This passage from pg. 135 to 137 of Zimmer’s Parasite Rex simply “blew my mind”:

“…When a fertilized egg tumbles down into the uterus and tries to implant itself, it encounters an army of macrophages and other immune cells. The new embryo doesn’t have the same proteins on its cells as its mother, which ought to trigger the immune cells to destroy it. The fetus faces the same troubles as a rapeworm or a blood fluke, and it evades its mother’s immune system in much the same way….

If you think of parasitism in terms of Dawkins’s definition of genetic interests, then a fetus is a sort of half-parasite. It shares half its genes with its mother, and the rest belong to its father. Both mother and father have an interest, evolutionarily speaking, in seeing the fetus get born and live a healthy life. But some biologists have argued that parents also have strong conflicts on how the fetus grows. As it develops, it builds its placenta and a network of vessels to draw nourishment out of its mother. It knocks out its mother’s control over her blood vessels near the uterus, so that she can’t restrict the flow of blood to the fetus. It even releases chemicals to raise the concentration of sugar in her blood. But if the mother lets her child take too much, it might take a serious toll on her health. She might not be able to take care of her other children, and it might even threaten her ability to have any more. In other words, the fetus threatens her genetic legacy. Research suggests that mothers struggle against their fetus, releasing counteracting chemicals of their own.

While a fetus can take a heavy toll on its mother, how fast it grows will have no effect on its father’s health. It’s in his genetic interest for the fetus to grow as fast as possible. This conflict plays out within the fetus itself. Research on animals has shown that the genes a fetus inherits from its father and mother do different things, particularly in the trophoblasts. The maternal genes try to slow down the growth of the fetus, to control this parasite within her. Meanwhile, the paternal genes clamp down on these maternal genes and silence them, letting the fetus grow faster and draw more energy from its host.”

In short, we are riven by conflicts, even before we’re born!

More news: a website called Achtung! that “pinged” this blog has picked up my translation of the first few lines of Beowulf. The website gives an update about Sarah Polley, a pop singer who looks like she was born about the time of my second divorce, concerning her involvement in a film version of Beowulf shot at locations in Iceland. I listened to Sarah Polley’s voice at the site as she sang a remake of a song I had no idea existed in the first place, and she’s darned good.

The wonder is, first, that they had found my translation and are using it; second, that I now understand enough of this technology to know what a ‘ping’ is, and finally, that I am actually participating in a no-fuss, no-muss publication process that allows what I do to be transposed from a few heavily scrawled manuscript pages, into a document read by thousands of people in an international forum. Oh yes, and a final wonder is that I learned something in return: the name and some of the music of Sarah Polley.

Of course there’s always room to do another Beowulf movie! What with Troy now available in Japan as a special DVD, this Anglo-Saxon epic is a sure bet. Another monster epic would do well here. I wonder how many film versions of Beowulf there are? The Sarah Polley URL: http://luna.typepad.com/weblog/2004/11_sarah_polley_s.html

I discovered late last night while searching through Amazon that I am mentioned in Martin Gardner’s Did Adam and Eve Have Navels? I appear on page 219 in a selectively edited role concerning Thomas Edison’s self-professed joke (see the New York Times for Oct. 15, 1926) about constructing a machine to contact the dead. Gardner, who has made a career out of pointing out the irrational beliefs of others, seems determined to hold on to his, because there is absolutely no evidence besides several mutually conflicting statements made by Edison himself, that such a machine was ever considered by the inventor. And we know, through our experience with our beloved George W. Bush, that mutually conflicting statements from a primary source rarely constitutes positive evidence of anything other than the dubious nature of the respondent and/or of the subject spoken of by the respondent.

Moreover, the cataloguers and workers at the Edison Papers Project–which contains virtually every scrap of paper Edison laid a writing implement to, as Edison appeared to have been incapable of throwing anything of that sort away–have found nothing. No plans, no parts lists, nothing. Given the fact that Edison was not shy about promoting and documenting any of his ideas, this is pretty powerful evidence that the machine was nothing more than what Edison said it was–a joke.

I’m pleased to be included in Mr. Gardner’s book. He is indeed one of my long-time favorite authors. We’ll keep you updated on the subject.