The Darwin Awards Countdown to Extinction (9 page)
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Authors: Wendy Northcutt
BOOK: The Darwin Awards Countdown to Extinction
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DARWIN AWARD WINNER: MAN MEETS MANURE
At least the Dunkin’ Donut man survived his disgusting dip. In a case of man-meets-manure, twenty-three-year-old Benjamin lost his life in 1999 in one of the most unappetizing manners possible when he careened into a 400,000-gallon tank of raw sewage. He was apparently driving too fast to make the sharp turn in front of the wastewater treatment plant, as his momentum carried him through a chain link fence, across an easement, and past a low post-and-rail fence surrounding the tank of decomposing sewage. Divers located his body beside his Mazda pickup, at the bottom of the sixteen-foot-deep tank.
Reference:
Darwin Awards: Evolution in Action
(Plume, 2001)
Darwin Awards: Evolution in Action
(Plume, 2001)
Confirmed by Reliable Eyewitness
Featuring work and gravity!
DECEMBER 2009, CANADA | Lester
4
, a career fire-safety inspector, entered a building in downtown Alberta for its annual fire inspection. Although new to the building, Lester is not new to his job. With several degrees in Fire and Health Safety, and fluent in three languages, this all-around nice guy has expertly inspected buildings around the world for many years.
4
, a career fire-safety inspector, entered a building in downtown Alberta for its annual fire inspection. Although new to the building, Lester is not new to his job. With several degrees in Fire and Health Safety, and fluent in three languages, this all-around nice guy has expertly inspected buildings around the world for many years.
The structure he entered has a mechanical room in the bowels of the building, a “boiler room” with a vast air duct that feeds into the air filters. The duct itself is more than strong enough to support the weight of a man. Indeed, inspectors are required to climb onto the duct from a cat-walk on the floor above, in order to inspect one of the fire extinguishers.
Oh, the Darwin Awards that have resulted from time-saving shortcuts.
Lester had just inspected that very safety device and was standing on top of the air duct when he decided to save himself a few minutes of time. Oh, the Darwin Awards that have resulted from time-saving shortcuts. The nearby fire device was almost in range if he stretched!
A highly trained Fire and Safety Inspector—well, it’s his or her job to know how to inspect a building safely. But sometimes the safe route is
inconvenient
. Instead of traveling all the way back down to the basement and climbing a ladder, Lester decided to
inconvenient
. Instead of traveling all the way back down to the basement and climbing a ladder, Lester decided to
A.
climb down the side of the air duct,
climb down the side of the air duct,
B.
in nearly complete darkness,
in nearly complete darkness,
C.
despite being warned by his senior partner an hour earlier that he definitely should not climb on the ductwork.
despite being warned by his senior partner an hour earlier that he definitely should not climb on the ductwork.
Halfway down, he misjudged his footing . . . and gravity performed its civic duty. Lester plummeted ten feet to the cement ground, landing in the carpentry shop adjacent to the boiler room and punching a hole through a tile ceiling in the process.
Sometimes the safe route is inconvenient.
Lester survived with two broken ankles, but easily could have impaled himself had he landed to either side—on the table saw or the tool bench.
Reference: D. Gustafson, First Aid Responder
Reader Comment
“An Inconvenient Truth Route.”
SCIENCE INTERLUDE RNAI: INTERFERENCE BY MOTHER NATURE
By Alison Davis
When was the last time you were happy about a flub-up?
In the unvarnished world of science, a wrong result can be the best thing that ever happened, but that success isn’t always immediately obvious. Thus is the case for the discovery of the game-changing, paradigm-busting, gene-silencing process called RNA interference, or RNAi.
To be fair, RNAi isn’t exactly new, and it wasn’t just discovered. Like so many stories in science, the epic tale of RNAi is one of hard work, some blind luck, and a careful eye for the unexpected.
RNA Rules
Thanks to the Human Genome Project and subsequent discoveries, DNA is a household name. Less famous, but also part of our genetic material, is RNA. You can’t see either of these stringy molecules, even with a very powerful scope, but both consist of long chains of four molecular “letters” (GATC or GAUC) hooked together by sugar molecules.
The notion that RNA is as important as DNA contradicts the traditional paradigm we are taught in school.
But it’s true!
RNA is headed for Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame.
But it’s true!
RNA is headed for Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame.
New types of RNA seem to appear monthly: snRNA, piRNA, and many more; microRNAs are the powerful “transcription factors” of eighties’ fame. Noncoding RNAs are about to turn the definition of a
gene
on its head!
gene
on its head!
Yet despite being made of similar ingredients, DNA and RNA are quite different. This is because DNA uses a different sugar than RNA (deoxyribose versus ribose) to join its alphabet. DNA is rigid and stable, double-stranded, and assumes a beautiful staircaselike structure. RNA is floppy and unstable, usually single-stranded, and sometimes tangles up into knots. These sister molecules have completely different personalities.
Researchers have known for decades that DNA stores our body plans—genetic information that is passed on through generations. They thought that RNA was merely a middleman, helping translate the DNA into proteins that do most of the work in the body. (If DNA is the blueprint, proteins are both contractors and building materials.) But it is time for mighty DNA to move aside. Beginning with the discovery of RNAi, researchers now realize that RNA is at least as important as DNA, if not more so.
Running Interference
RNAi is a natural gene-silencing process that has been preserved as a survival tool throughout billions of years of evolution. This gene-silencing effect was described decades ago—after a series of frustrating failed experiments—and today, at long last, its mechanism is known.
RNAi brutally hijacks a special form of RNA
that is doubled up, cleverly termed double-stranded RNA, and chops it into bits like a serial killer getting rid of a body!
RNAi brutally hijacks a special form of RNA
that is doubled up, cleverly termed double-stranded RNA, and chops it into bits like a serial killer getting rid of a body!
This is useful to the cell in many ways. For example, double-stranded RNA, otherwise rare, is a common component of many viruses. Virus-infected plants sense the wrongful presence of double-stranded RNA, and set RNAi in motion—recruiting a series of protein machines to interfere with the rogue invader’s dastardly plans by slicing up its genes.
Interfere
is too gentle a term since RNAi works through a molecular machine, descriptively named
dicer,
that cleaves double-stranded RNA into much smaller pieces. Those broken fragments are worse than useless to the virus, because they stick to other viral RNAs, gumming up their ability to schedule production time on protein-making ribosome factories.
is too gentle a term since RNAi works through a molecular machine, descriptively named
dicer,
that cleaves double-stranded RNA into much smaller pieces. Those broken fragments are worse than useless to the virus, because they stick to other viral RNAs, gumming up their ability to schedule production time on protein-making ribosome factories.
RNAi
dicer
destroys viral RNA; no RNA means no new viruses and a healthy plant.
dicer
destroys viral RNA; no RNA means no new viruses and a healthy plant.
Today, researchers have unearthed RNAi in virtually every organism, from plants to pandas to people The payoff is a revolution in medical research, leading the way to cures and treatments for a wide range of troublesome diseases.
Tough Tobacco and the Petunia Boondoggle
The RNAi epic begins in 1928 with, of all things, tobacco.
As published in the wildly popular
Journal of Agricultural Research
, a scientist who infected a tobacco seedling with the deadly tobacco ring-spot virus didn’t succeed in knocking it off (and this was years before we knew the evils of smoking). Try as he might, this researcher could not kill the plant with a supposedly deadly virus. Repeated infections had only a minuscule effect, shriveling the plant’s bottom leaves. Wha . . . ? Why was it stubbornly thriving? What was protecting this tough tobacco?
Journal of Agricultural Research
, a scientist who infected a tobacco seedling with the deadly tobacco ring-spot virus didn’t succeed in knocking it off (and this was years before we knew the evils of smoking). Try as he might, this researcher could not kill the plant with a supposedly deadly virus. Repeated infections had only a minuscule effect, shriveling the plant’s bottom leaves. Wha . . . ? Why was it stubbornly thriving? What was protecting this tough tobacco?
Fast-forward more than a half century and now the patient is a petunia. The protagonists are two plant researchers aiming to beef up the petunia’s drab purpleness by giving it a scientific booster shot of color. In molecular-speak, they were supplementing the purple petunia with an additional pigmentation gene.
Well, it didn’t work out. Adding this “purpling gene” did not beef up the petunia’s purpleness. Instead the puzzled plant scientists discovered that more is
less
, and their gene-gineered petunia flowers were plain-Jane white, or at best, splotchy. The hell . . . ? Why are the petunias white? What a boondoggle!
5
less
, and their gene-gineered petunia flowers were plain-Jane white, or at best, splotchy. The hell . . . ? Why are the petunias white? What a boondoggle!
5
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