Theological and biological concerns in the cloning of Jesus

I’m home! I get one day of rest before charging on another venture, but I thought I’d let you know about some Important News. It’s an old story.

A billionaire-funded Christian organization is currently working to clone Jesus Christ after obtaining DNA from the Shroud of Turin and feel confident they will have a Jesus clone in 2016.

Which means, of course, that Jesus would now be in his Terrible Twos. I hope you’re ready for tantrums and loud shouts of “NO!”.

Although, actually, they may have hit a hitch or two. Reviewing their protocol, which is somewhat interesting and makes me wonder why fundamentalists haven’t seized on this idea before to hasten the Second Coming, there are substantial problems.

“The Jesus Has Returned Project is a private organization devoted to bringing about the Second Coming of Our Lord, Jesus Christ, as prophesied in the Bible,” the The Jesus Has Returned Project spokesman said. “Our intention is to clone Jesus, utilizing techniques pioneered at the Genetic Research Group in Switzerland, by taking an incorrupt cell from the Shroud of Turin, extracting its DNA, and inserting into an unfertilized human egg (oocyte), though the now-proven biological process called symbiotic cellular transfer. The fertilized egg, now the zygote of Jesus Christ, will be implanted into the womb of a young virginal woman (who has volunteered of her own accord), who will then bring the baby Jesus to term in a second Virgin Birth.”

Random thoughts:

  • The shroud isn’t going to be a particularly rich source of Jesus cells. It would have had only brief, weak contact with the body, and probably contains far more cells from passing pilgrims and holy men over the centuries. You’re more likely to resurrect some 15th century priest who is not going to be very happy with the high expectations given to him.

  • The shroud isn’t old enough — it’s been dated to the 13th century. You’re not going to find any Jesus cells at all. Although you may extract a few cells from the fraud who manufactured it, in which case the resurrected man, if such traits are at all hereditary, might be very happy to take advantage of your expectations.

  • Haven’t the Shroudians argued that the imprint was produced by a burst of intense energy from the miracle that raised Jesus from the dead? Any cells might have been exposed to all kinds of ionizing radiation. Maybe you’d get Jesus — but it would be mutant Jesus. A tumorous, deformed Jesus. Which would be kind of cool, at least for the atheists.

  • Unfortunately, we do not have a technique for extracting whole human genomes from dead cells and inserting them into enucleate cells. Transferring nuclei is one thing, but this is going to require large scale synthesis and reassembly of over 3 billion nucleotides. We can’t do that yet.

  • I am intrigued by the notion of “incorrupt cells” from Jesus lurking in the Shroud. Does this imply that all of the, for instance, shed skin cells from Jesus were also brought back to life? What about toenail clippings? Does the site of Jesus’ barber shop contain still-living hair and follicle cells creeping about in the dust of the cellar? Are they independent cells still crawling about like amoeboid Jesi?

  • I can see a serious theological issue here, too: 40 days after his resurrection, Jesus ascended into heaven. All of his old cells may have done so as well — we have to imagine that as Jesus rose bodily into the clouds, there was a corresponding ascension of all the flecks of sloughed tissue, the crusty socks, the gunk in the shower drain, sewer sludge in Jerusalem, all the accumulated detritus of his residence on earth. In which case the shroud may well be totally devoid of any shred of Jesus tissue.

  • This, unfortunately, prompts another worry. On arriving bodily in heaven, was Jesus also rejoined by everything that had ever flaked or oozed or squirted or dripped off of his body in life? I’m picturing a man surrounded by several times his body weight in slime, walking about the garden paths of heaven, repelling everyone he encounters.

Sorry, it’s been a long day of travel. I get home and my brain is a bit off-balance and is easily sent scurrying off in weird directions.

A surprising development

A few days ago, I mentioned that Christian Ott, who lost his Caltech position for sexual harassment, had landed a new research position in Finland. We could argue endlessly about whether it’s appropriate for him to return to academia at all, whether there should be a path for rehabilitation, etc., etc., etc., but now it is all moot: the University of Turku has made a surprise announcement.

The University of Turku has decided to terminate the employment contract of Dr Christian Ott on 7 February 2018. Dr Ott’s fixed-term employment relationship of two years as a senior researcher was to start at the beginning of March.

​– I have considered the matter and decided that the employment of Dr Christian Ott to the University of Turku will be cancelled. I came to this conclusion after extensively hearing the science community, says Rector Kalervo Väänänen of the University of Turku.

Well alrighty then. Maybe something really is changing in the world of 2018. Maybe the powers-that-be are finally having to listen.

I hope Ott has some other skills for a backup career. I hear refrigeration repair has excellent job prospects, carpentry is always useful, and that coal mining is making a big comeback.

You guys have no decorum. There’s no level too low to go to.

But Sargon of Akkad has standards! He rants about the alt-right by accusing them of being like “n*ggers”, “f*ggots”, and “k*kes”, and whining that he gets no respect. It’s a spectacular meltdown that couldn’t happen to a more deserving guy.

“Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

One can only hope.

Now if we can just get a few more women and dark-skinned people on the research team

It isn’t at all surprising that ancient Britons were dark skinned — we know the genes behind pigmentation, we have sequenced genomes from skeletons that are thousands of years old, and we know that light skins were the result of a mutation that swept through Europe about 6,000 years ago. So when a reconstruction of Cheddar Man, a 10,000 year old skeleton found in England, is made from the skull plus genomic information, we should expect that he’d be found to have been dark-skinned.

The first modern Britons, who lived about 10,000 years ago, had “dark to black” skin, a groundbreaking DNA analysis of Britain’s oldest complete skeleton has revealed.

The fossil, known as Cheddar Man, was unearthed more than a century ago in Gough’s Cave in Somerset. Intense speculation has built up around Cheddar Man’s origins and appearance because he lived shortly after the first settlers crossed from continental Europe to Britain at the end of the last ice age. People of white British ancestry alive today are descendants of this population.

It was initially assumed that Cheddar Man had pale skin and fair hair, but his DNA paints a different picture, strongly suggesting he had blue eyes, a very dark brown to black complexion and dark curly hair.

The discovery shows that the genes for lighter skin became widespread in European populations far later than originally thought – and that skin colour was not always a proxy for geographic origin in the way it is often seen to be today.

Here’s the reconstruction in a BBC video. Cheddar Man is as we ought to have expected. Actually, the only thing that made me raise my eyebrows is that the research team consists of 6 white men and 1 white woman, kind of like how the SpaceX rocket team was mostly white men, too.

It would be nice if the research effort that is revealing the genetic diversity of our recent ancestors at least reflected a bit of that diversity today.

By the way, the comments on this reconstruction also reveal a tremendous amount of denial from the usual racists who think this is an invention cobbled up by scientists to appease radical leftists. This, also, is not surprising.

I’m skipping class for a few days…what will my poor students do?

I’m flying away to give a talk on Moscow, Idaho this week, and early next week I’m going to be a consultant on an NSF grant awarded to the Science Museum of Minnesota, so I’m missing a few class days soon. Oh, the wailings and lamentations of my students! They howled with grief at missing out on my sparkling presence for any length of time! Or I might have imagined that, but it was pretty vivid.

Fortunately, I found a babysitter. I’m having them attend the 2017 Evolution conference in Portland last June. That’s something technology lets you do nowadays — the Society for the Study of Evolution recorded all the session talks and uploaded them to YouTube, so you can attend, too, sans the hallway schmoozing and the arguments at the bar (we can only hope technology progresses to that point someday). I’m telling them to watch with a critical eye and report back when I get home about which of the subset of talks they enjoyed, and why, and to summarize the questions that were asked and methods that were used.

I remember getting the opportunity to attend Western Nerve Net and Friday Harbor Development meetings when I was a senior in college, and they impressed me greatly…but I was just lucky, getting to tag along with advisors at these events. We couldn’t bring along a whole class to a 3-day meeting back then, but now I can do it virtually, which is pretty cool.

Vegetables will kill you!

A new study, as reported by the Independent, finds that vegetarians are less healthy than meat-eaters.

Vegetarians are less healthy than meat-eaters, a controversial study has concluded, despite drinking less, smoking less and being more physically active than their carnivorous counterparts.

A study conducted by the Medical University of Graz in Austria found that the vegetarian diet, as characterised by a low consumption of saturated fat and cholesterol, due to a higher intake of fruits, vegetables and whole-grain products, appeared to carry elevated risks of cancer, allergies and mental health problems such as depression and anxiety.

It’s a classic example of confusing cause and effect. In other news, people who are sick with chemotherapy treatments are more likely to have cancer — therefore, chemotherapy causes cancer. The statistics can’t lie!

Alternatively, it could be a situation like mine. I was diagnosed with heart disease, so then I reduced consumption of saturated fat and cholesterol, and went with a vegetarian diet to help reduce the damage of a lifetime of indulgence and maybe squeeze out a few more healthy years. I also took up an exercise program. I’m going to have to inform my wife this morning that we’re skipping the gym today because it’s going to shorten my life.

Except — and this is an odd thing — the end of the article that happily mongers fear about vegetarian diets includes a disclaimer from the investigators.

Study coordinator and epidemiologist Nathalie Burkert told The Austrian Times: “We have already distanced ourselves from this claim as it is an incorrect interpretation of our data.

“We did find that vegetarians suffer more from certain conditions like asthma, cancer and mental illnesses than people that eat meat as well, but we cannot say what is the cause and what is the effect.

“There needs to be further study done before this question can be answered.”

Why would you publish a bullshit article that includes a clear statement from the researchers that your interpretation of the work is bullshit? Are readers of this newspaper so reliably stupid that the publishers can trust that they’ll only read the bullshit headline and never get to the disclaimer, which is buried at the very end of the article? As an experiment, I wonder how many people will read only the title of this article, and not get to the substance, which says the exact opposite? If you actually read the whole thing, and decide to comment, be sure to include the word “taradiddle” in your reply. This is a test.

Quentin Tarentino, happy hero

Last weekend, Uma Thurman spoke out about Harvey Weinstein and his history of abuse — but she also criticized Quentin Tarentino. Thurman had been seriously injured in a car crash while making Kill Bill, thanks to Tarentino, and she also disclosed how Tarentino stood in to the movie to perform some degrading acts personally, spitting on and choking her. There were no accusations of sexual harassment against him, instead he just comes across as insensitive and crude (which one might guess from his movies, anyway). So now gives his side of the story, and proves that he’s insensitive and crude. Why is it these guys are always so painfully unaware of how awful they make themselves look?

The interview starts off poorly, with the reporter making this condescending remark.

I offered Tarantino the opportunity to clarify because at this moment, stories get written and then picked up across the globe, often getting twisted to suit convenient narratives in this #MeToo moment.

What “convenient narratives” are those? What “twisting” is going on? Gosh, all those #MeToo accounts sure are imaginary.

But then, everything he says confirms everything in Thurman’s account — he just adds this bizarre happy twist to all the unpleasant facts. So Thurman was injured in a crash, and Tarentino was the happy hero who found the video footage of the wreck.

She asked, could I get her the footage? I had to find it, 15 years later. We had to go through storage facilities, pulling out boxes. Shannon McIntosh found it. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t think we were going to be able to find it. It was clear and it showed the crash and the aftermath. I was very happy to get it to Uma.

Never mind that he was responsible for the incident — smile, everyone, he filmed it! He had an assistant search through storage facilities and found it! He was such a good guy to give her a movie of the scene he made her do that nearly killed her. If only he’d been able to explain all that to Maureen Dowd, then people wouldn’t be so mean to him.

Part of my job on the piece was to do an interview with Maureen Dowd, and back up Uma’s claims. And we never hooked up. Me and Dowd never hooked up. I read the article and basically it seemed like all the other guys lawyered up, so they weren’t even allowed to be named. And, through mostly Maureen Dowd’s prose, I ended up taking the hit and taking the heat.

And then there’s the incident. It’s clear that Thurman didn’t want to do the scene, she had objected multiple times, she wasn’t much of a driver, but hey, Tarentino checked out the road. It was going to be easy. This is a classic example of someone not listening to another person’s concerns and simply sailing right past them.

…I heard her trepidation. And despite that we had set up everything in this shot, I listened to it. What I did was, I drove down this road, this one lane little strip of road with foliage on either side, in Mexico. I drove down it, hoping against hope that it would be easy and safe enough for Uma to drive. So we’re going down the road and I’m looking at it, watching it and I thought, this is going to be okay. This is a straight shot. There are no weird dips, there were no gully kinds of things, no hidden S-curves. Nothing like that. It was just a straight shot.

Uma had a license. I knew she was a shaky driver, but she had a license. When I was all finished [driving], I was very happy, thinking, she can totally do this, it won’t be a problem. I go to Uma’s trailer. Her makeup person, Ilona Herman was there. Far from me being mad, livid and angry, I was all…smiley. I said, Oh, Uma, it’s just fine. You can totally do this. It’s just a straight line, that’s all it is. You get in the car at [point] number one, and drive to number two and you’re all good.

How can anyone possibly think Tarentino wasn’t listening? He was very happy! He was smiley! Therefore, her worries were nonexistent.

I came in there all happy telling her she could totally do it, it was a straight line, you will have no problem. Uma’s response was…”Okay.” Because she believed me. Because she trusted me. I told her it would be okay. I told her the road was a straight line. I told her it would be safe. And it wasn’t. I was wrong. I didn’t force her into the car. She got into it because she trusted me. And she believed me.

By this point, I was more than a little disgusted with how often Tarentino was telling us that he was fucking happy, as if it didn’t matter what her feelings were. Time to blame the reporter!

The thing about it is, the good things I did are in the Maureen Dowd article. However, they are de-emphasized to not make any impression.

Then there’s the tale about Tarentino deciding to stand in for Michael Madsen to spit in Thurman’s face. It was OK, because the scene required the spitting, and Tarentino didn’t trust Madsen to get it right, so he needed to step in and do it so they wouldn’t need as many takes. What a hero!

The shot was, Michael Madsen had snuff juice. And you see him spit out a stream of snuff juice. Cut to Uma’s face, on the ground and you see it hit her.
Naturally, I did it. Who else should do it? A grip? One, I didn’t trust Michael Madsen because, I don’t know where the spit’s going to go, if Michael Madsen does it. I talked to Uma and I said, look. I’ve got to kind of commit to doing this to you. We even had a thing there, we were going to try and do it with a plunger and some water. But if you add snuff juice to water, it didn’t look right. It didn’t look like spit, when it hit her when we tried that. It needed to be that mix of saliva and the brown juice. So I asked Uma. I said, I think I need to do it. I’ll only do it twice, at the most, three times. But I can’t have you laying here, getting spit on, again and again and again, because somebody else is messing it up by missing. It is hard to spit on people, as it turns out.

Now that get me wondering — where did Tarentino acquire this amazing skill at spitting in people’s faces that Madsen lacked? Has he practiced it often? If people frequently mess up when they try to spit on people (and how does he know that?), why does it have to be a perfect spit for his movie? I think he was getting a little too in to this opportunity, which he wrote, to do something degrading to a woman on screen.

What about the choking scene? Apparently, he’s also an expert in strangling women for verisimilitude, and features his strangler’s hands in a couple of movies.

I was the one on the other end of the chain and we kind of only did it for the close ups. And we pulled it off. Now, that was her idea. Consequently, I realize…that is a real thing. When I did Inglourious Basterds, and I went to Diane [Kruger], and I said, look, I’ve got to strangle you. If it’s just a guy with his hands on your neck, not putting any kind of pressure and you’re just doing this wiggling death rattle, it looks like a normal movie strangulation. It looks movie-ish. But you’re not going to get the blood vessels bulging, or the eyes filling it with tears, and you’re not going to get the sense of panic that happens when your air is cut off. What I would like to do, with your permission, is just…commit to choking you, with my hands, in a closeup.

There’s this thing called acting, but Tarentino wants real panic and fear in the women in his movies, and he’s willing to put it there personally.

It’s also the case that he is the one writing these movies, insisting on the random violence and viciousness. He doesn’t get to excuse it by pointing to the printing on the page and saying that the choking and the murder and the spitting are in the script, therefore he’s got to do it personally.

This is one of those interviews where you like the subject less and less as it proceeds, because he is so oblivious to what he’s saying and his excuses are all so self-serving. And then I thought of the brutal misogyny inflicted on Jennifer Jason Leigh in the last Tarentino movie I saw, and realized that was literally the last Tarentino movie I will ever see.