THE DOUBLE HELIX AND ITS TANGLES

My niece's AI biz is for cows -- NOT pigs.

CSI television series, like “CSI Miami” or “CSI New York” or “Bones”, are a quick and easy way to pick up information about high tech or edgy or just surprising subjects.  The episode of “CSI Miami” that I watched last night was about a subject my niece knows very well, except that she knows about it in terms of cows.  I’m talking about the management of fertilized ova so that they produce live birth of healthy babies.  Last time I talked to her she was in her pickup on the way to an exceptionally good cow.  On the seat beside her was a cooler of high quality bull sperm which she would put into that mother.  In a few days an attending veterinarian would wash the resulting embryos out and implant them in other cows who would carry the calves to term.  Her AI business is in Oregon, but ranchers around Valier do this.

But the television program was looking at human consequences.  I can imagine the writing team sitting around a table imagining and debating each step after the original concept of exploring human artificial insemination.  This time the story -- “ripped from the headlines” --  began with a man whose sperm had resulted in more than a hundred children.  (The real life version was based on a doctor who thought, “Why pay for donated sperm when I have a little factory right at hand?”)  The donor in the story had a fatal flaw:  “Wilson’s syndrome.”  It means an accumulation of copper in one’s system.  Not necessarily fatal, but that weakened the story which turned on the kids all getting sick and needing liver transplants, so that they used the relaxed disclosure laws to find each other and their father.

Exasperated by the father -- who was not very nice -- the offspring had motives for killing him, which did indeed happen.  In the investigation of that, identical twins turned up.  And then it developed that a surrogate mother gave birth to them and kept one for herself.  In the story she had successfully carried to term some incredible number of implanted zygotes.  They were not biologically related, so the story didn’t follow them looking for each other.  But as it turned out, the sperm donor’s wife was the one who did him in -- he refused to inseminate her and she really wanted a baby.  The law favors people who marry in the expectation of children, which is considered a key purpose of marriage.

Leia and Luke

By now there have been many stories of people who fall in love, unaware that the sympathy they feel for their loved one comes from sharing genes.  (“Star Wars,” for instance.) The ability to move living beings around from conceiving mother to gestating mother, to discover the markers for biological fathers, and to gestate someone else’s zygote as a paid service, is great plot fodder, but also challenges our legal and ethical assumptions and strategies, to say nothing of jangling emotions.  

The closest precedents come from cultures where an important woman can cause her husband to inseminate a servant and then take the baby as her own.  That leaves out the laboratory and includes fleshly contact (i.e. sex), but presumably, technically, the semen donor could be in one room, the ovum donor could be in a second room, and the conception could be in a third. They need not meet each other.  No freezer storage necessary.  Now it is possible to transplant the mitochondria (little sub-cells that manufacture energy) of one woman’s ovum into a recipient, causing even more social puzzles.  Or two women could impregnate each other, taking a nucleus from each ova and combining them.

A cluster of storage "straws" -- each one a potential person

The possibility of storing these germ cells over time also creates problems, though the benefits might be great, for instance, if someone were facing disease or enormous risk, their genes could be saved, so that a woman could create a baby from her husband posthumously.  Sometimes the conceived blastosphere (early stage of development) is frozen for later implantation.  This has created a new CSI scenario over the issue of whether to treat these little blobs as human children with custody and legal costs of maintenance.  If someone unplugs the freezer, is that murder?   If someone sells someone else that tiny undeveloped embryo, have they kidnapped a baby?  As I type, the news comes that a California court decided that the embryos of a woman rendered sterile  by chemotherapy must be destroyed, because the father who was now divorced from her, has a “right NOT to have children.”  Indeed, he might be forced to pay to raise them.

Laws also have to struggle with marriage between closely related people since there are laws against such a thing that are based on the danger of in-breeding, probably much exaggerated unless there is a fatal flaw in the genome.  Luke and Leia might marry on a permissive planet.  But over time “sameness” works against the creative randomness that keeps the whole of the population adapting and creative.

Still, parallel research is showing that a child is as much a product of its environment and human interactions in its early years as it is created by the “simple” genome.  We’ve found the epigenome -- the genome is the piano keys, the epigenome plays the keys, and the environment is, um, the vibrating strings under the lid.  Fun to play with this idea.  Maybe a person is a concerto.

Someone's genetic code

For quite a while Native Americans and other indigenous people have resisted giving blood for genomic analysis. Some groups, due to being separated from other populations, have developed unique gene codes that might have such precious abilities as immunity to HIV or Ebola.  If such a person has blood that might save people, should they be forced to donate it, even if it will endanger their own health or make their lives miserable?  What if their blood is only studied, maybe against their will, using trickery to collect samples?

Apart from that, a genome is like a fingerprint.  The ability to identify individual people has huge implications, not all of them about health which is the way they are usually represented.  As CSI watchers know, it greatly increases criminal detections.  In the past. rape -- for example -- has been hard to prove, not just because the line between consent and force is blurry, but because one individual male couldn’t be identified.  Similarly, child support depends on identifying the actual father.

So the “rape kit” was developed that could take timely evidence from a woman or man to convict a rapist.  The trouble is that enough people don’t see rape as a crime to motivate them to store evidence carelessly and never provide the funds to do the genomic work.  Increasingly, rape is being used as a war weapon.  Viagra reinforces the adrenaline of violence.

One entering wedge is through the military, which agrees to identification partly because of motivation to keep track of many people who are “unitized” and arranged in a hierarchy which is monetized.  That is, an array of soldiers, some of which are considered more valuable and powerful than others, and which are paid according to rank.  There is a need to identify dead people.  

Feeling around for more justification, the military has tried to evoke the mojo of battlefield blood transfusions which we’ve learned can save lives.  But this time the idea is to bar from enlistment those who might have troublesome tendencies, maybe as ambiguous as a tendency to develop PTSD.  (Actually, no identifiable surefire way to do this exists.  Neither can sexual orientation be detected.)  Army medical insurance has already been accused of retroactively defining people as unsuitable because of pre-existing emotional problems, therefore denying promised benefits for PTSD.

Medical and social support for veterans is a mixture of gratitude and recruitment promises.  Since joining the military is a potent way to escape poor social situations, many people with pretty good genes have had miserable enough childhoods to suffer epigene damage or even parasite issues.  We are discovering that gut biomes have a lot to do with health and even personality.  We are used to people being excluded from the army because of flat feet or tricky hearts (that drives many plots), but might one not qualify because of worms? 

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2561935/

“The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 provides new legal protections to Americans by prohibiting the discriminatory use of genetic information by health insurers and employers. Additionally, the United States military recently created new policies for fair use of genetic information in the determination of benefits for servicemen and servicewomen leaving military service.”   What about the worm's genes?

Trying to digest the implications of all this, I asked Carl Zimmer, the outstanding science writer, whether the universal recording of all military personnel genomes could be matched (if funded) with the database derived from rape kits (if funded).  This was his answer:

“Greetings—

“The informed consent that veterans give when they agree to participate in this program does not allow anything like that.

“Best wishes,

“Carl Zimmer”

In other words, the lawyers have already seen this possibility and tried to block it.  But as we know, once there is ANY kind of electronic database, sooner or later it will be hacked.  The worst consequences from all this is that our ethical thinking and our cultural assumptions are nowhere near being able to cope with all this stuff.  The great advantage of CSI video stories is that it helps at least frame up the issues.

The Original Space Suit

But he has no say about his destination.

THE STORY OF THE BUTT HOLE

Baby weasel

Decades ago I did (or actually didn’t do) something that makes me feel so badly that I can still hardly talk about it.  Someone brought us a baby weasel barely five or six inches long.  I made it a bed, put a lightbulb where it would warm but not cook the baby (that was a previous mistake -- I put my fertile goose egg in our bed under the electric blanket and turned it too high), and fed it with a tiny bottle.  When it cried, I petted it and held it and rocked it.  I did all the Mama things except one.  I did not know -- though I seen it when the Mama cat was raising kittens -- that baby mammals need to have their anuses gently stimulated, as by licking.  The little weasel died writhing, swollen.

Our Victorian prissiness is slowly receding, rather like our glaciers.  (I could not think of a way they were related.)  In fact, Garrison Keillor is so fond of bathroom stories that it’s a bit of a relief to watch “Downton Abbey” where there are evidently no bathrooms.  Still, in some ways it’s better to know things.  Recently I read that gentle massage on the middle perineum (the stretch between the anus and the etc.) is very helpful for chronic constipation.  A flannel cloth and a little baby shampoo might be a good idea.  (Be guarded about doing this for a human child, for instance, as it could be misinterpreted.  Luckily, in general one’s arms are just long enough to reach one’s own crotch.  No doubt that’s an evolutionary advantage.)

One can also help bowels move by walking, which produces something like internal massage.  People who are paralyzed from the waist down must handle internal waste via irrigation, a regular protocol requiring help.  When I did my hospital chaplaincy, people wanted to talk about BM's more than about God.  So I've been alert ever since.  This article is worth opening.

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150313-the-origin-of-the-anus

It’s not the case that every creature has an anus.  The very smallest animals simply vomit out their excretions or push them out of pores in the cell wall (maybe there’s only one cell) or a few just accumulate what we would call feces all their lives.  In fact, if one kind of scorpion has its tail torn off, either because of the sting being embedded in an enemy or because it was grabbed, the anus goes with it.  In time, the scorpion dies of an accumulation of toxic materials it cannot discard.  (I’ve known people like that.)

Crotch shot of a lizard

When I write about my toilet (old and balky -- can a toilet be constipated?)  I often invoke St. Cloaca, who is an invented persona named for the tail-end openings of birds, fish and reptiles, which fuse the functions of excretion and sex in one accommodating aperture.  There are also creatures -- again very small -- that breathe through their butts.  (Humans are more likely to be mouth breathers.)   But humans deliberately ingest substances through their anal pucker and even use it for sex, though without fertility.  The experience, we are told, is no longer confined to SM practice where it gives more drastic meaning to a “hand job”, but is used to avoid pregnancy.  “Downton Abbey” DID include this.  England is a nation of buttock obsessors.  They say it is because of their disciplinary practices.

A patriotic pooper

Mouth, nose, vagina, rectum are or can be receivers, access to the internal world of the person.  As such, they are exquisitely endowed with sensory perceivers, because it is necessary to guard what enters, even at the one-cell level.  The first evidence of sentience is in the ability to approach what is food and avoid what is destructive.  This is the separating line between plant and animal.  Because these organs are so sensitive, they are inevitably involved in eros.   Because they are often controlled by taboos and, to be frank, icky stinky qualities, those who crave the mental stimulation of breaking prohibitions will mix that into eros as one kind of porn.

In a livestock raising community, people know a lot about what is under the tail of a cow.  In fact, it is often necessary to reach into a cow’s arm-length vagina in order to deliver semen which is very expensive but still cheaper than keeping a bull.  In the end, if the placenta fails to detach from the uterine wall completely -- it is fastened by a lot of tiny fingers that may tear loose instead of releasing -- one must reach in and tease them free.  This is not particularly pleasant for the person with the arm, since the cow squeezes tight enough to cut off circulation, and generally is stimulated to excrete manure on the shoulder of the person.

Fisting a cow in order to start a calf

Also, unborn livestock may present themselves for delivery the wrong way around or with legs bent the wrong way.  Humans sometimes have trouble expelling a baby but generally instruments are used -- or were before it became simpler to simply cut open the woman’s belly.  In the most extreme cases of constipation, when feces have hardened beyond the possibility of expulsion, surgery might be necessary, but fully equipped clinics will have a set of “spoons” that can be used to scoop muck that still is soft enough.

Back on more scientific ground, researchers have been trying to understand the evolutionary origin of the anus.  One possibility is the “cloacal” vent.  (The internal ceiling of the UU Church in Hartford, Connecticut, is made up of small slats that converge at one pleated point in the center.  In more irreverent moments, we sometimes debated whether it were meant to symbolize the anus or the cervix, those two little round drawstring organs.)

As Matt Walker remarks in his BBC article, it’s very difficult to stay serious about this subject.  But as experience teaches, ignoring it can have life-ending consequences.

Another possibility proposed in the past is that the anus evolved alongside bi-lateralism, the physical two-sidedness of us, which is so obvious and accepted that we have to be prompted to notice.  Some animals have an exit next to their entrance.  Some have “transient” anuses though no one can really figure them out.  Again the creatures are small.  Of course, cells themselves even in complex creatures, have cell wall ports where molecules can get in -- like oxygen and glucose -- and unwanted stuff can be pushed out.  These don’t seem to be in one dedicated place, but rather many ports are scattered around, as well as points of attachment for other cells.  “The polyclad flatworm (Thysanozoon nigropapillosum) have multiple anuses, situated on their back.”  

One could form a musical group called the “Anals” (something like LeDoux’s group The Amygdaloids) but they would only play now and then.  Wind instruments, of course.

Quoting Walker:  “The review into the evolutionary origins and development of the anus is published in the journal Zoologischer Anzeiger - A Journal of Comparative Zoology.  Molecular biologist Dr Andreas Hejnol and Dr Chema Martín-Durán, of the University of Bergen, Norway undertook the research in part, because no one else had.

“Hejnol and Martín-Durán’s review confirms that two sets of genes in particular, known as brachyury and ParaHox genes, which are present in nearly all animals, play a key-role in the formation of the anal orifice.  Animals that have an anus, almost uniformly express these genes in the tissues surrounding the organ. Those animals that do not have an anus, do not.”

When the anus is considered as the transition out of the intestinal tubing, which can be reversed in a possibly necessary or possibly erotic strategy, it is clearly not just “there.”  So why not think about it, instead of just sitting on the subject?