The Darwin Awards Countdown to Extinction (10 page)

Oblivious to the commercial windfall of dye-ready petunias, the curious researchers plodded on, searching fruitlessly for a reason behind this perplexing failure.

 

The frustrating dilemma in both instances was that the results seemingly violated scientific dogma, firmly established before we were born!

Math-religion guru Gregor Mendel worked alone in his bucolic monastery, making history with simple equipment available to any 1800s gardener. Mendel deciphered the rules for how genes from two pea parents combine, then transmit traits to their offspring. Today, Mendelian genetics explain why your hair is as frizzy and unruly as your mother’s and her father’s.

Mendel’s laws form the basis of modern genetics and are the motive behind today’s $40 billion biotech industry. But the petunia just didn’t fit. The experimental results did not follow Mendel’s laws. Oh no-sies! Talk about a fast track to career failure.

But it was not quite as intractible as an NP-Complete problem.
⁶
The answer arrived, although it took its own sweet time. This time, it is the 1990s and a new set of researchers are focused on the age-old mystery, “How do genes drive muscle development in roundworms as they grow in a petri dish?”

The worm scientists’ plan was to use a biotech trick to wipe out a particular worm muscle gene and witness what happens to the worms without that gene. But the scientists ran into a snag. Results were the opposite of expected! Adding a “control blank” (RNA that was
supposed
to do nothing) also wiped out the gene. Arghhh. What in tarnation was going on?

This time, perseverance paid off. A series of carefully planned tests explained the impossible result and finally unveiled the workings—mechanism, gears, and cogs—of gene silencing.
It was RNAi.
Earning the 2006 Nobel Prize for their work, Dr. Andrew Z. Fire and Dr. Craig C. Mello revealed that RNA itself, folded into a double-stranded knot, was the trigger for RNAi to shut down specific genes.

Now it all made sense.

 

In the Case of The Purple Petunia, the purple pigment gene
would
have obeyed Mendel’s rules, but that gene was being ignored: Its RNA messenger had been
chopped into bits
by RNAi. In the Case of The Virus-Resistant Tobacco, RNAi
diced up
the menacing ring-spot virus, a virus that otherwise would have stunted and killed the plant.

Molecular biologists are now convinced that RNAi protects things that can’t run away, like a tobacco plant. But they are less clear on the biological reasons for RNAi to exist in mammals, including us. One theory—backed by a mounting arsenal of evidence—is that RNAi serves as guardian of our genome by restricting the philandering of traveling viruses and other mobile segments of DNA that might go cavorting from one place to another. Genes in the wrong place create big messes—including many diseases—and RNAi may be our body’s way of keeping things tidy.

RNAi: The gene broom, sweeping away suspicious fragments of RNA.

 

Imagine how many wonderful things we can do with a tool that destroys target genes!

Scientists are learning to use RNAi as a tool to eliminate the genes we dread, in tumors, diseased cells, HIV infections, and so forth. Imagine RNAi used as a specific and safe natural pesticide! Imagine custom RNAi sprays that eradicate crop infections slaughter mosquitoes, or make tastier lettuce! And admit it, couldn’t lettuce use a tasty-spray?

Maybe it’s time to revisit the purple petunia.

REFERENCES:

D. Baulcombe, “RNA silencing in plants (Review),”
Nature
431 (2004), 356 -363.

National Institute of General Medical Science, “RNA interference fact sheet,”
http://www.nigms.nih.gov/News/Extras/RNAi/factsheet.htm
.

G. L. Sen and H. M. Blau, “A brief history of RNAi: The silence of the genes (Review),”
FASEB
9 (2006), 1293 -1299.

The 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, “Advanced information, RNA Interference,”
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2006/adv.html
.

“A friend told me, when I get depressed, just look up the Darwin Awards and I will feel better. Boy was he right!”

 

Placing one’s privates in predicaments is a common fast track to a Darwin Award. We lead off with two stories regarding scatology, follow up with two rare “living winners,” and end with four suspicious sex acts. Darwin delivers well-deserved kudos to the creatively kinky!

 

 

 

 

12 APRIL 2008, FLORIDA | Traffic was moving slowly on south-bound I-95. Shawn M. had recently left a Pompano Beach bar, and now he was stuck in traffic. As the saying goes, you don’t buy beer—you just rent it, and Shawn couldn’t wait another moment to relieve himself. “I need to take a leak,” he told his friends.

Traffic was deadlocked, so the waterlogged man climbed out, put his hand on the divider, and jumped over the low concrete wall for a little privacy . . . only to fall sixty-five feet to his death. “He probably thought there was a road, but there wasn’t,” said a Fort Lauderdale police spokesman. The car was idling on an overpass above the railroad lines.

His mother shared her thoughts. “Shawn didn’t do a whole lot for a living. He got along on his charm, just like his father.” Though his death was tragic, Shawn’s downfall proves the old adage:
Look before you leak!

 

Reference:
South Florida Sun Sentinel; The Miami Herald

 

“Guess he was dying to go.”

“He shoulda peed in a bottle.”

“That’s why they call it Flori-duh.”

“Apparently it was just his time to go.”

“Now here’s a wee joke.”

“I wonder if he wet his pants from fright!”

 

SUMMER 2003, USA | “I hired several laborers to prepare a garden area for me. They needed some supplies, so I showed them the location of ice water and the bathroom, and left to obtain the supplies. Upon my return, I found an ambulance in front of my home, along with two police cars. The police informed me that the neighbor had dialed 911 to report a naked man screaming and running around the yard.

My yard!

As it turned out, one of the laborers had needed to answer the call of nature. Rather than use the indoor bathroom, he went into the woods behind the house, dropped his trousers, and squatted down—right on top of a nest of hornets! He was released from the hospital about a week later, having learned a very painful and nearly fatal lesson:
Always watch
where you go!

 

Reference: Cy Stapleton

 

 

MARCH 1989, SOUTH CAROLINA | Michael Anderson Godwin was a lucky murderer whose death sentence had been commuted to life in prison. Ironically he was sitting on the metal toilet in his cell and attempting to fix the TV set when he bit down on a live wire—and electrocuted himself!