Re:Mystery of Somerton man’s identity solved after 73 years,...
by computator on Wednesday July 27, 2022 @11:04PM
(#32260049)
A fun question I was thinking about: If I were able to go back in time to 1948 and ask the coroner if it might be possible identify the mystery man by finding people related to him by using microscopic hereditary information extracted from a few of his hairs, would the coroner agree that it might be theoretically possible far in the future, or would he think I was a nutcase?
It wasn't until 1952 that DNA was confirmed to be the carrier of hereditary information[1]. Would an average (educated) person in 1948 even suspect that such a thing might be possible, or would it sound like crazy science fiction?
I wonder what astounding forensic techniques will emerge 50 years from now that might be applied to solve present day mysteries. Probing people's brains—living or dead—to directly extract memories? What else?
So maybe you could try to draw an analogy and say "as with blood typing, many more hereditary structures and features of tissues will be discovered at the chemical and microscopic levels, collectively sufficient to perform definitive studies of hereditary relationships on the basis of tissue samples".
It might be credible at that level, even though that description is a little bit misleading (because you're not actually using random sets of phenotypic features, but rather the actual underlying genetic data). But I imagine the coroner could at least believe that there are microscopic features that are heritable that would one day be subject to more and more informative analysis. And blood types could be a good prototype of that.
I'm not sure the coroner would find it that intuitive that genetic information is carried or expressed in hair, though!
Re:Mystery of Somerton man’s identity solved after 73 years,...
by asdff on Thursday July 28, 2022 @12:33AM
(#32260517)
It depends on how well read the coroner was, but people were having ideas about hereditary information that were pretty close to reality for decades before the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA (it was isolated almost a hundred years before Watson and Crick)
Re:Mystery of Somerton man’s identity solved after 73 years,...
by bergenty on Wednesday July 27, 2022 @11:31PM
(#32260190)
It’s a reach to believe that every cell in your body carries a complete set of instructions to recreate the entire person. It’s not intuitive. However the way you phrased it makes it sounds much less complicated and I think might be believed coming from the right person.
Re:Mystery of Somerton man’s identity solved after 73 years,...
by geraneum on Thursday July 28, 2022 @02:34AM
(#32261113)
> “My feeling has always been that it’s been suicide, that Rubaiyat was known as a kind of suicide handbook,” Bilsborow said.
This caught my eye as a Persian. I have never known this book to be a kind of suicide handbook! On the contrary there are many famous poems in this book about happiness, living in the moment and not worrying about past or future.
Maybe there are different interpretations of the poems in circulation elsewhere or something happens to them in translation.
While that article doesn't seem to go into any detail as to why it was known to the police by that name, the different phrasing of "the suicide's handbook" vs. "suicide handbook" probably means the police referred to the Rubaiyat as "this specific suicide's handbook" rather than something of a guidebook for suicide in general.
It wasn't until 1952 that DNA was confirmed to be the carrier of hereditary information[1]. Would an average (educated) person in 1948 even suspect that such a thing might be possible, or would it sound like crazy science fiction?
I wonder what astounding forensic techniques will emerge 50 years from now that might be applied to solve present day mysteries. Probing people's brains—living or dead—to directly extract memories? What else?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hershey%E2%80%93Chase_experime...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_type#History
and some information about blood typing was famous enough to get the medicine Nobel in 1930
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_transfusion#20th_century
So maybe you could try to draw an analogy and say "as with blood typing, many more hereditary structures and features of tissues will be discovered at the chemical and microscopic levels, collectively sufficient to perform definitive studies of hereditary relationships on the basis of tissue samples".
It might be credible at that level, even though that description is a little bit misleading (because you're not actually using random sets of phenotypic features, but rather the actual underlying genetic data). But I imagine the coroner could at least believe that there are microscopic features that are heritable that would one day be subject to more and more informative analysis. And blood types could be a good prototype of that.
I'm not sure the coroner would find it that intuitive that genetic information is carried or expressed in hair, though!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Miescher
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Koltsov
This caught my eye as a Persian. I have never known this book to be a kind of suicide handbook! On the contrary there are many famous poems in this book about happiness, living in the moment and not worrying about past or future.
Maybe there are different interpretations of the poems in circulation elsewhere or something happens to them in translation.
https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/130362134?searchT...
While that article doesn't seem to go into any detail as to why it was known to the police by that name, the different phrasing of "the suicide's handbook" vs. "suicide handbook" probably means the police referred to the Rubaiyat as "this specific suicide's handbook" rather than something of a guidebook for suicide in general.
It's interesting that he turned out to be Australian. Almost every theory I read assumed he was a foreigner.
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[https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-12-14/somerton-man-cold-cas...]
Taman Shud timeline, 1905-2010:
[https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-12-14/somerton-man-cold-cas...]
'An Empty Glass' wiki:
[https://anemptyglass.fandom.com/wiki/Anemptyglass_Wikia]