#adam rutherford

[mrdirtybear]

This image of British geneticist and explainer of science, Adam Rutherford, (born 1975) is a repeat. But the BBC Radio 4/audio series it is here to promote is new. Please left click here to hear the story of modern medical science, where Rutherford's applies his patience and much needed dry humour to dissect the behaviour of the people in history who called themselves doctors who the public seemingly took at face value, when the science that backed up these doctors actions lacked any secure foundation. Warning the series is quite gory in parts, and contains multiple stories of doctors normalising what amounted to exerting coercive control over their patients. The note of hope often comes from the patients surviving such control.

[105nt]

Start the Week - Emma Donoghue

There’s a great interview with Emma Donoghue by Adam Rutherford in Start the Week this week. I liked it so much I started making a transcript of the main bits relating to The Wonder. I’ll post it in stages - this is the last of four. All typos and errors are mine.

About eating and Florence Pugh:

AR: Eating is obviously a key theme in this, as Anna, the fasting girl is not eating, but many of the scenes feature Florence Pugh's character, Lib Wright, just jamming food into her face with big wooden spoons - big brothy Irish dishes. There's an enormous tension in there and that presumably is very deliberate?

ED: Oh, everything in a film is deliberate because you’ve worked it over so many times before the money is spent. Yes,  it was crucial to me to begin and to carry on the nurse eating, because of course, when you choose to write a story about what many people would understand as eating disorders, the last thing you should do is contribute to that cult by making it seem glamorous. 

And of course if you cast Florence Pugh, who is known to have a huge following especially of teenage girls - I  mean while we were filming the production there'd be .. the village was full of girls standing there hoping for a glimpse of her. The last thing you want to do is add Hollywood glamour to the idea of a child not eating. So it was crucial to us to show - not just to have Florence's character say, "you should eat" but to literally show her choosing life, eating this stew, stomping over the hills and saying "yes" to her body, rather than almost renouncing and turning away.

So yes, I think I counted eight eating scenes and the food was all very delicious. She took it home afterwards! She's got a wonderfully pro-food approach, Florence Pugh has, and she's known for her cooking videos as well.

AR: It is an astonishing performance, by her and all of the actors as well.

[noneun]

“Fra i pesci pagliaccio, se la femmina dominante viene eliminata, magari perché è stata divorata, la carenza di ormoni all’interno del suo gruppo fa sì che un maschio (di solito, il più grosso) salga di un gradino la scala sociale rigidamente stratificata del branco e subisca spontaneamente un cambiamento radicale di sesso. I suoi testicoli si atrofizzano, si sviluppano le ovaie e in un paio di giorni lui diventa una lei. Il pesce crescerà di dimensioni e andrà a rimpiazzare la femmina dominante. 

L’eliminazione del pesce pagliaccio femmina dominante segna l’inizio dell’ottimo film Alla ricerca di Nemo (2003). L’intrepido protagonista citato nel titolo è l’ultimo e il più gracile dei piccoli del branco e viene cresciuto dal padre, prima che un’eccitante avventura abbia inizio. La versione biologicamente corretta del film vedrebbe il padre, Marlin, trasformarsi fisicamente in femmina e poi fare sesso con il proprio figlio, ma suppongo che sarebbe un’altra storia, probabilmente meno popolare.”

—Umani, Adam Rutherford

[morgan--reads]

A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived - Adam Rutherford

Summary: A history of the use of genetics to study human history. The book covers paleo-genetics and modern applications of genetic testing.

Quote: “Vonnegut was half right. There is definitely no beginning, and if there is an end, it’s not in sight. We are always in the middle, and we are all missing links. Just like there was no absolute point when your life began, there was no moment of creation when our species began, no spark of life, no breath of God into the nostrils of an Adam molded in the red earth, no cracking of a cosmic egg. So it goes. Nothing living is fixed, and all creatures are four dimensional, existing in space, and also through time.”

My rating: 4.0/5.0  Goodreads: 4.05/5.0

Review: Rutherford is an excellent writer but the history and science would have been interesting even in lesser hands. Rutherford elevates an already fascinating, and timely, subject through a refusal to be a detached impartial scientist. He has a lot of outrage directed towards hateful ignorance and the willful exploitation of others but it’s an outrage articulated with a very British dry, sharp wit. I’m certainly never going to bother with a 23andMe test after reading this. I learned a lot and enjoyed the learning, which is what I look for in popular science books.

Read-alike: The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee. A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived is more funny than The Gene, and less formal, but it’s less focused as well.

[jessica-drewz]

-Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes

[comtedemoney]

You're descended from royalty — and so is everybody else by Adam Rutherford http://nautil.us/issue/56/perspective/youre-descended-from-royalty-and-so-is-everybody-else

From the article:

The answer came before high-powered DNA sequencing and ancient genetic analysis. Instead it comes from mathematics. Joseph Chang is a statistician from Yale University and wished to analyze our ancestry not with genetics or family trees, but just with numbers. By asking how recently the people of Europe would have a common ancestor, he constructed a mathematical model that incorporated the number of ancestors an individual is presumed to have had (each with two parents), and given the current population size, the point at which all those possible lines of ascent up the family trees would cross. The answer was merely 600 years ago. Sometime at the end of the 13th century lived a man or woman from whom all Europeans could trace ancestry, if records permitted (which they don't).

In 2013, geneticists Peter Ralph and Graham Coop showed that DNA says exactly the same thing as Chang's mathematical ancestry: Our family trees are not trees at all, but entangled meshes.

Chang factored that into a further study of common ancestry beyond Europe, and concluded in 2003 that the most recent common ancestor of everyone alive on Earth lived only around 3,400 years ago.

[yasbxxgie]

The Goats w/ Spider Genes & Silk In Their Milk Horizon: Playing God (BBC Two, 1/17/12 / 1/18/12) [v]

[mrdirtybear]

BBC presenter and scientist Adam Rutherford (born 1975), who is also president of the British Humanist Society. My main reason for putting this image up is to promote his podcast/radio series which outlines the history of eugenics from the 1870s to the present day. Find the first episode here. Alternatively put his name and 'eugenics' into the search engine of your choice and see where it takes you.