re: #141 freetoken

Well said. That Eva Braun-Jewish connection and the TV show, and the rest of it, is more carnival show than science. It is pretty far from science.

It does a disservice to people’s understanding of genetics when such tripe comes along and is published in the news media. It serves only to exaggerate genetic differences between ethnic groups and create artificial borders. Pretending there are great genetic differences between ethnicities is a fantasy, and in my mind, it is quite insidious, since it commandeers molecules to serve political purposes: nucleotides are such beautiful composites themselves, structurally speaking.

Most synthetic chemists have an abiding admiration for structure, and I have long admired the coplanarity of aromatic compounds, and the electronic anisotropy that helps us characterise aromatic protons. I have affection for pyrimidines (which comes from my hours in the lab), but it is uracil, with its lactam-lactim tautomerisation that is particularly interesting - and it, I have never used in a synthesis.
I admire these flat and the bumpy, the level and the choppy, the coplanar and the asymmetric. Those sp2 constituted nitrogenous bases are as pleasing as the asymmetric (bis)spiro-2H-chromenes. They have aesthetic beauty.

But they have functional beauty as well, which the biochemist knows and admires. We are all indignant when people tell these stories about ‘race’ and genes, mixing up these molecules with politics and ideology, especially when they’re on shlock TV shows, and prefixed with the word ‘science’.