Mesa--Seven Headed Serpent

biochem wrote:

HB of CJ wrote:Detweiler has at least seven sons. How many daughters, if any? Can you clone daughters from a male?

JohnRoth wrote:Yes, all you have to do is get rid of the Y chromosome and duplicate the X chromosome. Even easier would be to simply inactivate the SRY gene on the Y chromosome, thus producing an XY female. Heck, they could do that today using CRISPR, if they could actually get cloning to work, although they'd probably have to do some other stuff to avoid Swyer syndrome.

Cloning a male from female cells would be harder since there are essential genes on the Y chromosome needed for functional sex organs.

Male to female. Piece of cake with Mesan level biotechnology. As posters have said all you need to do is duplicate the X.

Female to male. I would remove one X and replace with a donor Y from another individual. But if they are too egotistical to do so, with Mesan level technology, they could probably build a Y chromosome from scratch utilizing the "best" genes for each gene contained on it. One note of caution though. They would need to carefully examine the remaining X chromosome for problematic recessives. There are any number of genetic diseases that usually only show up in males because they are carried on the X chromosome. Females are protected with a good gene on their second X. Color blindness is the best known of these.

SWM wrote:There are a couple Pearls that may help understand the Mesan Alignment. Some of them are a bit old, but perhaps still useful.
Why Does Mesa Still Exist?
Manpower's Optimism in its Covert Operations
Aspects of the Alignment's Uplift Program

cthia wrote:Which lends even more credence to the possibility of playing to the emotions of a possibly scorned wife in one Evelina Detweiler.

JohnRoth wrote:I'd assume that any reasonably advanced planet with a competent health service would have filtered most of the deleterious recessives out of the gene pool by this time, if only to reduce the expense of providing health service. That wouldn't violate the Beowulf Code, and, interestingly, there's an argument that it would produce a significant amount of "uplift" all by itself.

The idea is that there aren't a whole lot of genes that produce improvements to the baseline; only that there are a huge number of mildly deleterious variations; so while there aren't easy ways of having smarter kids, there are a lot of easy ways of having dumber kids. The concept is called "mutational load."

biochem wrote:I tend to agree with cthia that in reality a centuries long conspiracy such as this involving this many people is unlikely to remain undiscovered this long. MAlign's technique of increasing the background noise is a good one. Signal to noise is always a problem in intelligence work.

Some of the problems I see are:

1. Individuals with a crisis of conscience similar to Jack McBride. We're talking generations of individuals with 1000s individuals each generation knowing something about the onion. Not as much as McBride knew but still enough to give the Beowulf authorities a starting point. To keep this a secret Mesan counter intel would need to catch ALL of them. Similar to the problem of terrorists. The FBI needs to be right 100% of the time, the terrorists only need to get it right once.

2. Individuals who act stupidly and get caught. I have known any number of people with high level intellects (similar to alpha line) who act as dumb as a rock regardless of their genetic gifts. With the sheer number of people who know enough about the onion, there are bound to be some meeting this description.

3. Murphy's law. Centuries of time have pasted and Murphy's law hasn't kicked in once?

KNick wrote:3.) Who says Murphy hasn't already struck repeatedly? It is just that such instances are widely distributed in time and space with nothing to link them together, hiding in the noise of the fact that most such instances would happen to people who actually worked for Manpower or Jessyk or..or... with nothing to lead back to the Onion.

Garth 2 wrote:They have been spending a lot of time and money building there operation.

Don't forget Detweiler and co. founded the onion whilst the SL its self was all shine and new, which does raise the interesting question of how much of the current SL problems (corruption, infighting, criminal activity etc.) can be laid at the Mesans' door.

Tenshinai wrote:

Garth 2 wrote:They have been spending a lot of time and money building there operation.

Don't forget Detweiler and co. founded the onion whilst the SL its self was all shine and new, which does raise the interesting question of how much of the current SL problems (corruption, infighting, criminal activity etc.) can be laid at the Mesans' door.

Probably quite a lot.