Updated birds and bees

Daddy, where do babies come from?

Honey, when grown-ups love each other very much and decide to have a baby, which they do usually in their late thirties or early forties, they call an embryologist.

Em-bry-ol-ogist?

Yes dear. An embryologist gives the mother-to-be, assuming she's not just the egg-donor mother, in which case she'll be the biological mother but not the legal-mother, special shots which control her ovulation and then extract an egg from her ovaries under anesthesia. This is a tender act that only grown-ups do where the embryologist monitors the mother's follicles with ultrasound and may resort to a hormone antagonist to get the timing just right. Then the daddy-to-be, again assuming he's not just an anonymous donor in a cryobank, goes into a little room and uses provided magazines, or the gay magazines that are hidden under the sink, to auto-erotically put his germ-line in a dixie cup and gives it to a nurse. The two fluids are mixed in the precious beaker-of-love and that makes a zygote -- or, more typically, several zygotes.

Babies comes from goats?

No honey, not goats, ZY-gotes. Zygotes are single-celled fertilized eggs.

So then you have a baby?

Well, some people think so. Others think they're just tissue, like your skin or liver. Either way, the embryos get put in storage and whether or not you believe they are babies, everyone seems okay with freezing them solid.

Babies are frozen? Like popsicles?

Yup, that's how they come. Little babysicles. You defrost them like TV dinners and then you implant them in the mother's uterus, or the surrogate mother's uterus if the legal-mother-to-be can't or doesn't want to carry to term. But before you can do that, the embryos are graded for quality by how fast they grow.

Graded, like in school?

Yeah, like that, except those that don't win this race are destroyed.

You mean they're killed?

Well, some people think that. But then again, those slow ones were probably not going to implant much less make it to term so they would have died anyway.

Teacher said that my friend Tommy's not ever going to accomplish anything because he's slow since he goofs off. Are they going to destroy him?

Well, no, Tommy's not an embryo.

So, they should have been destroyed him when he WAS an embryo because he's slow?

Well, no, I mean, unless he was slow as an embryo, then yeah, I guess so. Anyway, pay attention, because this is where the act of love gets complicated since it's at this point where different insurance regimes have different policies. See, the procedure of baby-making is expensive, and the insurance companies in the US don't want to pay for more than one procedure so this puts pressure to implant more than one at a time. This increases the odds that at least one of the embryos grows to term but it's risky because you might get twins or triplets or even more sometimes. But in countries where there's single payer insurance then they just implant one because costs are better controlled. And that, honey, is why you have a fraternal twin brother.

But you said they plant three?

IM-plant three sweetie, not plant three. But yeah, they do, I mean, they did. You're sister or brother didn't attach so he or she didn't come to term.

I'm sad.

Yes honey, but not as sad as mommy and daddy were when the first two attempts at in vitro failed. The deductible almost killed daddy because back then daddy did contract work and could only afford catastrophic.

Cats a in trough?

No honey, "catastrophic" -- that's when the insurance company doesn't want to pay for baby making.

But what about baby sister? Why doesn't she have a twin?

Well, just to clarify, "baby sister" as you call her is actually older than you. See, she came from one of the frozen embryos from the first round of IVF because we switched back to the first embryologist on our third try because that doctor was then in-network to our HMO plan. So actually little sister was conceived two years before you, stayed frozen until you were three and was then unfrozen and implanted last year. She doesn't have a twin because her other two siblings didn't make it.

They died?

Well, yes, if you think they were alive in the first place. But that's something you'll have to decide on your own as you grow up.

I don't like baby making! I'm never-ever going to make babies! I don't want to talk about this anymore! WAHH! NO! NO! NO!

Listen, honey, you behave. Remember, we froze you once and we can freeze you again!

(Tip of the pen to Rob and Steve at lunch today)

Tree and Vine: An Allegory of Attenuated Parasitism.

The town of Forrest has been around for centuries. It’s the kind of place where sons inherit their father’s businesses and nobody can remember when things were too different. The town has always been so small that it supported only a single shopkeeper; the current proprietor of this humble store is a tall and stable fellow named Woody, the descendant of a long line of tall and stable men just like himself who have worked hard to build and maintain what’s always been a social focus of Forrest.

Small towns like Forrest might seem peaceful to visitors, but internally there are the inevitable gripes, grievances, and grudges. For example, a recent family feud over the inheritance of their grandfather’s property has split Woody from his cousin Trey. As a consequence, Trey has recently opened a competing store directly across the street from Woody thus ending Forrest’s long-established one-shop monopoly. This, as you’d suspect, has been terrible for Woody.

Forrest is not entirely full of hard working capable souls – for example, consider Vinnie the thief. Vinnie, like Woody, is descended from an ancient line of Forrest inhabitants. Vinnie, like Woody, pursues the same occupation as his father and his father’s father. But Vinnie, unlike Woody, isn’t exactly a clone of his ancestors.

Vinnie’s father was a notorious scoundrel. An aggressive thief and burglar, he was nevertheless as dimwitted as he was ruthlessness. It doesn’t take a genius to know that if you continue to steal from the same store over and over that there might eventually be nothing left to steal. This concept seemed totally lost on Vinnie’s father and as a result he almost caused Woody’s father to close the only store in town.

But, as suggested, Vinnie was not cut out of the same aggressive yet witless stock as his father. Indeed, Vinnie is more bargainer than terrorist -- a theme established early in his life. When Vinnie’s father began to push him into the family business, his father told him: “Go into Woody’s store, show him who you are, break a few things then take what you want and stroll out like you own the place. That’s how it works for guys like us. That’s how it has always worked.”

Young Vinnie tried. He walked into Woody’s store and looked around. He picked up a few items that looked breakable and considered tossing them to the ground. But, soon he became aware of Woody’s suspicious gaze following him around and found himself placing the stock back on the shelf and adverting his eyes. Finally, Vinnie decided just to come clean.

“Do you know whose son I am?” Vinnie asked Woody naively.

“Of course.”

“Then how about you just give me a hundred bucks?”

Woody thought about this. A hundred dollars was actually quite a small price to pay compared to the usual cost in damage and theft. But, a hundred dollars for what exactly? A hundred dollars just to make some kid walk away? All things being equal, Woody would just assume he didn’t have Vinnie’s small-time extortions nor his father’s grand theft, but that really wasn’t one of the available options and therefore the proposed agreement would be the lesser of two evils.

“I’ll tell you what”, said Woody pulling out the cash, “I’ll give you one hundred dollars a week for doing absolutely nothing as long as you don’t make the same deal with my cousin Trey across the street. This will be your territory, but the store across the street stays your father’s territory. Deal?”

“Deal.” Vinnie said, shaking Woody’s hand three times.

And with that simple verbal contract, an arrangement was made. Each week Vinnie would come in, shake Woody’s hand three times, and earn a hundred dollars.

Over time, their relationship became, if not exactly friendly, at least routine. Little by little they forgot about the initial circumstances of the arrangement and found themselves acting like civil gentlemen considering the issues of the day.

One day, a small force of bandits from a nearby town attempted to invade, seeking to steal supplies and animals. Obviously, both Woody and Vinnie were desperate to repel this invasion and during the crisis all past discord was forgotten. Not surprisingly, between the two of them, Vinnie was the better fighter owing to the weapons and viciousness inherited from his violent family. That’s not to say that Woody didn’t engage the enemy, but violence is clearly Vinnie's comparative advantage.

A few months later, a fire broke out. As before, both Vinnie and Woody had a mutual interest in stopping this mortal threat. While Vinnie pitched in to fight the fire, this time it was Woody – with his access to buckets and hoses – who played the comparatively larger role in extinguishing this mutual threat.

And so it went. As the relationship normalized, they found that their common needs were greater than their distrust and consequently they found more and more ways that it was profitable to depend on each other’s specializations. Vinnie became not only the defender of the neighborhood but also the store’s out-of-town sales representative and Woody paid him a commission on his sales. Meanwhile, Woody’s freed resources meant that he was able to invest more in a nicer shop with more stock to the profitable benefit of both.

Generation after generation inherited the agreement and the benefit of specializing and working together turned out to be great. The paltry hundred dollars became not so much an extortion as just one part of a complex set of mutual exchanges of goods and services. In fact, Vinnie and Woody’s sons didn’t even know why they engaged in this weekly routine of thrice handshakes and an exchange of cash -- maybe it was some sort of ritual of friendship; maybe it had to do with some old debt now long since irrelevant; whatever, it seemed a quaint part of their past. To outsiders, it was hard to imagine the shop running without two employees, and most assumed that it had always been that way and always would.

Shopping in the Science Supermarket

"Can you tell me where the mustard is?", I asked the nerdy looking storekeeper.

"It's next to the mayonnaise."

"Um okay....... But where is the mayonnaise?", I replied peevishly.

"Near both the ketchup and the soup."

"Again, this isn't really helping me. Maybe some sort of landmark independent of the foodstuffs themselves would be helpful?"

"Sorry."

"I mean, really? All you can give me is the location of everything in terms of other things! I want mustard and I'm standing next to radishes what am I suppose to do?!"

"Radishes are near the soup!"

"And?"

"Soups..." he directed me like I the slow child I was, "... are... near... the... mayonnaise."

And so I headed towards the soup. Turns out something called "onions" are also near the soup and the smell of these caught my attention: so pungent yet sweet. I peeled one back to see what was inside and what I found was... another onion! Onions are made of onions?! How can that be? So I tore open the onion and found onions all the way down.

That was 30 years ago. Someone just asked me where the mustard is. I don't know, I never did find it but, I told him. "the mayonnaise is near the bread."

Tree logic

The pecan in front of my house is slow. I think it might be, you know, one of the thicker trunks in the forest. The tree in the back yard tells me that it's time to blossom, flower, leaf out, spread its tree-semen with abandon. I say delicately to the front tree, "Look, I don't want to criticize, but, you know, the tree in the back..."

The front tree is having none of this; and, frankly, it resents being judged. "Look, just stop right there monkey," it says to me "I don't need to hear your thoughts on this. I was planted here 100 years ago. I didn't ask to be put here. I'm doing the best I can. I'm from Illinois, I know about snow. You ever had snow on your new leaves? No, you haven't because you're an ape. Trust me, you don't want to get caught out in that. I'm not going to get caught out in that."

"But in the 100 years you've been here has it ever snowed in April?" I queried cautiously.

"I got my ways. I've never been caught out in the snow."

"But it doesn't snow here in spring."

"And I've never been caught out in it."

"But if you don't get a move on, you're going to lose your chance to pollinate the other trees. I mean, don't you care about your legacy?"

"I'm not interested in having children that are so dumb as to leaf out too early and get caught in the snow. I don't want to breed with those premature blossomers, like your friend back there -- that's reckless risk taking. Rather not have children than have stupid children," the tree sulked.

"But it doesn't snow here in April." I repeated.

"And I've never been caught out in it."