Mutants

[Mighty_Emperor]

A new book on abnormalities, etc. (that will be a 3 parter on TV in a few weeks) and I have stumbled across various reviews and extracts so..............

Author's homepage:
http://armandleroi.com/mutants/

Leg count

Judith Hawley appreciates Armand Marie Leroi's Mutants, a scientific investigation of genetic variability that rises above prurience

Saturday May 22, 2004
The Guardian


Mutants: On the Form, Varieties and Errors of the Human Body
by Armand Marie Leroi
431pp, HarperCollins, £20

In a highly quotable dictum in this thought-provoking and aphoristic book, Armand Leroi declares: "We are all mutants. But some of us are more mutant than others." The expression recalls, of course, Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the subject of the book brings to mind that other dystopia, Huxley's Brave New World, with its nightmarish vision of the manipulation and manufacture of human life. Leroi is sensitive to the exploitation and interpretation of monstrosity, and alert to the ways in which artists and scientists have made use of mutation. He compares the collection of ghastly specimens assembled in the 19th century by Willem Vrolik and now on display in Amsterdam - the rows of pickled infant Cyclopes, human mermaids, and indescribable deformities - to "the demonic creatures that caper across the canvases of Hieronymous Bosch".

Bosch's monsters were the product of his imagination and of his belief in divine punishment. The word "monster" is derived from two Latin words: moneo, to warn, and monstro, to show forth; to Bosch's contemporaries, monsters embodied a warning of God's displeasure at man's moral imperfection. However, Vrolik's specimens, Leroi argues, "are presented with clinical detachment, cleansed of moral value. And that, perhaps, suggests the best description of the Museum Vrolik. It is a Last Judgment for the scientific age."

This is not the first book to interpret the significance of human oddities. Previous studies have tended to view deformity in the shape of fairground freaks, monsters and marvels. Books like this are in danger of becoming freak shows in themselves, arousing in the reader the wonder and revulsion from which the commercial exhibitors of human prodigies - monster-mongers - profit. Leroi is alert to this charge. Though he details the existence of such horrifying aberrations as "a Dutch child born in 1995 [that] had the remains of 21 foetuses (as determined by leg count) embedded in its brain", he stops short of describing some laboratory mice, engineered to manifest profound physical disorganisation, because "it would be gratuitously macabre to detail the appearance of these mutant mice".

The choice of the term "mutants" rather than "monsters" or "freaks", while it has a kind of B-movie ring to it, indicates that Leroi approaches abnormality as a scientist with a serious interest in what mutation can tell us about normal physical development. Yet, by stating of the disorganised mice that "it is enough to say that the deformities of a single litter would embrace the contents of a sizeable teratology museum", he at once frustrates and piques our curiosity.

The Channel 4 television series that this book accompanies, while highly informative, not surprisingly feeds on baser instincts of curiosity and prurience. In one shocking scene, Leroi watches some footage of a piglet dubbed "Ditto" toppling under the weight of its double head while he giggles and flirts with the woman scientist who studies it. The series seems besotted with the image of Leroi himself, and shows him being photographed as he meditates on his own male-pattern baldness, or strides across Amsterdam in golden sunshine, or peers into jars of mutants bathed in the same golden light.

There are three things that lift this book above mere exploitation: the seriousness of Leroi's scientific investigations; the humane concern he manifests for the suffering other; and the sensitivity of his aesthetic appreciation of the wonders of nature. "Beautiful" is a term frequently used to describe some bottled monster. This aesthetic appreciation extends to previous writers on the subject. He describes an account of the progress of a deer embryo by the 17th-century natural philosopher William Harvey (more famous for his discovery of the circulation of the blood) as "one of the loveliest descriptions of a mammalian foetus ever written".

Another 17th-century figure provides Leroi with a model for his endeavour: Sir Francis Bacon recommended the collection or description "of all the monsters and prodigious products of nature, of every novelty, rarity or abnormality", not for their own sake, but for what they reveal about the normal laws of nature. Moreover, says Leroi, Bacon argues, anticipating Huxley, that "once we know those laws, we can reconstruct the world as we wish".

Leroi is appreciative of pre-scientific thinkers and does not dismiss the theories of Aristotle, Bacon, Cuvier or Darwin, though he is aware of the separation of their world from ours. One of the many strengths of this complex but accessible study is its combination of medical history and an admirably clear exposition of up-to-date scientific thinking. Essentially, this book tells the story of the development of an individual from embryo to old age. It does so by exploring what genetic mutations reveal about the growth of different parts of the body, and by combining fascinating narratives with sophisticated science.

Leroi is a prodigious explainer. I listen to Melvyn Bragg discussing big ideas on the radio, but can't claim to have scientific training. Yet, with Leroi's patient unfolding of the mysteries of modern genetics, I found myself able to understand such sentences as "the mesodermal cells of the blastopore edge were the source of ... a morphogen", or "the most common cause of albinism in Africa is homozygosity for a 2.7 kilobase-pair deletion in the P gene". And I feel I can grasp the role of retinoic acid and free radicals, understand what is concealed behind abbreviations such as RNA, IGF, SRY, and get along with oddly named entities such as "noggin" and "sonic hedgehog", while having some insight into the laboratory culture that produces such monikers.

Poetic, philosophical, profound, witty and challenging, Leroi is, as he says of Goya, a "compassionate connoisseur of deformity". He writes as someone moved by the sight of mutation, marvelling at the forces that shape life. But he also writes as a scientist for whom the deliberate infliction of deformity on animals is necessary and acceptable. While he argues that naturally occurring human deformities are important because they can reveal the regular workings of nature, what has been most productive of knowledge is the manufacture of mutants in the laboratory. He might sigh at the fact that thousands of mice have sacrificed their legs to science, but he also describes as "lovely" an experiment that scrambles a chicken embryo in order to prove that the heart naturally falls to the left. The fact that scientific knowledge is derived from chopping up animals is more obvious in the TV series, in which Siamese tadpoles and lopsided salamanders grow before our eyes.

The book's epilogue is deliberately provocative. Leroi dismisses those who are concerned about the risks of genetic experiments on humans as "soi-disant ethicists, dialectical biologists and bishops", who, he claims in prejudicial terms, "speak portentously of a 'human dignity' ... or else mutter darkly about the 'ethical dilemmas that face us all' ".

Side-stepping these ethical dilemmas, he consciously courts others by suggesting that geneticists reopen the question of racial difference. However, far from lending support to racism, he points out that the differences that seem so obvious to the prejudiced eye depend on genetic variations of no more than 7%. At the same time, "each new embryo has about 100 mutations that its parents did not have". We would do well to recognise the fact that we are all mutants.



----------------------------
· Mutants, a three-part series, will be broadcast on Channel 4 from June 3. Judith Hawley is general editor of the Pickering & Chatto series Literature and Science 1660-1834

http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/scienceandnature/0,6121,1221924,00.html

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0002571137/

Emps

 

[Mighty_Emperor]

Meet the world's most perfect mutant

(Filed: 19/05/2004)


Beauty is more than a matter of good health – it is also down to genetics and a mixed ancestry, argues Armand Marie Leroi


I have met the World's Most Beautiful Woman. This may seem like an extravagant claim, and it is not one that I can prove – it's not as though I lined up the obvious contenders (Naomi, Kate, Liz, Claudia etc) and conducted a statistically defensible poll of the global populace. But, as a scientist, there are times when I have that rare illuminating flash of insight: the sort that gave Natural Selection to Darwin, and the Uncertainty Principle to Heisenberg. These comparisons may seem immodest, and so when I say that I have met the WMBW, let's just call it a hypothesis – but one consistent with first principles.

Her name is Saira Mohan and she is a 26-year-old New York supermodel. I met her while filming a Channel 4 documentary of my book, Mutants, which considers, among other topics, the nature of physical beauty. She'd appeared on the cover of Newsweek magazine above the legend "The Perfect Face". In the event, I found myself walking across the main concourse of Manhattan's Grand Central Station towards the loveliest thing I have ever seen, camera crew in tow.

It would be easy to dwell on Saira's charm, modesty and intelligence – she has all in abundance. Or how she stood frozen, but uncomplaining, for 15 minutes to satisfy a directorial whim for 15 seconds of time-lapse. But the issue is not niceness: it is physical beauty. And there it was: improbable; incomprehensible; ridiculous in its excess. I shan't attempt to describe her. I note only the curious fact that, even in repose, her mouth formed a smile: like the Mona Lisa or a dolphin, she could not sulk if she wanted to.

"Beauty," says the philosopher Elaine Scarry, "prompts the begetting of children: when the eye sees something beautiful, the whole body wants to reproduce it." As if to prove the point, Saira was a graceful five-months pregnant (and has since given birth to a son, Romen Alexandre, who is, she dotingly writes, "so handsome that my heart melts"). Of course, we hardly need a philosopher to tell us that beauty prompts children. After all, it clearly prompts sexual desire. The question is: why?

One idea, popular among scientists who study beauty, is that it has something to do with physiological condition; that it is, indeed, a certificate of health. In its simplest form the truth of this idea is quite self-evident. Clear skin, bright eyes and white teeth are manifestly signs of beauty and health. It is no accident that Brazilian men, glimpsing a beautiful carioca, sigh: "Que saúde" – what health.

This argument has an interesting corollary: since we are healthier than our ancestors, we must also be more beautiful. We are no longer disfigured by infectious disease and malnutrition. Goitres, ricketts, rotten teeth and smallpox scars are all things of the past. The model for Botticelli's Venus was, perhaps, one in a million; but her equal can now be seen by the dozen on any Californian campus. Indeed, if beauty is all about health, then even a classroom of British undergraduates must have an abundance of beauty that has never existed before.

This may seem implausible, but only because we have little grasp of beauty's advance. Beauty is like wealth. It increases over time, yet its distribution is unequal. However much of it we have, someone else has more. Why is this? To be sure, modern societies retain gross inequalities in wealth and health, but are they enough to explain the inequality of beauty? Is it all just a matter of environment? Perhaps. But the fact that Saira was born and raised in Calgary, Alberta, does tend to militate against the hypothesis.

I suspect that there is a residual variance in beauty that even the most controlled upbringing cannot eradicate. A residuum that lies in our genes. The average newly conceived infant is born with some 300 mutations that affect its health for the worse. This number is just a guess, but it is an educated one. It tells us that our welfare is being continually eroded by a mutational storm.

One place that we see these mutations is in our faces. When clinical geneticists try to work out what's wrong with patients, they search for subtle anomalies in the spacing of the eyes, shape of the nose, depth of the philtrum and the like. They speak, tenderly, of "FLKs" – Funny Looking Kids – to flag a deeper disturbance in the genetic order. Of course, most of the mutations that afflict us must have far more subtle effects; they are the cause of our graceless noses, wonky teeth and asymmetrical ears. They leave us just a little less beautiful than we might otherwise be.

But if mutation is game of chance, which we all lose, some lose more heavily than others. We are all mutants, but some are more mutant than others. And some are less. This, I suspect, is the meaning of beauty. An image of a beautiful face is not about the subject, but rather what it is not. It is about the absent imperfections: the machine errors from breaks in the genetic order written in our features.

There is, I concede, little evidence for this, at least in humans. But evolutionary biologists have long suspected that the peacock's tail and the red deer's roar are signals of genetic quality. The mutational-load explanation is also consistent with our intuitions about the distribution of beauty.

If deleterious mutations rob us of it, they should do so with particular efficacy if we marry our relatives. Most novel mutations are at least partly recessive, and inbreeding should accentuate their negative effects. Many weird genetic disorders come from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, where there is a strong tradition of first-cousin marriage.

Conversely, people of mixed ancestry should show the benefits of concealing recessive mutations. And this, I suspect, is the true meaning of Saira Mohan: half Punjabi, quarter Irish, quarter French and altogether delightful. She, too, is a mutant – but a little less so than most of us.


--------------------------------------
Armand Marie Leroi is Reader in Evolutionary Developmental Biology at Imperial College London. His book, Mutants: On the Form, Variety and Errors of the Human Body, is published by HarperCollins (rrp £20) and is £18 (plus £2.25 p&p per order) from Telegraph Books Direct on 0870 155 7222. It has been shortlisted by the Royal Society for the Aventis Prizes for Science Books (http://www.aventissciencebookprizes.com).

An accompanying Channel 4 series Human mutants starts on June 3, with the third program: Meaning of beauty showing on June 17.

Dr Leroi will be at the Cheltenham Science Festival in June. To request a brochure tel 01242 237377, for tickets tel 01242 227979 or see http://www.cheltenhamfestivals.co.uk.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/main.jhtml?xml=/connected/2004/05/19/ecfmut19.xml

The 'perfect mutants' homepage:

http://www.saira.com

Emps

 

[Mighty_Emperor]

A sad tale - although only one of far too many

Tortured in the name of 'science'

Mengele's fascination with dwarfism kept the Ovitz family alive at Auschwitz, writes Armand Marie Leroi

Thursday May 20, 2004
The Guardian

The man whose name will forever cast a shadow over the study of human genetics arrived at Auschwitz on May 30 1943. Josef Mengele had been urged to go there by his mentor, Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, and it was von Verschuer too who had urged him to take advantage of the, as it was put to him, "extraordinary research opportunities" he would find there. By the time he arrived at the camp, it contained just over 100,000 prisoners and the killing machine was fully engaged.

After the war, it was Mengele the survivors remembered. They remembered his physical beauty, his charm and his smile. They remembered how he could speak kindly to children and then send them to a gas chamber. He was often the first German officer prisoners saw. As they stepped from the cattle-cars on to the platform at Birkenau, he shouted "Links" or "Rechts". Left and they would die immediately, right and they were spared, at least for a time.

Among those spared was a 30-year-old Jewish woman named Elizabeth Ovitz. She and her siblings arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau on the night of May 18 1944. They were brought there in a cattle-car containing 84 other people. Elizabeth and her family, 12 in all, were herded to one side. Surveying them with fascination Mengele declared: "Now I will have work for the next 20 years; now science will have an interesting subject to consider."

The Ovitzes were Transylvanian Jews. Their father, Shimshon Isaac Ovitz, had been a scholar and wonder-rabbi. He had a form of dwarfism called pseudoachondroplasia that leaves much of the body unaffected but causes the limbs to grow short and bowed. Many Romanian Jews believed that, having been denied normal height by God, he was instead endowed with extraordinary and rare virtues.

Rabbi Ovitz had 10 children of whom seven, including Elizabeth, were dwarfed. This is consistent with a diagnosis of pseudoachondroplasia, which is caused by a dominantly inherited mutation.

Half a century later, it is clear that the stubby, bent and warped limbs that are the consequence of so many bone disorders speak of the phenomenon of the local control of growth.

Nowhere is the dynamic nature of bone more apparent than at the ends of an infant's long bones. Each end has a region, the growth plate, from which the bone grows. Unlike the rest of the bone, which is encased in calcium phosphate, the growth plates are soft and uncalcified. On a radiogram they can be seen throughout childhood and adolescence, ever decreasing in size, until by age 18 or so they become sealed over and linear growth stops.

Each growth plate contains hundreds of columns of chondrocytes - cells that turn into cartilage - dividing and differentiating. Born at the end of the growth plate furthest from the bone-shaft, they then swell with proteins from which they spin a cartilaginous matrix around themselves and then die. Osteoblasts - cells that turn into bone - march over the graves of chondrocytes, deposit calcium phosphate and yet more matrix, and at both ends the bone pushes further out into space.

Pseudoachondroplasia - the disorder that afflicted the Ovitzes - upsets this sequence of events. The mutation occurs in a gene which encodes one of the proteins that goes into the cartilaginous matrix that chondrocytes make. Instead of being secreted, however, the mutant protein accumulates in the chondrocytes, poisoning and killing them. Not all the chondrocytes die, but the toll is enough to result in short, bent limbs, but a torso and face that are hardly affected at all.

When Elizabeth was nine years old, her father died. His widow reasoned that her children's short stature could be used to their advantage and gave them a musical education so they could eventually form a troupe. Even as Romania and Hungary were drawn within the orbit of Nazi Germany, the Ovitz family took their Jazz Band of Lilliput through the provincial towns of the unstable states of central Europe. Hiding their Jewish identities, the Ovitzes continued to tour for two years, but in March 1944 German troops occupied Hungary and they were caught.

At Auschwitz, Elizabeth and her siblings were kept in a separate room so that they would not be crushed by the other 500 inmates of the block; they were also allowed enough food. But they paid for survival by being given starring roles in Mengele's bizarre programme of experimental research.

As Elizabeth Ovitz would write: "The most frightful experiments of all [were] the gynaecological ones. They tied us to the table and the systematic torture began. They injected things into our uterus, extracted blood, dug into us, pierced us and removed samples. The pain was unbearable. The doctor conducting the experiments took pity on us and asked his superiors to stop them, otherwise our lives would be in jeopardy. It is impossible to put into words the intolerable pain we suffered, which continued for many days after the experiments had ceased."

But then, Elizabeth wrote, other experiments began. "They extracted fluid from our spinal cord and rinsed out our ears with extremely hot or cold water which made us vomit. Subsequently the hair extraction began again and when we were ready to collapse they began painful tests on the brain, nose, mouth and hand regions."

The Ovitz family endured Mengele's obsessions for seven months. Once, when Mengele entered the compound, the youngest of the family, Shimshon, who was only 18 months old, toddled towards him. Mengele lifted the child into his arms and softly enquired why he had approached. "He thinks you are his father." "I am not his father," said Mengele, "only his uncle." Yet the child was emaciated from poor food and incessant blood sampling.

Mengele displayed the Ovitzes to senior Nazis. He lectured on dwarfism and illustrated his talks with the family, who stood naked on the stage. The experiments continued until October 1944. Even as the Third Reich entered its death-throes, Mengele brimmed with maniacal purpose, producing a collection of glass eyes from which he sought a match to Elizabeth's brown ones. As with all he did, his reason for doing so remains unfathomable.

Auschwitz was liberated on January 27 1945. For Elizabeth and her family the arrival of Soviet troops lifted a sentence of death. Nearly all Mengele's experimental subjects were killed once he had done with them.

During the following four years the family shuttled about the wreckage of eastern and central Europe. Reforming their troupe, they choreographed a grim tango that they called their Totentanz. Each night Elizabeth, partnered by one of her brothers, would dance the part of Life to his Death. In 1949, the family emigrated to Israel. Elizabeth Ovitz died in Haifa in 1992. Josef Mengele, who was never tried for his crimes, died in Brazil in 1979.

People with pseudoachondroplasia do tell us something important about how bones grow to the lengths they do, and how tall we become. But Mengele did not discover what this is, nor could his pointless experiments have told him.

--------------------------------------
· This is an extract from Mutants by Armand Marie Leroi, published by HarperCollins at £20. To order a copy for £17 plus p&p call Guardian Book Service on 0870 836 0875

http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/feature/story/0,13026,1220190,00.html

Emps

 

[carole]

Only just got the book, haven't read it yet, but saw the TV programme on Thursday - very interesting. I always thought all conjoined twins were caused by an imperfect splitting of the egg, apparently not,

Carole

 

[Anonymous]

A small point, but

"We are all mutants. But some of us are more mutant than others."

Isn't that a quote from Animal Farm, not 1984?

 

[Mighty_Emperor]

Re: A small point, but

Isn't that a quote from Animal Farm, not 1984?

I'd say no but that would just me being pedantic - good spot (odd factoid: I saw Animal Farm on the stage with Renee from Allo Allo as one of the lead pigs).

------------------------------
My dad was rather fraked out because a month or so ago he ha a dream about haivng two dicks and the strugle it was to get them in his undies and then lo and behold he sees the guy with two dicks - I still suggest it might be something Freudian or somehting though

Emps

 

[Melf]

skin colour?

a bit late i know

but i was watching the last episode of "the human mutant" on ch4? (last week?)

it was about the colour of skin and the processes pertaining to it

there was a case of a south african white lady, who turned from being white to becoming black skinned, over night. she died alone in a black hostel (there are earlier cases of "piebald" people)

afaicr. theres 3 chemicals involved, (within the purtuirty gland) so in theory people could change their skin colour every day!

any thoughts?

[edit] thought i posted this in notes and quieries? as a new thread?[/edit]

 

[Mighty_Emperor]

melf: I thought I'd merge this with the other thread on the TV series - hope you don't mind.

Anyway on your question: Essenetially the answer is yes you could. It wouldn't be too much of a stretch to imagine some kind of technology which would allow this (nanotech could, eventually, easily do it or some kind genetic engineering, etc.) and you can certainly see the need with the high incidence of skin cancer in Australia. One big early application of a technology like that would be allowing us pasty Europeans to increase the melanin content of our skins if we went to live in warmer countries. In some ways you can see that technology shouldn't really be used to overcome the problems (like air condiitoning) but actually make us fit better in our chosen environment - in some ways Germaine Greer makes a similarish point in this article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,1241036,00.html

Rather than fighting against things we can use technology (and knoweldge of the way our body works) to go with the flow.

I'm currently reading Peter Hamiltons "Fallen Dragon" (got it for 30p from a library sale ):

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0330480065/

and that makes similar points (they visit a planet where the biotechnologists from Earth had essentially adapted themsleves to live on the planet) and there is a part where someone uses some kind of (genetic) technology to change their skin colour.

Emps

 

[Anonymous]

In a highly quotable dictum in this thought-provoking and aphoristic book, Armand Leroi declares: "We are all mutants. But some of us are more mutant than others." The expression recalls, of course, Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four

Animal Farm, actually...

Of course, I don't really see what being "more mutant" means, considering that mutation is the raw material of evolution as a whole process, so really, everything is equally mutated from the original single celled organism...

If he means more or less mutated from the "human norm", then you have to take into account that the frequency of mutations is what defines what the norm is. Ie, if lots and lots of people were born with a mutant gene that, say, gave them bigger eyes, then by the law of averages the "normal" eye size would become bigger. So, what I think he seems to mean, is that it is the outliers who differ significantly from the "norm" which are "mutants"... but it's always possible the "norm" might change to resemble them, in which case wouldn't it be the un-mutated humans which would be mutants?

I think I've confused myself there...

It's a long way from being able to shoot laser beams from your eyes or have indestructible claws and healing powers, anyway...

 

[Bilderberger]

Indeed, it was an excellent series - being a cheapskate with about 20 unread books at the moment - I am waiting for the paperback.

The idea of beauty as the absence of mutation was fascinating. Had never considered that before.

I take Goldstein's point about judging what "normality" is. I took it as meaning the mean of current human form. I quite agree that that may change, but at any one point, there will be an average.

So,if beauty is the average of all human form - one has to consider why abormally large breasts are appealing to the majority of males? This is not a representation of female average size breasts - but larger than average breasts. So, where does that fit in? (I'm not talking about Lolo Pops style ridiculous breasts - just....errr.....well..... nice.....big......ones.....ah sod it - I can't finish of this sentence without sounding like a perv.).

I am sure there are other examples of larger than average (but not extreme) sizes being more attractive.

I don't know about the penis (ha ha - size doesn't matter heh?) but would confidently suggest that a larger than average male chest is more appealing than an average sized chest (but again, stopping short of the ridiculous muscle-man freaks who are only attractive to a minority of women - so I am told).

 

[Anonymous]

So,if beauty is the average of all human form - one has to consider why abormally large breasts are appealing to the majority of males? This is not a representation of female average size breasts - but larger than average breasts.

When it comes to body shape isn't the dominant line of thought that it's the ratio/scale that's more important than the size of various parts? That if the ratio between the various parts represents the 'average' that's what we'll respond to?

So a busty lady with no hips will look a bit 'off', but one who's hips and waist are in the 'proper' proportions to her enormous bust will not want for campari and lemonade down the the social of a saturday night.

(The same I 'm sure applies to men. A seven foot chap who's limbs are all in proportion is 'strapping', while a six foot six bloke with long legs and a little torso is a gangly ned).