Genetics & Politics

By way of experialist:

Students Dissecting a Cadaver, c. 1900.

Standards for dissection have changed a bit in the past hundred years. From the photograph description:

The cadaver lies on a ceramic anatomy-table. A gas lamp is above the corpse. A student has placed a book on the cadaver’s forearm as if the cadaver were holding it for him. Two of the men are smoking pipes. 

wildcat2030:

I’m not an angry man but a new analysis of the structure of DNA using electron microscopy made me cross yesterday. It wasn’t the fault of the scientists involved, but the sloppy way the result was reported that got my scientific goat. The structure of DNA was first determined almost 60 years ago by Watson’s and Crick’s famous analysis of the scattering patterns recorded by Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin as they fired beams of X-rays at narrow fibres of the stuff. We have had a long time to refine and digest this result so I was surprised to run across so much inaccurate information in the internet digests of the new finding, reported in the journal Nano Letters by an Italian group led by Enzo di Fabrizio. The web-site io9.com headlined George Dvorsky’s piece “Scientists snap a picture of DNA’s double helix for the very first time.” No, they hadn’t. The accompanying article interspersed fact with fancy before finally concluding that the new imaging technique would enable us to see “how it interacts with proteins and RNA”. No, it won’t. I’ll explain why in a minute but first let’s look at New Scientist’s coverage of the same paper. This was a more measured and more accurate account of the new result but the piece got off to a bad start. Roland Pease’s article claimed that “an electron microscope has captured the famous Watson-Crick double helix in all its glory.” But it clearly hadn’t. The accompanying image was fuzzy and did not show a double helix that resembled the one described by Watson and Crick. (via You can’t see DNA unless you look properly | Science | guardian.co.uk)

globalvoices:

Eloïse Lagrenée has posted on her Facebook page a picture by Yemeni photographer Bushra Almutawakel, illustrating how women could vanish into darkness and invisibility, step by step, under fundamentalist pressure and the full niqab. It has been shared over 1,500 times.

Source

Now do one where the women vanish into darkness and invisibility, step by step, under non-fundamentalist pressure.

Panthers on parade at Free Huey rally in Defermery Park (named by the Panthers Bobby Hutton Park) in West Oakland. Photograph © Stephen Shames

Named “the greatest threat to the internal security of the United States,” by FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover. [source]