King of the Bean

I got a copy of Fallout: New Vegas for my birthday. While I've always found post-apocalyptic books and movies to be mostly just depressing, something about Fallout 3 and now New Vegas is a little different. I feel much the same way about Portal. There's something I find compelling, horrifying and fascinating at the same time, about the decline of these huge corporate complexes, the tinfoil hat paranoia of the 1960s which in many ways proves to be all too true, the savage nature of people who can sit back and watch truly horrific things occurring. This last especially is more implicit in Portal, seeing as how one must assume the directives were programmed into the system by people at some point . . . and the various observation windows scattered around the test chambers, that clearly weren't placed there for the AI's benefit.

In the Fallout series it is a lot more direct. There are crazy people in the wastelands, gangs, people who don't care about anything but themselves, very Mad Max. There are people living in towns who act like a family from a 50's sitcom and commit terrible acts in secret. And there's Vault-Tec, the company who created the Vaults, in which a number of people survived the nuclear holocaust. A more in-depth explanation of the story is here, but in short, each Vault (there were only 122 built, despite the large population of pre-war America) is a sociological experiment designed to learn more about human nature. Completely aside from issues of 'normal' scientific ethics, many of these experiments resulted in truly awful things.

The games are both set in various places in post-war America, a few hundred years from now, where the player gets to travel around on their own, but Vaults still play a role in the game. In Fallout 3 you start out in one, and in both games, there are several you can find.

Ok, now for anyone who hasn't played the game, go out and buy it and play it first - right now, stop reading this post. Seriously. I mean it. It's for your own good. I don't exactly give a spoiler, but it's enough that I wouldn't have wanted to read it before I played through it.

Vault 11, in New Vegas, is a really intriguing story. You enter the vault, and find election posters for the Overseer Elections - where everyone is campaigning NOT to be elected. You have to search through the vault to discover more about what happened here, and the picture that forms is very, very grim. When I first entered Vault 11, I thought to myself, 'What could make someone not want to be elected?' Obviously there must be some negative consequence to being Overseer.

As an aside, I am a huge fan of Terry Pratchett books. The more I read them, the more I realize that they have huge substance and thoughtfulness underneath the interesting storylines and hilarious writing. Every time I reread one, I get more out of it than I had the previous time (I will be really sad when eventually this stops happening, as I suppose it must when I've gotten to 20 or 30 reads). One thing that Terry has done, way moreso than I had first realized, is incorporate a lot of historical and mythological references in his work. Plenty of these are things I don't know because I'm just not a history or literature buff; a few I don't know because I'm not British. Reading The Folklore of Discworld, a discussion of many of those references, opened my eyes to a lot of them. Anyway, in several of the books, and in the Folklore, Pratchett references The King of the Bean, which is something many people have heard of, but far fewer know its origins, apparently. And again, I'm not going into them here. I told you to stop reading a while ago, and you didn't listen. Once you've played at least that far in Fallout: New Vegas, then you can google it, or even better, buy your own copy of The Folklore.

King of the bean, indeed. I was right. And the entire story, all put together, made me feel like I'd been punched in the gut. One example I can compare it to is the first time you saw the Matrix, or the Sixth Sense, and when the reveal came, it hit you hard. Now those movies are as much jokes as they are taken seriously, but I still remember how amazing they were the first time through.

So far I'd been enjoying F:NV well enough, but this is something else entirely. This little piece of the game, at least, is thought provoking. And fucking creepy.

Immortal Life

I'm not a cell biologist, so I haven't ever done cell work. But among cell biologists, who hasn't used a HeLa strain at some point? From what I know about it, I would imagine that it's one of the first things that cell biology students are given to play around with. And even if you don't do cell biology, if you do any molecular biology, you certainly read about it - examples in text books, papers on experiments done with it, etc. I'd heard about HeLa my entire schooling and never once thought about what it meant or where the name came from - why should I care, either? It's not like the names of individual Drosophila lines are particularly illuminating. Most of them name the physical place the flies were originally collected from wild populations, or in the case of some others in our lab, they're just numbers.

I got a Kindle for Christmas this year and I absolutely love it, which is a whole other post; but anyway, one of the books I recently read was The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. For the first time, I learned where most cell lines get their names. For the first time, I learned in a manner that felt nearly first-hand, more about the things that were done to people in the name of science, as short as fifty years ago. I'd heard about the Tuskeegee experiments, just about every scientist has, even if they aren't in the medical field, but reading such a direct and painful description of the way things were . . . it's hard. Did you have to read Upton Sinclair's 'The Jungle' when you were in high school? I did, and it really upset me. I used my normal trick of reminding myself that it was a work of fiction, and besides, this was a compilation of every single bad thing that could happen to an immigrant family all happening to these characters. It only made it partially better, because I knew those things really did happen.

But reading this book, you can't tell yourself that it's okay because it didn't happen. It's like reading the Jungle but knowing that these people were real, that they worked and suffered and were lied to and then died. I don't want to give away the particulars of the book, because it's a really, really good read, and anyone who is interested in science or medical ethics should read it for themselves. But if you are like me, then be prepared for the horrible realizations that come with it.

That's just the way things were done. Maybe I could have been one of those privileged doing my work without regards to people or their rights, if I had been born sixty years ago. Maybe I wouldn't have seen how awful it was at the time either, even though my mind rebels at that idea. How many things do we allow because 'that's just the way it is'? Are there things we do today that will be considered atrocities in fifty years? I can think of a few things about society as a whole, but of course I would like to think there is nothing I, personally, do that falls under that. Wouldn't everyone?

Also, it reminds me of why cancer is so very creepy to me. Not just because it's deadly, and we still have inadequate treatment options even today - no, cancer frightens me because of what it represents. Cancer is a part of you that has declared mutiny. A part of you that refuses to cooperate, that seeks an independent existence from the organism it should be a part of. Of course, I'm anthropomorphizing, and doing it to a clump of cells, for added ridiculousness. It's much more like the concept of an industrial robot on an assembly line losing some of its built-in regulations and doing its particular job as much as it possible can, without regards to where it fits in the total assembly line of building a product, like spot welding 37 hood ornaments on to one car's hood, instead of the normal one-per-car it should be producing.

But changing the analogy doesn't frighten me any less. And knowing that I'm not one of those people now, that we don't do that to people any longer in the name of research, doesn't take away my shame that I still get to benefit from the results of such research.