WisCon 38 Panel Invention

[jesse_the_k]

While swimming and riding endlessly on paratransit, I've come up with some loose ideas for panels, and I know you can improve them. I welcome discussion, amendations, and improvements, that won't work! if you tell me why, and any other thoughts which come to mind. If you think you could design a better suggestion around my kernels go right ahead! WisCon programming is a collective, democratic process. Programming submission ends January 26th. You don't have to be registered to play.

I've placed each possible submission in its own thread, click the titles to jump there:
Genetic memory: past and future
Five Minutes Inside My Brain
1001 Things You Don't Know About Sheherazade
Designing Ethical Oversight
The Real Faces of Medieval Europe

Comments

Genetic memory: past and future

[jesse_the_k]

- It was commonly believed before Empiricism that an event in your granma's life influence would influence your phenotype?
- Lamarck said positive impacts on an individual would carry through the germ line
- Everybody laughed at Lamarck (except the Soviets, since it supported scientific materialism)
- Then DNA happened
- And now the latest twist is epigenetics -- environmental factors can alter the way our genes are expressed, making even identical twins different.
- impact of mutagens (radiation/toxin/poisons) are mostly negative

can't think of particularly helpful fiction/non-fiction titles; I'd surely love a reading list to come out of it.

Re: Genetic memory: past and future

[holyoutlaw]

There have been studies (I don't know if sociological or genetic) about how trauma affects subsequent generations. I remember reading a paper about this topic a couple years ago, and have an email query to the teacher to see if she could send me author and title. (Unlikely but worth a shot.)

Re: Genetic memory: past and future

[selki]

The Wikipedia article on epigenetics links to some of that (starvation in modern wartimes, studying grandchildren of famine victims).

Perhaps y'all might obtain Ken Liu's permission to read his extremely short SF story of baseball, cloning, and epigenetics, Second Chance: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v505/n7483/full/505448a.html

Re: Genetic memory: past and future

[jesse_the_k]

Great info.

Ken Liu's story is actually short enough someone could read it aloud at the start of the panel.

BAKED!