Reflections, Reflections, Reflections
A Writing Review
Never make this mistake. Go to review early but not too early.
FMP calls for multiple unplanned writing requests. Show me the ticketing blurb. What does your artist’s statement say? What is the context of this work? Random creative scribblings for the book front stuff with raw poetry, a collection of quotes and an interview. Add to this list this very CRJ.
An outcome has been the abrupt realisation that the writing needs to be planned
Reflections on the pandemic spread of SARS-CoV-2
Handwashing
Hand washing is Government advice and in turn, frequent hand washing has led for some to minor healing from drying and cracking.
Colour has returned to my work on this latest adaption to my FMP:
Deep Sequencing
The outbreak of the Corona Virus on a cruise ship was sampled and deep sequenced by scientists in Japan:
Despite the length of this nucleotide, a virus is a very simple molecular mechanism compared to our genome. Here is a visual rendition created for the virus to summarise all of the nucleotides you see in the PDF:
Factoids – Genetic Research
My FMP work can get really deep and intense and involved and I’m sure the intensity can be too much for the casual viewer of the work. This is becoming ever so clear as a result of making a synopsis of the Critical Review of Practice and book content.
A bias entered the FMP by deciding to place focus on own DNA (at a meeting with Victoria Forrest). I have since analysed 680,000 lines of my genome and revisited the book “Your DNA Adventure” (Living DNA, 2019). The language used there is straightforward to follow. It is better than my own writing that is based on two months of genetic research made possible when being laid low twice (or thrice) last year with the visit of a nasty virus.
Here are the snippets that inform. I like to call them factoids.
Motherline MTDNA Haplogroup T1a Subclade T1a1a arose in a woman in the Mediterranean 17,000 years ago. Inherited directly from mother.
Fatherline Y-DNA Haplogroup R-L21 Subclade R-DF25 Atlantic shores of Northern Europe. As male inherited from father.
Autosomal DNA cover the last 250 years. The FMP covers just over 100 years to the Great War. The first 22 (of 23) chromosome pairs form the autosome.
680,000 markers are analysed from my genome.
I am of Scottish cultural descent and now certified as Irish with Norwegian trace from the Viking invasions. This links me to Celtic legend and a tribal genetic legacy.
The genetic signature has a quality unusual in the British Isles linked to migrations in the 1600s but intermixing occurred before then with natural migrations across the sea.
Remarkably DNA can be traced back to nomadic Stone Age people at the end of the last ice age. The signature is found in Western Germany, Northern France and Belgium. It is therefore ironic that brothers from my family who fought in the Royal Highland Black Watch Regiment, fought their ancestral brothers and died fighting in France and Belgium.
I have a common motherline ancestor with peoples living in Udmurtia, Romania, Tunisia, Iran ant the Caucasus.
My common ancestral mother would have been a hardy hunter gatherer. Competition for resources would have been fierce. This character lived on in my mother and was present in her representing southern Scotland in as a sprint runner. The hunter gatherer tradition lived on in living memory in the Scottish community I was born into and lived within. A tradition that lasted for 17,000 years of which I may be the last in line to witness these events.
My fatherline hails from Ireland, Wales, Brittany, Scotland, England, Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland and Germany in an Atlantic Celtic migration arriving in the early Bronze Age. In fact my father was lined up to be the village blacksmith before he left to join the Parachute Regiment.
Mitochondrial DNA exists as circular cells outside of the chromosome nucleus. The egg contains thousands of mitochondria and the sperm very few. These are mostly in the tail which is lost during fertilisation adn so mitochondria is inherited from the mother. It is thought there may be one or two individuals alive who improbably inherited the mitochondria of the father. Mitochondia are very stable and can be assumed to mutate once in every 1,000 years. The Salamander and even wheat have greater DNA diversity than humans.Genetic diversity is very limited in modern humans outside of Africa.
Africans who are resistant to malaria received a gene 33,000 years ago. Europeans had already migrated and so do not share the resistant gene.
Although my DNA is unique, it is over 99% in common with every other human being alive. Our genetic connections with those in different regions have more in common than in our geographic separation.
While Crick and Watson won the Nobel prize and are credited with the discovery of the DNA double helix, their work actually used the results of X-Ray crystallography created by Rosalind Franklin at Kings College London, who was not credited.
Last year at a Symposium led by women on the subject of the parallels in thinking behind the art, and behind science, I met a husband of one of these eminent scientists. The husband took my research question and replied, and I asked if he had been at Oxford. No, he was Professor in X-Ray crystallography at King’s. But if that was not enough coincidence, when I said I’d been at the Oxford Department of Zoology on the Computing side of X-Ray crystallography, it turned out he was there doing his degree that same year.
And finally, when the 1951 discovery was made what knowledge previously existed? Plato (428 BC-348 BC) a philosopher and mathematician in Classical Greece wrote in “Tinneus” of the creation of man and used terms that directly parallel the modern science.
Bibliography
LivingDNA (2019) Michael Turner – Your DNA Adventure.
Critical Research Journal 