An interview by Kathryn Schulz with Alan Dershowitz on being wrong (and the follow up) got me thinking about the hazards of being a professional, or maybe just specializing. I have been working with one other person on an enormous project of my very own which requires me to get my hands dirty in the making process the way I’ve fussed about not being able to do for years now. (Why I haven’t done it until now is another story.) Unfortunately I’ve done so little of the everything I love for so long that my everything work now ranges from crap to adequate. It’s not immediately excellent. That is humiliating, stupid, and really, really exciting. I’ve always romanticized the polymath Victorian naturalists (Well, after age ten when I learned that naturalists were something different than nudists.) who seemed able to take a sprightly but rigorous interest in folklore, neurology, poetry, fossils, theology, Greek, boat building, painting, astronomy, and the language of flowers over a ten course dinner.

I think a new era of generalism is coinciding with the start of whatever this particular revolution will eventually be called. It’s suddenly no longer ridiculous to speculate on things outside one’s métier. (Partially because now there’s the potential to share some of the risk in increasingly organized ways.) It’s still scary and occasionally mortifying, but the responses to these forays are mostly charitable and rarely as hostile as they were ten or twelve years ago. It’s more okay than ever for me not to be a Scientist or a Technologist. It entitles me to ask a lot of questions. It keeps me humble in my inclination to do my homework and listen to other people, and audacious in my demands of what science and technology ought to do be able to do. Seth Roberts in a lovely paper on self-experimentation (pdf) in Medical Hypothesis, details the constraints under which professional scientists have to operate and says of his informal self-experimentation, “I had the subject-matter knowledge of an insider, the freedom of an outsider, and the motivation of someone with the problem.” He talks about how powerful and how underestimated freedom (to explore without professional consequences) and personal motivation are in research and invention. It’s a really good paper. Read it.

Huh. I think I just may have outed myself as both a reader of Medical Hypothesis and a self-tracking nerd. Might as well finish the job. I’ve been tracking a wild array of data for more than ten years now, though most people I’m close to don’t know I keep these sorts of records. Before now, I rarely mentioned it because of the consistent reactions I got on the few occasions I did. Let’s just say they started with raised eyebrows went on to skirt actual diagnoses of hysteria.⁰¹ It’s not culturally acceptable for women to appear too interested in or knowledgeable about their own bodies. Medical, critical, feminist (I’m looking at you, Linda Hirshman), literary, and popular theory are all frothing with critiques of women who appear preoccupied with their bodies. It’s a cliché feminine frailty, a headache on a horny Saturday night, an insanity defense in nineteenth century Ireland. (Probably. That’s a good paper too.) So I have mixed feelings when I survey the present quantified self culture. It’s exciting to see what other people are doing and gives me more ideas than I know what to do with, but I can’t help feeling as though it’s sudden legitimacy has to do with it being a more male culture. Somehow the hordes of women who have been quietly doing this since the beginning of time (especially to prevent or achieve conception) haven’t really found inclusion there. Why?

Dan Vorhaus gives a thorough history of the FDA and direct to consumer genetic testing. And here, he gets momentarily interviewed about the “safety and effectiveness and wisdom of personal genomics kits.” (Wait, how might these test kits harm consumers and what exactly are they supposed to effect? And wisdom! I keep seeing that astonishing conversation, as if we were discussing kindergarteners with sharp knives.)

The bottom line is that FDA regulation of genomics testing amounts to FDA regulation of genomic data. The interesting question is to whom that data belongs. And the answer is me! I can confidently say my genomic data belongs to me! I can choose to share it with my doctor or my health insurance company (hahaha!) or the rest of the world, but I’ll be damned if the FDA gets to make those decisions for me. This is not about medical treatments, this is about who owns the genomic description of my body. And eventually the epigenomic description of my body⁰¹ and the catalogue of the unique pattern of symbiotic microbes for whom I am the universe, and… The FDA ought to regulate medical therapies, including those based on genomic data, but regulating the morality and existence of data itself is really fraught. I suppose the problem is partially in the precedent of propagating my personal data (health records and lab work) throughout my healthcare provider’s and insurer’s paper and digital systems⁰² and only then dispensing bits to me more or less at the discretion of each, but I’ve never been convinced that’s very effective or safe. We need more than the legal right to extract own data from that labyrinth. We need the ability to acquire (or decline to acquire!) data about ourselves and to share it at our own discretion.

~

Lizzy Skurnick on blogging. She comes out swinging.

You link wrong. You’re not funny. Often, you’re boring. You think posts are something you “pitch”. You think posts should be timely, or related to news. You think other bloggers should respond to other bloggers, preferably in chin-stroking ways like, “I appreciate your thoughts, Gwendolyn, yet I…” You want headlines maximized for SEO. You want things to have a peg, you want to call sources for comments, you pester your readers for response instead of allowing readers to want to respond.

This kinds of fits with my growing discomfort around professional blogging as well. A few old timers manage to pull it off pretty elegantly as an end in itself (Good for you, Kottke!), but often the barrage of ads, SEO optimized headings, sponsored posts, and froth of affiliate links tweaks something in me that strengthens and exercises my capacity for cynicism. I don’t know what the answer is yet for how writers make a living writing online. But I don’t have to unravel it all logically within a taxonomy of carefully considered circumstances. It’s not a moral response. I just know that it does something I don’t like to me as a reader. I don’t ever want to slip from happy skepticism into anxious suspicion, and without giving it much thought, I avoid places where I have to breathe in all that stuff while I read. It smells bad. I wander off after not very long.

An important thing I’ve learned from gardening with a toddler who waves open packets of seeds in either hand: The more seeds you plant and the more stuff you let go to flower, the fewer weeds you have to bother with. I let the shiso and lambs quarter and a sprawling tangle of last year’s tiny yellow tomatoes go to seed and this year I have great drifts of everything in layered blue and yellow greens. More in my little fifteen by twenty foot garden than we can possibly eat. It’s all tangled up with lettuces, berries, peas, sorrel, herbs, little cabbages, carrots, and radishes. I just let the beautiful scifi blooms of the angelica go to seed for the first time, and now the lovage is flowering and the mustard is sprouting tall spindly stalks with little yellow flowers that the butterflies like. I know it’s not proper, but I am as absurdly proud of all this as I am my lovely son—as if I had anything to do with the outcome of either.

I have been chatting a lot with said pink and golden son about anatomy and organs these days. He loves to listen to my heart and tell me that it’s made of meat and muscle and that his skull protects his brains. Sometimes he gets confused and thinks his brains are in his stomach, but mostly I thought he was okay with it all. I probably should have known though, by the urgency with which he wants to discuss blood and bleeding and organs, that things weren’t quite settled in his mind. The other day he fell down a short set of concrete stairs and scraped his shin pretty badly. He’s been hurt worse though and usually recovers quickly, so I a little surprised when instead of calming down he became really hysterical, screaming and begging me in both languages to please, please close his skin. This tragic roaring went on for an hour as I lassoed a cab, whispering in his ear and clutching his arching little body all the way home; and decanted him into bed, where he fell asleep in shuddering exhaustion. When he awoke, he was still pretty upset, but able to speak enough to beg me again to close him skin so his bones and his brains and his heart wouldn’t flow out along with his blood. It took some explaining and lots of diagrams about how blood clots and bones are structural, before he calmed down. He mentioned a decomposing bird we saw on the ground the other day. It was a mostly dry husk that I let him poke with a stick to see the skull better. He didn’t say much at the time, but I think the visible skeleton impressed and frightened him. I said something about how all living things turn to dirt like compost after they die and he worked on that for a while until the bird in the story became wet lettuce in the garden. He’s been testing out the words dying and dead a lot since. He claims his babydoll is dead or that he’s dying and decomposing from hunger. He explains wound healing breathlessly, with entwined fingers and an exhibition of his scabby shin to everyone from a newborn baby to a strange old man sitting in a doorway; but he still seems nervous.