Science of the Times
I read (this is true!) in the learned journal Nature that biologists are divided on the issue of creating human-mice hybrids. Some think it's okay to engineer crosses between people and rodents; others think it's just wrong. Really, you don't expect professional biologists to be so indecisive and squeamish. That's not good enough.
The next time I meet one I'm going to go straight up to him and ask. "Come on now, are you a man or a mouse?"
There, in one paragraph I beat two columnists from the Irish Times today (Thursday). A better gag than their humour column and more real science news than their science column too. If Geraldine Kennedy is reading this, I'd like to point out that I could do both Kevin Myers' and William Reville's job better than either of them, and I'd settle for the pay of just one. (Whoever gets the most.) What was up with Myers Today? A piece about the gay erotic adventures of Blueshirts, all culminating in a joke that was breathtaking in its sheer bloody pointlessness. What? It was as if he were trying to write a Myles na gCopaleen 'Keats and Chapman' story, except without the ... without the everything, basically.
As for Dr Reville, he got through the day by recounting a story told by the late Stephen Jay Gould. I must ask, is he being paid much to take the work of one of the great science columnists and rewrite it to be less compelling? I think they're all miching up in the Times. They've a new boss in and she's not up to all their little tricks yet.
Just wait till she cops on, then they'll be in trouble.
But I had a point! I do find the idea of human-mice hybrids disturbing. Yet that is in itself odd, as I don't really have much of an ethical problem with engineering transgenic pigs for transplants. Eat a pig's liver, get it grafted straight into your thorax. What's the big difference? I mean, to the pig? And as far as the interfering with nature goes it's exactly the same thing. To me though, a human-mouse cross seems weirder than human-pig. I guess it's gut feeling. I can sort of imagine humans and pigs interbreeding. (I don't want to, but I can.) But humans and mice? Uh uh. That just ain't gonna work. No matter who's on top.
While we're on the subject of the joys of science, a woman known to me only as Angel Fish wrote a comment on last Tuesday's comic. (As you can too: visit www.doubt.it) This was the episode about satellite surveillance, and it reminded her of the time her boyfriend got a loan of classified surveillance photographs from the British government. Real spy stuff - 15 cm resolution. (In other words when this satellite's orbit passes over a soccer match, you can spot the ball.) He got these for the purpose of ecological research. Before that however, he and his friends spent the afternoon poring over them to see could they find any topless sunbathers ... Male friends, yes. Bear in mind here that even at a resolution of 15 cm, your average breast is going to look, from space, like a little square. Not even a square with a dot in the middle, just a pinky pixel square. Add to that the fact that these pictures were taken of Bolton - northern England - in February, and it's plain that what we're seeing here is the triumph of hormones over the most basic grasp of reality.
Or as Angel Fish herself put it: "Men," (Sigh) "bless 'em for their dogged optimism."