Me-ow-sis

What I saw:
What I thought: “Ha, biology lolcat! Wait… That’s not identical, obviously one has some sort of somatic mutation if that’s mitosis. The image would fit better if they were making a joke about meiosis, since crossing over occurs during meiosis I, resulting in non-identical daughter cells. But then what would meiosis II result in? Half-cats? Kittens?”

Goddammit grad school, you’re making me overanalyze funny pictures of cats. I’m doomed.

Compared to the rest of the tree of life, your sex life is boring

Man, the news seems to be Animals After Dark the last couple of days. As a sex-obsessed biologist, I can’t exactly complain. Here are some neat stories:

  • Male wasp spiders only get one chance at love, since females eat them after mating. How romantic. It used to be believed that males preferred larger, more fertile females, but it looks like what male spiders really dig are virgins. I guess it’s not a bad strategy when the first male to mate with a female is most successful. Well, as long as he remembers to snap off his genital inside of her to form a chastity belt. (What, did I make some of you uncomfortable? Look, I had to stare at a scary spider to read that article for you, so shush)
  • Move over, Mary. A female boa constrictor has given virgin birth twenty two baby snakes. Parthenogenesis – the development of an embryo without fertilization from a male – has been documented in reptiles before, but this case is unique. You’re probably familiar with how sex is determined in mammals – XX are female, XY are male. It many reptiles and birds, the homogametic (same sex chromosome) sex is reversed – ZZ are male, ZW are female. The surprising thing is that all of the virgin offspring were WW, which was previously thought to be nonviable. They are all essentially half clones of their mother, resulting in a duplication of just half of her genome. That, or God is sending an interesting message with his species choice for the second coming.

Dance Your PhD finalists are up!

If you’ve ever had a hard time explaining what your research is about, maybe you should consider interpretive dance. That’s what the Dance Your PhD contest at Science asks grad students to do. It’s fun, but the winner also gets a $500 dollar prize.

You can vote for whichever one you like the best here. To show I’m not inherently biased toward biology, my favorite was actually the chemistry one. I thought it did the best job at actually explaining the concept, while having the least abstract dancing. Oh, and I loved the part with Taq polymerase in the middle. Seriously, just watch it.

…Okay, it still had to do with DNA, shush.

Maybe in a couple of years I’ll be able to do this, though I kind of suck at dancing. Right now my lab rotation project wouldn’t be too interesting of a video though – not sure how to interpretively dance to coding in Python…

I already like this site way more than Facebook

I received an email earlier today from Nature Publishing Group advertising their new social networking project, GenoMate:

We at Nature are pleased to announce our premier academic social networking/graduate relationship development website. New multidisciplinary fields, particularly Systems Biology, require a greater degree of collaboration and shared expertise. Nature GenoMate combines cloud-based productivity tools with a social networking engine that includes your colleagues and citations.

At first I thought this was going to be super lame – I mean, do biologists really need a separate social networking site? But when I looked at the features, I realized how awesome it is. It’s really pertinent to the needs of grad students. For example, they give great advice that first years like me may not know:Or their Erlenmeyer-Briggs personality questions that match you with others:Go check out the rest of their features here!

I feel so lucky that my department received one of the first invitations. Helps that the main developer apparently works here, though I’m not sure who it is… hmmm…

Am I supposed to be giving sex advice now?

Why is Dan Savage in Indiana? Have we traded places?

Though I am genuinely curious. He’s been making posts about being in Bloomington, IN for a while – almost since I moved to Seattle. Is IU getting up to some awesome sexual shenanigans again? Man, why can’t Purdue be cool enough to have Dan Savage visit, let alone camp out there?

I mean, I’ve always been the unofficial Sex Advice Giver of my group of friends, thanks to scientific curiosity. Freshman year of high school I had the “Birds and the Bees” event in Science Olympiad, which forced me to learn a lot about human sexually. Soon I had read everything on Scarlet Teen and Ask Anne, and then I spent many years listening to Love Line. And then I spent many years listening to the Savage Lovecasts to undo most of the sexist crap I learned from Love Line (though it wasn’t all bad). Add to that the four classes I took at Purdue dealing with sex*, and all the random books** and papers I’ve read, and… well, yep, I’m a bit academically obsessed.

So, sex advice wouldn’t be out of character for me. Though I guess I’m really only qualified to talk about rodent sexuality. I’m going to guess no one is having problems with their partner’s copulatory plugs.

Hopefully.

*For the curious:
Sex, Gender, & Sexology (Health and Kinesiology Dept)
Human Sexuality (Psychology Dept)
Evolutionary Psychology (Psychology Dept)
Sex & Evolution (Biology Dept)

**I highly recommend:
Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation
The Red Queen
As Nature Made Him

Watch out! I'm susceptible to madness!

Biologists are the most common type of mad scientists in books, movies, and television in the last two hundred years. I never thought of starting my PhD in genetics as heading toward the dark side, but I may have to rethink that. I’ll try not to create any horrific chimeras or crazy viruses during my lab rotations.

Though it makes sense, really. Biology is obviously the coolest scientific field, so we have more potential for fiction novels. Just think about it. What would a mad astronomer do? Look at stars maniacally? Yeah, biologists totally trump that.

(Via Skepchick)

Another example of feminist distrust of science: Vaccinations

Not all feminists distrust science, but it’s a common enough theme that it’s become a major pet peeve of mine. I ran into another example reading a blogger I usually love, Lena Chen (who’s also one of More Magazine’s up and coming young feminists). So Lena, I apologize ahead of time for making an example out of you, but this issue is very important.

One of Lena’s readers commented that vaccination seemed a lot like circumcision in that it lacked consent, and asked for Lena’s opinion. Here’s the bulk of her post:

I’m against mandatory vaccinations, but that doesn’t mean that I’m against vaccinations. […] Invasive or not, vaccinations are something that individuals should be able to decide on themselves. Requiring them means that the government is essentially making health decisions for its citizens, without taking into account what they (or their parents) may want. (Most girls getting the vaccine are at an age when they can be informed about the benefits and risks of the procedure.) I got the HPV vaccine myself, and I’d recommend it to anyone, but I would never be able to justify mandating it, because I value personal freedom and think that choice should be left up to the patient.

And while, of course, it makes sense — in theory — to say that a modicum of personal freedom is a rather minor sacrifice for the “greater good”, it’s not like this line of reasoning hasn’t been abused in the past. Women — especially women of color and poor women — have more than just cause to be wary of a medical establishment that has historically profited from the coercion of marginalized groups. Forced sterilization of Black women threatened with the loss of welfare benefits, forced sterilization of individuals deemed “mentally defective”, electroshock aversion therapy to cure homosexuality … all of these things occurred in this country in the last fifty years. Frankly, I could give less of a damn about “public health” if it means that I get to live in a slightly more civilized society where no one is told what to do with their bodies anymore.

I commented:

Sorry, but I’m going to have to disagree. The way vaccinations work is through herd immunity. If the vast majority of people don’t get vaccinated, it puts those who can’t get vaccinated for medical reasons (newborns, the elderly, immunocompromised individuals) at even higher risk. If the government didn’t require vaccinations, they would be effectively worthless.

Thanks to vaccination fear mongering by people like Jenny McCarthy and people who make it into a personal freedom issue instead of a scientific issue, we’ve seen a sharp rise in diseases that were thought to have been eradicated. See: Whooping cough in California.

This isn’t some nebulous “for the greater good” ideology like forced sterilizations. The mechanics of herd immunity are pretty cut and dry.

Lena replied:

I think that one can definitely make a case for vaccinations being a good thing that benefits society and people’s health, which is why I don’t see a lot of folks opting out of vaccinations just because they’re no longer mandatory. I do think that a lot of anti-vaccination advocates spout arguments that sound like conspiracy theories (I’ve even seen 9/11 comparisons made), but I have to agree that there’s no reason why the government should be able to make decisions about their citizens’ bodies. This isn’t even something I would necessarily call fear-mongering, since there’s a historical precedence for this concern.

Me:

Except that people do opt out of vaccinations when they’re not mandatory. That’s precisely the reason why we’ve seen a sudden whooping cough epidemic. This is especially true when you have people like Jenny McCarthy going around lying about how vaccines are dangerous and cause autism. Not to mention that she’s well publicized by people like Oprah.

To say the government should not be able to make decisions about their citizen’s bodies is nice in theory, but ludicrous in practice. Do we want disease epidemics spreading across the country? Do we want children dying of genetic disorders that could have easily been treated if tested at birth? Do we want food and drugs we put into our bodies to become dangerous because the government shouldn’t regulate what’s safe or not?

There’s a point where historical precedence becomes antiquated distrust for science in general. We shouldn’t forget the past, but we shouldn’t be paralyzed by it either.

This could be worse. She obviously accepts that vaccine works and rejects the completely anti-science loonies. But at the same time, this is a perfect example of when ideology, specifically liberal and feminist ideology, supplants science and reason. And I say that as a liberal feminist. People have abused science in the past, but that doesn’t mean science itself is forever evil. It’s something that needs to be closely scrutinized, not ignored.

From my personal experience, I have a hypotheses as to why you see this sort of distrust in the feminist community. So many vocal feminist aren’t scientists by training, but rather come from liberal arts educations like English, Political Science, Sociology, or Woman’s studies. And when you consider most liberal arts majors probably only had to take one or two introductory science classes in college, it’s understandable why they might not fully grasp how vaccinations are effective or why not all evolutionary psychology is bunk (though some is). If I tried to give my opinion about economics based on one class I took senior year of high school, I’m sure I’d be wrong about a lot of things.

Now, plenty of scientists are feminists – we sort of have to be in a traditionally male dominated field – but there’s usually not much overlap between our studies and our feminism. That is, a political scientist can use their expertise to focus on women’s issues, but a chemist can’t really weave feminist philosophy into her next paper. Since we have less overlap, we can get busy in our geeky scientific jobs and forget to be vocal about other issues we care about. That’s why I personally try to be an outspoken scientific voice for feminism whenever I can.

And that’s why I’m going to give a damn about about public health – because it means I get to live in a civilized society, instead of dying from preventable whooping cough, measles, rubella, or polio.