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

[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.