The History and Challenges of Women in Genetics: A Focus on Non-Western Women

“Women in much of the world lack support for fundamental functions of a human life.” This truthful portrait was pointed out by Martha Nussbaum in her book “Introduction: Feminism & International Development.” Throughout history, gender inequality has been persistent in many aspects of life, including health and empowerment. Unfortunately, this inequality has not been excluded from the field of science. Perpetual assumption that women’s absence or restriction to secondary roles in various disciplines is an acceptable law of nature misrepresents women’s contribution to science and maintains hurdles for participation in the future. According to a recent UNESCO’s report, women make up only 30% of researchers worldwide. But despite all the obstacles, women made major contributions with discoveries that shaped the progress in many scientific fields. In the field of genetics, Rosalind Franklin is an example of unwittingly compromised women’s scientific achievements. Franklin was an expert in X-ray crystallography; her data, especially the “photo 51,” was critical to James Watson and Francis Crick along with their own data to publish the discovery of the double helix DNA structure in 1953. Her contribution was acknowledged posthumously in Watson’s memoir in 1968. Barbara McClintock was a 20th century American cytogeneticist who remains up to date the only woman receiving an unshared Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine. McClintock dedicated her work to cytogenetics and discovered the phenomenon of mobile genes. Her research was initially subjected to skepticism in the 1950s. It was not until the late 1960s that the community realized the significance of McClintock’s discovery. The history of science is occupied with a myriad of similar tales of such inspiring women that, after tremendous struggles, thrived and achieved breakthroughs in their respective fields. It is prominent our limited knowledge of women’s experience and struggle in science in non-western world. Addressing the stories of this outstanding minority is critical to expand the understanding of the gender disparity factors embedded in diverse cultures. In this article, we attempt to put the spotlight on some fascinating non-western women and their significant contributions to the field of genetics.

Genomic Intelligence as Über Bio-Cybersecurity: The Gödel Sentence in Immuno-Cognitive Systems

This paper gives formal foundations and evidence from gene science in the post Barbara McClintock era that the Gödel Sentence, far from being an esoteric construction in mathematical logic, is ubiquitous in genomic intelligence that evolved with multi-cellular life. Conditions uniquely found in the Adaptive Immune System (AIS) and Mirror Neuron System (MNS), termed the genomic immuno-cognitive system, coincide with three building blocks in computation theory of Gödel, Turing and Post (G-T-P). (i) Biotic elements have unique digital identifiers with gene codes executing 3D self-assembly for morphology and regulation of the organism using the recursive operation of Self-Ref (Self-Reference) with the other being a self-referential projection of self. (ii) A parallel offline simulation meta/mirror environment in 1–1 relation to online machine executions of self-codes gives G-T-P Self-Rep (Self-Representation). (iii) This permits a digital biotic entity to self-report that it is under attack by a biotic malware or non-self antigen in the format of the Gödel sentence, resulting in the “smarts” for contextual novelty production. The proposed unitary G-T-P recursive machinery in AIS and in MNS for social cognition yields a new explanation that the Interferon Gamma factor, known for friend-foe identification in AIS, is also integral to social behaviors. New G-T-P bio-informatics of AIS and novel anti-body production is given with interesting testable implications for COVID-19 pathology.

La historiografía feminista y los estudios de las ciencias Nuevos marcos metodológicos

: La incorporación masiva de las mujeres a la universidad y el avance del movimiento feminista fueron determinantes en la introducción de los estudios de las mujeres y la crítica feministas en la Academia en la segunda mitad del XX. Su influencia en la función de desvelar el androcentrismo como ideología subyacente en la producción del saber se hizo sentir en todas las disciplinas académicas, aunque con distintos tiempos y ritmos. En el caso de las ciencias de la naturaleza el retraso fue mayor debido fundamentalmente a lo intocable de los atributos de la ciencia: su objetividad y su neutralidad. Entre los proyectos innovadores que surgen en ese marco, se señalan ejemplos contemporáneos que interpelan a la historia de la ciencia tradicional y hacen significativas las biografías de mujeres. Esto es, la historiografía feminista en su intersección con los estudios de las ciencias ha permitido incorporar nuevos marcos metodológicos, que facilitan la recuperación de la agencia de las mujeres y su historia, ocultas en la historia tradicional, así como investigar las causas de esa ocultación y sus consecuencias en la conceptualización del saber y en la creación y organización de sus instituciones. Son proyectos que muestran que el conocimiento del mundo natural es una actividad humana, resultado del trabajo de mujeres y hombres, al tiempo que amplían el horizonte de la producción científica. Asimismo, ayudan a comprender que no es cierto que las mujeres tengan en la actualidad las mismas oportunidades ni gocen de la misma libertad ni que se les reconozca la misma autoridad científica que a los hombres, como lo muestra el caso de la científica Barbara McClintock, aquí brevemente reseñado.