BONUS QUESTION: (5pts possible) Pick a third prompt from the…
BONUS QUESTION: (5pts possible) Pick a third prompt from the prompts below based off of The Gene: An Intimate History, clearly indicate which prompt was selected, and answer completely in the space provided below. 1) What does the author mean by saying that “relatedness is a function of mutatedness”? Explain how this statement is true. In what scientific fields have we been able to apply this principle? 2) In 1994, behavioral psychologist Richard Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray published their book about genetics and intelligence, titled The Bell Curve. Briefly explain the concepts of “g” and IQ, which are foundational to the book. What has been determined about the heritability of g? What additional assertions regarding intelligence made in The Bell Curve made it so controversial? 3) What gene on the Y chromosome was discovered to be the “singular determinant of ‘maleness'”? How was this gene and its function discovered? (Briefly describe the experiments.) If most aspects of “maleness” are determined by the function of this one gene, what explains the “spectrum” of gender identities? 4) What two developments in early 1991 enabled researcher Dean Hamer to search for the “gay gene”? How did Hamer search for the “gay gene”, and what did he ultimately find (i.e., on what chromosome, location, etc.)? 5) What was scientist Allan Wilson’s “molecular clock”? How did he use this “clock” to answer the questions of “how old are humans, and where did we come from,” and what was at least one of his three “startling” findings? 6) Explain what geneticist Richard Ebstein found regarding gene variants that influence normal subtypes of personality. Specifically, which personality subtype particularly intrigued Ebstein? What gene did Ebstein find to be related to this personality subtype, and what does the gene do? How does this connect to the personality subtype expressed by individuals carrying the particular gene variant? 7) What is the “genetic memory” exemplified by the Dutch Hongerwinter study? How, in this case, was “historical memory… transformed into cellular memory”? How did John Gurdon’s experiments with frogs and Mary Lyon’s chromosomal studies relate to this “cellular memory”? 8) According to the author, embryonic stem cells were found to allow “mutation and selection in the same step.” Explain what this statement means. What new term was coined to describe the organisms produced from these experiments? 9) The author states, “In medicine… a beautiful therapy can be killed by an ugly trial.” To what type of therapy is this quote referring? Describe the “ugly trial” that (for a time) “killed” this therapy. Who was the patient involved? What disease did he/she have? How did the therapy trial turn “ugly,” and how did this temporarily “kill” that therapy? 10) The author gives examples of “three case studies illustrate the power and peril of using genes to predict ‘future risk’.” Briefly describe the case of one of these three “previvors” and explain how it relates to the complications and limits of genetic diagnosis. 11) According to the author, “Richard Mulligan, the pioneer of gene therapy, had once fantasized about ‘clean, chaste gene therapy’.” What discovery led to the ability to achieve this? Who discovered the system? (Hint: two individuals share credit for this discovery.) How did this discovery make “clean, chaste gene therapy feasible”? 12) The author states that “Medicine… perceives the world through ‘mirror writing’. Illness is used to define wellness….” According to the author, how did the Human Genome Project “ geneticists to invert this mirror writing on itself…. it was no longer necessary to use pathology to define the borders of normal physiology”?