The Journal of Microdimensional Civilizational Engineering

Fortean phenomena in drosophila research, pt. 1

Kent Kemmish, Keltar Rassoulian, Danny Brower

"Six million is a lot of death threats, especially coming from a Hare Krishna."

LucK on Ye

In a multi-year genetic experiment, I killed six million individual drosophila melanogaster fruit flies, mostly by knocking them out with carbon dioxide and drowning them in ethanol.

All this I justify by cancer existing.

I didn't hate the flies, I loved them, like one loves the mothership in close encounters. AWE! Spires of glowing morphogenetic programs singing out like little pavarotti.

It wasn't very long after Mother Teresa died that I stumbled on an image of her imprinted by an affinity stain on one of the proto-organs inside of a larva.

I am aware some people whisper and publish horror stories of Mother Teresa.

I'm here to tell you her face appeared to me on a maggot's internal organ, so maybe they're right.

Sorry but real drosophilists never say maggot. It's frowned upon, and I don't know the actual technical difference and not sure there is one. I think maggots and larvae may actually be the exact same thing but it's sort of an initiation ritual in a drosophila lab that someone takes you aside and warns you not to say maggot.

Maybe it is like MacBeth but for geneticists. It sort of starts with the same sound too. And I know maggots have their witch and fate relations Shakespearically and folklorically. So, fear intrudes.

Maybe Mother Teresa... is the name of the horror movie I should write.

No! No! No! It doesn't mean any of that. It's just funny to think of. And I really don't want to insult Catholics or others who might really venerate Mother Teresa. Though let me ask you this: think of her face and her eyes. Wouldn't she be absolutely terrifying as a Sith lord?

My advisor always called the flies "the animals". He was talking to some visiting air conditioning duct repairman in the fly room and mentioning the temperatures "the animals" needed to be at. And the only animals in that room were Danny, an AC repair guy, and millions of Drosophila melanogaster.

That feels like a beautiful memory of Danny to me that somehow opens up so much about who he was, his gentleness, his thoughtfulness, his sense of irony. I'm sure a part of him realized he was reminding the AC repair guy what animals actually are, technically, if the AC repair guy ever learned the biologist answer. I'm sure another part of him was remembering some advice or prior experience of other drosophilists interacting with laypeople in their fly rooms.

Spending thousands of hours in a room with millions of flies is certainly something to give rise to a nice little microculture. I feel blessed and grateful to have experienced that life and way of doing.

I wonder how big the megacidal fraternity itself is. How do I rank at six million? It was three years of phenotyping and mating and recombinant mapping and PCR and yeast and rolling carts full of food from the main fly facility across campus and... ah, flies. No one has yet done the Great Drosophila Geneticists Sitcom. But this is memoir not fiction. Just steal it all anyway. Why make any distinction between forms of storytelling at all. Here is not a picture of a pipe.

I will simply describe what happened and not weigh in on that.

I mean the question of Mother Teresa, saint or wildebeest.

This very present moment you are experiencing as you read this may have infinite complexity and meaning. Perhaps it necessarily does and whatever we imagine is real, is real.

So, be careful what you imagine.

Speaking of imagine, are you familiar with the word "imaginal"? We drosophilists use it all the time. It refers to the "imago", the adult form of a larval insect.

In its larval form—d o n ' t c a l l i t a m a g g o t—an individual drosophila is packed with proto-organs that become the various organs of the imago, the adult fly. We call these proto-organs "imaginal discs", because they're vaguely disc-like in shape—elongated and flat-ish.

The organs that become the wings are called "imaginal wing discs". I was studying genetic pathways that are active as these discs undergo the complex orchestrated dance that results in a fully-formed adult wing.

If you want to understand more about why we a drosophila genetics lab was in the basement of the arizona cancer center, check out my P.I.'s excellent review article below.

Danny L Brower,
Platelets with wings: the maturation of Drosophila integrin biology,
Current Opinion in Cell Biology,
Volume 15, Issue 5,
2003,
Pages 607-613,
ISSN 0955-0674,
https://doi.org/10.1016/S0955-0674(03)00102-9
(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0955067403001029)

Abstract: The integrin family of cell surface receptors is strongly conserved in metazoans, making simple invertebrate genetic systems valuable contributors to understanding integrin function. The Drosophila integrins have long served as a paradigm for genetic studies of adhesion proteins during development. Currently, Drosophila experiments are exploring more general aspects of integrin biology. Genetic screens are identifying proteins involved in integrin adhesion complexes and signaling, and structures such as embryonic muscle attachments can be manipulated experimentally to dissect the functions of cytoplasmic components of integrin adhesion sites in whole animals. Drosophila also is beginning to yield some insights into integrin heterodimer structure and function.

I was staining a particular set of imaginal wing discs from a mutant fly I had found in a large genetic screen that I was a few years into, the experiment that resulted in the sacrifice of six million animals which the Hare Krishna said I'd have to die six million times for.

By "staining" I mean treating with a combination of molecular tools that would result in a particular pattern of blue color on the surface of the disc. That particular pattern would tell us how much of a particular molecule had been present on the surface of the cells of that wing disc at the moment the molecules were fixed in place by a preservation method such as formaldehyde staining.

The pattern of particular molecules we were looking for on the surface of this wing disc would tell us whether an effect we were seeing was due to mutations in the natural complex programming of the developing disc, or due to improper functioning of a piece of unnatural code—a synthetic genetic tool—we had purposefully engineered into this particular strain of flies—having inserted a particular string of chemical letters into its genome.

Observing the pattern of the stain—the "expression pattern" of the relevant molecule—we would know whether this particular mutant—one of hundreds I found out of the six million sacrificed—was worth investigating further—that is, whether it might point to some new understanding of cellular adhesion during development—or if it were simply a false signal from our inserted sequence not functioning.

I was sitting in the fly lab staring at a microscope slide containing two blue-stained wing discs from the same fly, compressed under a hair-thin glass cover slip, when Mother Teresa appeared.

Color-wise, this is not a gestaltic surprise. She was often seen in public throughout her life wearing a particular white shawl thing with a blue and white border. The discs are milky translucent white and the stain I was using was sky blue.

Further, morphologically, this makes sense. The wing disc has a sort of concave bowl-like area in the upper portion, out toward what will be the outer edges of the adult wing, which readily corresponded to her face, framed by the shawl.

One of my first three thoughts was eBay.

I ended up showing it to some other people on the floor of the lab complex where we worked. Probably everyone made some kind of joke about eBay.

I wish I remembered who I had been talking to about Mother Teresa shortly before this happened. There goes a salient plot point from one of my top 200 life stories, down the oblivion hole after 20 years. Maybe it was Tim? I don't know. I wonder if anyone else in the lab remembered that moment. I think maybe I have pictures of her somewhere. But I definitely lost the artifact a few years later as the project wrapped up and I left the university.

I regret this deeply now because I still think I could get a lot on eBay for her.

I mean, an image of Mother Teresa appeared on an imaginal wing disc.

I was reminded of this story recently while watching a podcast about ancient biblical hyperdimensional beings talking to us through Fortean phenomena, and the podcast interviewer mentioned that the Our Lady of Clearwater incident took place very close to where they were doing the podcast.

Later this afternoon I realized—without having thought about it even once in this context in the intervening two decades—that it was an imaginal wing disc with an image. Somehow I had never put "imaginal" and "image" together when thinking about this particular Fortean breadcrumb of an experience.

Maybe I should tell the Vatican?! There's a word for the people whose job it is to decide if someone is a Saint—I literally just learned it yesterday and can't remember.

Think about it though—ugh. Lord of the Flies? Maybe. But a wing is a wing. And I'm sure Adonai should be proud of drophilids.

But, again, money. My first thought as a poor undergraduate was eBay. My thought now is a little more refined, but I'm also perfectly eager to exploit this vision for a good cause.

Gentle creatures, as I think Seymour called them.

Imagine if instead of appearing over Devil's Tower fully formed, the mothership had begun as just a dot of light, and then hyperdimensilonally* constructed itself out of billions of units each with million of parts, all of which were swirling around with impossibly fast rotational diffusion coefficients like little molecular genies.

This is how I came to regard the fly.

I was on campus one day when I let a Hare Krishna dude stop and accost me as I came out of the science library. We spent ten minutes talking about his beliefs and mine and my research.

He told me I would have to die six million times for doing this research. That got me thinking about a childhood encounter I had with a baby Chthulhu that dragged me into an astral world struggle that required me to wake up.(This actually happened, imaginally.)

If you don't think that really happened, you're probably right and I probably agree with you. I started playing creative producer of my imagination as a little kid, the first time I realized I could imagine a little green alien projecting on the underside of the bunk above me, and the same night I made it speak, or thought I was making it speak.

Now I wonder if maybe I learned to listen to Something that way.

That guy is still a part of my life and speaks to me, his name is Keltar. I am not quite sure anymore who says the Things, Keltar or me. That might be one of the factors influencing the possibility of transdimensional communication from a "future" superintelligence—perhaps causality violations can be avoided by communication schemes that re-ambiguate imagination from perception. One can envision a scenario in which your original unsimulated self had no qualia and your present co-temporal experience as you is mediated by transdimensional qualia field manipulation.

One can envision.

So the "you" thing experiencing your "you life" is really just being computed holographically in a qualia field—or, something. Your meat self is a p-zombie.

This is likely all nonsense but I take it seriously because I'm in so much pain and it has opiate qualities.

Stay tuned for pt. 2

Fortean phenomena in drosophila research, pt.2

Early tulpa model Weewoo or something, DB's permission to do an SEM, my stupidity with the straight ethanol plunge

A MESSAGE FROM GOD AND A FLY WITH TWO BODIES

I don't know where Keltar might have been when I struggled with an adult-sized six tentacled being from Somewhere We Can't Access in Three Meat Space Across the Great Microdimensional Expanse, as they call it. But we are getting way beyond the scope of this brief report, which concerns p-Hitler, Hare Krishna, Hyperdimensional Geometry, and dropshila** biology.

So he told I would have to die six million times, one for each of those little flies. I don't think this is right. I think if something does this to me six million times—makes me reincarnate as a fly over and over again six million times—it should itself have to die like six million times to the six millionth power. And then, you'r

There is a lot more to tell you especially the part about the fly with one head and two bodies, later on, if there's enough MR1 devices out there by a few weeks from now-ish.