Biology

Women have no genetic blueprint

Neither do men, but women *really* don't

Elise Cutts

Elise Cutts

— 6 min read
Women have no genetic blueprint
An exquisite mosaic portrait of an unknown woman from 1st century Pompeii. Source: National Archaeological Museum of Naples
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I'm working on a story for Broadcast magazine right now about metaphors of the genome, especially the blueprint. This is something I've been chewing on at least since talking to Anaïs Bailles about her work on Hydra, freshwater polyps related to jellyfish that are famous for being basically immortal. If you shred up 50 of the little guys (they have no brains, relax) and pack the shreds into balls of a few hundred random cells, those hodgepodge cell balls will grow into doubly-mythological Hydra-Chimeras that are perfectly viable, if sometimes multi-headed.

The mythological chimera combines the body parts of different animals, usually a lion, goat, and snake (sometimes upgraded to a fire-breathing dragon). She's also female and, in this case at least, a mosaic. Source: Wikimedia Commons

If the genome is a blueprint, where is the Hydra-Chimera's blueprint? Any one of its cells could carry the genome of any one of the four dozen or so ill-fated progenitor Hydra. So where's the master plan for its body?

You might ask the same question about women. We're not chimeras, but we're something close: mosaics.

Hydra are a cosmos in a cuvette
Anaïs Bailles on astrophysics and immortal animals
Reviewer, tooElise Cutts

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