As I had predicted, I didn't make the short list for New Scientist's flash fiction competition. Here's what I had entered, reproductive health a Lamarkian world:

Tuesday.

He closed the door, put the pottle down and sighed. Tuesdays were the worst. He’d adjusted to the early morning runs the late night saunas, he’d even come to like the all-curry diet but he couldn’t get used to this.

Before, when this had started, he’d boil from one emotion to the next on Tuesdays. He'd be angry at Janine for wanting to do it this way; angry at his parents for leaving him with this; disgusted by this harshly lit white room, its sterile lino floor and the list of men who’d used it before him. Today he didn’t even care as his flipped through the same set of magazines again. What was the point? Even if he could change Janine’s mind he wouldn’t, and his parents couldn’t have known their choices where effecting anyone by themselves. Hell, he’d got to thirty without finding out, on the first pre-conception check up:

CFTR: 46% (+/- 3%) germules abnormal

His parents hadn't exercised, the doctor explained, so the germules that would have helped them breathe and sweat efficiently didn't get used. As a result, he'd inherited a suite of derelict germules , the most dangerous of which was one called CFTR. He had enough healthy CFTR to get by, but because Janine had the normal background level of broken ones (about 4%) there was a chance their children would have cystic fibrosis. Once the counsellor explained the disease it was obvious they should avoid it. They might have created and screened embryos, only implanting healthy ones, but Janine couldn't destroy the ones that didn't make the grade.

So, his life had become almost entirely about his germules: chilli, running and saunas to exercise them and Tuesdays to test them. That meant a bleak ten minutes in this bright room, after which he handed Louise, the unnerving cheery nurse, his sample. He couldn’t even muster embarrassment at this transaction anymore, so he avoided the waiting room and stuck around for the verdict:

"It's definitely working, 23%, that's half way to the target! See you next Tuesday!"

Labels: fiction, sci-blogs

A friend of mine send me a link to New Scientist's Flash Fiction competition. The idea is pretty simple, write a super-short (350 words) story on the way the world might have been if some now disproved scientific theory turned out to be true. Get an entry in and it might be published in New Scientist and, much more excitingly, Neill-Freaking-Gaiman might read whatever crazy idea you came up with.

Three hundred and fifty words is about a prefect word count for my schedule at the moment (although it does take quite a long time to write something that short) so I've been working on a couple of ideas. You can only submit one story to the competition, so here's the one that I deemed too silly to send in. (There are bonus points for anyone who can explain why this wouldn't work even if recapitulation theory did turn out to be true)

Researchers Recreate Human Ancestors

• Bipedalism nothing new
• First animals sponge-like
• New tools create ethical dilemmas

An historic series of publications presented in PLoS Biology today detail how scientists have recreated stages of our species’ evolutionary history for the first time. Researchers took advantage of new technologies and the fact organisms recapitulate their evolutionary history during their embryological development. By arresting development of an embryo at an early stage and “knocking out” genes inferred to have arisen at different times in humanity’s evolution researchers recovered the developmental program of two human ancestors.

Etienne Meckle, the head of the Human Ancestor Project (HAP), expressed his amazement at the achievement.

“ 150 years ago - when Ernst Haeckel presented the modern version of recapitulation theory - Darwin’s ideas of evolution were new, we didn’t know what a gene was and we didn’t understand embryology at all. Now, two human lifetimes after his work we’ve used his theory to recreate two of our ancestors”

The creatures so far created by the HAP had been separated by 600 million years. By halting development of a human embryo after four days, and removing the effects of all genes not shared by all animals, scientists created a simple filter-feeding animal. This early animal is similar to a modern sponge, and supports the long held theory that the first animals were sponge-like.

The second of the team’s creation is bound to prove more controversial. Merca is a 3 foot tall ape, thought to similar to the last shared common ancestor of modern apes and not seen on earth for 32 million years. She walks on two feet, a trait once thought to be unique to modern humans.

Scientific controversy aside these results have fueled a wider ethical debate, summarized by a comment by BioEthaciser121 on the PloS Biology website:

“Science has delivered us the ability to bring intelligent animals into a world they can’t possibly be prepared for. Society now needs to decide if we want to do that.”

Both recreated ancestors are on display at the National Zoo in Washington, DC.

Labels: evolution, fiction, Human evolution, sci-blogs