Genetics is the study of how genes and how traits are passed down from one generation to the next. Our genes carry information that affects our health, our appearance, and even our personality.
If you’ve studied genetics it also has effects on evolution due to survival of the fittest. It can also show a person’s potential life cycle due to the genetics predictability of different ailments or abilities to help them in today’s world.
Today’s world is a more computer driven place, needing more programming abilities which rely on intelligence rather than brawn or muscle power. In the beginnings when we were hunters as the species survival relied upon strength we have seen this as a very attractive quality when choosing a mate. How many highly intelligent people do you know who look amazing? Yeah they don’t as a possible fact they became smart to compensate for their lack of physical perfection. But intelligence is not a predictable genetic trait. It also relies on environmental factors and abilities.
Humans have always been curious about their survival traits because as said, it means they survive… The greatest fear is death, so we hope to prolong the inevitable as much as possible. The worst genetic experiments always seem to coincide with war, as they seem to throw out the rule books and start getting creative. To mention a few really bad experiments (please see links if curious I’m only giving the brief explanation):
- Russians in 1920 trying to create a humanzee by mixing Chimpanzee and human DNA. This has been experimented on before and in 1960 China did a similar experiment, but due to humans have one pair fewer chromosomes than other apes not a good use of scientific research. The lack of chromosomes creates a genetic improbability of the ability for hybrids due to the fact humans have well evolved beyond the primative starts (our closest to great apes being Neanderthals). There are only very few species which have a possibility of interbreeding such as camels and llamas. But it is not a proven possibility from the failures of the past.
- The horrific Nazi experiments on twins during World War 2. Josef Mengele, an SS physician at Auschwitz looked for twins upon which to experiment, hoping to prove his theories of the racial supremacy of Aryans. The horrors inflicted included testing parachute drops, freezing, sterilization procedures, chemical warfare and infectious diseases… Beyond horrific, disgusting, inhumane experimentation. Some of the doctors responsible for these atrocities were later tried as war criminals, but Mengele escaped to South America. He died in Brazil in 1979, of a heart attack. I can only hope he is suffering in the lowest rings of hell as punishment.
- The Nazi’s were not the only horrific experiment as throughout the 1930s and 1940s, the Japanese Imperial Army conducted biological warfare and medical testing on civilians, mostly in China. Led by General Shiro Ishii, the lead physician at UNIT 731, the death toll of these brutal experiments is unknown, but as many as 200,000 may have died. Numerous diseases were studied in order to determine their potential use in warfare. Among them were plague, anthrax, dysentery, typhoid, paratyphoid and cholera. Numerous atrocities were committed including infecting wells with cholera and typhoid and spreading plague-ridden fleas across Chinese cities. It was not until the late 1990’s that Japan first acknowledged the existence of the unit and not until 2018 that the names of thousands of members of the Unit were disclosed.
- J. Marion Sims, gained much of his fame by doing experimental surgeries on slave women. Sims performed the surgeries without anesthesia, in part because anesthesia had only recently been discovered, and in part because Sims believed the operations were not painful enough to justify the trouble. Sims manipulated the social institution of slavery to perform human experimentations, which by any standard is unacceptable. Though unlike the above mentioned monsters, Sims was at least trying to help the women, not harm them even though he did it in an unethical way.
- Syphilis experiments from the US in 1932 and 1946 to test infected people with possible cures and follow how the infection spread. This involved people who were already struggling and in desperate states when contracting syphilis were given penicillin then no follow up or consent for informed participation in the experiment.Only in 2010 were they given a formal apology. The experiment in 1932, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. Public Health Service launched a study on the health effects of untreated syphilis in black men. They tested the progression of the disease in 399 black men and 201 healthy men, telling them they were being treated for “bad blood.” In fact, the men never got adequate treatment, even when in 1947, when penicillin became the drug to treat syphilis. It wasn’t until a 1972 that a newspaper article exposed the study to the public eye that officials shut it down. 40 years later…
I’m surprised I can’t find an experiment with a zombie infection…Funnily enough the fictional idea of a zombie was first thought up because an undead soldier would keep getting up and attacking…really useful in combat as they wouldn’t be killed. Scientifically speaking a zombie virus isn’t a likely hood due to the virus needing to kill off brain functions that would also be needed for the zombie to function normally e.g. the frontal lobe would need to stop empathy/thought processing or the anterior insular cortex but the broca would be needed for processing movement. So a virus that needed to kill off certain cells and not others would be near impossible to predict. The closest infectious disease would be rabies, but it only gets aggressively bad when the subject is near death. So you’d have a very short lived army. While meningitis does shut down areas of the brain which would be needed to create a zombie, unfortunately they still need to be alive to continue to function. So the undead will have to remain as fiction such as Frankenstein etc.
I know I just went off on a tangent, but it does have a reason. A person’s genetics do show how a person is more susceptible to certain conditions or diseases. For example diabetes type 2 and gestational diabetes are both hereditary, meaning they are a passed down family trait. But Diabetes type 1 is caused by an autoimmune disease which causes your white cells to fight your own healthy cells as it sees them as a threat, commonly caused by infections such as Mononucleosis, COVID-19, Cytomegalovirus, Measles, German measles (Rubella), Hand, foot, and mouth disease, Mumps and Influenza. If a condition (there are more, I’ve only mentioned a few) is caught by a person with autoimmune disorders their cells can attack the pancreas beta cells (as well as others) in response.
All potential viruses, diseases and infections are both factors of genetics and environment. We know that if you have family history of heart problems, you have a greater potential for a heart attack. We know that cancer syndrome is a genetic disorder in which inherited genetic mutations in one or more genes predispose the affected individuals to the development of cancer and may also cause early onset of these cancers.
Genetics influence your entire body and chemical makeup. The exception to similar genetic uniqueness being identical twins as identical twins share the same genomes and are nearly always the same sex. In contrast, fraternal or dizygotic twins result from the fertilization of two separate eggs with two different sperm during the same pregnancy. Like most other siblings, fraternal twins share half of their genomes. Apart from identical twins, people will not have identical genetical structures. While there are similarities we cannot all say we are the same. Our families are the closest to our genetic structure but it gets less likely the further out you go from your main genetic parents. Your first genetic similarity would be a sibling from the same set of parents. Then dependant of your genealogy and the more dominant in the genetics, one then the other of your parents.
It also gives you clues about genetic traits from your background. For an example being my mother and father come from the northern hemisphere. My mother’s family are Finish. I take a lot after my mum and grandmother and while I have my father’s genetics they are not the dominant gene within how I look. Now, we need to see our genetic anthropological homes to see how or why we are made the way we are. Environment has a big impact on genetics for our survival. Finland is negative degrees for most of winter. The core temperature of the body remains steady at around 36.5–37.5 degrees Celcius and as the external temperature drops we use more energy to maintain this. This results in the need for more calorie input to maintain our body temperatures. Do you ever wonder why you get more hungry during winter? Genetically speaking it makes our bodies, that are telling us to preserve energy for the harsh winter put on extra weight. Being in the Southern hemisphere we use less energy to keep ourselves warm, so need to eat less than average and exercise more than average to maintain a “healthy” weight.
This is genetics at work and understanding your own genetic environmental factors and the possible genetic hereditary conditions will help you understand your health and well being.
Certain mental conditions or factors can be hereditary or environmental. Both play a part with ability to process information or how a person responds to external influences. This area is a bit harder to define as it is a rather new area for discussion. There is no 100% definite answer, so it really relies on the individual and possibility not guarantee. As mentioned above we have genetics which suits us to environment. Mental or possible abnormalities do not always have to do with genetics, but rather learnt behaviour. I can give you an example of a sociopath and psychopath. They have the same brain structure and have no ability to feel empathy. Both have the same type of genetics, but environmentally the sociopath is functional and the psychopath is dysfunctional. This can be explained by behavioural influences causing trauma to a person who cannot understand empathy at an early age. Which causes them to question why they don’t feel like others and so try get understanding through hurting others, because they can’t feel emotional pain so they link it to physical pain.
I myself am autistic so I feel every pain imaginable through empathy. I think autism and psychopathy are complete opposites in brain functions. I also have found that a lot of sociopaths pick up on my empathy and try to bully me because of it. I think of it a bit like a Tom and Jerry silent comedy. We always are fighting, but silently. I have studied them and I have fought them when they inflict pain on others. They are more common than most think and they often will work themselves into positions of power to bully, demean and inflict emotional pain for their amusement. The difference between them and myself is that I do a great job, so they can’t intimidate or degrade my work. They then decide to attack my personality which we call bullying. I love that everything is recorded, so they no longer have the ability to do this online. Only face to face, which is another factor where working in an office is less preferable. Hope they ask the question why people are scared to go back?
Generally people are unaware of these conditions or possible genetic probability, science is progressing faster same as technology has, but it is still being investigated, tested and researched.
I very much encourage people to develop scientific curiousity because it is an amazing field and new ideas or findings are being discovered daily.
Maxine the Magnificent 