The Last Word On Nothing

Last autumn, Microsoft made a subtle change to its Excel spreadsheets, one which flew under the radar for normal mortals. Unlike many other software tweaks, this one made it easier to stop the software automating certain tasks. Specifically, its tendency to automatically convert input into dates. One major reason for the change was the havoc this automation had wreaked on geneticists needing to populate Excel with gene names like MARCH 1 and SEPT1. “Stop helping me,” one commenter pleaded in the Verge writeup: “Never automate anything without providing an easily discoverable means to de-automate it.” From your lips to god’s ear, mate.

This change from Microsoft was a welcome olive branch, as the human genome has had more than enough problems getting its naming conventions into the 21st century. Here’s my writeup about that from a couple of years ago.

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Look, no one is trying to get a dick joke into the human genome. If it happens, it won’t be by design. No one even really thought it was a possibility until the late 1990s, when the physical chemistry professor Paul W. May was having a beer with some other science friends and they got around to talking about funny molecules. Everyone knew about the ring-shaped molecule called Arsole. It didn’t take long to conjure up several more funny science terms. May began to collect these, and soon had so many that he turned the collection into a blog. By 2008 the blog had become a book. (NB: both blog and book are written in Comic Sans. And he commits to the bit. Main text, table of contents, acknowledgments, and references – all Comic Sans. References!) The book has a whole separate section on gene names, and here you will find some of the spiciest names in science. By the time the book was published, however, some of them were already out of date – the Human Genome Nomenclature Committee had begun to take a keen interest in what geneticists were calling their new genes, and by 2006 had put the kibosh on 10 names deemed the most offensive. But if they thought their work was done, they didn’t know how much stranger it could get.

I was in Assateague, Virginia, some weeks back, doing the summer beach thing. The wild horses, standing hoof-deep in the chilly saltwash, were lovely, as they always are. They’re one of the truly special things about this national seashore. The horseshoe crabs? Lovely in their own way, I suppose, and definitely special. Especially this one, with its crustacean backpack. The host was deceased, unfortunately, but its riders were still with us, holding on tight.

I knew a few things about horseshoe crabs before spotting this one, including that they’ve been around for more than 400 million years, that they haven’t changed much in that time, and that their blood–which happens to be blue because of a copper-based respiratory pigment called hemocyanin–is used in human medicine. Why/how that last bit? I looked up the details: Scientists discovered a protein in the crab’s blood called limulus amebocyte lysate that clots when it come into contact with endotoxins (toxic bacteria). So the substance can be used as a toxin-detection system that helps ensure vaccines, drugs, and medical devices aren’t contaminated before they’re put inside people.

I’m not on TikTok, so I had to be told about pregnancy nose. Whereas in the 1960s, women sat down together and discovered the political underpinnings of their personal struggles, now we do things like congregate online and discover, via selfies, phenomena we were never told to expect in ‘What to Expect When You’re Expecting.”

The same hormones that orchestrate a whole new placenta and get the blood flowing there also dilate blood vessels and produce fluid retention elsewhere. It can lead to a giant, unrecognizable nose. Perhaps we didn’t notice before because weight gain can, itself, reshape the face, but taken together on TikTok, it’s clear: pregnancy nose is a thing.

What about the more permanent effects of pregnancy? Our society tends to pathologize these, or rather, to focus on the pathologies that arise. But I wish someone had told me sooner about the coolest permanent change. It happens whether you carry the baby to term or suffer a miscarriage or abortion. It persists for decades, until you die.

You become a chimera.

 For as long as a little one and a mother share a body, they are exchanging cells. The fetal cells that circulate in a mother’s blood cross the blood-brain barrier (which is more permeable at that time) and stay in our brains. They don’t just accrete there like so much flotsam, either. They properly differentiate into neurons, colonize the heart and help it beat, and regenerate the liver. Sometimes when they reach a new organ, the baby’s cells fuse with the mothers’.

Studies often look for the clearest indication of this—cells with male chromosomes in women who have had sons—but you can also get those indirectly from an older male sibling, because your mother can pass them back to you in the womb.

The whole idea is just beautiful to me, that both my son and my brother quite literally live in me forever. I find meaning in it. And it makes me wonder what other magic is at work when we bring our ancestors to life, through birth.