You have ten times as many bacterial cells as human ones in your body, and that leaves out viruses and fungi. Are those non-human creatures in your body part of you?
It’s easy to think of them as ‘not you’, as little Others along for the ride on your body. They are parasites and symbiotes that feed off of us, help us digest food, might even protect us from infections – but they’re not part of me, right?
Enter Toxoplasma gondii, a protozoan parasite that infects all sorts of mammals but really loves getting into cats (the only place it can reproduce). In fact, its talent is finding its way from other mammals into cats. How does it do this?
By altering the behavior of intermediate non-cat hosts. If a mouse is infected, it starts hanging out in open areas. An infected rat actually seeks out cat urine, rather than running from it. Then, presumably, the mice and rats get eaten by hungry cats. In other words, T. gondii changes the behavior of its hosts in order to maximize the chance of finding its way inside a cat.
Of course, T. gondii doesn’t just find itself inside rats and mice on its way to cats. Often it gets into humans, through exposure to pet cats or from eating uncooked meat (a report in the UK discovered that up to 38% of stored meat was infected). Some infected people develop flu-like symptoms, but most people develop no symptoms and the infection remains latent and apparently inactive. For a long time, it was assumed that latent infection in humans had no real effect on the host.
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The Victims of Blowjobs
In 2007, the Georgia State Supreme Court released Genarlow Wilson from prison, after he had served 2 years of his 10 year sentence. The court concluded that his sentence was cruel and unusual punishment.
His crime? As a 17 year old, Wilson had accepted consensual oral sex from a 15 year old (the age of consent being 16). The irony? Having penetrative sex with the girl would have netted him a mere misdemeanor with no sex offender registration (because he was himself younger than 18 at the time). The fact that it was oral sex made it a felony with a minimum sentence of 10 years in prison. (Note that until 1998, oral sex between a married couple in Goergia was punishable by up to 20 years in prison).
That silly little detail in Georgia law (that oral sex — i.e. “sodomy” — was considered a felony while vaginal penetration was consider a misdemeanor) was amended as a result of the publicity from this case. However, the lawmakers specifically chose the update not to apply retroactively, meaning that people like Wilson would not have their conviction overturned. In other words, anyone convicted under this crazy law would still remain a sex offender for life.
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Back in 1961, Yale researcher Stanley Milgram performed a now-controversial experiment. He recruited people to volunteer in a psychology study supposedly about learning and memory. When they arrived, they were told the setup: a pair of participants were to play two roles, teacher and learner, while the experimenter (a stern man in a lab coat) observed. However, the trick of the experiment was that each participant was always “randomly” assigned to be the teacher, while the second alleged participant, assigned as learner, was in fact always an accomplice to the experiment.
For the experiment, the participant (as teacher) was moved to a separate room from the learner. Through an intercom, the participant was to read a list of word pairs to the learner, who then had to choose matching pairs when quizzed. After incorrect answers, the participant was to flip a switch to shock the learner — a panel at their desk had switches labeled 45 volts increasing up to 450 volts. The participant had watched the learner get strapped in to the shock equipment. The learner mentioned in passing that he had a heart condition, after which the experimenter authoritatively assured him that there was no danger (again, this was all acted out with the participant thinking the learner was just another volunteer). Back in the test room, the participant received a not-insignificant 45 volt shock to see what it felt like, and then the word-pair testing began.
The teacher read the words, and the learner appeared to be responding, and getting shocked at successively higher levels after each mistake. In fact, there were no real shocks, but a pre-recorded tape played reactions to each shock. As the shock levels went up, the learner feigned increased pain and eventually banged on the wall, complained about his heart condition, and asked to be released. If the participant continued, the learner stopped responding at all.
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