Biology in Science Fiction

Cum Grano Salis

2009-11-21T21:17:00.000-08:00

Imagine you and the rest of your expedition are stranded on a distant planet. Food stores are running low, but the local trees produce a lovely chartreuse fruit. It's tasty and full of nutrients, but has the unfortunate side-effect of killing the experimental animals you've tested it on (as illustrated above). So what can you do?

"Cum Grano Salis" is a good old-fashioned science fiction problem story that was originally published in a 1959 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. Since figuring out the scientific solution to the problem is the whole point of the story, I won't give it away. But if you want a few hints, you can follow the links below (mousing over the links will probably give it all away):

chartreuse is the same color as this pigment with this structure, which can have this property.
Cum Grano Salis means this

Read "Cum Grano Salis" by David Gordon

(Edited to make the links clearer)
Illustration by Emsh (Ed Emshwiller) for "Cum Grano Salis", originally published in Astounding Science Fiction, May 1959, currently at Project Gutenberg. Colored by me.
Tags:science fiction, biochemistry

Directory of Free Science Fiction With Biology

2009-11-18T17:27:00.000-08:00

You may have noticed a slight change to the Biology in Science Fiction blog's appearance. The change isn't merely cosmetic - I finally launched a project I've been fiddling with for quite a while.

One of the wonders of the internet is the abundance of quality fiction you can read (or listen to) for absolutely free. I've been collecting free fiction links as I run across them in a list, which has gotten less and less useful as the list has grown. My original plan was to clean up and organize the list for my own use (removing all those dead SciFiction links, alas), but as I got down to sorting, I realized that other people might be interested in what I was putting together. Add to that the fact that there are more free stories released each month than I could possibly blog about and the solution was obvious: make a web site with the information!

Of course it turned into a bigger project than I expected, but I think it's finally ready to share:

Science Fiction With Biology Free Fiction Directory

I'm still tweaking the formatting and the categories and I have a long list of links that are yet to be added, but I'm hoping that some of you will take a look and let me know if the layout is confusing or anything is broken or missing.

You can subscribe to the site's RSS feed to keep on top of the latest additions:

Subscribe to the Biology in Science Fiction: Free Fiction directory feed

You can rate the stories, leave a comment or send me a suggestion or correction.

I hope you find the database useful and interesting!

Tags:science fiction, biology

The Clone Song: You don't need to

2009-11-15T23:33:00.000-08:00

Oh, give me a clone
Of my own flesh and bone
With its Y chromosome changed to X.
And after it's grown,
Then my own little clone
Will be of the opposite sex.

The Beam Me Up blog has posted "The Clone Song", a ditty sung to the tune of Home on the Range, penned by Randall Garrett and Isaac Asimov. As the first verse above suggests, it's all about -er- self love.

It actually reminds me a bit of "Nine Lives", Ursula Le Guin's clone-based short story that was published in Playboy in 1969. Those clones didn't need anyone but each other either. (I find the whole "if I had a clone I'd be totally into incest" theme a bit creepy, but it's a popular one in SF.)

Tags:science fiction, clones

Will aliens look like us?

2009-11-11T20:08:00.000-08:00

Michael Shermer - science writer and founder of The Skeptics Society - has made a brief video in which he explains why it's quite unlikely that aliens would look essentially like humans with minor differences in eye shape or forehead topology.

He continues in an article in the November issue Scientific American in which he discusses the possibilities with Richard Dawkins, who isn't quite as skeptical as Shermer. Dawkins argues:

In the film vignette, you implied a quite staggering rarity, so rare that you don’t expect two humanoid life-forms in the entire universe. Now you are ... pointing out, correctly, that a certain inevitability would predict that humanoids should have evolved more than once on Earth! So, yes, we can say that humanoids are fairly improbable, but not necessarily all that improbable! Anything approaching “a certain inevitability” would mean millions or even billions of humanoid life-forms in the universe, simply because the number of available planets is so huge. Now, my guess is intermediate between your two extremes ... I suspect that humanoids are not so very rare as to justify the statistical superlatives that you permitted yourself in the vignette.

The argument depends on how often life has actually arisen in the universe, and I hard to find it disagree with Dawkins when considering the potentially vast number of intelligent species that could have arisen in an infinite universe.

However, I think Dawkins slightly misses Shermer's point. The way that popular culture depicts aliens - from the many humanoid species in the Star Trek and Star Wars universes to the big-eyed Greys of UFO abduction stories - is almost certainly wrong. Even if the universe holds a million planets with intelligent humanoids, the chance that humans will encounter them is vanishingly small. If we do eventually find intelligent extraterrestrial life, it's likely that they won't be anything like us. And they almost certainly won't look like this:

Related: Darren Naish at Tetrapod Zoology on "Richard Dawkins and the crappy 'humanoid dinosaurs' that just won't die" (based on Dawkins' comments quoted in Shermer's column).

Read "Will E.T. look like us? at Scientific American

Or if you want something a bit lighter, check out "Star Trek's 6 Most Ridiculous Alien Races" at Cracked.com (although in an infinite universe perhaps there really is a planet inhabited solely with individuals who appear to match the "cartoonish Italian mobster stereotype" of early 20th-century Earth - anything's possible, right?).

Image: Cantina scene from the Star Wars Holiday Special
Tags:aliens, biology

Sci Fi Psi

2009-11-10T21:48:00.000-08:00

At io9 Charlie Jane Anders wrote about the riffs on Star Wars in the Ewan McGregor-George Clooney movie The Men Who Stare at Goats. The movie is a humorous fictionalized take on Jon Ronson's (supposedly) non-fiction book by the same name, which documents the real-life US Army program to develop psychic soldiers in the 1980s.

At Wired's Danger Room blog, David Hambling takes a closer look at the program, and its origins in New Age woo. But it's woo with a sciency overlay. Just take a look at Lt. Col. Jim Channon's First Earth Batallion manual (pdf), which suggests that psionic powers are a matter of evolution (we may be abled to live on a diet of radio waves and our carbon based bodies may be turning into silicon!).

I kind of like the manual's description of warrior monks who participate in "ethical combat" and are connected into the biosphere and the universe. But I find the psychic powers idea to be pretty ~~silly~~ non-supported by any conclusive evidence that it work. Read the whole Danger Room post for more about what was tried and what they succeeded in doing.

But the idea that the human mind holds untapped abilities is a familiar one to anyone who has read the classics of science fiction from the mid-20th century. That was due in large part to the fascination of John W. Campbell - influential as the editor of Astounding Science Fiction - with pseudoscience. As Wikipedia quotes:

In 1957, novelist and critic James Blish tallied: "From the professional writer's point of view, the primary interest in Astounding Science Fiction continues to center on the editor's preoccupation with extrasensory powers and perceptions ('psi') as a springboard for stories.... 113 pages of the total editorial content of the January and February 1957 issues of this magazine are devoted to psi, and 172 to non-psi material.... By including the first part of a serial that later becomes a novel about psi the total for these first two issues of 1957 is 145 pages of psi text, and 140 pages of non-psi." James Blish, The Issues at Hand, pages 86-87.

But psi-based science fiction stories didn't start with Campbell. There's a long list of pre-golden age SF featuring telepaths at io9, many of which have passed into the public domain. And moving into mid-century - Campbell's era - there are number of SF classics featuring characters with psi powers: A. E. van Vogt's Slan (1946), Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human (1953), Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man (1953), Isaac Asimov's Second Foundation (1953), John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos (1957), Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), to name a few.

There is a common theme that development of psychic powers is supposed to move Homo sapiens up the "evolutionary ladder"*:

"E for Esper," he muttered. "Esper for Extra Sensory Perception . . . For Telepaths, Mind Readers, Brain Peepers. [ . . . ] Those damned mind-readers are supposed to be the greatest advance since Homo sapiens evolved. E for Evolution. Bastards! E for Exploitation!
~ The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester

Definitely good reading, but personally I don't consider telepathy to be "science" no matter how it's dressed up in technical terms. While some parapsychology researchers have claimed to see positive results, those studies are controversial and, even if valid have only demonstrated minor effects.

I get the sense that SF authors sometimes want to write about powerful wizards in a technology-based setting, hence psi-powered supermen that explore the stars. I don't think that's a bad thing, but it does annoy me when people go on about about how "hard" the science was during the ~~olden days~~ "Golden Age".

And coming back around to The Men That Stare at Goats, it sounds very much like the story of people who view the world through a science fiction lens. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not.

(Danger Room post via BoingBoing)

* Of course evolution has no direction or goal. Continuing human evolution does not mean that Homo sapiens will become more "advanced", only different. Listing the SF stories that get that wrong is a completely different post.

Tags:science fiction, parapsychology, psi

Biopolitics of Popular Culture Seminar

2009-11-09T19:59:00.000-08:00

The Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technologies (IEET) will be hosting a seminar on the "Biopolitics of Popular Culture":

Popular culture is full of tropes and cliches that shape our debates about emerging technologies. Our most transcendent expectations for technology come from pop culture, and the most common objections to emerging technologies come from science fiction and horror, from Frankenstein and Brave New World to Gattaca and the Terminator.

Why is it that almost every person in fiction who wants to live a longer than normal life is evil or pays some terrible price? What does it say about attitudes towards posthuman possibilities when mutants in Heroes or the X-Men, or cyborgs in Battlestar Galactica or Iron Man, or vampires in True Blood or Twilight are depicted as capable of responsible citizenship?

Is Hollywood reflecting a transhuman turn in popular culture, helping us imagine a day when magical and muggle can live together in a peaceful Star Trek federation? Will the merging of pop culture, social networking and virtual reality into a heightened augmented reality encourage us all to make our lives a form of participative fiction?
During this day long seminar we will engage with culture critics, artists, writers, and filmmakers to explore the biopolitics that are implicit in depictions of emerging technology in literature, film and television.

Sounds pretty interesting - and some of the confirmed speakers should be familiar to science fiction fans:

David Brin, described as a "scientist, best-selling author, popular commentator on modern technological and political trends". I know him best for his "Uplift" novels.
Richard Kadrey, novelist and tech writer. "Carbon Copy" his 1998 short tale of the first human clone went from the pages of Wired to form the basis of what Kadrey calls "one of the worst movies of 2001"
Annalee Newitz, lead editor of io9 and freelance writer.
Brian Cross, co-creator of Eclipse Phase, a post-apocalyptic transhuman conspiracy RPG.
Jess Nevins, a reference librarian at UC Riverside who is well known for annotating comics (hopefully rescued from Geocities). He's the author of The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana and has a special interest in stempunk.
PJ Manney, writer for fantasy series Hercules and Xena: Warrior Princess, and Chairperson of the Board of Directors of Humanity+. Humanity+ Executive Director Alex Lightman will also be participating.
RJ Eskow, who writes about and (consults on) technology, health care and public policy. He blogs at the Huffington Post.
And of course a number of IEET-associated individuals will be participating, including Natasha Vita-More "pioneer of transhumanist aethetics", writer Jamais Casicio, and J. Hughs, author of Citizen Cyborg.

You can check out all of the particpants at the official web site.

The seminar will be held on Friday, December 4th in Irvine, California. Click for details. If you register before November 15th, the cost is only $99 - $60 for students.

Saturday and Sunday, December 5th and 6th, the Humanity+ Summit will be held at the same location.
Tags:science fiction, biopolitics, movies

Empire of the Ants

2009-11-05T19:20:00.000-08:00

In a few miles of this forest there must be more ants than there are men in the whole world! This seemed to Holroyd a perfectly new idea. In a few thousand years men had emerged from barbarism to a stage of civilisation that made them feel lords of the future and masters of the earth! But what was to prevent the ants evolving also? Such ants as one knew lived in little communities of a few thousand individuals, made no concerted efforts against the greater world. But they had a language, they had an intelligence! Why should things stop at that any more than men had stopped at the barbaric stage? Suppose presently the ants began to store knowledge, just as men had done by means of books and records, use weapons, form great empires, sustain a planned and organised war?
~ "Empire of the Ants", HG Wells (1911)

Sometimes an ant is more than just an ant.

University of Kent senior lecturer in the history of science Dr. Charlotte Sleigh has been known as "the ant woman" for her research into the way that society has shaped the way scientists have looked at ants. In her 2003 book Ant she discusses how ants came to represent "Europeans' fears about the complicity of savage insects and humans" and how that was "part of a larger anxiety about "degeneration".

This has been well documented by historians; predictions that the sun was going to die, that hte comforts of civilization would cause evolution to run backwards, that the working classes were out-breeding the rest, and that the white man could not survive the tropics all contributed to the sense that things were going downhill around the turn of the twentieth century.

This is, of course, the period when H. G. Wells wrote most of his novels, and it is no coincidence that many of his monsters were quite ant-like. And, of course, in Wells's short story "Empire of the Ants" the monstrous creatures truly are ants. Sleigh points out:

Although they are large as ants go, they are still too small to be shot, and little enough to swarm and surge like Ewers' black carpet. The ants also seem to have evolved greater intelligence than normal. The Portuguese captain turns out to be incompetent; he sends the lieutenant to his death on an infested ship of human corpses. He futilely fires his cannon at the ants' ranks - ranks that simply scatter and recondense like so many droplets of black water. No wonder, then, that the mission fails. The ship turns around and sails away with all haste, leaving the ants to their new-found mastery of the continent.
What gives the story its bite is its title. The tale goes beyond the fantastic and taps into contemporary fears about the tenability of European empires.
[. . . ]
Wells could not resist pushing anxieties about the limits of progress and the fragility of European superiority to their furthest extreme.

That brought to mind another ant short story, Carl Stephenson's "Leiningen Versus the Ants", originally published in Esquire in 1938. The story is about a "scrappy, no-nonsense" settler in the Brazilian wilderness who battles to save his plantation from being overrun by ants. Even though he's the hero, when I read the story I ended up quite disliking Leiningen (who is racist, sexist, and arrogant) and was rooting for the ants to win. But, alas, he does. Apparently Europeans can conquer the savage wilderness if he is of strong enough character and willing to do anything to succeed.

You can read "Empire of the Ants" in the HG Wells collection The Country of the Blind, and Other Stories at Project Gutenberg. (The collection also includes the story "Valley of Spiders", which may or may not symbolize something beyond icky eight-legged creatures. ) Aternatively, you can download the pdf of just "Empire of the Ants" from Horrormasters.com

Read "Leiningen Versus the Ants" at Classic Short Stories.

You can purchase Ant and Sleigh's follow-up book Six Legs Better: A Cultural History of Myrmecology
at Amazon.com:

Top Photo: Ant Pile by Thirteen of Clubs. http://www.flickr.com/photos/thirteenofclubs/ / CC BY-SA 2.0
Bottom Photo: Salivating Ant by NeilPhotography. http://www.flickr.com/photos/neilspicys/ / CC BY 2.0

Tags:science fiction, ants, evolution

The Stonemaker Argument

2009-11-02T18:51:00.000-08:00

The latest episode of science-loving web comic The Stonemaker Argument features a little girl after my own heart.

Go read the whole comic!

(via Bad Astronomy)

Tags:science fiction, biology

Genetics in Fiction @ Clarkesworld

2009-11-02T18:49:00.000-08:00

Roger Moraga has a nice article in the current issue of Clarkesworld Magazine on "Modern Genetics in the World of Fiction":

Most of the time there is a certain amount of unrealistic superscience involved in the creation of speculative fiction, but as a geneticist I can't help but wonder if it is really necessary to trample all over what we do know about genetics to make it happen. Ultimately it is up to the creator to decide how much, and how soon, to depart from "real" Science, but before long it may not be necessary to depart much at all. A more in-depth look at what genetic engineering is doing today may be enough to make one's imagination run wild.

You should definitely go read the complete article for yourself, but I will note that I couldn't agree more with Moraga's conclusion:

If you are a writer considering genetic engineering for your next work, take a little time to invite a molecular biologist to a drink or two and pick his* brain. We don't bite, we love speculating about science fiction, and many of us even like free drinks.

* and don't forget that some molecular biologists are she rather than he (hint hint).
Tags:science fiction, genetics, genetic engineering

The Unselfish Gene: Altruism and Zombies

2009-10-31T12:55:00.000-07:00

The Unselfish Gene is the first published novel of science journalist Robert D. Burns, and it sounds like a lively mixture of pulpy science fiction-horror and genetics. The novel's blurb gives you a taste of that:

It's love and terrorism in the time of cholera. In the mid-21st century, a form of bird flu has killed billions and turned most of the rest into mindless, stumbling zombie-like invalids. The few humans who had immunity now face the threat of a comet on a collision course with Earth. Settlers from the Moon colony were spared the disease, but face their own threats to survival: radiation-induced mental illness, a limited gene pool and shrinking resources. The Moon settlers have launched a last-ditch mission to Earth to salvage human DNA and other crucial materials ... before the comet strikes. The salvage crew find the biggest threat to the mission is neither the zombies or the comet, but insanity within their own ranks.

Now if you are a biology geek like me, the first thing you think of when you hear the novel's title is Richard Dawkin's classic book on evolution The Selfish Gene. It turns out that that was indeed one of Burns's inspirations for the novel, as he told Irma Arkus in an interview on Hi-Sci-Fri (The interview begins at 22:17). They also discuss the evolution of altruism, the deleterious effects of radiation, and other sciency bits from the novel.

Read excerpts from The Unselfish Gene, and take a peek at the novel's illustrations.

Purchase The Unselfish Gene @ Amazon.com.

Bioscience books discussed on the Hi-Sci-Fi podcast:

David Sloan Wilson's Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior.

Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene

Tags:science fiction, zombies, genetics

Creature Features

2009-10-30T18:25:00.000-07:00

If you plan to stay in this Halloween weekend, you might want to plug your laptop into your TV, dim the lights and watch one of the many free SF-horror movies featuring terrible (in more ways than one) creatures.

Here are a few to get you started:

Movie: The Killer Shrews (1959) (Google video)
The science fiction setup: A doctor performs experiments to make humans half-size which have the unintended side effect of creating giant, venomous shrews.

Sometimes called one of the worst sci-fi movies ever made, you can get a taste of Killer Shrews from the trailer:

Movie: Giant Spider Invasion (1975) (Hulu.com, US only)
The science fiction setup: "NASA scientists Dr. Langer and Dr. Vance try to save Wisconsin from 15-foot flesh-eating spiders from another dimension."

Movie: Empire of the Ants (1977) (Hulu.com, US only)
The science fiction setup: "An aggressive land developer takes a boatload of prospective buyers to a reclaimed swamp in the southeast. While there, the group is attacked by a swarm of huge ants, the result of genetic mutation after exposure to atomic wastes."

These movies may be more silly than scary, but they'll keep you entertained for a few hours while you are waiting for trick-or-treaters.

You can find more free horror movies at Classic Cinema Online, YouTube, and Hulu.com

Tags:science fiction, biology, horror

When it Changed - Science Into Fiction

2009-10-29T21:51:00.000-07:00

UK publisher Comma Press has just released When it Changed, a cool-sounding new anthology where writers and scientists have teamed up to produce something that incorporates both their specialities. From their book's web site:

When It Changed is an attempt to put authors and scientists back in touch with each other, to re-introduce research ideas with literary concerns, and to re-forge the alloy that once made SF great. Composed collaboratively – through a series of visits and conversations between leading authors and practicing scientists – it offers fictionalised glimpses into the far corners of current research fields, be they in nanotechnology, invertebrate physiology, particle physics, or software archaeology. From Planck's Length (the smallest indivisible distance) to Plankton (potential saviours of the Earth's ecosystem), from virtual encounters between Witgenstein and Turing, to future civilisations torn asunder by different readings of the Standard Model, together these stories represent a literary 'experiment' in the true sense of the word, and endeavour to isolate a whole new strain of the SF bug.

Edited by award-winning author Geoff Ryman, the scientists involved include two biologists and a bioethicist:

Dr. Jennifer Rowntree, post-doctoral researcher, Faculty of Life Science, University of Manchester. Rowntree is a plant evolutionary ecologist whose reseach includes "genetics of plant-plant and plant-animal interactions and the value of genetic diversity in plant communities."
Dr. Matthew Cobb, Programme Director Biology, the University of Manchester. Cobb and his laboratory study how genes and environment shape animal behavior and communication. Most of his research has focused on pheromones and olfaction in fruit flies. Cobb was paired with writer Simon Ings, who wrote the story "Zoology" for the anthology.
Professor Steve Williams, Williams develops and uses magnetic resonance imaging techniques to study appetite regulation and gut-brain interctions.
Professor John Harris, Lord Alliance Professor of Bioethics, and Director of the Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation, University of Manchester. He has written a number of books, including Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making Better People and On Cloning.

When it Changed had it's UK debut at an apparent joint event of the overlapping Manchester Literature Festival and Manchester Science Festival (which runs through the weekend -TThere's a lecture on "Exploring neuroscience through literature" on Sunday, Nov. 1, which is right up Bio in SF's alley). You can read all about the October 24th panel on the Manchester Literature Festival Blog.

When it Changed will be released in the US in April 2010.

(via io9)

Tags:science fiction, biology, When it Changed

Joan Slonczewski's Biology in Science Fiction Course

2009-10-27T22:41:00.000-07:00

The Columbus Dispatch published a nice article about Kenyon College biology professor and science fiction writer Joan Slonczewski's Biology in Science Fiction course:

"It's well-known as being amazing," said Kenyon student Ferrell Garramone, an 18-year-old studio-art major from Nashville, Tenn.

"I took (advanced-placement) biology in high school, and it was just a drone. This is much better than reading a textbook."

The offering has plenty of required reading: six novels, including two by Slonczewski. And it includes pop quizzes, class presentations and homework assignments known as "mutant challenges."
[snip]
Kenyon students -- most with backgrounds in literature, philosophy and the arts -- relate to the approach.

"I think it epitomizes liberal-arts education," said Rachel Rubenstein, a 21-year-old American studies major from San Francisco. "It's interesting, and it's exciting."

There has been a lot of discussion of late about how to make science interesting and engaging to non-scientists. This seems like a great approach - not only do students learn about biology without being put off by a dry textbook, but the course also probably introduces science fiction to students who wouldn't read it otherwise. It's a win-win!

Slonczewski has put the class syllabus, quizes, related links, and study guide online. The class has started a related wiki, and many of the students' projects are online.

This year the course focuses on "Mutants". Some of the science fiction references that were used:

Mutants in X-Men
Star Trek:TOS episodes "The Trouble with Tribbles" and "The Devil in the Dark"
Star Trek:TNG episode "The Measure of a Man"
X-Files episodes "The Host", "The Erlenmeyer Flask", "The Post-Modern Prometheus"
The Time Machine by HG Wells (full free text with audio, buy at Amazon.com)
Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut (Wikipedia, Amazon.com)
Dune by Frank Herbert (Wikipedia, Amazon.com)
Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton (Wikipedia, Amazon.com)
Slonczewski's own Door into Ocean (Wikipedia, Amazon.com) and Brain Plague (Amazon.com)
Barlow's Guide to Extraterrestrials (Amazon.com)

See the course syllabus for the full list.

(I find it oddly comforting that her students are required to have a calculator that doesn't look much different than the one I used in my own college days, way back in the 80s. I suppose the difference is that my good old Casio was the fanciest bit of technology I carried around with me, while students today probably all have cell phones with more computing power.)

Related posts about Joan Slonczewski:

SF Pet Fish: Guest Post at the Reef Tank

2009-10-27T21:43:00.000-07:00

I have another guest post up at The Reef Tank blog, in which I talk about my favorite science fictional pet fish. Go check it out!

Image: Borg Hugh examines Livingston, Captain Picard's pet lionfish

Tags:science fiction, biology

ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS, EXCEPT...

2009-10-12T21:21:00.000-07:00

" . . . relay this information to Earth. Tsien destroyed three hours ago. I'm only survivor. Using my suit radio – no idea if it has enough range, but it's the only chance. Please listen carefully. THERE IS LIFE ON EUROPA. I repeat: THERE IS LIFE ON EUROPA. . . "

~ 2010: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clarke

Europa, one of the Jupiter's large moons, holds a special place in the minds of science fiction writers and astrobiologists alike. What sets Europa apart from the other planets and moons in our solar system is that it is covered with a fairly smooth surface layer of frozen water, and its interior is much hotter than its surface, suggesting that there could be a zone of liquid water under that protective layer of ice where life might exist. That easily accessible source of water on its surface could also make Europa a handy refueling stop for space ships exploring the outer solar system – assuming there isn't the sort of life that destroyed the ill-fated spaceship Tsien in Clarke's 2010.

In the afterword to 2010, Arthur C. Clarke says his Europans were inspired in part by a 1980 article by Richard C. Hoagland – "The Europa Enigma" – which describes his "quite brilliant concept" that there might be life on Europa. Since then, NASA's Galileo exploration mission to Jupiter and its moons has provided more detailed information about the moon's surface:

Prior to the Galileo mission, scientists' knowledge of Europa was simply a small ice- covered moon with an exceptionally bright surface covered by faint curved and linear markings. Now, scientists see evidence of a young and thin, cracked and ruptured ice shell, probably moving slowly over the surface of a briny ocean that is 100 kilometers (62 miles) or more deep.

University of Arizona Professor of Planetary Sciences Richard J. Greenberg, a member of the Galileo Imaging Team, believes that Europa might even be able to support fairly complex life forms, as Discovery News reported last week:

Judging by how quickly Europa's surface ice is replenished, Richard Greenberg estimates that enough oxygen reaches the subterranean ocean to sustain "macrofauna" -- more complex, animal-like organisms. Assuming Europa life forms would need as much oxygen as Earth-like fish, Greenberg estimates the moon's ocean has enough oxygen to support 6.6 billion pounds of macrofauna.

Unconstrained by the limitations of biology, futurist/physicist Freeman Dyson has speculated a bit more wildly, suggesting that we should be looking for flowers on Europa's surface:

Life could be visible from orbiting spacecraft, however, if it made a home in cracks in Europa's shell that connect the surface to the interior, Dyson said.
Such life might take the form of flowers with a parabolic shape that focuses the dim sunlight falling on Europa on the interior of the plant. Flowers with such shapes [...] are found in Arctic climes on Earth, where the plants have evolved to maximise solar energy.

Europa flowers could be detectable through a phenomenon called retroreflection, in which light gets reflected back to its source, Dyson said. This optical effect is seen in light reflected from animals' eyes, and was used in the design of road signs and mirrors left behind on the moon by Apollo astronauts.

My first thought was that Dyson had wandered off into Larry Niven's Known Space, but on further consideration I think it's an interesting idea – assuming that Dyson was referring to life forms with a superficial resemblance to flowers, rather than actual Earth-type plants. Or as University of Washington astrobiologist John Baross explained:

As for Dyson's flower suggestion, he says it is "a very radical" idea. "On Earth, flowering plants evolved during the Cretaceous and became diverse by co-evolving with insects. . . . I would not include flowering plants to my list of life-forms to look for."
"Any photosynthetic system on Europa would have to live at a depth removed from the high radiation bombarding the ice surface and still get light," Baross says. "Having said this, it would be worthwhile to make more comprehensive observations and analysis of some of the surface features, including the deeply coloured ridges [...]," he says. "One might find evidence for biosignatures or very interesting chemistry."

More likely than surface flowers are organisms similar to those found around the deep sea hydrothermal vents on Earth. Frank Carsey and his colleagues at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory are designing robotic vehicles that will be able to cut through ice and explore the watery world beneath, initially in Antarctica, but with the hope of eventually exploring Europa's depths. Until we are able to send exploratory probes, the possibility of life on Europa is little more than educated speculation.

Free Short Fiction:

"A Spy in Europa" by Alastair Reynolds
"The Color of Sunfire" by Larry Niven (set in Know Space, with Slaver Sunflowers)

Further Background Reading:

Scans of Richard Hoagland's article "The Europa Enigma" (Star and Sky Magazine, Jan. 1980)
Discovery Channel Video: Top 5 Reasons Europa Rocks
Technical Presentation: "Checking up on Arthur C. Clarke: The next mission to Europa and the Jupiter System" by Dr. Bill Moore
University of Arizona's Richard Greenberg has written two popular science books about Europa. His most recent is Unmasking Europa: The Search for Life on Jupiter's Ocean Moon (link to Amazon.com)
2010: Odyssey Two (link to Amazon.com)

Top Image: The Conamara Chaos. "a view of a small region of the thin, disrupted ice crust in the Conamara region of Jupiter's moon Europa showing the interplay of surface colors with ice structures." From NASA's Galileo Image Gallery. More details.
Middle Image: Europa and the Thrace Region. This image shows an image of the cracked surface of Europa. From NASA's Galileo Image Gallery.
Middle Image:"Metal Flower" http://www.flickr.com/photos/quepollo/ / CC BY 2.0
Bottom Image: Artist's concept of a cryobot and hydrobot that can melt through ice and then explore the water beneath. From "The Search for A Planetary Ocean on Europa" at JPL.
Tags:science fiction, biology, Europa

Science Fictional Ribosomes

2009-10-07T21:10:00.000-07:00

"What you want is to add and subtract lengths of input DNA easily, and the feedback enzyme arrangement does this. When the feedback arrangement is in place, the molecule will open itself up for transcription much more easily, and more rapidly. Your program will be transcribed onto two strings of RNA. One of the RNA strings will go to a reader - a ribosome - for translation into a protein. Initially, the first RNA will carry a simple start-up code ––

~ Blood Music by Greg Bear, 1985

This year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to three scientists - Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas Steitz, and Ada Yonath - for their study of the structure and function of the ribosome", the organelle assembles proteins from amino acids based on nucleic acid sequences. Since ribosomes are essential part of the cellular machinery, it's no surprise that writers who incorporate genetics and biotechnology into their fiction include it in their fiction. They even provided the name for the bioscience-based science fiction subgenre called "ribofunk".

This classic 1971 human reenactment of protein synthesis, made by the Department of Chemistry at Stanford, can give you a pretty good idea of how ribosomes work¹. (Click for bigger video)
The much abbreviated version:

DNA sequences that encode proteins are used as a template for the transcription of messenger RNA (mRNA)
a ribosome attaches to the mRNA
protein synthesis begins at a specific sequence of three nucleotides - the AUG start codon - within the mRNA
a transfer RNA (tRNA) that has a sequence complementary to the start codon sequence (the anticodon) carries the amino acid methonine to the ribosome.
a tRNA with an anticodon complementary to the next three nucleotides in the mRNA - the next codon - also binds the ribosome, and the amino acid it carries added to the initial methionine
this process continues along the length of the mRNA until a stop codon is reached and the newly synthesized protein is released from the ribosome

Greg Bear's mention of ribosomes in Blood Music gets the process right. Other science fiction writers have used ribosomes much more fancifully in their stories. Take, for example, the 2003 short story "Junk DNA" by Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling:

"You’re about to tell me that Alan Turing anticipated the notion of DNA as a program tape that’s read by ribosomes. And I’m not gonna be surprised."

"One step further," coaxed Veruschka. "Since the human body uses one kind of ribosome, why not replace that with another? The Universal Ribosome–it reads in its program as well as its data before it begins to act. All from that good junk DNA, yes Janna? And what is junk? Your bottom drawer? My garbage can? Your capitalist attic, and my start-up garage!"

"Normal ribosomes skip right over the junk DNA," said Janna. "It’s supposed to be meaningless to the modern genome. Junk DNA is just scribbled-over things. Like the crossed-out numbers in an address book. A palimpsest. Junk DNA is the half-erased traces of the original codes–from long before humanity."

While they use lots of sciency terminology, the description of ribosome function doesn't make much sense. Of course ribosomes skip over "junk DNA" - they don't interact with DNA at all. And while some "junk DNA" may be transcribed into "junk mRNA", it appears that those sequences are degraded before they can be used to encode protein. I'm just not grokking how "junk DNA" that is primarily made up degenerate coding sequences², could be translated into proteins that do anything more than muck up cells, even given an Universal Ribosome Turing-like machine.³

And I should say that "Junk DNA" is an entertaining story if you can gloss over the nonsensical biology details - read it for yourself for free at Asimov's Science Fiction.

I'm hoping that science fiction writers will embrace recent research exploring complex biochemistry of our cells to come up with some interesting variations on life as we know it. I just wish they would get their terms straight (of course, that's probably just me).

Oh, and if you know other SF that uses ribosomes as a plot device, mention them in the comments. I know there is an episode of Star Trek:TNG that does, but I couldn't come up with any other examples.

1. Note that the ribosomal components are not depicted to scale. They are also a bit more colorfully dressed than you find in your typical cell.

2. What most biologists call "junk DNA" is primarily made up of repetitive DNA sequences from transposable elements, not interesteringly "scribbled over" ancient genes.

3. While DNA-based Turing machines have been proposed (and even shown to work in rudimentary form), the "computations" are not performed by protein synthesis, which is the function of ribosomes I don't think that's the case, anyway. My understanding of Turing machines is a little fuzzy. Mark Chu-Carroll has posts about them here and here and here that I'm still thinking about.

My related posts:

Gregor Mendel Died for Your Sins! Biopunk and Ribofunk
Another Day, Another Woman Wins a Nobel Prize for Nucleic Acid Biochemistry (at Women in Science)

Animation: "Animation of the small subunit of the Thermus thermophilus ribosome. RNA shown in orange, protein in blue." Taken from PDB 1FKA and animated by David S. Goodsell
Tags:science fiction, ribosomes

Telomeres, Aging, and Science Fiction

2009-10-05T20:15:00.000-07:00

It was announced today that Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider and Jack Szostack won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their "discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase." While the winners' biochemical studies have been extremely important in our understanding of how cells divide, what has caught the attention of science fiction writers is the role that telomeres - or more precisely the loss of telomere sequences - plays in the process of aging.

A bit of biochemical background:

When Watson and Crick figured out the double-helix structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, one of the cool aspects of their model was that the structure immediately suggested how identical copies could be produced when cells divide: the two strands of DNA could "unzip" and be used as templates to create a new double strand. Research into the actual biochemistry of DNA replication, however, discovered a problem. The enzymes that synthesize the duplicate strand of DNA - DNA polymerases - can only add nucleotides onto an existing nucleic acid sequence called a primer, which is made of RNA, rather than DNA.

When the DNA sequence that is being duplicated is a circle, like most bacterial chromosomes, the head of the growing DNA strand eventually meets up with its tail, completing the sequence. However, the DNA in the nuclei of eukaryotic cells - which includes fungi, plant and animal cells - is packaged into large linear chromosomes. Consider that every human starts out as a single cell but ends up with an estimated 10 trillion (10¹³) cells after many many cell divisions. If your chromosomes shrank every time a cell divided, they would be severely truncated by the time you were ready to pass on your DNA to your offspring and any functioning genes located near the ends of the chromosomes would be lost.

What chromosomes clearly needed is something to protect its ends during replication, and that "something" turns out to be a telomere. A telomere is a short DNA sequence on the end of the that is repeated many times and folds into a three-dimensional structure that protects the ends of chromosomes. Nobel winner Blackburn had compared telomeres to the plastic tips that prevent shoelaces from fraying.

Imagining biological aglets paints a pretty decent picture of what telomeres do, but doesn't really capture the dynamic nature of chromosome structure. An enzyme called telomerase can extend the repeating telomere sequence, but telomerase is absent from most adult cells, so a bit of the telomere sequence is lost every time a cell divides. Once its telomeres become too short, a cell loses its ability to divide and either ages or self-destructs.

If all that seems too complicated to visualize, check out this nice animated tutorial on "Solving the End-Replication Problem" or watch Elizabeth Blackburn's excellent recent lecture on telomeres and aging.

So how has telomere research been adopted into science fiction? I've looked at a couple of examples below.

Telomeres as Longevity Controls

"Look at me," said McGavin, spreading his arms again. "I'm sixty-two years old, according to my birth certificate. But my cells, my telomeres, my free-radical levels, and every other indicator say I'm twenty-five. And, if anything, I feel younger even than that."
Don's jaw must have been hanging open in surprise. "You thought I'd had a facelift, or something like that?" McGavin said, looking at him. "Plastic surgery is like a software patch. It's a quick, kludgy fix, and it often creates more problems than it solves. But rejuvenation, well, that's like a code rewrite — it's a real fix. You don't just look young again; you are young." His thin eyebrows climbed his wide forehead. "And that's what I'm offering you. The full-blown rejuvenation treatment."
~ Rollback by Robert J. Sawyer

A natural extrapolation from the correlation between the shortening of telomers and aging is that artifical means of keeping telomeres long would reverse - or at least halt - the aging process. That is one of the premises of Robert Sawyer's 2007 novel Rollback, in which the characters undergo anti-aging Rejuvination treatments that includes telomere lengthening. At least that's what the treatments are meant to do.

"We did succeed in lengthening your telomeres, Sarah, but for some reason the new endcap sequences are just being ignored when your chromosomes are being reproduced. Instead of continuing to transcribe all the way up to the end of your DNA, the replicator enzyme is stopping short, at where your chromosome arms used to end."
~ from Rollback by Robert J. Sawyer

I'm finding it hard to imagine how DNA replication would not occur in extended telomeres and be limited to the exact end of the original telomeres, since the extended telomeres should just be repeats of the same DNA sequence¹, at least the way I would do it.

The easiest way to extend telomere length is by increasing the activity of the enzyme telomerase. Scientists at the biotech company Geron, for example, have shown that expression of telomerase in adult human cells can signficantly increase the life span of those cells in culture. Extending that to "cure" human aging has been suggested by others, and is not surprisingly the claimed mechanism of action of overhyped so-called "neutraceuticals" currently on the market, as well as some anti-aging drugs that are apparently in development.

It's important to keep in mind, however, that there is a potential downside to allowing cells to divide indefinitely. The adult cells that do express telomerase are usually tumor cells. That's not particularly surprising, since one of the characteristics of cancer cells is that they keep dividing when they aren't supposed to be. While introduction of telomerase can immortalize human cells in culture without causing changes associated with cancer cells , transgenic mice with increased telomerase expression only show an increased lifespan if they don't die from tumors during their first year of life. I don't think that would be acceptable for a human therapeutic treatement.

So while telomeres are an obvious target to increase human longevity, I think we're a long way from safe and practical anti-aging treatments.

1. I haven't read Rollback beyond a few excerpts, so the speculation is all mine and not reflective of the what's in the novel. But to get all pedantic, that a particular passage seems to muddle the action of DNA polymerase enzymes, which replicate DNA, telomerase, which is a reverse transcriptase (a DNA polymerase that uses an RNA template), and "transcription" which is the synthesis of RNA using a DNA template (i.e., not DNA replication). I guess it all sounds good and sciency if you aren't familiar with the terminology. Or maybe there's a better explanation in the text. Clearly I need to put Rollback on my "to read" list.

Telomeres as the Human Equivalent of Tree Rings

While it it's been well established that telomeres get shorter as cells divide and an individual gets older, it wasn't until fairly recently that it was demonstrated that telomere shortening appears to occur at a predictable rate. In 2002 scientists at Kyushu University in Japan published a method of roughly estimating human age from DNA samples (see Tsuji et al. (2002) doi:10.1016/S0379-0738(02)00086-5). That's a nifty scientific device to determine an individual isn't the age he claims to be - say, for example if the character turns out to have been (dun, dun, dun) cloned from an adult cell.

The logic goes like this: as people age, their telomeres get shorter. When a clone is made by transferring the nucleus of an adult cell into an egg, the telomeres are presumably at their adult length, rather than the longer length found in embryos. As the clone ages, its telomeres would always be shorter than uncloned individuals of the same age. Not only would the shorter telomere length give away the fact that the individual was a clone, but the clone's life would be shortened because his cells would stop dividing at an earlier age.

Science fictionally, that was the scenario used on Stargate Atlantis. In the episode "The Kindred" the Stargate Atlantis team discovers an imprisoned Dr. Beckett. That wouldn't have been particularly remarkable if Beckett hadn't died heroically several years before. The man they found looked like Dr. Beckett, had the memories of Dr. Beckett and even was genetically identical to Dr. Beckett - except that his telomeres were 30% shorter than they should have been for a man his age. Sadly, his cells are also rapidly degenerating so that he needs to be kept in stasis until the ~~plot~~ team really needs his help.

Clone Beckett looks at the analysis of his DNA.

Now that we've been cloning mammals for more than a decade, we can ask if that scenario is plausible. The first mammal cloned from an adult somatic cell, Dolly the sheep, did indeed have shorter telomeres than expected for her age, and she died young. However, that doesn't seem to hold true for all other cloned animals. There is evidence from cloned pigs and cloned cattle, for example, that the presence of telomerase enzyme during embryonic development can rejuvinate the length of telomeres in clones. And it's still unclear whether Dolly's shorted telomeres played any role in her death.

And to complicate matters, telomere length isn't only dictated by age. For example, psychological stress has been shown to reduce telomere length to the equivalent of 10 years of aging, and men generally have shorter telomeres than women of the same age. While telomeres may be a good measure of an individuals physiological age, I suspect that they will never provide more than an approximation of chronological age.

----

So to sum it all up: telomere length can affect both the aging and health of cells, in ways that aren't entirely understood. Ideal science fiction fodder!

My related posts:

Are clones like cheap knockoffs?
Blackburn and Greider win the Nobel for Medicine: the first time two women share the prize (at Women in Science)

Top Image: Crystal structure of parallel quadruplexes from human telomeric DNA. The DNA strand (blue) circles the bases that stack together in the center around three co-ordinated metal ions (green). Produced from NDB ID: UD001 by Thomas Splettstoesser for Wikipedia.
Middle Image: Cartoon of a telomere forming a loop at the end of a chromosome. From Wikipedia.
Middle Image: Chromosomes with telomeres stained yellow. From the Human Genome Program, US Department of Energy, 1997.
Bottom Image: Clone Beckett looks at the analysis of his telomeres. Screen grab by Crystal @ Perspective.

Tags:science fiction, telomeres

And there were giants in those days . . .

2009-09-30T22:54:00.000-07:00

Imagine that at some point in the near future explorers on the moon discovered a dead space suit-clad body. Imagine further that examination of the body - nicknamed "Charlie" turned out to be 50,000 years old - and fully human. That's the premise of James P. Hogan's 1977 novel Inherit the Stars.

Now, Charlie's kind, Hunt told himself, must have evolved to their human form somewhere. That this "somewhere" was either Earth or not Earth was fairly obvious, the rules of basic logic admitting no other possibility. He traced back over what he could recall of the conventional account of the evolution of terrestrial life forms and wondered if, despite the generations of painstaking effort and research that had been devoted to the subject, there might after all be more to the story than had up until then been so confidently supposed. Several thousands of millions of years was a long time by anybody's standards; was it so totally inconceivable that somewhere in all those gulfs of uncertainty, there could be enough room to lose an advanced line of human descent which had flourished and died out long before modern man began his own ascent?

Now the novel itself isn't very good, as novels go. There is no character development and little plot beyond scientists lecturing about "Charlie's" origin. The only female character that appears in more than one paragraph is introduced via the "proud thrust of her behind under her thin skirt", provides a clue to translating Charlie's alien-language documents not through any particular expertise, but because she is familiar with the format of a diary, then spends the rest of the book pouting and winking. There is no conflict or personal relationships any of the other usual things that drive a story.

The novel provides the convenient discovery of additional artifacts to help the scientists with their analysis, including a 25 million year old spaceship with the skeleton of a non-human giant and preserved samples of Earthly flora and fauna. There's never really any question that the mystery of Charlie's life fully will be understood by the final chapter.

In the end, it's just a good old-fashioned "what if" story, and one that I found fairly interesting.(Yes I'm easy.) There aren't many science fiction novels that speculate about evolution, so that makes it fairly unique. Could technologically-advanced humans have existed on Earth 50,000 years ago? Could Charlie be the product of convergent evolution on another planet? If completely alien species were successfully introduced into a planet's ecosystem and survived (and evolved) for millions of years, how would that look to evolutionary biologists?

Now this being fiction, the scientists are able to extract a lot more information from poor Charlie's ancient freeze-dried body than you might expect, such as precise enough metabolic information to infer the composition of the atmosphere where he lived. But, very oddly from a modern perspective, there is no DNA sequence data or detailed molecular phylogenetics. That's not too surprising, since back when the novel was written DNA sequencing was in its infancy. since Sanger, Gilbert, and Berg didn't receive their Nobel Prize for their contributions towards recombinant DNA technology and sequencing until 1980, and the human genome project wasn't even a twinkle in Wally Gilbert's eye in the mid-1970s.
Professor Danchekker, the novel's chief biologist and paleontologist, is of the adaptationist school of evolutionary thought - he assumes that all of Charlie's apparent traits are due to adaptions to his environment. He also doesn't have that great a grasp on evolutionary theory, at least it seems that way when he is lecturing about it:

"The point you are overlooking here, I think, is that the evolutionary process is fundamentally made up of random events. Every living organism that exists today is the product of a chain of successive mutations that has continued over millions of years. The most important fact to grasp is that each discrete mutation is in itself a purely random event, brought about by aberrations in genetic coding and the mixing of the sex cells from different parents. The environment into which the mutant is born dictates whether it will survive to reproduce its kind or whether it will die out. Thus, some new characteristics are selected for further improvement, while others are promptly eradicated and still others are diluted away by interbreeding.

and later

"But this is typical of the way in which evolution works. The forces of natural selection will always operate in such a way as to bend and shape a new mutation, and to preserve a variation of it that offers the best prospects of survival for the species as a whole. [...]"

Evolution does not happen merely by random chance as he suggests, and he seems to be ignorant of the role that genetic drift plays alongside natural selection. And then there is his belief that humans are oh so very special:

"Have you ever stopped to think what it is that makes man so different from all the other animals on Earth? I know that we have larger brains, more versatile hands, and so forth; what I am referring to is something else. Most animals, when in a hopeless situation will resign themselves to fate and perish in ignominy. Man, on the other hand, does not know how to give in. He is capable of summoning up reserves of stubbornness and resilience that are without parallel on his planet. He is able to attack anything that threatens his survival, with an aggressiveness the like of which the Earth has never seen otherwise. It is this that has enabled him to sweep all before him, made him lord of all the beasts, helped him tame the winds, the rivers, the tides, and even the power of the Sun itself. [...]"

It seems he'd be a fan of the humanity test used by the Bene Gesserit in the Dune novels. As Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam tells Paul Atridies:

"You've heard of animals chewing off a leg to escape a trap? There's an animal kind of trick. A human would remain in the trap, endure he pain, feigning death that he might kill the trapper and remove a threat to his kind.

So it's a comforting notion that humanity's aggressiveness and ability to transcend suffering is both unique and an excellent survival trait, but I don't think there is any solid science to support that notion.

So the details of the evolutionary biology aren't at all perfect*. And yet, I still found myself entertained by the wild speculation and the final piecing-together of Charlie's life. Like I mentioned above, I'm easy. However, I probably won't be searching out the sequels - known as Hogan's "Giants Novels".

You can read Inherit the Stars for free at the Baen Free Library

If you do read it, you might be interested in some additional scientific background related to the story:

Becoming Human (an interactive web site about human evolution)
Human Population Bottleneck (Wikipedia), or more technically: Hawks J et al "Population Bottlenecks and Pleistocene Human Evolution" Mol Biol Evol 17:2-22 (2000)
On Fossil Coral Record Dates, or if you have access you can read the original paper: Wells JW "Coral Growth and Geochronometry" Nature 197:948-950 (1963)
Carbon dioxide toxicity (Wikipedia)

* Hogan is apparently a "skeptic" of the "I don't believe any modern science that touches a political issue" variety. His web site has positive links to books and sites about Intelligent Design, AIDS denialism and other pseudoscience. So his writing is likely not a good source for biology-based science fiction.

Tags:science fiction, evolution, paleontology

The Fiction of Now

2009-09-28T23:40:00.000-07:00

The September 19th issue of London-based popular science magazine New Scientist is a special section, "Sci-fi special: The fiction of now"*, guest edited by Kim Stanley Robinson.

I don't feel like I know enough to either agree or disagree with Robinson's assessment of British science fiction. I would agree with him, however, that the British SF writers who contributed flash fiction to the special issue are excellent.

Justina Robson's story "One Shot" is the only completely biological one of the bunch, but it's worth spending the short time it takes to read them all.

And if you think you could do better, enter New Scientist's Flash fiction competition with your story or 350 words or less.

* New Scientist unfortunately seem to have missed the memo that some consider SciFi a dirty word - perhaps the hyphen removes the sting?

Tags:science fiction, biology

Who knew cats had a high midi-chlorian count?

2009-09-27T19:16:00.000-07:00

Back to regular posting!

Image from Animals with Lightsabers (click for large version).

WiSF reading club: Woman on the Edge of Time - Equality Through Biotechnology?

2009-08-12T20:16:00.000-07:00

Note: I've volunteered to host the WiSF reading club discussion about Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time. The post below is my take on one aspect of the novel - one that fits in with the "biology in science fiction" theme of my blog quite nicely - but I don't mean for it to limit the discussion. I think there are a number of other issues the novel touches on that would be interesting to explore, so please have at it in the comments.

====

Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time is a disturbing novel. It's the story of Consuelo "Connie" Ramos, a poor Mexican-American woman who has been in and out of mental hospitals. She ends up committed once again after she physically defends her niece from her niece's pimp boyfriend and that's where the horror starts. In the "present day" (mid-1970s) mental hospital the patients are treated with both indifference and abuse by the staff, and Connie and several other patients are chosen to receive experimental neural control implants, not only without their consent, but in Connie's case explicitly against her wishes. The patients are considered little different than test animals by the physicians and doctors participating in the experiment:

[Connie] remembered something she had heard Dr. Redding say to Superintendent Hodges: that they had used up five thousand monkeys before they began doing these operations on patients. Used up. She had heard him say he had wanted to work with prisoners – he thought the results would be more impressive – but there had been such an uproar about three little psychosurgical procedures at Vacaville in California that his team decided to work with mental patients. "After all," he had said, smiling his best ironic smile, "they made a court case and a bleeding heart publicity brouhaha about three procedures, while San Francisco Children's Hospital does hundreds with sound and thermal probes – mostly on neurotic women and intractable children – and no one says boo."

This unfortunately wasn't just fiction. By the mid-1970s there had been a number of cases in which experimentation on human subjects without their informed consent had been revealed to the public.

But Connie has an escape of sorts*: she is visited by Luciente, a woman from 22nd century Massachusetts. She comes from a future in which time travelers leave can behind their unconscious bodies while appearing corporeally by forming a mental link with an individual at their destination. This allows Connie to leave the nightmarish hospital to visit Luciente's utopian future. What she finds is that Luciente lives in a small rustic-appearing village, a communal society in which everyone has their own space, works to their best ability, is free to pursue their interests and has their necessities are taken care of. However that appearance of rusticity is somewhat deceiving. Not only does everyone have a personal networked computer (a "kenner"), but the underpinning of their society is advanced biotechnology.

Luciente herself is a plant geneticist who develops new crops, in part by introducing new genes from the plants in carefully preserved wild areas. But the real difference that sets her society apart from Connie's is the elimination of discrimination due to gender or race. Their solution was two-fold: eliminate childbearing and child-rearing as female-only activities and separate genetics from parenthood. As Luciente explains to Connie:

"It was part of women's long revolution. When we were breaking all the old hierarchies. Finally there was that one thing we had to give up too, the only power we ever had, in return for no more power for anyone. The original production: the power to give birth. cause as long as we were biologically enchained, we'd never be equal. And males never would be humanized to be loving and tender. So we all became mothers. Every child has three. To break the nuclear bonding."

Their reproduction is based on vitro fertilization and fetuses grown in artificial wombs. After birth, each infant has three co-mothers, male and female, who are given hormonal treatments so that all can share in nursing. And because there are no genetic ties between parents and their children, they have eliminated discrimination by race. However, they have found a way to maintain cultural diversity by separating it from genetics:

"At grandcil – grand council – decisions were made forty years back to breed a high proportion of darker-skinned people and to mix the genes well through the population. At the same time, we decided to hold on to separate cultural identities. But we broke the bond between genes and culture, broke it forever. We want there to be no chance of racism again. But we don't want the melting pot where everybody ends up with thin gruel. We want diversity, for strangeness breeds richness."

As that quote hints at, people of Luciente's society can adopt any culture they chose, just as they select a name they feel suits them. Luciente's village is culturally "Wampanoag", while others are "Harlem-Black", "Cape Verde" and "Ashkenazi Jewish". I use quotes because only the elements of those cultures that fit their society are adopted - sexism, racism, and patriarchal religion are excluded.

But not everything is idyllic. Luciente and her people are at war with a neighboring society that is essentially their exact opposite. It's urban, uses genetic engineering to create super soldiers, and the common people eat bland food grown on factory farms. Connie accidentally travels to the future New York City where she meets a woman - Gildina 547-921-45-822-KBJ - from this society who has been "cosmetically fixed for sex use" and is sealed in her windowless apartment. Gildina's none to bright, and that's by design:

"She was born a dud. She's just a built-up contracty. All duds have brain deficiencies from protein scarcity in fetus and early childhood. Their IRP's are negative forty to negative fifteen. Her psych scan tests show negative twenty-five. She has no more mental capacity than a genetically improved ape."

Wealthy families and corporations in this version of the future use biotechnology to keep the lower classes oppressed. Gildina doesn't expect to live beyond her 40's while the "richies" live for centuries on involuntarily "donated" organs. It's a nasty place to be one of the masses.

Despite the novel's heavy handed (to my eyes) dichotomy between Luciente's idyllic pastoral Marxist society and the hellish capitalist urban society of New York, I thought it was interesting that both versions of the future are heavily dependent on technology - particularly biotechnology - for their existance. In one it's used to allow women to become independent equal members of society, in the other it creates women that are just sexual objects (among many other differences). If forced to chose I'd obviously prefer the former over the latter, but my perhaps naive hope is that we can achieve equality without reengineering our biology.

* There is some ambiguity as to whether Connie's trips to the future are real, or whether they are just manifestations of schizophrenia. It could be argued that she is a victim of being a poor non-white woman whose normal actions are interpreted with the assumption that she is mentally ill (something that has been shown to happen in psychiatric hospital).

======

So that's my take on the biotechnology in WotEoT. I think there are a number of other aspects that would make for good discussion too.

If you are interested in an academic analysis, check out this essay by Clemson English professor Elisa Kay Sparks.

Tags:Woman on the Edge of Time, Marge Piercy, biotechnology

Hugo Award Winner: Bear's Shoggoths in Bloom

2009-08-10T22:34:00.000-07:00

The sea-swept rocks of the remote Maine coast are habitat to a panoply of colorful creatures. It's an opportunity, a little-studied maritime ecosystem. This is in part due to difficulty of access and in part due to the perils inherent in close contact with its rarest and most spectacular denizen: Oracupoda horibilis, the common surf shoggoth.

This year's Hugo for best novelette went to Elizabeth Bear for her WWII-era alternate natural history tale "Shoggoths in Bloom". As the title suggests the story features shoggoths, creatures from HP Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, but with a slightly different twist.

Read Shoggoths in Bloom

Image: Shoggoth by pahko @ wikimedia commons. Also see pahko at DeviantArt.
Tags:science fiction, biology, Elizabeth Bear, Hugo Award

Hugo Award Winner: Chiang's Exhalation

2009-08-10T20:54:00.000-07:00

It has long been said that air (which others call argon) is the source of life. This is not in fact the case, and I engrave these words to describe how I came to understand the true source of life and, as a corollary, the means by which life will one day end.

Ted Chiang's excellent short story "Exhalation" won a Hugo last night. The setting is an alien world where an argon-breathing metal scientist seeks to understand his world and himself. Admittedly, it technically isn't about biology - at least not carbon-based life - but if you read it for yourself I think you'll see the similarities.

Read Exhalation
Listen to a podcast of "Exhalation" @ Escape Pod or @ Starship Sofa

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dmperez/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

Tags:science fiction, biology, Ted Chiang, Hugo Award

Hugo Award Winner: Kress's Erdmann Nexus

2009-08-10T02:53:00.001-07:00

Nancy Kress's novella "The Erdmann Nexus" won a Hugo yesterday. It's basis is a combination of the philosophical and scientific concept of emergence in complex systems along with a bit of neuroscience. In particular she uses the fact that activity in the brain changes when people go into deep meditative states as an indication that humanity could develop a group mind that goes beyond basic human consciousness. It's not a new science fictional idea, and not surprisingly the story has significant religious and mystical themes. I didn't find the story that interesting, other than Kress's inclusion of some recent science.

Read The Erdmann Nexus.

Image: fMRI data for expert meditators. From Brefczynski-Lewis JA et al. "Neural correlates of attentional expertise in long-term meditation practitioners". Proc Natl Acad Sci USA (2007) 104: 11483–8. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0606552104
Tags:science fiction, neuroscience, Nancy Kress, Hugo Award

Hugo Nominee: Pride and Prometheus

2009-08-05T22:53:00.000-07:00

Mary Shelly's 1831 classic, Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, is considered by many to have been one of the earliest science fiction novels. It is, of course, dear to me because of it's basis in biology, particularly the contemporary experiments on the effect of electricity on "reanimating" corpses.

Shelley's work is revisited in John Kessel's "Pride and Prometheus", a nominee for this year's best novelette Hugo Award. Kessel has Dr. Victor Frankenstein meeting a young Miss Mary Bennet, Elizabeth Bennet's bookish younger sister in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Mary is a Natural History enthusiast, and her meeting with Frankenstein changes her life . . .

Read "Pride and Prometheus" at Fantasy & Science Fiction

Download John Kessel's The Baum Plan For Financial Independence and Other Stories (including "Pride and Prometheus") at Small Beer Press

Image: Illustration from the 1831 Edition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
Tags:science fiction, biology, Frankenstein, John Kessel