Why This Is Hell

‘There is no way to stop this’: ‘Biotech Barbie’ Cathy Tie on her mission to genetically modify babies

Gene editing has the power to alter the trajectory of human evolution for ever; the direction it takes will depend on who wields the editing tools. “There is no public funding available for researchers in the space,” Tie explains. “Everything is privately funded.” It’s up to entrepreneurs to demonstrate the potential benefits for humankind, she says, so regulators may soften their hardline stance and allow them to rewrite human DNA.

Also, just look at the people who are funding this, and we think that this is the C21st equivalent of Citizen Kane trying to make his mistress an opera star.

And as for this, I don't think she can really get away from it?

“Eugenics is a very heavy word,” Tie says just before taking questions from the floor. “I would prefer to stop throwing that word around.”

- and somehow I have been thinking all week about Charles Darwin moseying around the Galapagos, and over the subsequent decades gradually evolving the theory of evolution....

Unfortunately 'The Big Idea' on AI children as the future of reproduction is not yet online.

I also think of the fairly parlous state even in relatively advanced countries of women's ability to reliably control their fertility, have high-quality safe obstetrical care, etc, issues around children' nutrition, early years care, education....

But I guess these things do not have a gosh-wow factor.

France overturns law classing people as property – 178 years after it abolished slavery

Have been for some considerable time casting sceptical glances at the whole liberte egalite fraternite thing, because that third element did seem rather to circumscribe the application....

(And also the historical tendency to consider that o-la-la, they were far more sorted in matters erotique - a good deal of this was surely the perception of gents Britannique en vacances, surely.)

I was a bit stunned by this: Argentina’s ‘European’ self-image under renewed scrutiny after racist incidents in Brazil, but agreeably surprised to find that Brazil (which was very late to abolish slavery) has a law of 'racial insult'. Although it has significant racial problems.

What I read

Dorothy Richardson, Interim (Pilgrimage, #5) (1919) for online reading group. Less dentistry in this one, but Canadian doctors.

Vonda McIntyre, The Curve of the World - which, well, my bar for her is set high, and one does wonder if maybe she would have worked more on this had she had the time, but it was still pretty good, even if there was a bit of an air of thought-experiment about the possibilities of cultural exchanges at the period. Points for having ageing (textually indicated to be menopausing) protag, and the seafaring party includes a pregnant woman.

Mick Herron, Nobody Walks (2015), thriller set in the Slough House universe and with various known characters mentioned but a stand-alone about unrelated characters. Not bad.

On the go

Still Persuasion, but very nearly there.

Still dipping in to Violet Hunt's Tales of the Uneasy - possibly her strength lay in the creepiness lurking within human relations, because I'm not sure she's really up there with her horror contemporaries?

Up next

There's a new Slightly Foxed.

I may just possibly have fulminated heretofore about the assumption that a woman over 35 is But A Barren Stock and her fertility has fallen off a cliff and She Should Have Frozen Her Eggs while there was still time -

- and this may be a factor of age and reading certain novels at an impressionable age not to mention being a historian with interest in that area -

- but honestly, is the existence of The Menopausal Baby - You're Not Having The Change, Duckie, You're Preggers! - unknown to the present generation?

I will state, for information, that my sources in organisations such as BPAS indicate that a significant % of their custom comes from women who believed that their ovaries had shrivelled up and they no longer needed to employ contraception, and WHOOPS.

Misinformation about perimenopause on social media ‘putting women at risk’: Dangers include unintended pregnancies, taking unnecessary medication and missed diagnoses, say experts

(Okay, maybe there's some kind of pendulum thing going on here, from No-One is Talking About The Menopause to Everything is Attributed to the Peri/Menopause once a woman is over a certain age?)

Briggs said misinformation around perimenopause is concerning.
“I look at things like Instagram to see what they are exposed to and I am horrified,” she said, citing examples of women in their 30s being told to demand HRT if they are unable to sleep or are struggling with migraines – and to switch GPs if denied. Or women being told they should seek testosterone treatment.
“I’m not anti any of these things in the right person, but females produce their own testosterone lifelong, even women without ovaries, so the idea that everybody has to demand testosterone is bonkers,” Briggs said.
Dr Channa Jayasena, an expert in reproductive endocrinology at Imperial College London, also raised concerns.
“It’s great that there’s better [public] awareness [about perimenopause]. And I think many doctors are completely unaware about how debilitating the symptoms of perimenopause can be,” he said. “But the flipside of that, I think there’s a risk that some women are being mislabelled as having perimenopause when they have other things that are wrong.”

I am very much inclined to think that the President of the British Menopause Society knows whereof she peaks:

[T]here is a perception that any symptom affecting women between the ages of 40 and 60 is due to perimenopause or menopause and that HRT is required.
“I think HRT is completely wonderful,” Rymer said. But, she added, “it’s not for women who don’t need it,” noting that in such situations it can cause heavy bleeding.

This week's bread: a loaf of Marriage's Organic Country Fayre Malted Brown Bread Flour, v nice.

Friday night supper: ven pongal (S Indian khichchari).

Saturday breakfast rolls: Tassajarra method, 50/50% white/wholemeal spelt flour. molasses, raisins: turned out rather well.

Today's lunch: a sort-of cassoulet thing, with the other half-pack of pancetta, Belazu Judion Butter Beans, garlic, onion, bay leaves, 5-pepper blend, panko breadcrumbs, worked pretty well; served with buttered spinach and chicory quartered, healthy-grilled in pumpkin seed oil and drizzled with lime and lemongrass balsamic vinegar.

Not so much re-inventing the wheel, as having to point out something that is already known and has been for a long time (it was not really news when my primary-school teacher was making the point): Children’s reading should prioritise pleasure over learning, says laureate. Sigh.

***

Also on perhaps a similar theme that the obvious straight road is not actually the way there: science is not simply a sequence of tasks that can be optimized:

It advances through a process analogous to Darwinian evolution: variation across many independent efforts; selection through critique, replication, and competition; and retention of robust results. This distributed structure is what allows science to correct itself and to generate novelty. Independence is not incidental; it is the mechanism that produces both reliability and discovery.
....
The scientific system thrives on inefficiency: redundant efforts, failed attempts, and divergent paths. These are not costs to be eliminated but sources of discovery. By contrast, optimization pressures drive convergence—faster iteration within a constrained search space. The result may be more output but less exploration of the unexpected.

I stumbled across a remarkable collection of photographs:

There are several images in the collection of relevance to queer history, not least in those that record varieties of touch between men that would later become discouraged. In one, we see four young men sitting together on a bench in a garden: two of them hold hands. In another, a man takes another man on his lap, posing as lovers in a pose that mimics the popular visual culture of the day.
But the collection is arguably of most interest to LGBTQ+ history, specifically trans history, for the kinds of gender play it records. Several images in the collection illustrate traditions of gender crossing in British culture. Some show pantomime dames and another perhaps shows the role of a boy character taken up by a woman.

***

An extraordinary story of people who appear to be the 'good guys' (Liberal representing the anti-slavery interest in Lyme Regis) absolutely knee-deep in electoral corruption. Bonus appearance of Mary Anning!

What is most striking about Pinney’s career as an MP is not just the willingness of a fairly advanced Liberal to engage in wholesale electoral corruption, but his own attitude to slavery given his family background. As early as 1832 he had called on the hustings for its complete abolition and in 1838 he willingly voted for the Whig government’s apprenticeship reforms.

This is fascinating: The Plotland Houses of Britain: How a 20th century working-class housing movement was stifled, but I'd like to see some consideration of how the post-WWII prefab housing developments and attitudes thereto would fit onto what's described here.

(Also resonates with account in Houlbrook's Songs of Seven Dials about what well-intentioned progressive town-planners wanted to do to those traditional parts of inner London, but in the event, didn't.)

Anyway, I was dipping in again to the Violet Hunt Tales of the Uneasy and in 'The Operation' there is the backstory where a man's first wife -

had smoothed and made easy the path of divorce for the man she loved.... full of zeal to give him his freedom. It was hardly human, so the woman who had profited by her action thought, and certainly not very womanly. Florence could not imagine herself allowing a cold business-like lawyer to dictate her a letter bidding Joe come back to her herewith; a summons intended, of course, for ultimate publication. It disgusted Florence, this horrible business of sueing for restitution of conjugal rights!

This was the cleanest way a woman could get quit of a husband pre 1923 - he had of course to be adulterous (or appear to have been) and refusing to restitute conjugal rights counted as desertion.

Otherwise she had to prove cruelty (which could include knowing infection with a loathsome disease) or that he was guilty of a sexual crime (rape, sodomy, incest....).

But in a situation where the man had, presumably, already run off with Another Woman, having to go through that legal rigmarole of asking him to come back so that he could refuse and be legally deserting does strike one as a very chagrining procedure.

What I read

John D MacDonald, The Quick Red Fox (Travis McGee, #4) (1964) - pour me out a shot of that cheap whisky.

Change of pace - this was more, this was actually I wanted to be reading something like this, but this wasn't quite hitting the spot, nevertheless I continued and finished: Gail Godwin, A Southern Family (1987), bits of which I remembered and bits of which I didn't.

Have just finished Alba de Céspedes, There's No Turning Back (1938) - for in-person reading group. Young modern women in Rome in the late 1930s - they are modern in that they have left home to study, but they are living in an institute run by nuns (and not all of them are actually studying). A more complex picture of the lives of Italian women in the Fascist era than one perhaps supposed (though the education mostly seems to be with a view to teaching ho hum) - politics is all rather on the margins, though one of the women is Spanish and the situation in Spain affects her.

The latest Literary Review

On the go

Persuasion, for the bluesky daily chapter read-through.

Up next

About to embark on Dorothy Richardson, Interim (Pilgrimage, #5) (1919) for online reading group.

And then, maybe, can get to Vonda McIntyre, The Curve of the World, just posthumously published by Aqueduct.

Queer Non-Monogamy in Edwardian London.

Author of article does point out that this is happening among people with huge amounts of privilege and possibilities of discretion:

[I]t is certainly easy to romanticise the traditions of lavender marriages and queer non-monogamy that were so prevalent in the London arts scene during the Belle Epoch. However, to over-simplify the past in this way would be to overlook the many tensions that existed between queer couples, as well as the growing interest in alternative relationship structures within heterosexual participants in this scene. Most importantly, however, it would be a failure not to take into consideration the considerable inequalities that allowed the rich and the powerful to live by a double-standard of sexual propriety. Provided they avoided relationships that troubled other structures like class and race, this group remained free from the expected social and legal repercussions of queer sex in the early twentieth century.

Does she not realise quite how much This Sort of Thing - negotiating the boundaries of marriages that were made for various reasons of status, money, and politics, to accommodate other relationships - had been going on For A Very Long Time, and has she not seen that movie about the Duchess of Devonshire in the late C18th? (Which included sapphic dalliance.)

Will concede (she concedes) that a) Lords Strachan and Warwick did not seem on-board with their Ladies' sapphic dalliance (see icon), though the issue there does seem to have been they had not been sufficiently Pas Devant the wrong kind of people who would gossip and go away to make satirical prints sold in Piccadilly and b) the whole thing probably got even more discreet in the Victorian era, though when one considers Edward the Caresser's set, did it do so by very much?

I once, in fact, I think, put forward an argument that Bertrand Russell, e.g., in his arguments for free love, was proposing to democratise a way of life his family had been practising for generations.