A Thought Provoking Intrusion

Blog by Chris Berry - Genomics Forum Genomics Forum Press and Communications Officer

It was standing room only at Pulp Fiction – Edinburgh’s leading genre-fiction bookshop – last week, for the launch of Intrusion – the latest book from leading science fiction author, and Genomics Forum Writer in Residence, Ken MacLeod. 

Intrusion explores a dystopian UK of the near future, where repression comes not from dictatorship, but rather the societal pressure to embrace the “common-sense” benefits resulting from scientific progress.  This is a society where the trade in second-hand books has collapsed, amid fear of the impact from fourth-hand tobacco smoke leaching from their pages; where the trees that line London’s streets are torn down to be replaced with superior, genetically optimal, specimens; and crucially, it is a place were expectant mothers are “encouraged” to take a pill that ensures their offspring will be free from genetic disease and abnormality.

Having read from the opening chapter of Intrusion – which skilfully echoes Orwell’s 1984, by hinting at the social constraints impacting even the mundane elements of the main characters’ lives – Ken MacLeod discussed his book with Scotland on Sunday’s Literary Editor, Stuart Kelly. 

During a fascinating and insightful interview, Ken indicated that his time spent as Writer in Residence with the Genomics Forum had underpinned his exploration of the interaction between society and ongoing developments in the life sciences.  This in turn has fed into his development of themes that flow through Intrusion: significantly, if genetic engineering where to become so cheap and safe so as to produce a simple, all-encompassing “fix” for genetic diseases, would denying this to your children be comparable to denying them vaccinations today?

Discussions between Ken and the audience – which later spilled over to the pub adjacent to the venue – raised further key issues, such as: would fixing genetic diseases make for a homogeneous, non-evolving human race; and what are the moral dilemmas of considering the rights of individuals ahead of the future benefits science might bring to society.

Amongst the many questions raised and debated during the launch of Intrusion, one thing is clear;  Ken MacLeod’s exploration of how science might shape the future of society has resulted in a highly engaging and thought-provoking read.

Intrusion is published in the UK by Orbit, and is available in hardback from leading booksellers.

Ken MacLeod was Writer in Residence with the Genomics Forum from 2009-10, and remains affiliated with the Forum.

Visit the Genomics Forum’s flickr page to view photographs from the Forum Social Session - Ken MacLeod's book launch.

Laboratory Conditions

Well...the last act of my residency (per se) is on Thursday Night at the Trav...and, having just played some blues harmonica loud enough to disturb some scholars...sorry...I can safely say that "Talent Night in the Fly Room" isn't what I expected it would be when we started rehearsal.

We started last Monday with roughly ninety pages of material...three hours worth or so...mostly quotations from the most important sources I've been looking at, all the way from TH Morgan to Erwin Schrodinger...to Max Delbruk...and a couple of songs and sketches, sure.

But under laboratory conditions text is tested to destruction...the reality test of having actors in the room with the ideas, and the anticipation of an audience being there alters the shape and feel of the work, and forces it towards reality...or at least, into the version of reality that we can share, we're down to what I hope is a tight little, right little show.

Something like the laboratory process of rehearsal is going to be the thrust of a more academic presentation I'll make at the Genomics Conference in London at the British Library in April: to wit, have I learned anything about the way the specifically dramatic arts...(as opposed to music or poetry) relate to scientific ideas and processes?

Well, maybe. In the meantime, the show is the thing. And here is the lyric to a little tango number I'll be doing:

If you want spider silk from goats
You tweak the genome
If you want diesel fuel from oats
Just use the genome
If you’re feeling all alone
There’s no one we can’t clone
From any chromosome
Just ask the genome.

We make brain cells from your armpit
And the genome
If you’re sick we’ll make you fit
We’ll use the genome
We’ll insert those nano-bots
And end up which god knows what
Don’t put up with what you’ve got
Call in the genome

Nothing comes from nothing
Not even genomes
All history is written
In our genomes
Material machines
Tell you what existence means
All your fears and all your dreams
Are in your genome

Miracles are every day
Just provided you can pay
Though the price might be obscene
Depending on your genes

All the birds and all the bees
Have all got genomes
Every virulent disease
Has got a genome
We’ve all got the same ancestor
Who was a such a wise investor
In the chemical congestor
Of the genome

Sharing with Bright Ideas Fellow Alessandro Delfanti

by Alessandro Delfanti - Genomics Forum Bright Ideas Fellow
Contract Professor, University of Milan
Research Fellow, Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA), Italy

Here I am, back in Italy after a wonderful month spent at the Forum as a Bright Ideas Fellow. It has been a very productive and interesting experience.

First of all, I had the time and space to work on my book – I seem more likely to be able to meet the deadline and turn the manuscript in, now. And what a space, a lovely office with a view on Edinburgh's Salisbury Crags.

I read and studied a lot, away from my daily routines and in the quiet environment of Edinburgh and its beautiful university. I even finished and submitted a paper that had been waiting for... how much? Two years perhaps!

And then, the Forum helped me organise a workshop on one of my favourite topics: sharing.

We invited eight people from the UK and the US to discuss how genomes circulate today. The focus was on the balance between stricts intellectual property rights and open source modes of managing data, and we had a very diverse set of people to attend it: social scientists, biologists, open access advocates, and policy experts.

It was great to finally meet in person some people I had only worked with online before, and to debate those issues with such an interesting group of scholars, and hopefully I will borrow some of the ideas that emerged during the workshop and use them in my book. After all, open source means that one can take, remix and reuse knowledge, right?

So I am grateful to everybody at the Forum: the two Steves (Yearley and Sturdy), who invited me, Matthias who helped me organise the workshop and Margaret, who put up with my demands. Actually, everybody has been supportive and kind, for example helping me settle, showing me the best pubs around and inviting me to Peter's theatre play. I have been back to business in Milan only for a day, and I miss Edinburgh already. But then I also know I will soon have more chances to enjoy Edinburgh and the Forum's intellectual environment. Can't wait!

Circulating genomes: sharing in the life sciences sector Workshop
My book
My personal homepage

Aristotle in the Cheeseshop

"Aristotle's doctrines were a very strong and lasting influence in the history of the world because of their compatibility with observation. For us, as for Aristotle, it is the sun and the stars that rise and set...As we proceed on our daily tasks it does not appear to us that the Earth is moving at high velocity. If we drop a stone and a feather from a high cliff into the sea then of course the stone reaches the sea before the feather does. "

Bernard Lovell. In the Centre of Immensities.

I'm such an amateur, in both senses of the word. I look back over the stuff I've written on this blog since May, and sometimes I catch the sound of myself pontificating away at the Traverse Bar...and I think "Who do you think you're fooling?"

My job was supposed to be to respond creatively to the philosophical/social/political challenge of the genomic view of life. I was supposed to come up with a drama. Instead I'm doing this over weight and unconvincing Bronowski impersonation, regurgitating half digested information I've just come across as if I've known it all the time.

A playwright is an actor with a pencil.

But then when I read something like the above written by one of the most famous 20th Century British astronomers, and it makes me feel a bit better. See, I had a chemistry teacher at school who once told me I was "as stupid as Aristotle"...which even aged twelve and still basically reading Marvel Comics to the exclusion of all else, struck me as a peculiar put down.

(He'd asked me to name an element. And I'd said "Fire"...based on information about a character in The Fantastic Four, as it happens...and that's when he hit me with the above epithet. I wish I could say it became my school nickname, but it didn't. Not the "Aristotle" bit anyway.)

Stephen Jay Gould wrote a lot about the arrogance of the "now". The assumption that because the scientific world view has been so successful that previous thinkers from other, older times must have been wilfully thick not to see what now seems so obvious...when had these god bothered ivory tower dwellers taken the trouble to look out of the window, had they observed empirically like they should have done, they'd have quite clearly seen what we can clearly see.

Lovell's point is that if we look out of the window we only see what Aristotle saw...that we have to learn how to see the earth going round the sun, or the chemistry that fuels digestion...or, just maybe, that neutrinos, once in a while, seem to beat photons in a hundred yard dash...

We don't live, except intellectually, in the world as it is. We live in reality as an evolved element of it. We have to engineer reality in order to understand it, and understand it in order to engineer it. And for a non scientist like myself, for the bit of me that's a writer, what my attempt to assimilate the genomic "view of life" amounts to is an extraordinary enriching of available metaphors. Honest to God, it's like waking up in a sweetshop (or even better, a cheese shop). I don't know where to start.

Which is why, I think, what I've come up with as a scenario reflects that sense of both richness and disorientation. It's going to be publicised in the next Traverse Brochure, and will try out some ideas which may or may not become the play I write. Briefly, it's about librarians trapped with the total information of the universe at their disposal...but who've forgotten how to read.

I know...iffy...but it feels how I feel and you've got to start somewhere.

Peter Arnott is Resident Playwright at the Traverse Theatre Edinburgh, Peter will be hosting a number of public engagements as he explores ideas and seeks inspiration for a genomics related play.

Queequeg's Coffin or The Lifeboat

Before I get going, I want to think about this image for a second. This was how it was chosen to "market" the project for sequencing the human genome. We are contained and confined and defined by it. That's what it says. The gene is the essential us. Every branch of knowledge falls into its helical embrace.

Shudder!




Like every other "View of Life", genomics seems to me to be capable of being used in two ways: the way of Ahab or the way of Ishmael. A restless wish to master and control the experience of being alive... against a rather fluffier, more accepting, more systemic sense of being part of a continuum which we cannot seek to master. Religion, I think, has similarly bipolar potential.


What is wrong in the image above (and with almost all religions) is the idea that it's all about us. Take us out of the centre of the image, and genomics, I think, offers "us" liberation, not confinement. Freedom, not definition.

Like all good ideas, genomics is capable of being at least two opposite metaphors at the same time. But if you listen to the hype, genomics is all about mastery. Taking the stuff of life and making of it the raw material for commerce, for technical innovation. Oddly, the promise of total control of our biological destiny is the way this idea of life's interconnections and interdependence has been sold to us.

Now I'm all for enhancing our quality of life through an enhanced technical capacity. I don't believe I suffer from residual "essentialism", from any idea that life, as such, is sacred and not to be messed with. Far from it. If anything, my own "View of Life" is more rigorously material and relativist the more I find out about it through this residency. A molecule is just a molecule.

It's "mastery" I distrust as a metaphor for how we should regard ourselves and our relationship with nature. It's "truth" I distrust as a metaphor for our intellectual interactions with stuff. Including human nature. I don't think it's a coincidence that the financial technocrats whose delusions currently afflict us are referred to as the "masters of the universe", even if they had the plastic toys rather than the gods in mind. The track record of mastery in its financial manifestation is poor and the future prospects for that "view of life", if anything, are worse.

Bruce McKibben, in "the End of Nature", one of the founding texts of modern environmentalism, put forward the idea that our metaphor of being actors upon a stage...humanity in nature...was no longer tenable. Specifically, that "man made global warming" undermined our "stewardship" of this ball of rock and water we call home. That we are living in the Anthropocene era...that we are causing such fundamental changes in the climate, (and, if the 1 October edition of New Scientist is to be believed, in earth's geology as well) that we need to adjust our thinking to a different kind of reality. A different metaphor, in our terms. To quote David Cameron, that we are all in it together. But we have to mean it.

The temptation is to see ourselves as the devil. But we're no more the devil than we're God. It's the separateness of the ideas of "human" and "natural" that is being rendered incoherent by the new demands on us for living in the world consciously.

Genomics, I think, fundamentally challenges both sides of the "Human/Nature" dialectic. It integrates our biology fundamentally and practically with biology tout court. It fosters, as does the threat of environmental catastrophe, a systemic way of thinking about "life" which radically de-centres humanity, humbles us, in fact, while at the same time demanding of us urgent self-protection. To see ourselves as an accidental and temporary evolutionary product dramatises the contingency of our civilisation. Both terms, both metaphors - human and nature - are now of questionable utility in getting us to do what we need to do.

A very narrow window for "life as we know it" opened at the receding of the ice from the middle east 10 000 years ago that can just as easily and dramatically find itself closing. Human exceptionalism, like American exceptionalism, is a fantasy in the mind of Michelle Bachman. Rather the reverse of exceptionalism is more and more overwhelmingly the case, both in terms of how we hope to survive as a "civilisation" and of how we see ourselves, what metaphors we use to describe and think about ourselves.

I suspect that the fact that climate change denial joins manifest destiny and "the right to life" on every Republican platform is itself a response to the slippage of mastery as a tenable image of our relationship with nature and with each other. Fundamentalists of all stripes are insisting so loudly that "we are who we say we are" that one suspects that they secretly doubt it.

My last three blogs have all been heading in the direction of some sort of synthesis. Between Cezanne's renunciation of the joys of perspective, to Andrew Knoll's bacteria-centric model of "life" to Carl Sagan's celebration of the immensity of time, I think there is a liberating and emotional connection.

We are time and environment limited. Only by learning how not to be God, only by learning that we are not the centre of everything can we learn to be the centre of ourselves. We have to learn a new way to value ourselves and each other that not only does not seek to deny our contingency and material commonality with "nature" but takes inspiration and purpose not from our imaginary strength and uniqueness, but from our actual, demonstrable weakness, fragility and dependence.

For this purpose, may I offer a small selection of equivalences in the hope of their utility.

Complexity is evidence of improvisation
Natural selection is intelligent chance.
God is Dice.
Mastery is illusion.
We do not and cannot live in the world the way it really is.
Metaphors are how we make things useful to us.
To observe is to act upon the world.
There is no one but ourselves who cares to save us.
The measure of everything is everything
The measure of "man" is whatever we want it to be
Ishmael survived.
Ahab went down with the whale.

Shantih Shantih Shantih


Oh...quick recommendation, next time you hear someone describe Hitler as a Darwinist, (and hence Darwin as Hitler), send them this.


http://coelsblog.wordpress.com/2011/11/08/nazi-racial-ideology-was-religious-creationist-and-opposed-to-darwinism/






Peter Arnott is Resident Playwright at the Traverse Theatre Edinburgh, Peter will be hosting a number of public engagements as he explores ideas and seeks inspiration for a genomics related play.

Just My Type

Toni Freitas is part of the ESRC Genomics Forum writers team covering the Edinburgh International Book Festival 2011.

Do you know what your font choice says about you? Have you ever really thought what people might feel when they read a letter or email that you have typed without considering the font? Do you just use the default setting? Or have you carefully chosen your font?

Reading in one language and hearing in another

Ken MacLeod is part of the ESRC Genomics Forum Writers team covering the Edinburgh International Book Festival 2011.

I'm a native non-speaker of Gaelic: my parents spoke the language to others and to each other, but not to us. Many parents must have done the same, stopping the transmission of the language dead in its tracks. No doubt they had the best of intentions. As I once wrote about the background to all this, the story is peculiar and contorted. That story leaves me with very mixed feelings about attempts to revive the language by such expedients as road-signs. But I love hearing it spoken.

The Revolution Will be Followed by a Signing Session in the Adjacent Tent

Ken MacLeod is part of the ESRC Genomics Forum Writers team covering the Edinburgh International Book Festival 2011.

This year's theme for the Edinburgh International Book Festival was decided last year. With what was described at the launch party as uncanny prescience, the theme was 'revolution'. There was a definite echo of that in the voice of the first author I heard on Saturday: Alan Warner, Edinburgh University's newly appointed Writer in Residence. Catchily if clunkily billed as 'Sopranos author does trainspotting', the event, chaired by Zoë Strachan, centred on Warner's reading from the MS of his forthcoming novel The Dead Man's Pedal. It's about a lad who by mistake becomes a trainee engine-driver on a West Highland railway line in 1973-74: a moment when Britain seemed to edge closer to a pre-revolutionary situation than at any time before or since - though not quite as close as some of Simon's more radical work-mates think, as they trade banter in the station hotel bar. Warner first came to prominence with Morvern Callar, which like his later The Sopranos and his current The Stars in the Bright Sky was hailed for its brilliant evocation of young female voices. In the section he read, the man from Oban showed a similar - and on the face of it less surprising - fluency with a range of male voices, from political badinage over a pint to pained recollection of war's absurd horror between swigs of the hard stuff. But catching the cadence of the industrial work-place, and indeed of working-class socialism, isn't as easy as it seems or as easy as it used to be - not that many have tried.

Next Meeting Thursday 28th July Traverse Bar

Where we'll be talking about morality and nature...the attempts over the years to find moral guidance in the world around us...or justification for being amoral, of course...

In the meantime, I thought I'd share a bit of a play I've been working on with you. It's an adaptation of The Cone-Gatherers by Robin Jenkins I was working on in Aberdeen last week with a splendid team of actors...

This particular speech, maybe, betrays some of my own pre-occupations with such questions:

DUROR

It’s everywhere. It’s all around…it’s in you and me and the trees and the stone…it’s all the one thing. It’s all the one substance. Matter. You see? Every creeping thing. You can’t fight the truth…you have to submit…you have to agree…you have to say…yes…

(He stops suddenly. Then suddenly starts again)

if there’s no God, and no soul….if all there is…is trees and stone…then there is no me or you…is there?…not really… And when we die…we vanish so you can’t believe it was ever real, that there was ever life, that there was ever…

(Pause. He starts again, mechanically)

…people get shot in the head…don’t they? …their bodies are still there…but where are they?…they’ve gone…bodies in a pit, covered in sweaty earth, naked, white, rotting…what are they? What is the difference between a dead man and a living man…can you feel that?…can you touch it?…no…you can’t…it’s not a thing…

(Sudden pause. Sudden resumption)

…what happens if we just stop? What happens if we just stop? When we die…or have a stroke…or get hit in the head…if we can stop being ourselves, what are we? Hah? What are we?

(Pause….he’s got something. The following is more considered, rising to triumph)

We pretend to be ministers or doctors or soldiers or fathers or wives…we just pretend…it’s not true…we know it’s not true…we know we’re nothing…we’re not anything…we’re the world… we’re all made of the same stuff…we know that’s all we are…and sometimes we can see it, we can feel it… there’s nothing…nothing but the forest and the fear and the pain and the joy and the feeling…the feeling…that we’re all one thing…I’m not me and you’re not you…it’s all just…we feel it….

(Pause. He slides into despair and terror)

And we’re scared …we don’t want to be alone…we don’t want to know , we don’t want to see it…but sometimes we do see…we can’t help but see ourselves, and there’s nothing for us…no hope, no joy, no meaning, no purpose, no wars no world no stars no flesh no skin no trees no stones…there’s just …it…this dead…horrid…huge…nothingness…but I see it…I see it now…right now…it’s all lies…all of it…all of it...all of it…

Well...you see the kind of thing...

Come for a jolly chat!

The Altruism Equation

rB>C

Yup. That's it. That's everything explained right there.


Where "r" is relatedness...how closely genetically related you ( the subject) are to the recipient (object) of your kindness...

and

"B" is the benefit this cousin of yours acquires from your sacrifice...

Then if the product of these two is greater than (>) the cost (C) to yourself of that sacrifice or expenditure of energy...

Then you won't eat your grandson at Christmas instead of getting him a book token.

Or, if you're a drone bee or worker ant, it's why you will still contribute to the hive when you aren't, personally/reproductively speaking, going to get anything out of it. You may die but your genes will thrive. To put it yet another way, all social (or familial) behaviour is really nepotistic survivalism in disguise.

This equation was Bill Hamilton's way of accounting for selfless behaviour within the "selfish" paradigm of Darwinian Nature. He came up with it in the sixties, and it's still quite popular.

It's an early highlight for me in my current reading for this project, which is Oren Harman's biography of George Price "The Price of Altruism".

(See that clever thing he did there with the title?)

The first part of the book sets the scene for Price's own work...and strange demise...by an historical survey of the various ways that various minds have tackled this paradox, from Kropotkin's Anarchistic reading of nature as modelling "Mutual Aid" as the answer to all our problems, to the neo-liberal free market in genes offered by Dawkins et al that is our current orthodoxy.


(I know whose side I WANT to be on...I know who I WANT to be right)


But it begs the question - do we really read nature as it is, or do we map our desires and values onto it? Like we used to do...still do...with God? Isn't the word "nature" itself an instance of that?
And a further maybe broader question...which I think will be the theme of our next gathering in the Traverse Bar

(Thursday July 28th 2pm to 4pm- be there or be excluded from kinship selection) -



Can Understanding Nature Ever Tell Us How to Be Good?







I'll try to dig up some interesting stuff to look at...meanwhile, here's some bees.

Humans 1 Potatoes 2

In today's Metro you may have seen a piece showing that the James Hutton Institute in Dundee, of whom we are very proud, have just completed sequencing the Spud Genome. My title today refers to the comforting fact that it turns out potatoes have got roughly double the number of active genes as you have.

Why do I find this comforting? Well, it's just another demonstration that the cultural assumption that humans must be the most complex of nature's creations because we're (allegedly) the smartest...is based on a false paradigm of "evolution as an advance in complexity" with us at the top of the pyramid.

It's what Thomas Kuhn called a "paradigm shift". Suddenly, everything looks different because the frame of reference within which we interpret the world has been irrevocably altered by the genome's eye view that has been emerging into "viewability"over the last twenty years.

That which was carved in stone now comes with quotation marks round it. There are some, like the philosopher John Dupree who is attached to this forum at the Exeter branch - "Egenis", check him/them out - who would have it that it is becoming less and less meaningful to talk about "genes" at all.

Which has got what to do with the price of potatoes? Well, the lovely little things are afflicted every so often with virulent and catastrophic crop failure...and having a DNA map may well be useful in understanding and dealing with that...Potatoes are the third most important carbohydrate source we've got. (After rice and wheat).

And if someone could do for rice what Norman Borlog did for wheat back in the sixties (some deft hybrid making...dwarf wheat it's called, and it has saved millions of lives) then that might give us some options when the environmental whip comes down.

(And, yes...that's going on too in a lab near you)

Finally, I have been reminded by correspondents that the number of areas of possible human interest opened up by my having this opportunity are, pragmatically speaking, limitless. My choice of focus has to partly be driven by circumstance as well as volition. But please keep suggestions coming.

One of these circumstances is that another of my colleagues here, Steve Sturdy, is chairing a discussion at the Edinburgh Book Festival with Oren Harman, who has written a biography of George Price called "The Price of Altruism".

This is, even at a glance, an extraordinary story...into which I'm going to be delving over the next couple of weeks. It's all about altruism...the puzzle of kindness...of selfless behaviour...and the attempt Price made to mathematically reconcile "good" with the imperatives of natural selection...

To put it another way, it's asking what sound you get when you bang two paradigms together.

I'll let you know what I hear...and keep you updated about our next Gene Therapy Session at the Traverse Bar.

After the Bar

Well how was it for you?

We had our first informal gene therapy session in the Traverse Bar the other day, and a small but select band of pilgrims came to view the relics of my digging around in the genome. (see left)

I brought along the Act passed in the Tennessee Senate banning the teaching of evolution in 1925 -the act that John Scopes deliberately broke, thus prompting the three ring circus of the Dayton Monkey Trial, the founding act of political theatre in the long, still ringing tale of the post Darwinian culture wars...

I brought along another piece of legal history, the US Supreme Court Decision of 1927 (written by Oliver Wendell Holmes, no less) upholding the enforced eugenic sterilization of Carrie Buck - "three generations of imbeciles is enough" - from 1927...

And more up to date, the current hoo ha around the stem-cell regenerated pitching arm of Bartolo Colon of the New York Yankees...

And a story from last week about women in the States being prosecuted for harm done to the children they were carrying through pregnancy... up to and including murder...that I found in the the Grauniad last week.

(Why are all of these stories AMERICAN? Maybe because us Brits are too buttoned up to argue about belief in public. God Bless Michelle Bachmann! - He will if He knows what's good for Him!!!)

I didn't really have an agenda...and I don't know if we were any further on towards discovering one by the time we got to the end and I needed some Dutch lager.

But it was stimulating anyway. The conversation. And the lager.

We'll be doing it again in a while...and soliciting responses and contributions to the online poetry/prose poem/thought anthology "The Human Genre Project"

(My contact details are on there)

But in the meantime, having looked at the genome at the top of this posting, have a swatch at the cladogram below.

This is the modern take on the "Tree of Life". With a topologically appropriate model of "descent with modification."

Once again, if there really is a paradigm shift implicit in "Genomics" it has to be something along the lines of "sameness" - the homology of all life at the genetic level. Something to do with the near enough inestimable privilege of being alive at all...on a ball of dirt on the edge of the western spiral arm of the Milky Way. And how, Goldilocks like, by bizarre yet accountable happenstance, the primordial soup turned out to be "just right". And here we are. All of us. Even Michelle Bachmann.



Whatever else it does, it has to give us pause from living to have a look at life.

Or stop and smell the cyanobacteria or something...


Back the week after next!

Genomics Come all Ye to the Traverse Bar

So our first meeting is on Thursday. Our first "experiment". To be honest, a good part of the "experiment" is whether anyone shows up...or it becomes a meeting about meetings...

Anyway, I'm bringing along some juicy things to talk about, all connected to the same question -

Whose View Of Life?

I blogged earlier about Darwin, and Sean Carroll...and their view of life. The question is...what's yours? Does it depend which Church Pew or Lab Bench we sit at when it comes to assigning a sense of value to what science tells us is accidental? Where do you look for morality? Is there a gene for it? Or a kinship equation?

Let me put it this way:

I live in the world. We all live in the world. More or less inadequately. (Or maybe that’s just me...or Scotland). We do what we do. We do our best.


It’s not enough. It’s never enough. For our families, our societies or for ourselves. Never.

Why not? What, exactly, is the matter with us? Is there a design flaw? Or if we evolved this way, what’s that about? Is the lacking we sense in ourselves something we're stuck with...like tonsils?


We worry away at this. That’s why we build things, make things, write things…it’s why we rape continents, start wars, paint pictures…sequence genomes…It’s all questioning and not answering…why be human? Why live? Why do we die?


We attempt lots of answers to the same damn questions over and over again. Our attempts are what we call “culture” . That's why you will find exactly the same damn questions in every damn blog…in every damn thesis about every damned thing…and in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the first story ever written…


Every answer we come up with, we secretly suspect, is a lie, a con, something (anything) to get us through the night. We always intuit there's something more.


I suspect that’s roughly what Einstein did to get him through the night…and Mother Theresa…mind you, I think that’s what Himmler did too…
Why do we DO that?

The search for a reason…a shared search...however Hopeless…and not always Harmless. I think that’s what “genomics” is about for the non scientist (and the scientist)…especially as it aspires to being a science of “everything”


Anyway, I'm going to bring along some thought provoking hunks of text I've come across in the hope that we can start an argument...then go away and write FURIOUS poems and plays about it all.


Do come.










Traverse Bar, Thursday 30th, 2pm

The Metaphor in Question

"I live in a world of poetry," she said. "Everything seems significant to me. Everything has meaning. It's what gets me into trouble"

Una Persson in The Entropy Tango by Michael Moorcock.








1.

History, besides BEING a metaphor
Is MADE of metaphors.

I want to EMPHASIZE that.

Evolution is a metaphor -
one that Charles Darwin
much resisted.

The word does not appear
In the eighteen fifty-nine
"Origin of Species"

("The survival of the fittest"
Didn't turn up till the fifth edition
and there as a quotation
from the work of Herbert Spencer)

Being classically educated
(led-out)
Darwin knew that "evolution"
means "a rolling out from"

He didn't like that a bit

Implicit in the word
is the idea that the organic present
has rolled
- progressively, Whiggishly
and inevitably –
from out of the past.

That’s what his predecessors (and successors)
Meant by the use of that metaphor
That's not what Darwin thought he saw
In the garden at Down
Or the volcanic lumps of the Encandatas

Niether did he see
The History of Life
As a ladder
From lower to higher






On his "entangled bank"
all life,
plant, insect, mould and duck
was exactly as "evolved"
as every other "form most beautiful"
Every bit as lovely...
Every bit as interesting







2.

He didn't like his title either.

"Origin of Species" was a
publisher's echo of the earlier
(Best selling)
"Vestiges of Creation"
Robert Chamber's anonymous blockbuster
of 1844
To which, many people thought,
"Origins" was a sequel.

In Vestiges, Chambers talked
of "evolution"
of higher, better forms
succeeding, lower, simpler breeds
till at the pinnacle stood man
(white, male, possibly Scottish)
with mutton chops and a waistcoat -
a monkey's paw
fiddling in his pants

On the publication of Origins
(which didn't sell like hotcakes - or Vestiges)
Huxley, Darwin's bulldog, snapped at bishops.

But Huxley never accepted -
Descent with modification
Naturally selected in the struggle for existance -
as the engine of life's changes

But he, like Herbert Spencer,
Andrew Carnegie, and, yes
Adolph Hitler
"believed" in "Darwin"

Darwin the metaphor, that is.

3.

In the beginning, then
Man created Darwin
just as Man created God

as a metaphor
out of metaphors

as a belief
a cause
an explanation

4.

The Revd Adam Sedgewick
Who taught Charley his geology
broke his pupil's heart
when he wrote to Darwin
how he loved him
and how he hated his ideas.

But Sedgewick hated "Vestiges" more,
Despised it,
Assuming the anonymous author
to be a woman -
Like Eve, seeking out of vanity
For things she shouldn't know.

(Original Sin, also
Is a metaphor
But not for "knowing" No.
For "meaning"




Because till Eve took the apple
Nothing had a meaning
Everything had names for what they were.






So there was no need for metaphors
In the Garden.)






5.

Pace Aristotle,
a human being (since Eve)
is a "meaning" reed

It must have happened first in Africa
Possibly with a yam or a banana

We've been in trouble ever since.

Meeting Up

Anyhoo…the next bit of my masterplan is to start meeting people and talking about this. If there’s anybody out there reading this, this means you…

Last Thursday of the month…June 30th…2pm … and the same in succeeding months…excepting August and December

I want to convene an informal group discussion around key texts I’ve dug up…Trav staff, writers’ groups, anyone else I can dig up…

(Burke and Hare made their contribution to the materiality of bodies and knowledge just round the corner, don't ya know)

The idea being to run a few of these ideas past and through some craniums (crania?) other than mine…to talk about this stuff not as people who UNDERSTAND genomes necessarily…

Just people who’ve GOT one…and are interested in what it means.

I’m posting a sort of poem I’ve written with some first thoughts a bit later on today…and we’ll see what kind of conversations we can get going.

" "What Forum?" "Genomics What?" "

 by Peter Arnott, Resident Playwright – ESRC Genomics Forum and Traverse Theatre

I've got a residency at the Genomics Forum I tell people.

And the ones who nod wisely and avoid saying "Eh?" are just pretending they have any idea what that means. (I should know.  I was bluffing when I got the gig.)

"Genomics Forum" - people do keep asking me what that is.  They're mostly puzzled about the genomics bit.  I'm getting a bit of a handle on that, maybe.  It's the Forum bit I'm still wondering about.

Anyway I'll start with the first bit:

Genomics - this is:

EITHER a catch all term for techniques and research developed in the life sciences since the specific event of the sequencing of the human genome.

OR a bold new all inclusive paradigm for the understanding of absolutely everything...honest!

Hum...my patchy recollection of Thomas Kuhn suggests to me that a paradigm shift cannot be willed.  It happens or it doesn't. Maybe it has happened, or IS happening...I hope to find out.

What does seem to be rock solid already in the papers I've been reading is that "old style" Genetics is currently being rather huffily and contemptuously dismissed.

(Genes code to proteins, proteins to body parts and functions...Hah!)

That's now known as Astrology in the biz, apparently.

The most important thing we seemed to have learned since 2000 - (I say "we" , I mean "they") - is that we know a lot less than we thought in terms of one to one functionality between genotype and phenotype - or a lot less than we thought we were going to know by now.

Getting the whole genome was supposed to have been getting an easy-to-read shopping list of miracles and nightmares...It hasn't turned out that way.  This is philosophically reassuring and (maybe) politically and commercially disastrous.

Jesus! All that money!  Where's my leukaemia cure already? -

(I do stand open to correction on all this by the way.)

The only other thing I know is that as far as the general public is concerned, it's all gone very quiet...since Dolly the Sheep and Venter the Press Conference...nothing...zip...

So...the second half of the phrase: Forum?  To which all I can offer so far is a bad rhyme.

For whom?

When the Edinburgh International Science Festival and Gengage met each other...

Blog by Alicia Lopez Cuesta - ESRC Genomics Forum Intern

You’re probably familiar with the Edinburgh International Science Festival but not with Gengage…? It is time to remedy that!  Gengage, also known as The Scottish Healthcare Genetics Public Engagement Network, exists in symbiosis with the ESRC Genomics Forum. Gengage has the challenging mission of connecting people who are working to enhance public engagement with healthcare genetics in Scotland.

As part of the Edinburgh International Science Festival, Gengage held a successful event on Pre-implantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD) on the 20th of April, titled “From Healthy Embryos To Designer Babies: How Far Is Too Far?”.

How Dr Atkins brought me to the Genomics Forum

I came to work at the Genomics Forum by a somewhat strange route. As an undergraduate I studied English at the University of Adelaide, South Australia. When the time came to think about a PhD, I was keen to research something more “socially relevant” than literature. I’m not sure I agree with my younger self any longer about the social irrelevance of fiction – or indeed, that “relevant” is even the relevant word. Nonetheless, that wish back in 2003 to study something “relevant” is responsible for my career path to date.

Back in 2003, one of the hottest topics in the media was the craze for the Atkins Diet, and other low-carbohydrate, high-protein weight-loss diets (such as South Beach, Protein Power, and The Zone). Low-carbohydrate diets were hugely popular in the late 1990s and early 2000s in English-speaking countries such as the UK, US and Australia. For those who haven’t tried them, they recommend a more or less drastic reduction in starchy and sugary foods, including bread, rice, pasta and potatoes; all foods with added sugar; and certain high-carb fruits and vegetables (bananas, tropical fruit, sweet potatoes, corn, etc). The rationale is that these foods raise blood sugar and insulin levels, causing weight gain and type 2 diabetes.

Telling a story of body parts

Blog by Ann Lingard - Genomics Forum Bright Ideas Fellow

Would you donate your eyes, your brain, biopsy samples or an amputated limb? And why would you do it - for research, to help someone who needed new organs, for teaching purposes, or for display in a Museum? If you have donated bits of yourself, for any reason, would you like me to write the story of how and why you made this decision? And if you are long, long dead, would you mind if I tried to find out more about you, and wrote your story too?

Amongst the extraordinary collections at the Surgeons' Hall Museum there are skeletons, plaster-casts of faces, amputated limbs, fixed pathological tissues and foetuses, and a collection of surgeons' 'memorabilia' - drawings and tools of their trade - which help us to put in context just why some of the human specimens have ended up in Museum shelves. But 'specimen' is a dry word: these organs and bones were 'donated' by human beings, each of whom had a life, perhaps in a town, on a farm, perhaps with a family and friends; or perhaps he or she was ridiculed and despised.

Darwin, Dawkins and the Left

By Ken MacLeod - Genomics Forum Writer in Residence

A few months ago Chris Williams, an OU history lecturer and political activist whom I've known for years online, asked me to give this year's Darwin Memorial Lecture to the Leicester Secular Society. I suggested the topic because, a couple of years earlier, I'd put together a stash of notes and links for a blog post that I'd never quite got around to writing.

The event, at the Society's splendid Victorian red-brick Secular Hall on 13 February 2011, drew a large and lively audience, from that cross-section of radical England that you so often find in its socialist, secularist and peace movements. Their searching and informed questions often had me thinking fast on my feet.

Here's the gist of what I said - a longer version will no doubt appear on my own blog.