BEN FRANKLIN'S BONES : ANCESTRY WORSHIP GENEALOGY FILM REVIEW

BEN FRANKLIN's BONES : ANCESTRY WORSHIP GENEALOGY FILM REVIEW

 

The Benjamin Franklin connection is exploited for the title of this PBS video that is part of the Secrets of the Dead series. His 18th century residence in London, which was the home of a family at 36 Craven Street was also the home of Dr. Huston, a doctor who was probably more or totally responsible for the burial of human bones in the basement. Though Ben Franklin's experimental and scientific nature is well known, there is no way to prove he ever had anything to do with them. 

This film is about the state of the art of medical science in that era. It is about the "body snatchers," people who would sell dead bodies to doctors (science) so that autopsies and dissections could be performed. Check your gag reflexes because this is a time honored practice to learn about the human body and expected in medical schools. The "body snatchers" were not always the most moral and ethical people, however, and so by modern day standards they may be thought of as criminals.

But what else did those who wanted to understand and some day cure diseases that killed people like typhus and cholera have to work with if not the bodies of the dead?  Methods then were primitive compared to now, as were the tools to saw a skull in half.  In this society there was no concept of virus or germs and people were dying of kidney stones and gall stones, which we well understand today, as well as broken bones.  Today many people donate part or all of their bodies for organ transplants and skin grafts and there is huge debate over the ownership of sperm and eggs that are frozen for later use once the people who donated them don't want to or can't pay for them to be kept.

In the 18th century, men who were sentenced to death wrote begging letters to their families to claim their bodies before they were sold or given away, fearing the desecration even though they'd be dead.

So though Benjamin Franklin is one of my favorite most fascinating historical personages, perhaps what was more interesting was that when he returned to America, this "Second Family" he had lived with in London was brought here to live and their family tree is full of doctors, including a woman who will show you some of the family documents that link Ben Franklin and their family.

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ARE YOU A CHIMERA? (Do You Have Eyes That Don't Match?)

The other day, my brown eyed dog and I were taking a walk when we encountered a person with a white pit bull that had one blue and one brown eye?  His name was Bruce.  I said his name should be Bowie, as in David Bowie, who has one blue and one brownish eye. Got to talking and I remembered a set of twins in my neighborhood growing up, a girl and a boy, who were not identical but looked a lot alike.  The girl had one blue eye and one hazel.  I'm leading up to this:

A CHIMERA is a person who has TWO SETS OF DNA! 

Here is more about it from SANTA CRUZ HUB PAGES! People-with-Double-DNA-An-Overview-of-Chimeras 

When I heard about this, I thought about all those TV shows in which DNA tests are administered to reveal truth or lies about the paternity of the children.  Almost always the mother is absolutely right about who the father of her child is, even if he's in denial.  In the cases where there was not a match, I wonder if another test has to be made!

BLACK DEATH CRACKED BY TEAM OF GERMAN CANADIAN AND AMERICAN SCIENTISTS

Kate Kelland of Reuters news service wrote this one and I'm linking to the Chicago Tribune article about it.

"The work, which involved extracting and purifying DNA from the remains of Black death victims buried in London's "plague pits," is the first time scientists have been able to draft a reconstructed genome of any ancient pathogen... Building on previous research which showed that a specific variant of the Yersinia pestis (Y. pestis) bacterium was responsible for the plague that ravaged Europe between 1347 and 1351, a team of German, Canadian and American scientists went on to "capture" and sequence the entire genome of the disease... For this study Poinar's team analysed skeletal remains from Black Death victims buried in London's East Smithfield "plague pits," which are located under what is now the Royal Mint.By focusing on promising specimens from the dental pulp of five bodies, which had already been pre-screened for the presence of Y. pestis, they were able to extract, purify and enrich the disease's DNA and at the same time reduce the amount of background non-plague DNA which might interfere."

I'VE BEEN READING ABOUT THE HUMAN GENOME

and the question is, are we are who we are (and what we are) by NATURE or NURTURE and how so! I think that we often ask ourselves who we are like in our family, looks, personality, and character, talents and skills, psychology... and it seems that all these things may be a bit predetermined if the scientists are right...

SIBERIAN ANCESTOR NOT NEANDERTHAL or MODERN HUMAN MATCH !

By MALCOLM RITTER, AP Science Writer Malcolm Ritter – Wed Mar 24, 3:35 pm ET

"NEW YORK – In the latest use of DNA to investigate the story of humankind, scientists have decoded genetic material from an unidentified human ancestor that lived in Siberia and concluded it might be a new member of the human family tree....The DNA doesn't match modern humans or Neanderthals, two species that lived in that area around the same time — 30,000 to 50,000 years ago."