On a ship hovering in the atmosphere over a volcano, the captain bends down to help free a child from an ejection pod.
Science Officer: Captain, we have to eject this child into the volcano!
Captain: What?!
The science officer angsts dramatically.
Science Officer: It’s terrible, but all life on this planet will perish unless his DNA fertilizes the lava, creating an embryonic cloud of life renewal.
Captain: Isn’t there another way?
Science Officer: I’ve agonized over every possibility. Cloning would take too long, no other DNA will work, and the embryonic cloud can’t be synthesized… The only solution is to dissolve this child in hot rock.
Science Officer: Can you make the hard decisions?
The captain holds up a braid of hair she cut from the child’s head.
Captain: My hard decision is to throw his hair in.
Science Officer [defensively]: I would have thought of that.
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The question is when the science officer would have thought of that…
Another nice one, Bunny and Chris!
I think Tyranny did it best. Murder infant, doom land, or find some obscure legal workaround to avoid both.
Why does anybody think that something demanding a sacrifice would be that easily satisfied ore fooled?
I doubt a volcano is sentient or sapient.
Human hair does not contain DNA.
The roots may have some cells attached if they’ve been pulled out of the scalp, but otherwise zero DNA, just protein strands.
(Also, ALL nourishing Shampoo ads are 100% bovine excrement, since hair is not a living organ of the human body.)
If they wanted to drop the child’s DNA into the volcano, they needed to draw a blood sample. A mouth swab or fecal sample would be contaminated (overwhelmed) by bacterial DNA.
Presumably DNA extraction techniques have advanced somewhat by the time we run into alien terraforming volcanos. https://www.ishinews.com/no-nuclear-dna-in-rootless-hair-myth-or-fact/
I apologize if I read as angry, or nit-picky in this, or my earlier comment.
Future advancements in technology are irrelevant; one cannot extract what isn’t there.
If you want someone’s DNA, you have to get it from a sample of a tissue which actually contains it. (blood etc.) Human hair is simply not a tissue and contains no DNA. Scientific accuracy might seem like a high bar to clear, but it’s an important bar to clear when your comic’s entire premise relies on it.
Also, in this case, the bar was set at puddle height. :-(
Let us not forget, my friends and fellow mythcreants! The fight against anti-intellectualism always starts with ourselves! ;-)
I dunno, seems like there are a few sources claiming you can extract DNA from rootless hair.
https://www.genomebc.ca/blog/forensics-breakthrough-dna-extracted-from-rootless-hair
https://www.legalgenealogist.com/2012/06/03/dna-and-the-locks-of-hair/
https://seedna.org/information/technical/hair-sample/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28993934/
And I’m not sure why you’re so quick to assume it’s rootless. Or why you’re so fixated on it to begin with, since whether rootless hair contains nuclear DNA is hardly a pressing (anti?)intellectual question in the scheme of things or that this comic really risks perpetuating even if it was, since the hair is pretty irrelevant to the topic of this being a silly trope. I’d hardly call it a question worthy of as dramatic a statement as “what is currently known of the physical reality which we all inhabit and share.” Like… I don’t think our present reality would be totally shattered by rootless DNA turning out to have hair in it, but maybe that’s just me.
Toodles.
Misinformation on DNA is socially harmful in the real world.
Read up on the CSI effect.
Whilst, yes, I DID mistype in my earlier comments that rootless hair contains NO DNA, (it does contain fragments of DNA, so chemically speaking it does have it) this DNA cannot be used to legally identify a person, that is, match their DNA to the hair.
I apologize for spamming the comments, but far too many men (mostly african-american) have been executed in the US for crimes of which they have been posthumously exonerated by DNA evidence, so I’m a little touchy whenever false DNA information is being promoted.
As it stands, DNA evidence is seemingly the last bastion of justice for underprivileged groups, if they can get the prosecutor to pay for sequencing, instead of RFLP methods, which carry a 1% rate of false positives and are the dominant form of DNA evidence in US jurisprudence. This reads like nonsense, but it means that hundreds of underprivileged young men are getting sentenced for crimes they did not commit on the basis of deliberately incomplete scientific evidence.
Again, hair DOES contain DNA fragments, but those fragments are just typo-riddled partial copies of the original and cannot be used to scientifically identify the original. (Or represent the totality of the child’s DNA in this comic)
Most people get their first taste of scientific concepts from spec fic and it would be great if such concepts were not flawed from the start, like the idea you could represent someone’s DNA identity with rootless hair strands.
Mythcreants does a very good job of promoting social justice in spec fic. Maybe you should try and expand into also promoting scientific accuracy, as well?
The days when genetic engineering and cyber augmentations might fracture human society into layers of such different levels of power and wealth inequality that they might as well live in feudalism again, are potentially around the corner. It would be nice if, when the general public is given their last vote on the subject, most make it an educated choice.
And nothing can teach scientific concepts better than spec fic. You wrote articles on good and bad ideas sci fi tries to teach us. How about some more, focused on badly taught concepts?
Hey there again!
Interesting, I think I wrote and posted my comment before you made the clarifications below. Thanks for those! They clarified a few things. I also did not know that hair DNA (or more largely, misrepresentation about DNA) was harmful, although in hindsight it does make sense. Thanks for enlightening me; I really should’ve thought of that. Ah, our broken terrible criminal justice system strikes again. Ugh.
Are you a forensic scientist or biologist or someone of that ilk, by any chance? Because we do take guest author submissions and actually an article on misrepresentation of crime and forensic science would be super helpful and something we haven’t covered yet on the site, and we take guest author submissions if you’d be inclined to write one! It sounds like you have some pretty extensive knowledge of the subject. To that point, I’m curious what other common misrepresentations you see, if you wouldn’t mind sharing! Especially those found in spec fic.
As a side note, your observations about genetic engineering and the future of humanity makes me think you might be interested in the book Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari (if you haven’t already read it!). It’s speculation about the future, though not really speculative fiction — in a rather scary way!
Anyway, it’s always interesting when one of our comics provokes a strong reaction, positive or negative, and I certainly learned some new stuff about hair DNA today.
I mean, in the comic the science officer is all “it has to be the child’s exact DNA” and then you say “hair will do”.
Um, no, it most certainly won’t do. Cannot do. It’s simply wrong.
I get it’s not meant to be serious science, what with the scientist saying cloning would take too long, like are you cloning the entire child? Cause if you need an entire child’s amount of DNA, a tuft of said child’s hair is definitely not gonna do the trick.
But still, DNA identification and equivalency carries actual legal ramifications in the real world and those are far more harshly felt by the underprivileged and marginalized.
Maybe not spread inacurate messages about this one thing?
Maybe tread more carefully around this particular topic and not add misconceptions to it?
Also, just to clarify the link you posted, *some* degraded DNA fragments can be recovered from human hair, as well as mitochondrial DNA.
Mitochondrial DNA is not the DNA of a whole human being and is shared by every human and their entire maternal lineage, meaning everyone they’re related to through a common female ancestor going back multiple generations.
The degraded DNA fragments which are, in fact, the remnants of the actual DNA that existed in the cells which produced the hair in question, are incomplete and thus unable to represent the actual human in question (the child in this comic).
Furthermore, any effort to try and get a DNA match from DNA fragments extracted from human hair is completely wasted as any such results are inadmissible in any court of law that I’ve ever heard of.
In summary, let me translate it from biochemical to literary!
Degraded DNA is like a manuscript that’s been riddled with random typos due to a computer glitch, then partly printed out and then ripped up and thrown in several trash bins. After recovering the shreds from one trash bin, you could hardly call those a novel, let alone be able to read it.
The science officer declares the volcano wants The Novel to be thrown in. Nothing else will appease it.
The Captain refuses to part with the novel, since it’s the original manuscript and the Captain loves it dearly.
The Captain suggests a third edition reprint of The Novel be thrown in instead and the Science Officer agrees, stymied.
The Volcano refuses this nonsensical “sacrifice” and erupts with great umbrage!
Downer ending, but not inconsistent with what is currently known of the physical reality which we all inhabit and share.
Correction:
The Captain suggests the remains of a third edition copy, which was mostly destroyed in a warehouse fire, be thrown in, since no one will miss it and it can be spared.
Oh, and to translate the mytochondrial DNA, it’s like the publisher’s imprint on the novel, hardly anything distinguishing, or identifying of a specific novel.
Might not even get into the right genre with it.
I can’t seem to find the reply button to Bunny above, I’m on my phone.
Anyways, I’ve studied biochemistry at University and this included forensic DNA analysis, but I’m not an actual forensic scientist, just someone who is interested in the topic (and also literate in it).
I’ll think about your idea of writing up an article on the topic of misrepresentation of crime and forensics, but it kind of hits home for me and I’m not sure I could make it not read like a bitter rant. Maybe at a later date?
Sorry if I made you or Chris feel attacked, it’s just a pet peeve (read major trigger) for me.
Love the new look of the website, BTW.
Hello again!
Yeah, the nesting only goes so far! No worries about putting it down here. And no worries about us feeling attacked; it’s an interesting angle on the subject I genuinely didn’t consider when I drew the comic (I’m the illustrator, not the writer, for the record).
Would love to read an article about crime and forensics! It’s certainly one that would be worth putting on the site — because hoo boy are there some questionable detective shows out there! If the rep is as bad as you say in that type of media, perhaps those do merit a bitter rant. And if you decide not, I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts even just as a comment, as someone who is admittedly very not literate in the subject. There’s always the comments section, if not an article :) So thanks for taking the time to share, and glad you like the site!
Editor’s note: I’m putting an end to this entire DNA argument.