My word for the week is genetics (closely followed by scared silly, but that’s for later). Gregor Mendel spent years in meticulous research to provide the world with his theories on genetics, dominant and recessive genes and the consequences of genetic interplay when same mixes with same. I could have spent my whole life being resigned to mousy brown hair, muddy green eyes, and a short stature, the consequences of sharing DNA with parents who are tall, blond, and brown eyed. I am the youngest of five children, and while you can see a definitive family resemblance, my four older siblings are certainly my parents’ children. I have two theories on this. First, my Mom had too many martinis with the guy across the street, or more realistically, I was the last combination of two exceedingly tired parents and thus received the dregs of genetic material.
I stick by the latter because, of all my family, I seem to have inherited every genetically linked disease that ever poked its nasty little head into my family tree. The difficult part of accepting this is that each separate disease does not live comfortably with the others. As a rheumatoid arthritic, my joints are in a constant state of destruction and I must take drugs to counteract that destruction. These drugs suck the calcium from my system and thus aggravate my inherited tendency towards osteoporosis. Large amounts of calcium supplements aggravate my kidney’s inherited tendency towards kidney stones. Many episodes of passing these stones (and if you have never experienced that, you will never know what it feels like to be drawn and quartered, disemboweled, and burned at the stake!) necessitates the need for even more drugs that interfere with the properties of all the other drugs I must ingest. Being a diabetic just complicates the issue even further.
I spent a few days this week being evaluated for joint replacement. It is a remarkable experience having several therapists bend you, poke you, stretch you, and throw 30 pound medicine balls at you and have several doctors stand by to ask you “How much did that hurt? On a scale of 1 to 10?” Mmmmmm. I thought of several answers my mother would be shocked to hear. In the end, the evaluation was that I was in desperate need of joint replacement. After another few hours of having the procedures explained to me by the physicians and a few hours spent with a psychologist to ascertain whether or not I fully understood what was going to happen and how I felt about it, I settled into my 2 hour drive home with only one clear thought—“Yeah. Right.”
I am a fairly eclectic reader, but truly enjoy science fiction and am thrilled to pieces that this genre has become so popular in media during the last few decades. Many books and movies were written and made in the ‘pulp fiction’ days of the 1930’s through the 60’s although all were considered lowbrow. Even the original Star Trek, which lasted only 3 seasons, was considered unsophisticated and popular with only a few fanatics. Then came Star Wars—a big screen, big money, action-packed, sci-fi adventure comic book that took the world into the joys of a visually real future. From there, science fiction became the ‘in thing’ and has been able to hold its head up high through the continual production of high quality motion pictures (the Star Trek movies, the Star Wars movies, the Terminator movies) and novels that not only have been on the best selling lists, but have stayed there. (Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker series, Michael Crichton’s JurassicPark, Carl Sagan’s Contact).
I have a theory about this, too. My grandmother, born in 1898, used to brag that she was born when the horse and buggy was the norm and lived to see a man walk on the moon. Since I have been born…wow! How do you explain the tremendous leaps and bounds in technology in the last 40 years? When I was a kid we had portable record players and neat little cases for our 45’s. Today, I pop an almost indestructible plastic disc into a device attached to my belt to listen to music so clear and defined it is as if I was listening to it live. Computers, the internet, the space station, GPS devices, smart cars, microwaves, robotics, the list goes on. The interesting thing is, is that most of today’s technological wizardry had already been invented in the minds of the early sci-fi writers.
So, as I contemplate the amazing advances in science and, more particularly, the advances in medicine (they want to saw away a major part of my skeletal structure and replace it with a metal facsimile!), I am drawn to my lessons in science fiction. I am fully cognizant of how lucky I am to be able to benefit from the major advances already made—the thought of being a bedridden arthritic in the 1800’s, addicted to and eventually dying from overdoses of morphine is hard to contemplate—but my inner ‘scared silly because they want to do this for my own good’ reaction is definitely rearing its terrified head. What I really want is to have Dr. McCoy strap his device on my joint and non-invasively heal me. I want Dr. Beverly Crusher to tap into my obviously warped DNA and with a twitch of a button take away all the nasties. I even, in a perverse sort of way, want Data to tell me how lucky I am to be biological. I don’t think that technology is too far around the corner do you? I think I’ll wait.
