Otherways- Fiction Fanatics

Although it was a long time ago, I did my initial schooling in biochemistry, Genetics to be precise. I had a low-level job working in plant pathology, sequencing DNA and even slicing and dicing DNA to add interesting new bits to the plasmids of E. Coli bacteria in order to attempt to add those same genes to corn. Why anyone in their right minds would let a 17 year old kid tamper with nature completely unsupervised is a question I really have no answer for. I have to say, it was an awesome couple of years. I felt like a kid let loose in a toy store. There are probably a few bacteria on ice still at that lab that bear my initials.

Besides that questionable legacy, I took two things from that lab: an abiding love of the science of genetics, and a deep irritation with science fiction, fantasy and horror novels that use DNA changes to alter the entire body at once. Changing the fertilized egg is a relatively simple process. Dealing with one cell is just a lot less trouble than dealing with a trillion. If you can get your change into that single cell, it will cheerfully replicate it for you into all the trillions of cells that make up a living creature. Somatic, or body cells, are not nearly so helpful.

I've used the trope myself, although in order to sleep at night I blamed mine on magic rather than science, and I've been tempted at other times. It would have made a good visual for the story, but bad science is bad science. The body doesn't change once it is set.

Or does it? The older I've gotten, the more I've come to realize that there truly are exceptions to every rule. One natural example of this is the salmon. We're probably all familiar with the life story of salmon. They hatch in fresh water streams, make their way to the ocean, spend a number of years munching on seafood and growing larger before heading back up the same freshwater stream. There, they will leap spectacularly, feed themselves to charming bears, spawn, and die.

What you might not realize is that the fresh water to salt water environment change requires a complete body overhaul. Simply put, with out the changes, a fresh water fish moving into salt water would continually lose the internal water it needs to survive, until survival was no longer an issue. Baby salmon do this, sans death. Young salmon undergo changes before they head into the ocean that have been little understood until now. Apparently triggered by the amount of light in the Spring, their brains actually show a huge increase in the number of cells created in the hypothalamus during the process of "smoltification". (Young sea-going salmon are called smolt.)

These new cells, in turn, lead to the production of special enzymes that seem to control the necessary changes to the fish's body.

Perhaps, then, it is possible to change an entire adult body by triggering a simple change, It would require finding a "keystone" change, such as the one in salmon, that lies dormant in non-coding DNA, and somehow awakening it from that dormancy. Of course, you would have to make a compelling argument for where in the creature's evolutionary history such a change would have naturally occurred, at least to satisfy the science geeks like me.  A more difficult proposal than, say, random viral mutation is likely to answer, but possible nonetheless. All scientific doubts aside, that would be a book I'd enjoy reading.

Cheers,

Michelle