…I’ve hit my stride now. I’m well launched and feeling…I can’t describe how good. It’s like nearly drowning and remembering how to swim. My writing skill has waked up and is fully functioning after two years of chemo and recovery, and it feels good, like stretching muscles too long cramped and not moving. Yep, some glitches, yep, going a third pass over what I’ve been working on is still finding some things to fix, but it’s smoothing out. Bren is in trouble as usual, and things are building up into a real mess, which is a good thing at this stage of the book.
Thank you all, thank you Sooooooooooooo much for staying with me.
So, chemist & applied geneticist here. Vincristine is extracted from vinca, aka Madagascar Periwinkle, and is a cellular division “spindle poison”. When a cell divides, chromosomes are duplicated, the nuclear membrane breaksdown, centrosomes at opposite sides of the cell form “spindles” that send microfibers to the centromeres of the duplicated chromosomes, contract and pull them apart to either side, soon to become separate daughter cells.
So it causes failure of cell division, preferentially in cells that are dividing rapidly, like cancer cells. But also our constantly growing hair & fingernails.
Coincidentally, horticulturists use it to cause “polyploidy” in plants, making normal “diploid” plants with chrosomes in pairs, into “tetraploids” with pairs of pairs. Often such plants are larger, have larger flowers, bigger, thicker leaves. For example, the difference between ancestral grasses and our wheats, durum is a tetraploid, “bread wheat” is a hexaploid! Strawberries & sugar canes are octoploids.
Our common Cavendish banana was a natural hybrid cross of a diploid with a tetraploid, a viable (most weren’t) triploid. Now, as described above it’s all about duplication, and THREE chromosomes just AIN’T GONNA WORK! And that’s why our bananas have no seeds! They are all produced by offsets; they’re all a single clone; all in effect the same plant! Seedless watermelon? Uh-huh, same thing.
If commercial bananas are all clones, no wonder the fungus that got the Gros Michel variety took out that strain almost completely. Sadly, despite the Cavendish varietal initially being immune, the fungus mutated again and now looks to be causing trouble for Cavendish bananas. Other bananas are still immune, but life finds a way. I have a Gros Michel start (locally they are called Bluefields) that I got a stalk of bananas from, but the neighbor mashed the clump flat when they cut down a tree, and recovery has been very slow.
Don’t know about the genome that particular variety, but does it have seeds? The way we grow things, in very efficient plantations, e.g. SE Asian palm nuts, makes it all too easy for the pathogens. If we grew things like Mother Nature does, spread out in diverse biomes, they’d ALL have a better chance to survive. It didn’t save the American Elms though.
Gros Michel was the big commercial banana before the fungus killed off most of them; AFAIK, they didn’t have seeds, but were propagated by splitting shoots. I have found a couple of (individual) bananas with seeds, but very rarely, and none from my tree.
Seedless watermelons are hybrids grown from seed. There was a guy in my area of west Texas who grew the parents that produced the seeds.
Indeed they are hybrids, and the seedless watermelons themselves are indeed grown from seed. Here’s what Michigan State says: “The standard number of chromosomes in watermelon is 22. This is called the diploid number (di meaning two, as in dissect – cut in two). With this even number, cell division is highly regular and produces pollen and egg cells with 11 chromosomes that recombine to produce seed with the usual 22 chromosomes. Through a chemical process, the chromosome number can be doubled from 22 to 44 (tetraploid, tetra meaning four). Cell division in plants with 44 chromosomes is, again, highly regular and will produce pollen and egg cells with 22 chromosomes that recombine to produce seed having 44 chromosomes. However, if pollen from a plant with 22 chromosomes is placed on a female flower of a plant with 44 chromosomes, the resulting seed will have 33 chromosomes (triploid – three sets of the base number of 11 chromosomes). This odd number does not produce (or rarely produces) viable pollen and eggs in the resulting seedlings.
Seed companies maintain diploid and tetraploid parental lines and then perform controlled crosses by hand pollination to produce seed.”
https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/seedless_watermelon_how_do_they_do_that
Just as I described, they are also triploids. Each seed is a de novo version of what happened to that first Cavendish banana. Because watermelon cannot also produce offsets as bananas can, they have to keep doing the same trick all over again, and again, and again.
Triploidy really messes things up. (Including even with one chromosome, i.e. 21 trisomy in humans, Down Syndrome.)
Sweet Mother of Mercies, WOL! I am sorry that you may have to endure all of those annoyances again!
Oh, WOL, so sorry you need to go through this again! I’ve been thinking of you and I’ll wish on stars for you.
Have my first COP infusion Thurs. Got a buzz cut today. When my hair starts falling out, it’ll be really short hairs and easy to clean up. Started knitting a hat for my po’ li’l bald head.
I still have some yarn — should I crochet you a Jayne hat with the earflaps?
I get to be scanned again this Tuesday morning. Fasting beforehand is so much fun. I’m looking forward to the results.
And the results: no signs of cancer (hurray!) but I have gallstones and some teeny stones in one kidney. This is what happens when you get old.
“Some rain must fall”, eh? Well, the radiologist used the word “packed” about my gall bladder. It’s asymptomatic for the most part, except for being unable to store much, so effectively as if it had been removed. It has made my digestion of fats/oils iffy. I have found some relief with “lipase” supplements, the primary ensymes that digest fats.
Most druggists don’t carry them, can’t even fulfill a written prescription. I’ve found them through Amazon. But like supplements in general, it’s hard to compare brands and tell what one gets from the labels. Mostly it’s trial and error as to brands. And hope
Results of the serum lipid test: it’s down to 225! Hasn’t been this low since before I was 25. (Yeah, it’s high by the standards. But it was 380, 5 years ago.) This is why I’m not surprised by gallstones.
Glad to see Wave back online. Hope the difficulty wasn’t too painful.
Agreed! I was somewhat worried when Wave was down for 3? days.
Jane’s site as well.
eta: I just noticed I can’t amend a comment. Leftovers from the breakage?
I found I had to change “http” to “https” in my bookmark to make it work again. (Shrug.)
Yes, https://cherryh.com/WaveWithoutAShore doesn’t work, but https://cherryh.com/WaveWithoutAShore does.
It would be worthwhile for whoever is maintaining the site to add a redirect from the http address to the https address. Probably also a good idea to get rid of the old page at http://cherryh.com and have that redirect to https://cherryh.com/WaveWithoutAShore.
It’s not accessible from the menu, still. I had to go around the side to get in.
Jane’s site is still broken, several weeks in. Is all well over there, or are things just hurry-hurry-ding-ding?
Funny, the “recent comments” index for this thread shows a message I entered a couple days ago, just behind this “reply”, but coming here there is no comment. It was a first level comment. I saw it when entered, with the large avatar. This is a test, so see if replies appear.
It did! At least it dis immediately.
“Never mind!” Different thread.
I live for Bren getting himself into trouble — and Machigi cooking up shenanigans. : )
Dumb question # 92: is something odd going on with Closed Circle? My old linky doesn’t work any more, and typing it in directly takes me to a site that says they own it, would I like to buy it from them? Jane’s site is also still offline.
I just tried and got there. http://www.closed-circle.net/
https works too.
I don’t know why my old link was broken, but i know why typing it in manually didn’t work: I used .com, not .net Silly me!
OTOH, Jane’s site is still down, and I can’t edit comments here. D’oh!
When has Bren ever not been in trouble? haha
For all the Wavy Navy that celebrates a holiday this weekend, ReadyGuy and I offer our best wishes.
Hope CJ is doing okay. 🙂
CJ has been posting daily on Facebook and sounds as if she is doing well.
Could you please post a link to her active Facebook homepage?
Now and then I try to search for it again, but the one about replacing tge airco last summer is still the most recent facebook post I can find.
O bother, the edit button is gone. Here is the link I have for CJ on facebook:
https://m.facebook.com/pg/CJ-Cherryhs-Books-Questions-106696991055059/posts/
I can see her at facebook.com/cj.cherryh
Sorry to hear about your problems and really happy you are feeling better. Glad you are back to writing and so am waiting for Defiance. It’s August the 24th today 2022. This is the closest conversation I could find. Took me a bit to find your web site again.
but like I said so glad you are getting better health wise and writing rise.
We all have those set backs yet we get back up, grab a ounce of feeling better and running with that till we are back to par and on our way once again.
From a waking dream this thought came; ” Form always follows your expectation!”.
So true even when I forget it.
You are the best and you even got me interested in Latin 🙂
Hope you get this and it comes with what energy I have to you!
Be well, be free, be joyful
love and health to you one of my favourite all time writers. Love your books.
Jean Horn
jeanhorn@msn.com
a Canadian fan