Epigenetics

Liv posts a brief summary of what people should know about epigenetics on dreamwidth at: Hypertext in the book of life

The most important implications, which I didn't realise had become standard knowledge while I wasn't paying attention until Liv told me about it, are:

1. DNA has annotations on to say which bits are active. And some of these are fairly permanent, like to say "this cell is a liver cell, turn on all the liver cell genes and turn off all the heart cell genes" or "living in hostile environment, activate all survivalist genes". And some of these are passed on through gametes to offspring and make a measurable difference to the next generation. Biologists knew this could happen in theory, but it sounded suspiciously Lamarkian, so it took a while before people realised that it was prevalent, and important!

2. Stem cells are cells which haven't differentiated into specialised sorts yet, as in a foetus. If you want to grow tissue in a lab, you need to grow it from stem cells to get the right sort of cells. And you used to have to get stem cells from a foetus :( But now we can make stem cells out of mature cells. We can't grow a whole organ yet, but it's starting to useful for some sorts of tissue!

See, I can be concise sometimes! :)

The Ink Readers of Doi Saket

The Ink Readers of Doi Saket

I really liked the setting, I liked the concept of the village reading and recording the wishes set adrift in the river, and that there was a story in a non-western setting where people were just ordinary people.

But people who knew more about the setting than me said it definitely felt a bit appropriative. And after a short while, all the humour like "X did Y, which was said to cause Z, though of course no-one believes that any more. A year later, Z happened to him, but that's not important right now," started to feel a bit forced.

Inspired by this story but not necessarily about it

The wishes written and thrown into the river are said to come true. And many of them do, if not always exactly as you'd expect. It seems some of them come true by subterfuge, and some of them come true through coincidence (but many more than you might statistically expect throughout the course of the story) and some come true through magic, maybe. I think the story overdoes it, but I think it's something that can work very well, if the author doesn't try too hard to set up rules exactly when it will and it won't: in Babylon Five, when wishes made to Morden eventually come true through Morden's scheming, even if not to his intend or advantage; in Tolkien, when trusting Gandalf and Fate and Goodness and Manwe makes everything turn out well, even if the mechanism for that is obscure; in Shakespeare, when the witches give a true-but-obscure prophecy to Macbeth.

When I first read Macbeth, I was confused -- why did the witches do that? If they could tell the future, why weren't they more systematic about it? And if not, how did they know exactly what would happen? But now I think it's something that can happen in stories sometimes even if it's unrealistic.