A Celebration of Life, Death and Continuance
by
Albert Kumirai
A Child is Born
I still remember one bright and sunny day more than twenty two years ago in Texas, in a College City called Lubbock, home of the Red Raiders for those who relate to American College Football. I had just received the picture of my new born son, whom I had not seen yet as he had been born on the first of January 1988, four and a half months after I had left my native Zimbabwe to pursue higher education in America. I had had to leave behind a pregnant wife at a critical time in her second trimester because of the imperative of compliance to the starting dates for my scholarship-funded higher degree, courtesy of the United Nations Development Program's Agency for International Development.
The picture was of a six month old baby, it was a black and white picture of a baby boy swaddled in a woolen blanket with only the fisticuffed right hand and the face showing. I could not believe that I was beholding my second son and for the first time putting his image next to the imagination and feeling of fatherhood I had nursed since New Year's day some six months back when I had been informed of his advent. The picture made it seem as if it was the first time I had heard of him as I was seeing his face for the first time. It escaped me that the child was already six months old. It crossed my mind to enquire why it had taken so long to get a picture to me, but I immediately checked myself. The mother had been ill for a while after delivering the baby. The baby had been out of sorts from many afflictions that trouble little babies from birth to six months, including colic, diarrhoea, fevers, and having to be taken for immunization against diptheria, pertusis, tetanus, and also immunized against BCG better known as Tuberculosis, as well as immunization against polio, and all sorts of other medical complications not least among which was marasmus, arising from improper feeding. With the intervention of nurses and a few words of advice the feeding regimen was straightened up and the baby was back on track with a growth chart that resumed normal trends.
So it had been six months before it was even possible for the baby to be taken to the studio for pictures. Pictures only came from photo studios those days from Kodak film wound in a still camera, usually a single reflex camera with no zoom or wide angle lens. A third world tropical country like Zimbabwe could ill afford such luxuries as expedited photo processing, expedited mail delivery, and E-mail was not yet available even in America. So things proceeded by snail mail, and things took their time, and things happened eventually at their own sweet time.
Specimen Number 50000
I went to the Natural Science Research Laboratory (NSRL) at the Museum of Texas Tech University, an excellent research facility for the study of the evolutionary biology and biogeographic radiation of recent mammals. I proceeded as usual to the minus-seventy degrees Celcius ultra-cold freezer and the liquid nitrogen canisters to continue with my task which was to accession tissue samples into the Museum's frozen tissue register. This we did by extracting, recording and storing heart, liver, kidney and muscle tissues of mammal specimens for molecular biology research, chromosome karyotyping, protein allozyme electrophoresis, DNA restriction fragment length polymorphisms, DNA hybridization and polymerase chain reaction augmentation of small sized samples for use in DNA sequencing studies.
The Director of the Laboratory came in and after the usual greetings and the updates on progress we got to talking about the accession progress and he was delighted to note that the Museum had reached a landmark number of specimens accessioned and catalogued in its register. This landmark needed to be celebrated for all to see and note. It required that a small ceremony and a few speeches be made. The announcement of the landmark accession of the 50000th voucher specimen was a joyous occasion and well attended, including the graceful presence of his Honor the Mayor of Lubbock who set aside time in his busy schedule shuttling between Dallas, Houston, Amarillo and Lubbock to come and celebrate the achievement that The Museum, Texas Tech University had acquired a landmark 50000th specimen. This specimen was a Bobcat. So it is that, twenty two years after the fact, I still recall that specimen number 50000 in the catalogue of the NSRL, the Museum, Texas Tech University, Lubbock is a bobcat.
Cytoplasm
While we were talking and laughing and being merry, the subject of my child's picture came up and congratulations were aired all round. I even had occasion to joke about his appearance when asked who he resembled by immediately comparing my son to a lump of cytoplasm, still to develop phenotypic characteristics robust enough to be used as diagnostic comparative attributes! This brought the house down with laughter. Still it was all merriment and joyful chatter. The comparison of my son to cytoplasm was apt within the context of the tissue samples being catalogued. Without a label on the vial one would not be able to identify what tissue it was, and let alone from what animal it was.
Continuance
I got thinking and the fact that I was celebrating life in the form of the birth of my son, and celebrating the accession of a dead bobcat on the same level of cheer meant that there must be a unifying theme for such apparently diametric opposites to be placed on the same platform of celebration. I immediately recognized the unifying concept here was continuance. The purpose of a collection of specimens in a Museum as vouchers is to maintain a physical record of the existence at a certain point in time of a representative of a species of animal that can be touched, measured, examined, analyzed and photographed as part of research into the evolution, taxonomy, systematics and radiation of the population to which that animal belongs. Many years after the species is extinct, the only reference to that species in terms of phenotype, genotype, location and relationship to other such species will be the Museum specimen. The specimen is a physical voucher for the existence in physical space at a point in time of that species. The voucher specimen and the data that are appended to it provide the provenance for that species. It provides concrete and irrefutable evidence of the existence in physical space at a point in time of the species to which the specimen belongs. Without specimens to vouch for the existence of species there will be too much conjecture in the description of species to the extent that Roman and Greek mythology would be a better pastime in identifying the gods and godesses of ancient times than trying to sort out the taxonomic relations between animal species for which there is no physical evidence. That is the premise upon which our celebration of specimen number 50000 was predicated. The physical-ness of a specimen has extended to the level of DNA. Long ago the Museums of the world could only collect and record measurements on whole specimens and stuff the skins to make them lifelike, and dispose of all the flesh and blood. With the advent of new technology, it became possible to collect tissues, including blood, and to cryogenically arrest the enzymatic processes that would normally lead to the destruction of the tissues, and make these soft tissues available for use in research many years after the specimens were collected by simply defrosting them to take them out of suspended animation and using them again as if they had just been collected.
So is also with my sons, they are continuation of my blood line, so that when I too am long gone, my sons will continue my identity into posterity and they remain as living physical entities to vouch for my existence in a distant time past in physical space. So also is the evolution of the praying mantis or the black widow spider and many other arthropod species whose female eats the male after fertilization to use the protein of the father as nourishment for the unborn offspring. Continuance is the main theme in evolutionary biology and its imperative goes down all the way to the level of the subcellular infrastructure. The genes that we see in chromosomes are each paired as alleles to exert influence on the outcome of the animal that eventually shows up at birth. The survival of that new born is determined by a multiplicity of combinations of genes and the chromosomes on which those genes are located, as well as the environment in which the animal is born and the characteristics of the population and ecosystem to which the animal belongs.
Selfishness versus Neighborliness
Is this survival driven by selfish motives? Is there such a thing as the selfish gene? Richard Dawkins seemed to be strongly pursuaded that such a phenomenon exists. Does nature select for those gene combinations that fit the environment? Charles Darwin seemed quite convinced of the matter. What happens when natural fitness is influenced by social policy and religion, in such a way as affirm the naturally unfit and give them undue advantage in a competition where they were doomed to failure by loading the bases in their favor? What if government opened a manufacturing firm that employed only paraplegics, or only women, or only blacks, or only homosexuals, or only whites, or only albinos, or only single mothers, or only members of ZANUPF party? Social Darwinism came into dangerous play more than seventy years ago with disastrous consequences for the whole world and played out with no less than ten million people dead. It may be called positive discrimination, affirmative action, black economic empowerment, indigenization, gender support, special interest group support, gays and lesbians interests awareness. The primal play between genes and the environment has a new player called man who can now easily and casually change the environment at will, and can determine which players get to compete for what, and can exclude from competition which population he chooses. One species on earth now holds the keys to the survival of the biosphere, but is evidently steering the world towards environmental catastrophe with nuclear weapons in the hands of mad people, industrial development hell-bent towards destroying the ozone layer and accellerating global warming, governments refusing to follow the agreements of the Kyoto Accord on sustainable development and ignoring the recommendations of the Rio Summit on biodiversity conservation. The world is hurtling at high speed towards a certain end and the architect of that demise is none other than man, the custodian of nature.
Life is a cycle of birth, death and rebirth. A grassland pasture has to be deliberately burnt so as to catalyze the birth of new pasture to graze the farm animals. A grain of wheat has to die in the soil in order to give rise to a head of wheat with much more wheat on it, so too does a grain of corn or maize die to give rise to a cob with much more grain. This cycle of continuance looks at posterity and values survival over time rather than individual survival. Those who kill other people in the same way venom from a serpent would kill a human with no intention of eating him go against the very grain of the survival motive of nature.
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