trials was shown to be insufficient for protective immunity.

So, chimeric DNA vaccines are now being actively explored. The research is exploding, the combinations are endless, and findings can be difficult to explain in simple terms. At the most basic level, one study created a chimeric gene by putting Dengue virus on a Japanese encephalitis gene backbone. The results showed high neutralizing antibody titers with less Dengue virus infection-enhancing activity. In essence, by combining the DNAs from these two diseases, the researchers were able to produce a more effective vaccine against Dengue virus.

Another study took two copies of a DNA found on a tuberculosis protein and inserted them into another tuberculosis gene of another protein. Mice were given this vaccine after either a tuberculosis infection or a clinical multi-drug resistant tuberculosis isolate. Unfortunately, both groups of mice treated with this chimeric vaccine actually had accelerated mortality. According to the researchers of this study: “These findings are in contrast with previous results, which indicated that DNA vaccines expressing the individual antigens were either beneficial or at least not harmful. The results of the present study suggested that the ESAT-6 antigen is not suitable for inclusion in therapeutic vaccines.”

Other researchers are more cautious and argue the introduction of a foreign DNA actually disrupts a cell’s natural DNA sequence. Additionally, we do know what type of adverse reactions, if any, can occur with DNA vaccines. Regardless, research continues and science should prevail on this debate.

Chimeric Treatment for Cancer

In addition to bone marrow transplants and the ongoing research into DNA cancer vaccines, Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR) T-Cell Therapy is an exciting and recently approved type of cancer immunotherapy. CAR refers to genetically engineered molecules manufactured in a laboratory, hence the reason why the word chimeric is applicable here. The process uses the T- cells of the individual who has cancer.

White blood cells and T-cells are separated from the rest of a patient's blood via a process called leukapheresis. The blood is then returned to the patient's body.

The T-cells are sent to a laboratory.

The laboratory engineers and increases the amount of active T-cells that can then find and kill cancer cells.

After approximately one to two weeks and a round of chemotherapy, the T-cells are reintroduced to the patient's bloodstream.

Once inside the body, the CAR T-cells identify the cancer cells with the target antigens and kill them. CAR T-cells also may remain in the blood for some time to help prevent the cancer cells from returning.

Does this turn someone into a chimera like bone marrow transplants? Technically, no, because the genetic DNA of another person is not taking over that of the patient. However, researchers may use the word “chimerism” to refer to the presence of cells from a third-party source to indicate the persistence of the CAR T-cells and absence of rejection.

Chimeric Species

On January 26, 2017, the scientific journal, Cell, published a study on human-pig embryos – reigniting the ethical debate on interspecies chimeras. The ethical concerns are a heated topic that could potentially never be resolved. Nevertheless, the study was conducted and the results were fascinating. In this study, the researchers wanted to see about growing transplantable human tissues and organs to address the worldwide shortage of organs. So, they injected human stem cells into pig embryos to create a chimera. The embryo was then implanted into a sow for up to one month. Of the 2,075 implanted embryos, only 186 continued to develop up to the 28-day stage. Interestingly, signs indicated that the human cells were functioning – albeit as a tiny fraction of the total tissue – within the human-pig chimera.

It should be noted that scientists do distinguish the biological differences between hybrids and chimeras. A cell from a chimera contains the genetic material of either one parent species or the other. While each cell from a hybrid animal, such as a mule, contains genetic material from both parent species (donkey and mare).

W. Jean Dodds, DVM Hemopet / NutriScan 11561 Salinaz Avenue Garden Grove, CA 92843

References

Axiak-Bechtel, Sandra, et al. “Y-Chromosome DNA Is Present in the Blood of Female Dogs Suggesting the Presence of Fetal Microchimerism.” PLoS ONE, vol. 8, no. 7, 8 July 2013, doi: http://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0068114.

Bolhassani, Azam, and Sima Rafati Yazdi. “DNA Immunization as an Efficient Strategy for Vaccination.” Avicenna Journal of Medical Biotechnology, vol. 1., no. 2, 2009, pp.71–88. Print. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3558129/.

Boklage, Charles. “Embryogenesis of Chimeras, Twins and Anterior Midline Asymmetries.” Human Reproduction, vol. 21, no. 3, 1 Mar. 2006, pp. 579–591., doi: http://doi.org/10.1093/humrep/dei370.

“Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR) T-Cell Therapy.” Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, 10 Sept. 2015, http://www.lls.org/treatment/types-of-treatment/immunotherapy/chimeric-antigen-receptor-car-t-cell-therapy.

Kenderian, Saad, et al. “Chimeric Antigen Receptor T Cells and Hematopoietic Cell Transplantation: How Not to Put the CART Before the Horse.” Biology of Blood and Marrow Transplantation, vol. 23, no. 2, Feb. 2017, pp. 235–246., doi: http://doi.org/10.1016/j.bbmt.2016.09.002.

Liang, Yan et al. “Ag85A/ESAT-6 Chimeric DNA Vaccine Induces an Adverse Response in Tuberculosis-Infected Mice.” Molecular Medicine Reports vol. 14, no.2, 2016, pp. 1146–1152., PMC. doi: http://10.3892/mmr.2016.5364.

Rettner, Rachael. “3 Human Chimeras That Already Exist.” Scientific American, Scientific American, 8 Aug. 2016, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/3-human-chimeras-that-already-exist/.

Sjatha, Fithriyah, et al. “Evaluation of Chimeric DNA Vaccines Consisting of Premembrane and Envelope Genes of Japanese Encephalitis and Dengue Viruses as a Strategy for Reducing Induction of Dengue Virus Infection-Enhancing Antibody Response.” Microbiology and Immunology, vol. 58, 2014, pp. 126–134., doi: http://10.1111/1348-0421.12125.

“VANGUARD CrLyme.” Zoetis US, www.zoetisus.com/products/dogs/vanguard-crlyme/index.aspx.

Wu, Jun, et al. “Interspecies Chimerism with Mammalian Pluripotent Stem Cells.” Cell, vol. 168, no. 3, 26 Jan. 2017, pp. 473–486., doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2016.12.036.

#chimera #chimeric #hemopet #dr. jean dodds

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fromthedeskoftheminister · 6 years

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Kaminoans are awful scientists and have horrible business sense, pass it on

Alternatively - It is possible for phenotypically and genetically female clones to have existed because Jango Fett was human and human DNA is weird enough already, the existence of the Force notwithstanding.

This is a rant about how the Kaminoans are horrible scientists, have really bad business sense, horrible ethics in general and a series of head canons about mutations in the clones.

I would like to preface this by saying that everything I know of the Kaminoans comes from both wookieepedia pages, and the rest of this is based on what I know of real world genetics, how science is actually done (trust me I’m a scientist), and a vague understanding of the Force

Known things about the Kaminoans

They’re cloners but before that they’re scientists

They have a caste system

They’re amoral scientists

They're xenophobic to the point of racism

They apparently have no issue with slavery as they clone slaves for spice mines occasionally

They're perfectionists

Before Jedi inspection (or whatever the hell you want to call Obi Wan rediscovering the facility) they culled most of the clones that did not meet standards (whatever the hell those were)

They had a fully mapped genome from Jango Fett, which means that no mutations should have occurred

They somehow managed to fix the issue of telomeres

What This means

Ok, so I don’t actually know how much the internet knows about science but I'm going to assume nothing as I explain things.

So, as the cloning tubes were initially set up for a lot of different species’ requirements. Per the Republic order for the GAR those all had to be converted, reconfigured and cleaned from their initial species’ designation to human. The quickest way to get something of that size to happen is to get a lot of help, which in the Kaminoans case meant that it was probably reassigned to one of the lower castes. The Kaminoans also needed to have much larger quantities of whatever their substitute for amniotic fluid was. This was also something that was probably delegated to a different caste because mass producing amniotic fluid was probably not high on a scientists to do list.

Good science means that you have trials and replication. This is to ensure that any weird instances in the data are truly random occurrences and not part of a larger pattern. Yes, you can technically argue that every clone was a replication and that every batch produced was a different trial, but that is not actually the case. The replicant thing sure, but for trials to be counted as separate trials, something in it or about it needs to be changed. The Kaminoans didn't do this. After experimenting with the Nulls and the Alpha ARC commandos they went straight into producing the rest of the CT series. Hell, they didn't even try for more than 2 trials when they were experimenting with what would make the perfect combination of genetics to create their super soldiers. That is not a good idea when faffing about with DNA, as human DNA likes to mutate. It does this randomly, and that’s normal, as most mutations are either corrected naturally or simply don’t change anything and thus are not problems.

Good science also has clear communication. The Kaminoans did not quite have that. There are two instances of this. The first is in their directive. The Kamonians had a simple directive of “Make an army of one man”. No one knows how this was determined. Was it just based on genetics? Or did the genetics not quite matter provided they all looked the same? Just because something is phenotypically (looks) the same does not mean that its genetically the same. Look into the insect (butterflies have great examples) and animal kingdoms (Dolly Varden and Bull trout are completely identical unless you look at DNA) for examples of this. Look at twins if you need an example in humanity. Twins can look exactly the same and be very different people. Twins can also look vastly different and effectively be the same person to the point of creepiness. The second instance of poor communication comes from the clones’ designations. When doing science, labels are important. They tend to designate several things from the trial number, the trial type, the actual sample number and occasionally the date depending on the experiment. For the clones this means that their designation should reflect the type of clone, their batch number and then their number within their batch. While this is done to some extent, as seen as the differences in the numbers of the ARCs, the CC clones and the CT clones it is not consistent and does not actually tell us anything about the clones nor the order they were decanted.

Good science also means that you don’t discard data. Outliers are noted and included in the final presentation of the data. They are included in a results section. More often than not the anomalies are not discussed unless the scientists potentially have an explanation for said anomaly. But my point is that they are still there and not swept under the rug. Instead they are studied. More often than not, an anomaly in the data is the lead for someone else’s project. In other words if you're basing your standards off of a genetic match, then anomalies would have been allowed to grow to completion as they were interesting but irrelevant. It also might have allowed the Kaminoans to identify any potential harmful mutations that could possibly appear in normal clones. Instead the Kaminoans chose to cull (kill) them because they didn't fit their standards.

The Kaminoans also have horrible horrible business sense. Do you know how much money it takes to clone a person? Its a lot of money. Right now, IRL it takes about $20,000 USD to clone a cow. In June of 2001 Forbes estimated that it would cost about $1.7 million USD to clone a person. Adjusting for inflation that would be over $2.3 million USD today. I know that we’re dealing with a fictional universe here but can you tell me that you think cloning would have gotten any less expensive over time? If thats how an entire species supports itself the answer is probably not. And so what do they do with defective clones? Canonically the Kaminoans kill them. Which makes no sense given how much money it theoretically takes to produce a clone. Even if the Kaminoans are only being payed for every “perfect” clone they produce, having a “defective” clone is still a waste of resources on their part. They could have simply trained the clones in administrative or maintenance work as they did once the Jedi “found” Kamino again. Hell, slavery is already a problem in the Star Wars verse, and the Kaminoans already cloned slaves, so for them selling defective clones would be a reasonable way to recoup some of their financial losses.

What does this have to do with mutations in the clones and the ideas of genetically and phenotypically female clones?

Everything. It was a well known fact among the cloners of the galaxy that cloning Force Sensitive beings was a bad idea. This was due to the fact that those particular type of clones ended up being highly unstable. Kaminoan society also disliked the idea of Force Sensitives. Their distaste was so severe that the one historically recorded member who was Force Sensitive was made outcast once she started displaying her Sensitivity despite her high caste birth. The Kaminoans also regularly killed off green eyed offspring due to the fear that they posed a threat to their well ordered society which suggests that green eyed Kaminoans may have been naturally Force Sensitive. This also means that they had no real idea of how the Force would have effected the cloning processes. The Jedi confirm that all of the clones were individuals within the Force. The Force also has a habit of messing with physical/genetic things (see Anakin’s entire existence), so it stands to reason that the Force caused some measure of mutation in the clones.

Theres also the problem of human DNA being weird. As I mentioned earlier human DNA likes to mutate and mutate a lot. Most of the mutations are benign and are corrected by ones own DNA. Others simply don’t change anything and thus do not show up in physical characteristics at all. Which means a clone may not look like a mutant if the Kaminoans are just judging based on appearance, but is definitely a mutant based on genetics. Some physical traits in humans are controlled by multiple genes and we still dont quite know how to change them from one thing to another. This includes things like height, hair color, eye color, body type and numerous other traits. Depending on what standards the Kaminoans were attempting to meet, any of these benign mutations could have been enough to make the Kaminoans call them defective.

Some other mutations are not quite so simple. There are random mutations at different stages that can cause mirrored organs or others that affect the sex chromosomes. Depending on when in development these mutations occur, you can occasionally end up with genetically male but phenotypically female clones through things like Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome or Swyer Syndrome, or even genetically and phenotypically female clones through Turner syndrome or identical twins where one has Turner syndrome (effectively creating different sex identical twins).

Initially, the mutations were probably attributed to screw ups due with the mechanical systems as most of the scientist kamonians would have considered that work beneath them and reassigned it to one of the other castes. Alternatively this would have also been attributed to mistakes made in the amniotic fluid. As mentioned earlier mass producing amniotic fluid could have been easily handled by another caste. Just hand them a recipe and hope that they do not screw up. Either way, the Scientist Kaminoans would have declared themselves to not be at fault because their science is perfect. Which its really really not. Either way once the Kaminoans realized that the mutations were not actually random and that there might have been a pattern, occasional “defective” clones were probably allowed to survive provided that they managed to meet the Cuy’vul Dar’s military standards, and remained available for further study upon reaching “adulthood”.

In conclusion the Kaminoans practiced horrible science, had really bad business sense and there were probably phenotypically female clones, if not phenotypically and genetically female clones, running around with the trans female clones and the rest of the vode during the Clone Wars.

#star wars: the clone wars #kaminoan #clones #star wars meta #clone mutations #female clones #female clones of all types #slavery #mentions of slavery in star wars #slavery in star wars #star wars legends #star wars eu #i used a liberal mixing of canon and legends in this #because what even is canon at this point #star wars headcanons #clone wars headcanons #clone trooper headcanons #kaminoans have horrible horrible business practices #and they're horrible amoral xenophobic racist beings #and really really bad scientists #seriously #they're such bad scientists #and i would know #trust me I'm a scientist #i dont know how i fell into this fandom #but now that I'm here y'all have to deal with my thoughts and feels on things #from the head of the minister #from the desk of the minister #sooo much thanks to kaasknot for betaing this #you're a gem

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procyonvulpecula · 6 years

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Unpopular opinion

(Be warned, this is an opinion about ethics, morality, crime and punishment, not a “pineapple on pizza” type unpopular opinion, so this may lead to Discourse(TM). I’m expecting to lose some followers for this, but...)

Retributive justice is inherently immoral.

Retributive justice is the idea that crime somehow “needs” punishment to balance it out, that criminals deserve to suffer in proportion to the crime they committed, and that punishment is an important and necessary end in itself. I believe this view is immoral and isn’t actually justice at all, and nobody actually “deserves” to suffer no matter what they’ve done.

Before I start I’d like to say that retribution is different from “vengeance” or “revenge”! Revenge knows no limits (e.g. killing someone because they cheated on you), but retribution keeps punishment proportional to the crime - an eye for an eye. Retribution is obviously not as morally wrong as revenge. But “not as wrong” doesn’t mean “right!” (Incidentally, the phrase “an eye for an eye,” though found in the Old Testament, has its origins in the Babylonian law Code of Hammurabi in about 1754 BCE. While it may seem vindictive to us, it was actually a progressive step in its day, designed to limit punishment to proportional punishments in an era where cutting off limbs as a punishment for minor transgressions was common. I’d like to think we’ve morally progressed in 38 centuries, though!)

To me, legitimate punishment serves four purposes:

1) Deterrence - punishment has to be somewhat harsh to act as a deterrent to potential future offenders.

2) Rehabilitation - if possible, there should always be an effort at rehabilitating criminals so they can fit back into society...

3) Safety - ...and if rehabilitation is hopeless, then prisons should exist to keep dangerous criminals away from the public for the public’s safety.

4) Restoration - criminals can help make amends for the wrongs they’ve caused, both psychologically (e.g. through restorative justice programs) and physically (e.g. cleaning up vandalism).

These four purposes help make the world a better place and lower crime rates, but to me, any suffering above and beyond those four purposes is immoral and not legitimate punishment. So physical and psychological torture and killing are never justified, for example, as the above four purposes don’t need them. Only a gut feeling that someone “deserves to suffer/die” requires them. Retribution causes suffering beyond what is necessary - so it’s by definition immoral and unjust.

Does that gut feeling that “they deserve it” stand up as a legitimate excuse to harm someone? That’s the feeling that caused a lot of the criminals to harm someone in the first place. Acting on those feelings causes suffering but doesn’t lower crime rates and can’t somehow “undo” a crime that’s already been committed. It’s just inflicting harm on someone to satisfy an internal feeling that someone “should” suffer - certainly not a morally sound basis for a justice system.

The idea of anyone “deserving” punishment also seems to me to depend on the existence of libertarian free will - the idea that we’re in full control of our thoughts and actions, and could have done otherwise in any situation. Yet our thoughts and actions are influenced by everything from our upbringing to our genes to our childhood experiences to our economic situation to our brain chemistry to our diet to... yeah. It seems pretty hard to see how libertarian free will could work in a universe governed by cause and effect, where our actions are the product of a chain of dominoes that we’re not genuinely “in control” of. Of course, you could argue quantum physics shows there’s a lot of chance and randomness in the Universe too, and it’s not all deterministic cause and effect - but if our thoughts and actions are a matter of chance then we’re not in control of them either! And it seems pretty hard to justify retributive punishment without libertarian free will, any more than a hurricane or a virus “deserves” to be punished. To me, wrongdoing/evil should be dealt with the same way a disease or natural disaster should - identify its causes, try to prevent it before it happens, and try to stop it once it’s started, rather than deciding someone deserves to suffer because of it. The concept of people “deserving to suffer for the wrongs they have committed” reeks to me of a combination of gut instinct and magical thinking about the mind rather than a rational approach to human psychology. (Also, by denying that human actions are part of a chain of cause and effect, libertarian free will also means we can’t tackle the causes of crime. What’s the point in tackling poverty and mental health as part of a crime reduction strategy if people can just freely choose to commit crimes or not? This may explain why the strongest proponents of retribution as a moral solution to crime also often aren’t in favour of welfare spending or mental health reform, and instead adopt a “hang the bastards” mentality as a solution to all criminal problems.)

Retributive justice dehumanises offenders, labelling them as “a bad person who deserves to suffer.” This sort of “good person/bad person” mentality denies that “bad people” can change, or that “bad people” can do good things - or worse still, blinds people to the fact that “good people” can do bad things. Every single person does good things and bad things - to label someone one way or the other and deem them deserving of punishment is a woefully simplistic view of humans. Nobody can ever lose their humanity.

Finally the concept of retributive justice also denies people’s capability for change, or even denies it’s relevant. To some people, a reformed criminal who hasn’t offended for 20 years but was never punished for their crime still deserves punishment, even if they’re a completely different person now (which brings up its own questions about the continuity of personal identity over the years...) - they may think it’s immoral if that person is not “brought to justice” and made to suffer for past crimes - and still argue that retribution helps lower crime rates! If someone “deserves” to be punished for something whether or not they “clean up their act,” then there’s no reward there for rehabilitation. Retributive justice makes a mockery of the idea of rehabilitation. Thinking about it, in fact, the idea that past crimes “need” punishment even if the offender has completely changed for the better kind of reminds me of religious ideas of sin and karma - the idea of a past transgression almost being a physical thing, like a stain that “needs” to be washed out by an appropriate punishment rather than an event at some point in the past. So again, it seems to apply magical thinking to the mind rather than a rational psychological approach.

Also, the idea that “nobody deserves to suffer” doesn’t mean that something bad happening to person A is always a bad thing - the death of a tyrant for example may generally be a good thing on balance, because it ends the suffering of people under that tyrant’s regime - but not because the tyrant was “a bad person who deserved to die” in some abstract sense. The removal of the tyrant from office would be equally good - better, in fact, since it ends the tyrant’s reign with one less death. And the tyrant being imprisoned for life would be even better still, as that adds the deterrence element to other would-be dictators and shows the international community that tyrants can be brought to justice. If a tyrant’s death or imprisonment is a good thing on balance, that’s because of the way it brings an end to the suffering of millions under their regime and acts as a deterrent to other dictators, not because the tyrant “deserved it.” That answers the inevitable “so you’re saying Hitler/Stalin/etc. didn’t deserve to suffer/die?” question - no, they didn’t, but their deaths were still on balance a good thing for other reasons.

I’m aware that these problems often apply at institutional levels and lead to enormous problems in prison systems like the UK and especially the USA (e.g. private for-profit prisons, police brutality, racial injustice, solitary confinement and other inhumane conditions in prisons and so on), but I’m not just talking about those in power - this also applies to everyone. Vigilante justice, personal relationships, doxxing and internet “hit mobs,” etc. I see this kind of attitude in both right-wing hate tabloids like the Daily Mail and left-wing corners of Tumblr crying out for “justice” (i.e. punishment, sometimes even death) for wrongdoers. It kind of worries me that in circles all over the political spectrum retribution is often seen not only as just but as the only legitimate form of punishment, and a moral imperative - and if you disagree that someone “deserves” punishment for its own sake you’re somehow condoning the wrong action! Punishment should be about deterrence, rehabilitation, public safety and restoration/making amends for crimes. Because of the “deterrence” element it can’t be pleasant and there has to be some degree of suffering. But that suffering only serves a practical purpose, is a means to an end, and should be kept to a minimum. Punishment should not be about making people suffer for the sake of it, as if that suffering is a good thing in itself.

Nobody ever “deserves” to suffer.

#philosophy #justice #retributive justice #criminology #morality #ethics #punishment #restorative justice #free will #determinism #libertarian free will #criminal justice system

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thorsonk · 4 years

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Analytical Reflection

1. Techno-Panics Throughout History

Technology, as something that’s continually progressing, is always breaking into uncharted territories. People, by nature, tend to feel comfort in what they know and fear what they don’t understand. When these two elements are combined a phenomenon called a Techno-Panic happens, the mass public is captivated by the latest technology and speculation runs wild as to any possible way it can go awry. Throughout history there have been several large Techno-Panics (most of which revolving around computers and the internet), but I wanted to focus on a few that are of recent.

My first article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” (Carr, 2008, Techno-Panic link 1) reminded me of the articles that we have read for class because it cited and discussed a historical Techno-Panic; the invention of the typewriter. The internet provides a source of convenience and immediacy of information, but the article proposes that as a cost it may be modifying how we think and function: we may be becoming less patient and losing our deep independent thoughts. Philosopher, composer and writer Friedrich Nietzsche turned from writing to using a typewriter because of his failing sight, and in doing so his entire writing style ended up changing. By using the traditional approach to thinking about technology, Carr rationalized that in much the same way the internet may be modifying how we think and act.

My second article “The Return of the Techno-Moral Panic”(Herrman, 2017) addresses more current Techno-Panics: fake news and explicit content reaching children. This article in particular was interesting to me because it showed that one of the big Techno-Panics of the past, explicit content reaching children, not only was but still is a valid concern to be dealt with. This shows me that even though a lot of Techno-Panics were huge overreactions (New Years, 1999), it’s still good to keep reality in check.

According to my third article “The Six Things That Drive ‘Techno-Panics’” (Thierer, 2012) “Paranoia and fears are often driven by the fact that humans are both naturally risk adverse and poor judges of risks. Thus, the survival instinct combined with poor comparative risk analysis skills lead many people to engage in, or buy into, Techno-Panics”. When examine historical Techno-Panics with this quote it makes sense, all of them seem to revolve around not knowing how to embrace new technology.

My final article “The U.S. May Lose the AI Race Because of An Unchecked Techno-Panic”(Castro, 2019) shows what can happen consequentially if we do take the traditional approach to technology and be fearful of it. According to a few studies it appears that the American public seems hesitant to embrace AI whereas China is more willing. Castro makes the point that “simply waiting out this techno-panic may give China an opportunity to successfully challenge U.S. dominance in AI”.

2. The Future of the Body

One of the most exciting prospects of technology constantly evolving for the general well-being of everyone is in the medical field. It seems like every day someone has another breakthrough or invents something to make the lives of others easier.

The first link “Smart Bionic Limbs are Reengineering the Human” (Sofge, 2012) I chose because it comes from the unique lens of Popular Mechanic, focusing on the structure and operation of several different smart limbs above all else. I thought this was cool in conjuncture with the articles we had about smart limbs in class, which focused more on the aspect of the individual instead of the literal operation of the limb.

My second link “The Biggest Revolution in Gene Editing: Crispr-Cas9 Explained – video” features Professor Jennifer Doudna explaining what exactly gene editing is. She explains that it can be useful in correcting mutations that cause genetic diseases to hopefully one day eradicate them entirely. Because of this utility, in her view, the biggest thing we have to fear about gene editing is fear itself, adapting a futuristic approach to technology. The class links (and topic for this section) are aimed at improving life through technology, and eradicating genetic disease majorly checks that category.

My third link “Your brain could be backed up, for a deadly price” (Whiteman, 2018) had an interesting concept. In class we read about and watched videos on Dr. Sergio Canavero’s proposed concept for a human head transplant. Almost seemingly on the same level of science-fiction, this article introduces us to Netcome, who claims they can make copies of our memories through a process called ‘vitrifixation’. Currently the process is 100% fatal, though Netcome believes “If memories can truly be preserved by a sufficiently good brain banking technique, we believe that within the century it could become feasible to digitize your preserved brain and use that information to recreate your mind”.

The final link I have in this section “Designer Babies: An Ethical Horror Waiting to Happen?” discusses the potential implication to use gene editing tools to create ‘designer babies’. I wanted to use this article because it discusses gene editing software in a traditional, fear-first, approach to a new technology. Crispr-Cas9 is highly untested and we do have the right to be very wary of messing with the structure of another human being, especially for as frivolous of a purpose of changing a baby’s eye or hair color.

3. Intelligent Systems

The concept of Artificial Intelligence(AI) has been around for a very long time in the Science-Fiction world. Contrastingly AI in the real world is a newer technology that has been slowly making its way into our lives. Intelligent Systems have slowly been entering our lives too. Land lines turned into bag phones, bag phones into cell phones. Now everyone has access to the internet and virtually anyone else on the planet at any given time.

My first link coming from Forbes “10 Powerful Examples of Artificial Intelligence In Use Today” (Adams, 2017) lists common AI services that we use in our everyday lives. These services range from automated personal assistants (like Siri, Alexa, etc.) to predicting sales trends (John Paul, Amazon.com, etc.) to personalized delivered content (Netflix, Pandora, etc.). These systems seem basic in nature when compared to AI like Watson that we read about in class, but it’s hard to argue with services that are used constantly, globally.

My second link “10 Powerful Examples of AI Applications” (‘Magnimind’, 2019) focuses on AI as well, but less on the companies that offer them and more on which industries may be soon changed by introducing AI to them. The article predicts everything from customer service (automated customer support) to finance to health and security will be altered by AI. The links we read in class revealed the medical field is still hesitant to adapt AI, but perhaps we could gain footing by focusing on applying it to one of these other proposed fields.

My third link “Future Mobile Phones: What’s Coming Our Way?” (Hiley, 2019) discusses potential features that may be added to cell phones in the future. The writer seems to embrace what technology could potentially become, and suggests features such as holographic displays, flexible frames, and clean/green charging. The holographic display in particular made me think of Sophie the robot from the class readings, because they both sounded like they were plucked from “Star Wars”.

My fourth and final link “Future of Smartphones: 5 Predictions for the next 5 years” (Mathias, 2018) stood out to me because it mentioned a few changes for the near future I hadn’t thought of. The first of which was the dropping of physical ports off phones. The second is the shift in rigor of computing being put on the server instead of the phone, requiring less gear to be stuffed into the phone. The last was the prediction that VR would NOT become a big factor in mobile phones because of the requirement of separate components. These upcoming features all show me that smart phones are getting even smarter in the near future.

4. Making and Things

Autonomous cars are the future of our roadways; we are really just waiting on the Internet of things to connect everything together. In the meantime 3D printers can be used to print an array of things: toys, parts to fix itself, medical devices, etc.

My first link “Why Don’t We Have Self-Driving Cars Yet?” by Business Insider on YouTube is a cool source because it gives an in depth view of Volvo’s 360-c concept car. The car features an interior that looks like a lounge, with no steering wheel. As we read in our class readings that would qualify this concept car as a level 5 autonomous car (no human intervention, completely driverless). Unfortunately, as the video points out, we still have barriers to overcome before this happens such as: the need for better roads, connection to other cars, and traffic laws for these driverless vehicles. I’d say this video follows the traditional way of approaching technology: trying to map out all potential flaws before time.

My second link “Swiveling Seats and Sound ‘Bubbles’: What the Inside of Cars Will Soon be Like” (Poliak, 2019) focuses not on the technology of the driverless cars, but rather how not needing a driver will affect the experience of being in the car. Poliak writes of designs of interior televisions, individual sound ‘bubbles’, swiveling seats, 3D surround sound, and internet connectivity. Poliak follows a futuristic approach to technology and really embraces the potential of what riding in the car can become without the need for a driver, much like in our reading.

My third link “7 Amazing Real-World Examples of 3D Printing in 2018” (Marr, 2018) explores several things 3D printers are capable of creating. In addition to the options suggested by our reading (firearms, manufacturing, and prosthetic limbs), Marr suggests 3D printers can be used to create buildings, musical instruments, and “edible” 3D printing.

My final link “How the Internet of Things Changes Everything” (Penna, 2017) estimates that 34 billion devices will be connected to the internet globally by 2020. The reason I chose this article is not only does it do a good analysis of The Internet of Things, but it poses the question that is raised of privacy and security. This traditional approach to the technology I feel is necessary: after all, if everything’s connected it’s hard to keep something private.

5. Cyborgs and Bioart

As a programmer I am usually one of the first people to embrace new technology. However, while reading through this section I felt myself taking a traditional, hesitant stance on a lot of it. There’s something that seems wrong about trying to modify yourself with a machine, and something very wrong with modifying genetics for “art”.

My first source “Top 9 Cybernetic Upgrades Everyone Will Want” (Miley, 2019) took a futuristic, embracing approach to new technologies and suggested upgrades such as Full-Spectrum Vision, Brain-Computer Interfacing, and Increased Endurance. These features reminded me of the readings of the Bionic enhancements.

My second source “The Future is Here: Six of Today’s Most Advanced, Real-Life Cyborgs” (Tangermann, 2017) displayed people who have embraced a futuristic approach to technology and “enhanced” themselves in various ways. The first “legally recognized” cyborg: Neil Harbisson, was born without the ability to see color, but mounted an antenna to the back of the neck that allows him to “hear color”. There are several other high tech bionic legs and hands discussed in the article that reminded me of the readings from class, particularly “The Insane and Exciting Future of the Bionic Body” (Brumfiel, 2013).

I chose my third source, the video “Our Cyborg Future is Coming (And That’s Not a Bad Thing)” (freethink.com, 2017) because the narrator explains does a great job at explaining the potential benefits to come from these cybernetic enhancements. He takes a futuristic approach to the technology and rationalizes that it’s a great tool, it just needs to be used correctly. “Is a baseball bat a good thing or a bad thing? It’s a good thing if you use it to play baseball with. It’s a bad thing if you use it to beat someone over the head with” (Piore, 2017).

My final source “Bioart: An introduction” (Cell Press, 2015) I chose because it had a good overview on bioart. The proposed projects in this article weren’t as extreme as growing a functioning ear on your forearm, but rather had a proposed project to engineer silkworms to spin metallic gold in homage to Rumpelstiltskin. Bioartists definitely take a futuristic approach to technology, the field of bioart is completely all new grounds.

6. Conclusion/Connections

I noticed several connections between the second and fifth themes; The Future of the Body and Cyborgs and Bioart. Specifically, there were a lot of connections between the cybernetic enhancement s of the cyborgs and the smart limbs of the amputees. This connection draws a correlation between “replacement body parts”, necessary or otherwise; so I get the argument for those who feel they should enhance themselves.

The other two sections that seemed closely related were the third and fourth themes; Intelligent Systems and Making and Things. For example, the automated cars were part of the Making and Things section, but could easily have belonged in the Intelligent Systems category because of all the tech on the inside of them. On the other hand AI, while clearly an Intelligent System, is being implemented into everything now day, and could easily find a home under the category Making and Things with the Internet of Things.

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bluewatsons · 4 years

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Dena S. Davis, The Changing Face of “Misidentified Paternity”, 32 J Med Philosophy 359 (2007)

Abstract

Advances in genetic research and technology can have a profound impact on identity and family dynamics when genetic findings disrupt deeply held assumptions about the nuclear family. Ancestry tracing and paternity testing present parallel risks and opportunities. As these latter uses are now available over the internet directly to the consumer, bypassing the genetic counselor, consumers need adequate warning when making use of these new modalities.

I. Introduction

The ultimate point is that none of us really know who we are, ancestrally speaking. All we ever really know is what our parents and grandparents have told us. (Staples, 2005)

Just in time for St. Patrick's Day, the New York Times carried the story that the English and Irish, historic enemies who were always considered to have separate origins, are actually genetically indistinguishable (Wade, 2007). Students of Irish culture and other commentators greeted the news with great interest, but no one is willing to speculate on whether the genetic discovery will have any implications for English/Irish relations. Given the famous Irish penchant for literary soul-searching, will this discovery have any effect on Irish literature? Is the metaphor of two warring peoples suddenly discovering that they are “really brothers” at all apt? Is there any parallel between discovering an uncomfortable truth about one's nuclear family and an uncomfortable truth about one's ethnic heritage?

A fascination with one's parentage is probably a stable element of human psychology since prehistoric times. Increasingly sophisticated genetic technologies raise new issues about how people discover their parentage and ancestry, and how they cope with sometimes unexpected results. This essay considers three different phases of the problem of “misidentified paternity.” These phases all raise important issues of autonomy, beneficence, and informed consent to genetic testing.

II. The Problem of “Incidental” Information

An early and ongoing challenge of genetic counseling is how counselors should handle unexpected collateral or “incidental” information. Of these challenges, perhaps the most disturbing is presented by an individual or family who come for counseling in order to discover their risk for a genetic disease, but where testing also reveals that their beliefs about their biological connections are not grounded in fact. The scenario of “misattributed” or “misidentified” paternity has variously been estimated to be true of anywhere from one to thirty percent of families (Lucassen and Parker, 2001, p. 1034), with the true number probably under ten percent (Bakalar, 2006, F7).

In one of many examples, a couple attended a genetic clinic to discover whether the severe disorder recently diagnosed in their baby was likely to recur in future children. Testing of the couple and of the baby revealed that the husband, who had assumed he was the father of the child, actually was not the biological father (Lucassen et al., 2001, p. 1034).

Cases of this sort raise a host of ethical problems for geneticists. The threshold question is, “Who is the client?” The best answer might be “the entire family,” but in this case different family members have different needs. Respect for persons includes the duty of truth-telling, but the couple only asked if this condition was likely to recur in future children. A simple “No” would be the correct answer to that question, and perhaps no more is needed. However, a richer understanding of “respect” might include the notion that one does not withhold this sort of information, that it would be wrong for the counselor to know something about the client that she fails to share with the client himself.

Nonmaleficence (the duty to avoid harm) might suggest that only by telling the husband the whole truth will he and his siblings be safeguarded from the diffuse genetic anxiety people often feel when there is a serious genetic condition in their family. However, concern for the mother (who might be the object of abuse if the truth came out) pushes some counselors to argue that she should be told privately, and that she should have the final say over whether the information is shared. Nonmaleficence may argue for telling no one; the information has little medical significance and the whole family could be torn apart by the news.

The responsibilities of counselors faced with this type of scenario have occasioned a great deal of discussion. Surveys of genetic counselors and medical geneticists conducted in the 1980s discovered that nearly all the respondents believed that protecting the mother's privacy was paramount, and that they would either lie, fudge the truth, or report the results only to the woman (Ross, 1996). The 1994 report of the Institute of Medicine's Committee on Assessing Genetic Risks, also recommended telling the woman only (Ross, 1996). Lainie Friedman Ross, however, as well as the 1983 President's Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research, has recommended telling both parties. Ross argues that nondisclosure is “deceptive and immoral” (Ross, 1996, p. 120) and leaves both the child and the couple “at risk for future decisions based on false information” (Ross, 1996, p. 124). Ross claims that full disclosure is the only way to respect and empower clients. However, Ross acknowledges the potential downsides to such a policy, for example that it might provoke spousal violence.

The obvious solution to the problem is to alert clients at the outset of counseling that misidentified paternity is one possible outcome of testing. Both Ross and the President's Commission recommend that clients be informed at the onset of a counseling relationship that discovery of misattributed paternity is one possible result of genetic testing (United States President's Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research, 1983, p. 63). In other words, part of the informed consent process should be to warn clients contemplating genetic testing that the process has the potential to disrupt their family relationships and to explode important beliefs about lineage and paternity.

Mahowald claims that parents who are “presumed to be carriers for an autosomal recessive disorder are usually warned in advance that genetic testing may disclose unexpected information regarding paternity” (Mahowald, 2000, p. 167). Mahowald bases her statement on “many years of interactions with genetic counselors at different institutions, and participating in their training programs” (Personal communication, August 2, 2006).

Another scenario involves adults who come for testing and discover incidentally that they are not the biological sons and daughters of the men they think of as their fathers. Bonnie S. LeRoy describes such a case. Four adult siblings, one of whom was affected by Huntington's Disease, contacted a testing center in order to discover whether the siblings also carried the HD gene. Their parents, of whom the father was affected and the mother unaffected, were both alive and willing to give blood samples. When analysis of all six samples was completed, it was clear to the testing team that two of the three unaffected siblings were not the biological children of the man they knew as their father. Although the counseling team struggled with a number of possible options, they eventually elected to tell these two people directly, even though the team did not have the opportunity to discuss this decision first with the mother (LeRoy, 1993).

A third situation in which the discovery of misattributed paternity is a concern is in testing living related donors for possible organ donation. In a case described by Soderdahl et al., a 20-year-old man was tested to see if he was a suitable match to give a kidney to his dialysis-dependent father; testing revealed nonpaternity. Interestingly, the authors report that consultation with ethicists and transplant experts at a variety of institutions yielded conflicting opinions on whether and to whom the information about nonpaternity should be disclosed. “After much deliberation,” the team elected to inform both parties. The two men were still a good, if not ideal, match, and the young man decided to go ahead with his plans and donate a kidney to his father nonetheless (Soderdahl et al., 2004, p. 590). Wright et al., describing a similar case, recommend informing patients at the outset “that unsought information may be found inadvertently,” echoing the point made by Ross (Wright et al., 2002, p. 205).

There are many ways in which people may be startled by the discovery that their social and legal fathers are not their genetic fathers. Children of couples who employed donor insemination to create a child and who tried to keep that fact secret, may find out accidentally through other family members or when their parents blurt it out in an argument or divulge the fact after a divorce (Orenstein, 1995).

As laws regarding donor gametes change, children conceived under one set of rules may be in for a surprise. In Australia, for example, a law that came into effect on July 1, 2006, allows a sperm donor to apply for identifying information on adult children conceived from his sperm. A news report comments that “some Queenslanders may be contacted by parents they didn't know about,” and quotes legal expert Derek Morgan's estimate that as many as seventy per cent of parents who procreate through assisted conception do not tell their children (, p. 52). (Although egg donation will probably never approach the frequency of sperm donation, it has become common enough that perhaps we should speak of “misattributed parenthood.”)

Barbara Bowles Biesecker writes that:

The individual's sense of identity and continuity is formed not only by the significant attachments in his [or] her intimate environment but also is deeply rooted in the biological family—in the genetic link that reaches into the past and ahead into the future. (Biesecker, 1997, p. 108)

Adults who discover that their genetic identity is not what they thought it to be are often extremely disrupted (Orenstein, 1995). Clinical psychologist Sharon Pettle notes the strong emphasis in our culture about parent-child similarities, which are used to “confirm the child's place” within the family and the world. “Having that place swept aside can be a hugely powerful experience and I've known some adults to be severely affected psychologically, and experience a period where their emotional stability was severely compromised. They are left with a gaping hole”(, p. 1). For these reasons, genetic counselors and bioethicists are right to be concerned about the ethical and psychological challenges that arise out of cases of misattributed parenthood.

III. Direct-to-Consumer Paternity Testing

The first phase of concern over issues of misattributed paternity focused on inadvertent discovery in the context of a genetic counseling team that had a professional relationship with at least one of the parties. Thus, the geneticists were those who faced the ethical dilemmas. They controlled the information and they had to decide whether and how to divulge it. In the second phase, paternity testing has burst the bounds of the sober and responsible environment of clinical testing and counseling centers.

A survey conducted by the American Association of Blood Banks revealed that the number of paternity tests had more than doubled between 1995 and 2003; the cost of testing had dropped from $1,000 to $500 (Navarro, 2005, p. 9). In the United Kingdom, the demand for tests has grown by a factor of ten in the last decade (). All Tests International is currently offering paternity testing over the Internet for $100. For $145, AllTests will determine if two or more siblings are biologically linked and if they share the same parents (http://www.alltestsonline.com/index.php).

Surely Lori Andrews exaggerates when she describes Chicago as a place where divorced men “take their children to Lincoln Park to play, then … ‘pop’ into a nearby hospital to determine whether the child is really ‘theirs’” (Andrews, 2005, p. 187). And yet, the media are replete with accounts of men (and women) initiating paternity testing on impulse or for purely legal reasons, with little thought given to the devastating consequences to the children involved.

In Germany, a laboratory that specializes in DNA testing offered a “Father's Day Discount,” and producers of German talk shows have been scouring the country for people willing to have the results of their tests unveiled on TV. Over 100 results have been announced on the German show, “Vera at Noon” (, p. 26). In the United States, the “paternity show” is Maury Povitch's “signature format.” “Maury” is the fourth highest-rated talk show in America, and contested paternity is its most popular topic. The plot usually involves either a mother trying to “pin” paternity on a lover, or an alleged father trying to disprove paternity to get out of support payments, or to corroborate his suspicions about his partner's sexual fidelity (Crews, 2006). So far, the children all seem to have been babies; Povitch has never discussed whether he would decline to feature a couple because their child might be old enough to understand and be devastated at having his or her paternity disclosed from a TV stage.

In Europe, legislation is being crafted to address some of these issues. Much of the legislation, as in the U.K., grapples primarily with clandestine testing (as when someone steals DNA by secretly taking a piece of hair and sending it to a lab for paternity testing). In Belgium, proposed legislation requires that all paternity testing be performed on blood samples, thus attempting to ensure that medical personnel retain a gatekeeper function. Before samples are taken, the genetics center is required to interview the adults involved and test results must be personally communicated to the persons involved by a center physician, accompanied if desired by a psychologist (Mertens 2006). Given the potential psychological disruption of paternity testing, such paternalism might seem warranted.

In the United States, however, it is simply not a solution. The expense involved would put testing outside the reach of many families. A paternalism that requires that information be accompanied by counseling seems reasonable, but a paternalism that essentially bars access to information about oneself, cannot be defended.

IV. Ancestry Tracing

Although it may seem like sacrilege to mention Maury Povitch and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in the same breath, much less daytime talk shows and PBS, Gates's recent four-part series African-American Lives, which aired on PBS in February 2006, would have seemed familiar to Povitch's audience. Gates invited eight African-American celebrities, including Oprah Winfrey and Whoopi Goldberg, to embark on a genealogical journey to try to recapture some of what had been lost when slave traders and owners deliberately obliterated Black people's tribal and familial identities. In the first three programs, Gates enlisted a number of experts to use sophisticated genealogical techniques to trace his subjects as far back in the New World as possible.

In the final segment, the program employed DNA technology to inform people of their African ancestry. As the camera watched, Gates asked his subjects what they believed about their ancestry, what their family story was. Sarah Lawrence-Lightfoot, the eminent sociologist, had always believed that she was part Native American. However, as Gates “opened the envelope” and read out the results of the test, Lightfoot was startled to discover that she had no Native American ancestry. Oprah was let down by the discovery that she was not descended from Zulus, which she had always believed, but recovered later on when found out that she was related to the Kpelle people.

Gates, ironically, was the subject most continually shaken. In the first part of the show, he had to face the fact that the white ancestor, Samuel Brady, from whom his family had always thought to be partly descended, and who would have been Gates's great-great-grandfather, was in fact not biologically connected to them at all. Later, he “almost had a heart attack” and described himself as “heartbroken” when he discovered he was 50% European. “Nothing,” said Gates, “could have prepared me for what I was about to discover. . . . I'll never see my family tree or myself in quite the same way.” “I have the blues,” he nervously joked. “Can I still have the blues?” He shared with his Harvard students his profound shock at the results, calling it “the irony of my life” (). Gates persisted, using increasingly sophisticated tests, until he could document a slim connection with the Mende tribe. Visibly relieved, he announced that finally he knew what to tell people: I am Mende.

Conversely, Gates's guests were buoyed by what they learned about their ancestors' remarkable vision and perseverance in the face of slavery and oppression. Many of these ancestors had striking commitments to community and to education. However, law professor Patricia Williams castigates Gates for a kind of genetic essentialism, when he tells Oprah that “You've got education in your genes,” or says that he is “50 percent white.” As Williams says, “there is no more an allele for ‘whiteness’ than there is for ‘education.’” Jews (including Gates's newfound Ashkenazi ancestor) were not considered ‘white’ a century ago, but became so through certain sociological shifts. (Williams, 2006, p. 14)

African-American Lives concluded with an inspirational trip taken by the comedian Chris Tucker, to his “homeland” in Africa. Tucker and Gates had moments of sadness as well as joy, as they relived the horrors of the Middle Passage, but there was no doubt but that Tucker felt at home. The people they met in Africa assured Gates that the tribal members lost to slavery were not forgotten but were mourned and missed even today. “Welcome home” was on everyone's lips. Tucker said that this was the best thing that had ever happened to him.

Rick Kittles, University of Chicago geneticist and Scientific Director of the African Ancestry project, notes that most people find their human identity in a mix of familial, cultural and genetic ancestry. New forms of ancestry tracing are critical for African-Americans because enslavement “obliterated” their familial and cultural history (Kittles, 2003 p. 219).

However, just as not all reunions with birth parents are joyous and uncomplicated, the relationship between Africans and African-Americans is also not simple. African-Americans, foregrounding the ancestral tie, may feel that they are coming “home,” but Africans may focus instead on national, cultural, and economic differences, and see the visitor as just another foreigner.

Seeing parallels with the Israeli experience, Ghana has recently begun a campaign to attract African-Americans to think of Africa as their homeland, as a place to invest money, build retirement homes, and educate their children. Emphasizing the “family” ties, Ghana has offered special visas and passports to descendents of slaves. But to many Ghanians, the tourists are “obruni,” or “white foreigners,” even if their skin is dark. “It is a shock for any black person to be called white,” said an African-American who had moved to Ghana. “But it is really tough to hear it when you come with your heart to seek your roots in Africa” (Polgreen, 2005, p. A1).

In a 2003 British Film, Motherland: A Genetic Journey, three “black Britons” of Caribbean origin, against theme music of “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” are given the same opportunity as Gates' participants. The centrality of genetic relation is emphasized again and again. The narrator proclaims: “This is the story of a quest to recover a lost identity.” One of the three seekers, who has never been to Africa, explains: “They are family. They are blood. They are lineage.”

Like Gates, Motherland's Mark is in for an unpleasant surprise when he finds out that his Y chromosome is European in origin. “Wow. That is a shock. That is a deep shock. I'm totally flabbergasted, I must say.” When he finds out that his maternal ancestry is African, and that he is connected to the Kanuri tribe, he employs the same strategy as Gates. Choosing the genetic ancestry that best fits his existing social identity, he says of his Kanuri connection: “This is the true me.”

Many people have found that making an ancestral connection can offer comfort and perhaps compensate for broken nuclear connections. Mika Stump, an African-American woman who was abandoned by her birth mother in New York City's Pennsylvania Station, was elated to forge an ancestral connection to the people of Sierra Leone through DNA testing. “I have a place where I can go back and say, ‘This is who I am; this is my home’” (Willing, 2006, p. 4A).

A customer on the African Ancestry website writes:

It has only been a week since I received the letter from you indicating that my DNA was a match to the Mende people of Sierra Leone on my mother's matriclan. This week has fundamentally changed my life and view of myself and my family. This one piece of information has sent me on a journey of exploration . . . ‘Thank you’ is so very inadequate to express what I feel. Your vision, your research, and your efforts on behalf of the descendants of slaves is God ordained work. Today I am more at peace. I walk straighter with my head held higher because I know who I am.” (http://www.african.ancestry.com)

This idea of going “back” to a place where in fact one has never been is a thread that runs through people's stories of ancestor tracing. Others, however, have less happy experiences. One customer of African Ancestry was extremely upset to find out that his white paternal line came from a German (Willing, 2006, p. 4A).

Tellingly, a Wall Street Journal columnist reporting on the Wells Family Research Association, in which 70-year-old Jim Wells had been searching fruitlessly for his fifth great-grandfather, described Wells metaphorically as an “orphan” (Wells, 2003, p. A1). If we continue our analogy between genetic discoveries in nuclear families and discoveries in population research, we see that not all people seeking to find their “true home” have an unalloyed positive experience. In this, they are like many adoptive children or children conceived through donor gametes, who may find that the experience of reconnecting with their biological parents falls short of the ideal. Gates, Lightfoot and others were able to recover from their initial surprise and (in Gates's case) chagrin, by identifying with a strand of ancestry that fit what they were looking for. Gates might be disturbed to discover that he is half European, but he was reassured when he was able to connect genetically with the Mende people of Africa. Or, as the PBS website has it: “[Dr. Shriver] found a close match for Dr. Gates among the Mende people—introducing him to his distant relatives and revealing, at last, his roots in Africa” (http://www.pbs.org/wnet/aalives/science_dna2.html).

For Gates and his seven fellow subjects, however, only the purely personal is at stake. Oprah's celebrity standing is not likely to be affected by whether or not she is truly descended from Zulu warriors. Even Gates, self-professed “Captain BlackMan,” whose profession is most closely tied to his identification as an African-American, is only joking when he asks whether he must give up chairing Harvard's Afro-American Studies Program. In contrast, for some people, important political, economic and ethnic identity issues are implicated when groups decide to become involved in migration research or other types of genetic anthropological research.

Many Native Americans strenuously resist migration theories that place their origin in Asia, with a subsequent trek across the Bering Strait. Not only does that theory contradict Indians' own origin stories, but it has the possible political consequence of vitiating their special political status as Native Americans and turning them into just another group of immigrants. As Vine Deloria, Jr. writes,

If Indians had arrived only a few centuries [before Columbus], they had no real claim to land that could not be swept away by European discovery. . . By making us immigrants to North America [non-Indians] are able to deny the fact that we were the full, complete, and total owners of this continent. They are able to see us simply as earlier interlopers and therefore throw back at us the accusation that we had simply found North America a little earlier than they had. (Deloria, 1995, p. 82)

African Ancestry is only one of many centers which is engaged in what has variously been called “genetic anthropology,” “molecular anthropology,” or “archaeogenetics.”

Genetic Anthropology is the study of genetic ancestry of humans using modern forensic techniques to collect and blueprint ancient human remains. The purpose is to determine genetic lineages by analyzing unique DNA markers found only in the specific groups, and tracking those markers forward to present day. This allows the archaeologist, and often times anthropologists, to find the current living descendants of our long dead ancestors.” (http://www.geneticanthropology.com/)

In other words, paternity testing writ large. Is that really my (great-great-grand) father? Who are my siblings? Are the Kpelle my cousins? Is my grandmother's story about our family true? The Center for Genetic Anthropology, in the U.K., describes its work as follows:

TCGA was established in September 1996 to pursue research on the evolution and migrations of human populations in north Africa, east Africa, the Near East, Asia and Europe. Research is undertaken on modern populations and, by the analysis of ancient DNA, their precursors. The Centre uses some of the latest advances in molecular genetics to study questions in human history and pre-history that cannot be addressed by other means. The human genome contains an enormous amount of information on the movements and relationships of past populations and on the biological adaptations of those populations to a changing environment. Non-recombining genetic systems, principally the mitochondrial genome and the Y-chromosome, contain detailed information on female and male specific genealogies respectively. Using modern molecular techniques this information can be accessed with increasing speed and in recent years it has been used to address a range of historical and demographic questions. Currently, the relationships between and among populations from Africa, Europe, Asia and The Middle East, with a particular focus on Jewish and Judaic groups, are being investigated using both ancient and modern DNA as source material. (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/tcga/)

In what follows, I offer instances of this new kind of “paternity testing,” and the challenges it presents.

Perhaps the most obvious example of new uses of DNA to trace ancestry occurred in the 1990s, when DNA evidence convinced most American historians that Thomas Jefferson had indeed been the father of at least one of the children of Sally Hemings, his slave (Davis, 2004). In some of its manifestations, the spotlight on Jeffersonian paternity was not all that different from the Maury Povitch show, with one historian speaking of Jefferson almost as a defendant in a criminal case, whose relationship with Hemings was now proved “beyond a reasonable doubt” (Ellis, 2000, p. 126). Pathologist and amateur historian Eugene Foster convinced fourteen people, including male descendents of Jefferson's paternal uncle and descendents of Sally Hemings, to volunteer their DNA to attempt to nail down the truth of a story that had clung to Jefferson since his presidency (Foster et al., 1998). Although DNA evidence can never conclusively prove paternity, most people accepted the evidence (along with corroborating data that connected the dates of Hemings's children's birthdays with Jefferson's presence at Monticello nine months earlier).

Some of Jefferson's “official” descendents were delighted with their new cousins and welcomed them to the family. Others were much more negative. There is an unresolved conflict about whether Hemings descendents can join the Thomas Jefferson Family Association and whether they have the right to be buried in Monticello.

For the “unofficial” descendents, those who trace their ancestry from one or another of Hemings' sons, the results were decidedly mixed. The descendents of Thomas Woodson are the Hemings descendents with the strongest oral tradition of presidential paternity, but they were told that the DNA evidence conclusively rejects their connection to Jefferson. Like Gates' parents, who decided to stick with “the Brady story” despite the scientific evidence, some of Woodson's descendents rejected the genetic evidence in favor of their deeply rooted family narrative. Ironically, it is the descendents of Hemings' youngest son, Eston, who have the strongest genetic claim to Jeffersonian paternity, but that line had long passed out of the black community. Eston himself moved to Wisconsin and changed his race to white on the census.

Many of Hemings's descendents had complex families in which some members knew and hid their black ancestry. In a PBS reunion story more ambiguous than Chris Tucker's, we see Amalia Cooper, whose father had hidden his black connections all his life, connect for the first time with her black second cousins, part of the extended Hemings clan that settled in Ohio. Amalia and her sisters were made welcome, but there were obvious tensions in this new family grouping, which has both “black” and “white” members, depending on their chosen identity ().

My second example involves a whole group of people, many of them probably not even aware that their paternal ancestry has been redefined. Somerled, a Celtic hero who died in 1164 after ousting the hated Vikings from Celtic lands, is traditionally believed to have descended from an ancient line of Irish kings. Driving out the Vikings was Somerled's primary accomplishment and his cause celebre. (Another accomplishment was robust paternity; about half a million people today are thought to be descended from Somerled, a number second only to the descendents of Genghis Khan.) The MacDonald, MacDougall, and MacAllister clans all claim descent from Somerled.

However, Bryan Sykes of the company Oxford Ancestors has apparently discovered that Somerled himself is of Norse origin on his paternal side. In other words—a Viking! Maggie Macdonald, archivist of the Museum of the Isles on Skye, suggested a classic case of misidentified paternity. “[I]t could have been that his great-great-grandmother had relations with someone who wasn't her husband—it could be Somerled wouldn't have known and thought he was this great Celtic hero.” The newspaper account does not discuss whether the half million descendents are currently having an identity crisis (Johnston, 2005).

The remarkable story of the Lemba of South Africa highlights the ways in which genetic anthropology can influence a group's culture and self-identity, as well as shifting power relations within the group. The Lemba are a black African tribe with a strong tradition of Jewish identity. Their oral history begins with descent from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, followed by an epic pilgrimage to the southern part of Africa. The Lemba now live in South Africa and Zimbabwe and number about 50,000. They base their Jewish identity on their Solomon ancestry and also on a number of practices, including male circumcision, ritual slaughter, and so on. Their ethnic symbol is an elephant inside a six-pointed star (Parfitt, 2000).

Until recently, the Lemba's claim to Jewish ancestry made little impression on either white South African Jews or the Lemba's black African neighbors. However, in the 1980's the Lemba met Tudor Parfitt, who directs the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of London and is an enthusiastic traveller. Parfitt invited the Lemba to volunteer DNA samples to compare them with others of Semitic origin. The results were striking. The study showed a “significant similarity” between the Lemba and other people of Arabia, which seemed to confirm the Lemba account of their Middle East origin (Parfitt, 2002, p. 215).

Even more dramatic was a comparison between Lemba Y chromosomes and those of Cohanim (Jewish male descendents of the original Temple priesthood). Just as the Cohanim are traditionally an elevated group within the Jewish people, the Buba clan are an elevated group within the Lemba. The Buba has certain ritual responsibilities, and are thought to have led the people on their original southern journey. Men of both the Buba and the Cohanim show a 50% instance of the Cohen Modal Haplotype. Among the general Jewish population, the population at large, and the non-Buba/Lemba, the percentage of the Cohen Modal Haplotype is only 10%. Although this is certainly not “proof,” it does suggest a close connection at some point in the past between the Lemba and Semitic peoples.

These findings, made into (yet another!) PBS program, described in Parfitt's books and discussed widely in the media, have had some interesting results. Like Gates, young Mark, and others, the Lemba reached out to embrace the genetic identity that best fit their cultural self-identity. The Lemba had comfortably accommodated a strong Jewish identity with a mix of Christian and Muslim religious practice. Some Jews outside of Africa, however, excited by this romantic story, were discomfited by the Lemba's cheerful syncretism. Jewish proselytizers have made the Lemba an object of missionary zeal, sending books, ritual objects, and educational missions, to bring the Lemba more in line with “normative Judaism.” Parfitt remarked:

[T]he Lemba today are completely different from the Lemba that I first met when I started on my journey several years ago. And as we speak, some North American Jews are arriving among the Lemba of South Africa on a two-year mission to bring them mainstream Judaism, complete with a library and with Torah scrolls and everything else. So as a result of my work, though it was in no sense intended, they have become, if you like, properly Jewish and recognized as such by quite a number of people, particularly in America. (Tudor Parfitt's Remarkable Journey http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/israel/parfitt2.html)

So the Lemba began with a cultural identity, reached out for the genetic identity that corroborated it, and then began to change their cultural practice to better match what they or others felt was “proper” to that identity. It will be interesting to see how Gates's guests change in response to their newly discovered African ancestry. Will Quincy Jones's music take on a subtly different cast?

V. Conclusion

In the first phase of concern over “misidentified paternity,” geneticists were appropriately worried about the effects on identity and on family dynamics when genetic findings disrupt deeply held assumptions about the nuclear family. Although there is disagreement about the proper way to handle unanticipated information, there is agreement that it is important to warn people beforehand that the discovery of misattributed paternity is one risk of genetic testing.

Ancestry tracing presents parallel risks. True, the results will not throw people into divorce court, but they may profoundly change their sense of self. Amalia Cooper found a whole new set of relatives. Julia Jefferson Westerinen, a descendent of Sally Hemings, discovered her black ancestry for the first time, and chose to change her race on the next census (Staples, 2001). The Thomas Woodson family found that the DNA evidence contradicted their family story. People who avail themselves of ancestry tracing are navigating some of the same scary waters as the families who seek genetic testing, but in the former case they are navigating them alone, without whatever guidance geneticists might provide.

Internet providers of direct-to-consumer ancestry tracing services need to use the sophisticated technology available on the Net to provide at least some approximation of informed consent to their clients. Internet “chats,” sophisticated FAQ pages, videotaped interviews with people who were shaken by their discoveries, perhaps even mandatory waiting periods before purchasing ancestry tracing services, are all ways in which Internet providers of ancestry-oriented genetic testing can respond to some of the ethical issues raised by their products.

Notes

All Things Considered. (2006). ‘Series Looks at Notable African American Lives’ National Public Radio, February, 8.

BBC News. (2005). “One in 25 Fathers Not the Daddy,” October 8.

Frontline. (1999). Jefferson's Blood.

Hilpern, K. (2007). ‘Family: My father, Mr. X.’ The Guardian (London), January 20, Guardian Family Pages p. 1.

Hundley, T. (2005). ‘Father's day ‘gift’ in Germany: DNA test,’ Chicago Tribune (p. 6). Potsdam.

Metcalfe, F. (2006). ‘Where did I come from?’ Courier Mail (Australia), July 1.

References

All Things Considered. (2006). ‘Series Looks at Notable African American Lives’ National Public Radio, February, 8.

BBC News. (2005). “One in 25 Fathers Not the Daddy,” October 8.

Frontline. (1999). Jefferson's Blood.

Hilpern, K. (2007). ‘Family: My father, Mr. X.’ The Guardian (London), January 20, Guardian Family Pages p. 1.

Hundley, T. (2005). ‘Father's day ‘gift’ in Germany: DNA test,’ Chicago Tribune (p. 6). Potsdam.

Metcalfe, F. (2006). ‘Where did I come from?’ Courier Mail (Australia), July 1.

#paternity #genetic anthropology #ancestry tracing #misattributed paternity #ethics #identity #family

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makingscipub · 7 years

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Genome editing, metaphors and language choices

Genetic Alliance and the Progress Educational Trust recently published a report entitled ‘’Basic understanding of genome editing”, based on research supported by the Wellcome Trust.

As I have worked on metaphors relating to genetic, genomics and genome editing for more than twenty years, I was particularly interested in this report. Unlike many other publications, including my own, which tend to focus on metaphors in the media, this report tells us how lay people use and understand metaphors when talking about genome editing.

In this post I’ll provide a brief overview of the report (in addition you can consult various overview articles by Sandy Starr and Sandy Starr and Jennifer Willows, for example). People interested in issues around genomics, metaphors and language, should of course also read the report and recommendations themselves.

The report emerged from workshops held at the beginning of 2017 with participants from the rare disease and (in)fertility communities. These workshops provided occasions to explore how these participants talked about genome editing (i.e. which metaphors they used spontaneously), but they also gave them an opportunity to learn more about this technique and reflect on the underlying concepts (and metaphors) used by scientists and journalists.

The genome

Many participants were familiar with the term ‘genome’ but unable to explain it. This is not astonishing, as in ordinary life we often use terms, such as, say, computer or carburettor, for example, without being able to explain how these things work. However, it surprised me to find that many thought the genome was a small unit of DNA, while ‘in reality’, the genome encompasses all of an organism’s genetic material (see p. 9).

Participants liked the phrase genome editing but were confused by other phrases such as genome engineering and genetic modification (see p. 14). They also did not understand or like the term CRISPR. This, and other insights, led the team to issue some useful guidance for genome editing communication.

Metaphors for the genome

Over the last thirty or so years, during and after the Human Genome Project, many metaphors for the human and other genomes have circulated in the public sphere. These have been documented and dissected extensively in peer-reviewed social science and communication science articles, books and chapters. Many of the metaphors discussed in this literature seem to have entered our collective consciousness and become part of our general ‘cultural imagination’.

Participants at the workshops used these metaphors quite freely and spontaneously. Examples are: recipe, roadmap, but most importantly book, text, letter, script and so on. More unusual were metaphors of ‘a picture of a whole living being’ or ‘a shopping list’. Not surprisingly, ‘blueprint’ was found to be somewhat outdated. Instruction manual afforded participants with the possibility for more creative metaphorical elaborations in terms of assembling or breaking a LEGO set, for example. The same goes for script which was creatively extended as “different theatre companies staging very different productions of Romeo and Juliet even though the script is more or less identical (and is certainly always distinguishable from Hamlet)” (p. 19).

There were also reflections on the difference between ‘instruction’ and ‘information’, something that opens up quite difficult issues!

Metaphors for genome editing

While the genome was thus basically metaphorically pictured as some sort of ‘book’, genome editing was conceptualised in a more active way as word processing, with phrases like find and replace, copy and paste and cut and paste being commonly used. However, and interestingly, “’word processing’ as an explicit concept was alien to younger participants” (pp. 19-20).

Off-target effects of genome editing were talk about too, in terms of being the result of an “imperfect search function” that confuses, say, custard and mustard (p. 20).

The process of genome editing, which relies on a guide molecule that directs a nuclease to the relevant part of the genome and the nuclease which cuts DNA at he required site in the genome, was conceptualised as a combination of ‘satnav’ and ‘scissors’. People were, however, aware of some problems with these metaphors, as they are taken from very different conceptual source domains and as scissors evoke destruction, rather than healing (see p. 21).

People also discussed novel metaphors, such as cooking recipes and airport boarding passes, used in some videos, but found them quite confusing (p. 21).

The popular metaphors used by these participants should be compared with the metaphors for genome editing discussed in an article by O’Keefe et al. It seems that, yet again, old genomic metaphors are difficult to shift.

Popular culture

As expected, and as extensively discussed in literature regarding metaphors used when the Human Genome Project was made public, people also reflected on popular cultural framings of genomics and genome editing, such as Frankenstein and Brave New World. They did not find such references helpful though. One participant said, using a neat metaphor, that they elicited fear in an almost Pavlovian way (see p. 21). More recently, some popularisers of genome editing have claimed that they might be able to create unicorns or dragons. Such framing carry risks, participants observed, especially the risk of trivialising genome editing and distracting from its potential to cure debilitating diseases (see p. 21).

Designer babies

For many participants the phrase ‘designer babies’, a staple of popular culture, evoked images of consumerism and commodification. Some said for example, using an interesting metaphor, that one can’t ‘upgrade’ human beings, as ‘we’re talking about people, not phones’ (p. 16). Attitudes to the term ranged from “weary acceptance to fierce dislike” (p. 16). So, basically, this is a term or phrase to avoid in public discourse!

The future of genome editing

Many participants did not draw a clear distinction between somatic and germline genome editing and did not express any particular fears about the latter. In general they saw a lot of potential in this new genomic technology. Some used interesting metaphors to talk about its potential and promise, likening it to the Gutenberg press and the internet (p. 10). They hoped that genome editing would “increase the quality of life for affected patients, without necessarily bringing a cure” (p 11).

In general they were excited and optimistic, but also realistic about this new technology, with one participant, again using a creative metaphor, saying “that we are ‘a split second after the big bang’ and it is too soon to make detailed predictions” (p. 13). Well said!

Ethics and information

When discussing ethical and regulatory aspects of genome editing, one interesting insight emerged from the workshops. While participants were interested in discussing ethical issues “they were keen to acquire a grounding in what genome editing is and how it could be used before holding forth on such issues” (p. 24). In short, they wanted to fill their knowledge deficit before engaging in ethical, social, legal etc. speculations about an emerging technology! Basically, paraphrasing Kant, badly: Ethics without information is blind. In short, knowledge/information deficits are not a good thing.

Other languages, other metaphors

The report ends with a call to hold similar workshops in other countries where other languages are used. This is a great idea! Some time ago I have tried to raise awareness of these issues around the metaphor ‘gene surgery‘ (not used by the participants) in English and German. It seems clear however that Germans have chosen ‘Genome editing’ as their ‘translation’ of choice for genome editing as in: “Durchführung von Fokusgruppen zur Wahrnehmung des Genome Editings (CRISPR/Cas9)” (Using focus groups to explore the perception of genome editing). This recent focus group research showed that (some) Germans seem to equate genome editing with genetic engineering (which has quite negative connotations) and that there is a division emerging between red and green genome editing that mirrors that in the debate about GMOs.

A French group of researchers discussed how best to talk about genome editing in French in an article entitled “Genome Editing and Dialogic Responsibility: ‘What’s in a Name?’“. They studied French and Italian media coverage and found that ‘genome correction’ and ‘manipulation’ were most commonly used. However, they argue that ‘correction’ hides many aspects of ‘genome editing’ and ‘manipulation’ has too many pejorative connotations. They think that the use of ciseaux (scissors) or couper-coller (cut-and-paste) is too playful. In the end they recommend a metaphor that would not have gone down so well with the participants in the workshops, namely: ingénierie ciblée du génome (targeted genome engineering).

This is only the tip of the language and metaphor iceberg! More research is needed!

Image: It was impossible to find a free image that the participants in the workshop would have liked (see p. 27 of the report). So I used this one from Pixabay.

The post Genome editing, metaphors and language choices appeared first on Making Science Public.

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deniscollins · 7 years

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Years of Ethics Charges, but Star Cancer Researcher Gets a Pass

A top cancer researcher has been found to manipulate data in more than 20 published studies. If you were a journal editor, would you continue to publish his findings? Why? What are the ethics underlying your decision?

Dr. Carlo Croce is among the most prolific scientists in an emerging area of cancer research involving what is sometimes called the “dark matter” of the human genome. A department chairman at Ohio State University and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Croce has parlayed his decades-long pursuit of cancer remedies into a research empire: He has received more than $86 million in federal grants as a principal investigator and, by his own count, more than 60 awards.

With that flamboyant success has come a quotient of controversy. Some scientists argue that Dr. Croce has overstated his expansive claims for the therapeutic promise of his work, and that his laboratory is focused more on churning out papers than on carefully assessing its experimental data.

But a far less public scientific drama has been playing out in the Biomedical Research Tower that houses Dr. Croce’s sprawling laboratory on Ohio State’s campus in Columbus.

Over the last several years, Dr. Croce has been fending off a tide of allegations of data falsification and other scientific misconduct, according to federal and state records, whistle-blower complaints and correspondence with scientific journals obtained by The New York Times.

In 2013, an anonymous critic contacted Ohio State and the federal authorities with allegations of falsified data in more than 30 of Dr. Croce’s papers. Since 2014, another critic, David A. Sanders, a virologist who teaches at Purdue University, has made claims of falsified data and plagiarism directly to scientific journals where more than 20 of Dr. Croce’s papers have been published.

“It’s a reckless disregard for the truth,” Dr. Sanders said in an interview.

As a result of complaints by Dr. Sanders and others, journals have been posting notices of problems with Dr. Croce’s papers at a quickening pace. From just a handful of notices before 2013 — known as corrections, retractions and editors’ notices — the number has ballooned to at least 20, with at least three more on the way, according to journal editors. Many of the notices involve the improper manipulation of a humble but universal lab technique called western blotting, which measures gene function in a cell and often indicates whether an experiment has succeeded or failed.

Dr. Croce’s story is a case study of the complex and often countervailing forces at work as science seeks to police itself.

Findings of fraud in biomedical research have surged in recent years, whether from an actual increase in misconduct or from heightened caution inspired in part by an internet-age phenomenon: “digital vigilantes” who post critiques of scientific papers on anonymous websites. Yet the primary burden for investigating and punishing misconduct falls to inherently conflicted arbiters: universities like Ohio State that stand to reap millions of dollars from the federal grants won by star researchers like Dr. Croce.

Despite the lashing criticisms of his work, Dr. Croce has never been penalized for misconduct, either by federal oversight agencies or by Ohio State, which has cleared him in at least five cases involving his work or the grant money he receives.

At Ohio State, officials said they were unaware of Dr. Sanders’s charges against Dr. Croce until asked about them for this article. Now, in the wake of those and other questions from The Times, the university has decided to take a new look to determine whether it handled those cases properly. “The university is instituting an independent external review,” a spokesman, Christopher Davey, said in a statement, adding that the review “is not an indication that we have discovered any evidence of scientific misconduct or other issues raised in your inquiry.”

Whatever the outcome of that review, Mr. Davey said, decisions on research misconduct at Ohio State were based solely on “the facts and the merits of each individual case,” not a researcher’s grant money. Any other suggestion would be “false and offensive,” he said, adding that the university has “spent significantly more to support his research program than he has brought in from outside sources.”

During an interview in October, and in a later statement, Dr. Croce, 72, denied any wrongdoing, said he had been singled out in some of the accusations simply because he was a prominent figure, and largely placed the blame for any problems with figures or text on junior researchers or collaborators at other labs. Academic papers often have multiple authors, with the scientists who perform the hands-on work listed at the beginning and the senior scientists in charge named at the end.

“It is true that errors sometimes occur in the preparation of figures for publication,” Dr. Croce said in the statement, issued through the Columbus law firm Kegler Brown Hill & Ritter. Any mistakes with figures were “honest errors,” he said, adding that he did not condone plagiarism but that he must rely on co-authors to provide proper attribution.

Even before his arrival at Ohio State in 2004, Dr. Croce had stepped beyond the generally expected bounds of cancer research. In 1994, he joined the scientific advisory board of the Council for Tobacco Research, which the tobacco companies created to fight the public perception — supported by increasingly overwhelming scientific evidence — that smoking caused cancer. Dr. Croce said in the interview and the statement that he had always believed that smoking caused cancer.

During the same period, Dr. Croce and a colleague faced federal allegations that they had submitted false claims for payment of grant money for science that was never carried out and that was to be overseen by a scientist who had, in fact, left the United States and gone to Italy. After the case was combined with a second fraud investigation, a civil settlement forced Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, where Dr. Croce worked at the time, to pay $2.6 million to the government. Neither Dr. Croce nor the other parties to the settlement admitted any wrongdoing in the case.

In a world where most scientists are so wary of public conflict that they seem to apportion criticism with a pipette, the new doubts about Dr. Croce’s work draw carefully measured opinions from some towering figures.

Randy Schekman, a Nobel Prize-winning biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, said he had informally advised Dr. Sanders in 2015 on lodging a complaint about Dr. Croce’s work with the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which he once edited and which has been the most common venue for Dr. Croce’s work, according to the PubMed database. “I am aware of the allegations, and I am aware of other concerns that have been raised about Croce’s work outside of these specific allegations,” Dr. Schekman said.

Another Nobel Prize-winning biologist, Phillip Sharp of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who said he had been previously unaware of the misconduct allegations, offered qualified support.

“I would say Carlo has made some important contributions to the molecular causes of cancer,” Dr. Sharp said. “I can’t condone the sloppiness he has in general. But if I look historically at what Carlo has done, if I delete Carlo from the scientific community, I think the scientific community is a little less, and that isn’t true of everybody who publishes papers.”

LONG ARTICLE CONTINUES ....

#Science

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bluewatsons · 4 years

Text

Dena S. Davis, The Changing Face of “Misidentified Paternity”, 32 J Med & Philosophy 359 (2007)

Abstract

I. Introduction

The ultimate point is that none of us really know who we are, ancestrally speaking. All we ever really know is what our parents and grandparents have told us. (Staples, 2005)

II. The Problem of “Incidental” Information

Barbara Bowles Biesecker writes that:

III. Direct-to-Consumer Paternity Testing

IV. Ancestry Tracing

A customer on the African Ancestry website writes:

African Ancestry is only one of many centers which is engaged in what has variously been called “genetic anthropology,” “molecular anthropology,” or “archaeogenetics.”

In what follows, I offer instances of this new kind of “paternity testing,” and the challenges it presents.

V. Conclusion

Notes

All Things Considered. (2006). ‘Series Looks at Notable African American Lives’ National Public Radio, February, 8.

BBC News. (2005). “One in 25 Fathers Not the Daddy,” October 8.

Frontline. (1999). Jefferson's Blood.

Hilpern, K. (2007). ‘Family: My father, Mr. X.’ The Guardian (London), January 20, Guardian Family Pages p. 1.

Hundley, T. (2005). ‘Father's day ‘gift’ in Germany: DNA test,’ Chicago Tribune (p. 6). Potsdam.

Metcalfe, F. (2006). ‘Where did I come from?’ Courier Mail (Australia), July 1.

References

All Things Considered. (2006). ‘Series Looks at Notable African American Lives’ National Public Radio, February, 8.

BBC News. (2005). “One in 25 Fathers Not the Daddy,” October 8.

Frontline. (1999). Jefferson's Blood.

Hilpern, K. (2007). ‘Family: My father, Mr. X.’ The Guardian (London), January 20, Guardian Family Pages p. 1.

Hundley, T. (2005). ‘Father's day ‘gift’ in Germany: DNA test,’ Chicago Tribune (p. 6). Potsdam.

Metcalfe, F. (2006). ‘Where did I come from?’ Courier Mail (Australia), July 1.

#paternity #paternity deception #genetic information #genetic anthropology #ancestry tracing #misidentified paternity #family lore #technology #ethics #medical ethics #nonmalfeasance #Direct-to-Consumer Paternity Testing

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