Articles by Anne Buchanan
The Mermaid's Tale: The Oval Moon
Ihave a macular pucker in one eye, scar tissue on the macula, and now straight lines that I see with this eye are distorted, objects are elongated, the full moon is an oval. I’m seeing things both differently from the other eye, and differently from all the years before this happened. But, when I look at the moon with this eye, it looks just as right as when I look with the other eye, or when I remember that the moon was round for all the years before this.
A Letter From A Friend
Anne, Thank you for having the love, strength, and courage to write this blog spot about Ken. It is powerful, devoted, and could be of great help to others whose husband/spouse/partner is inflicted with this terrible disease. For those of you who do not know, I have been a close friend of Ken's since we were graduate students in the late 60s--he at Michigan, me at Colorado--and we were both doing research on demographic methods for anthropological populations.
The Mermaid's Tale: Loss After Loss
The Essence of the Thing As most often now, Ken was sleeping when I entered his room. He opened his eyes, said hello, and dozed off again. This is how our visits most often go. I watched him for a while, quiet. I sometimes wonder if he will be surprised to see me there when he opens his eyes again. Maybe he is, but doesn’t say so. Or maybe he’s not. He woke again and said, alarmed, I thought even frightened, "Have I been asleep for a day and a half?" I said no. "Weeks?" he asked, more alarmed.
Plants are People, Too
What Can Plants Do? I haven't written a blog post since 2017. I've missed it, but, well, life has intervened. But, I've just read The Light Eaters, by Zöe Schlanger, a book describing a tidal wave of new thinking about plant behavior, and it has moved me to write. It's a New York Times bestseller. It's exciting stuff.
Got a Great Idea for a Super Bowl Promotion? Careful – or You May Earn a Penalty - Buchanan Public Relations
Got a Great Idea for a Super Bowl Promotion? Careful – or You May Earn a Penalty With the approach of one of the greatest events in sports, it’s natural for creative PR minds to start thinking of ways their brand or client can capitalize on a Super Bowl tie-in. But before you head too far downfield, take time for a refresh on the rules surrounding promotions that link to the Big Game.
Is there a gene for celibacy?
We see study after study of genes 'for' behavioral traits considered to be driven by selection: intelligence, athletic ability, criminality, recklessness, drug abuse, aggression, even being a caring grandmother. The list goes on and on and on.
Redpolls: genetically similar, phenotypically different
Redpolls are a group of small birds in the finch family, members of the genus Acanthis. They breed in the far north, but sometimes migrate as far south as the central US in winter, when food is scarce further north. They rely on a small variety of seeds, and sometimes travel a remarkable thousands of miles to find them.
Rare Disease Day and the promises of personalized medicine
ur daughter Ellen wrote the post that I republish below 3 years ago, and we've reposted it in commemoration of Rare Disease Day, February 29th, each year since. I wish I could include an update reporting that the cause of her rare disease has been identified.
I think I know where babies come from, therefore I am human
Throughout most of evolutionary history, sex was just sex. Among vertebrates, fish were the first to do it, going back some 400 million years. While it might be fun for fish and all the other species that evolved to reproduce sexually, for most species, sex still is just sex. But for our own peculiar species of primate, sex is about something more. Sex is about babymaking.
DNA is the ruling metaphor of our age
DNA is a metaphor for our age. It conveys the powerful idea that our identity is scientifically reducible to an unambiguous, determinative code. We hear this idea expressed all the time.
PR Pros, It’s Time to Pay Up: #SubscribeToTruth
For those of us in the profession of public relations, the rise of fake news and the attacks on legitimate media outlets have been deeply disturbing. The Code of Ethics developed by our industry’s leading professional association, PRSA, calls out honesty as one of six, key professional values that its members uphold: We adhere to the highest standards of accuracy and truth in advancing the interests of those we represent and in communicating with the public.
Replacing the Affordable Care Act -- what's so complicated?
Nobody knew health care could be so complicated? Er, except everybody but Mr Trump. And yes, it's a huge behemoth of a system, but the devil is in the detail. It's when you throw in all the special interests, political considerations, back-scratching, etc. that it quickly gets complicated. But before all that happens, there are only three basic choices when it comes to proving medical insurance, and they are easy to grasp.
The Lifegiving Home: Creating a Place of Belonging and Becoming|Paperback
Read an Excerpt The Lifegiving Home Creating a Place of Belonging & Becoming By Sally Clarkson, Sarah Clarkson, Anne Christian Buchanan Tyndale House Publishers, Inc. Copyright © 2016 Sally Clarkson and Sarah Clarkson All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-4964-0337-7 CHAPTER 1 A LIFEGIVING LEGACY (SALLY) The wise woman builds her house, But the foolish tears it down with her own hands.
How many diseases does it take to map a SNP? Fifteen years on
Ken and I are here in Finland, preparing to teach a week of Logical Reasoning in Human Genetics with Joe Terwilliger and colleagues. Not statistical methods, not laboratory techniques, not the latest way to analyze sequence data. Concepts, logical reasoning. Ken and Joe have been reasoning logically for a long time. They've taught this course together in many places, and they wrote at least one logically reasoned paper 15 years ago. That paper was published in Nature Genetics.
Does Mendel fit in contemporary high school curriculum?
It’s not too often one gets real eureka moments, but I had one of those last August. I participated on Logical Reasoning in Human Genetics course taught by Ken Weiss, Anne Buchanan and others in University of Helsinki. I promised to write this up for Mermaid's Tale (as Anne has been continuously complaining it's difficult to read my own blog Kaiken takana on loinen via Google Translate).
Do scientists have heroes? Should we?
We always welcome comments, but we moderate them to reduce spam, gratuitous unkindness and so forth. Because we moderate comments, they won't appear on the blog until one of us publishes them, but we try to do that in a timely way. We've had to make a change to the commenting page. People had told us that Blogger was eating their comments, so now, rather than embedding comment editing with the posts, it has to be done on a separate, full page.
Art photography, and the Darwinian explanation for Vivian Maier
We always welcome comments, but anonymous comments won't get through the filter. Because we moderate comments, they won't appear on the blog until one of us publishes them, but we try to do that in a timely way.
Early childhood interventions and health in later life -- or not?
these days of DNA rapture, the much more common and fashionable argument that inherited genotypes are responsible for everything in life. (that is, at least were correlated with) low Even so, these sample sizes seem 'under powered' to be convincing for this sort of study, to say the least.
Chewing the antibiotics-make-us-fat story
We always welcome comments. You can comment anonymously if you choose, but be aware that anonymous comments go straight to the black hole of spam because that's what they almost always are, and we only occasionally look at them. Better to use your name, or some modicum thereof if you want your comment to be published. We do moderate comments, so they won't appear on the blog until one of us publishes it, but we try to do that in a timely way. Sorry about the captcha, by the way.
The well-posed problem problem
We always welcome comments. You can comment anonymously if you choose, but be aware that anonymous comments go straight to the black hole of spam because that's what they almost always are, and we only occasionally look at them. Better to use your name, or some modicum thereof if you want your comment to be published. We do moderate comments, so they won't appear on the blog until one of us publishes it, but we try to do that in a timely way. Sorry about the captcha, by the way.
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