science snippet against racism

[jinian]

There are different wild-type lines of Arabidopsis that people work with. We use the Columbia line (wt col-0 or just col for short), one of the widespread ones, but plenty of groups use other lines. The important features of a wild-type line are that its parts all function and it breeds true for all traits. Details like how fuzzy it is or how tall it gets just need to be the same within a given line, so you can see if something funny is going on. The lines I've seen have looked pretty different from each other.

PI says, "When I explained it to [former undergrad researcher] E, she said, 'Oh, it's like Asian people [PI] and white people [E]. We look different, but we're both wild-type.' Neither one is better, just different."

(Featured Int'l Blog Against Racism Week post: coffeeandink's excellently pointy How to Suppress Discussions of Racism, which also has stick figures.)

Comments

[gregtitus.livejournal.com]

Gee, I thought that PI and E story was going in an entirely different direction. Details of appearance not mattering, they all look the same, "Oh, it's like Asian people"... uh, wait a minute! Is this why it's a _former_ undergrad researcher? ;-)

Is there an opposite of wild-type that just means "doesn't breed true"? Wikipedia opposes "mutant" and "artificial cross-breed" but both of those phrases include cause and/or intention rather than just being descriptive of non-constant phenotype.

[jinian.livejournal.com]

Eep. Maybe I should exercise a little memoir-craft and reverse the order of those.

"Hybrid" or "heterozygote" are cause-neutral. You could say you had a "segregating population" if you were talking about a smallish number of Mendelian traits.