Exoneration: The use of DNA to free the innocent

Not only can DNA be used to convict criminals, it has successfully been used to exonerate individuals, some of whom were wrongly imprisoned for more than two decades.

Often, the person who is wrongly convicted of a serious crime such as murder or rape has a criminal record for petty crimes, which means a record already exists. These individuals are frequently convicted on eyewitness testimony, but without any physical evidence tying them to the crime.

The Innocence Project, created in 1992 by Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck at the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law in New York, works to exonerate people by use of post-conviction DNA, in which DNA from the crime scene is tested against the accused's DNA. Often, physical evidence from a crime is kept for many years. If the evidence includes samples of blood, hair, skin, or other evidence that can include DNA, it can often be used to prove that the person accused could not have committed the crime. Moreover, if it turns out that the DNA matches a profile in a database such as CODIS, the real criminal can be located and tried. From 1992 to April of 2014, the Innocence Project helped exonerate 316 prisoners.

Personally, I feel that the use of DNA to exonerate wrongfully convicted individuals is a necessity in the criminal justice system. I suspect an innumerable amount of wrongfully convicted individuals are still in prison, just waiting for an organization like The Innocence Project to come along. Every human being, regardless of their racial, cultural, or financial backgrounds, deserves a right to live their life to the fullest. Now, how can that happening if they are stuck behind bars?

Lucy the Chimpanzee

This is the story of Lucy the chimpanzee. When Lucy was only two days old, she was adopted by psychologist Dr. Maurice K. Temerlin and his wife Jane. The Temerlins wondered, if given the right environment and socialization, how human could Lucy become?

Temerlin and his wife raised Lucy as if she were a human child, teaching her to eat with silverware, dress herself, flip through magazines, and sit in a chair at the dinner table. She was taught rudimentary American Sign Language eventually learned 140 signs. When Temerlins introduced her for the first time to a male chimpanzee, and she was frightened and did not relate to him, let alone find him attractive. Fouts has written that when he arrived at Lucy's home every morning, Lucy would greet him with a hug, take the kettle, fill it with water, find two cups and tea bags, and serve the tea.

By the time she was 12, Lucy had become very strong and was very destructive in the Temerlin house. Eventually, she was shipped to a chimpanzee rehabilitation center in Gambia, accompanied by graduate student Janis Carter. For years, Lucy was unable to relate to the other chimps in the rehabilitation center. Lucy showed many signs of depression, including refusal to eat, and expressed "hurt" via sign language. Though her adopted Temerlin parents stayed with Lucy for only a few weeks in Gambia, Janis Carter remained at the Center for years, devoting a great deal of time to helping Lucy assimilate to life in the wild.

A year after leaving Lucy, Carter returned with some of Lucy's belongings. Lucy and a group of chimps greeted her, and Lucy embraced her, and then left with the other chimps without turning back, which Carter interpreted as Lucy having adapted to life as a chimpanzee. One year after that, Carter returned and found Lucy's skeleton with hands missing and head separated from the rest of the body, and no sign of skin or hair, from which Carter concluded that Lucy had been poached.

Lucy has taught us that chimpanzees are very intelligent (near human level) and if socialized / raised differently, the only difference between the two species would be our physical characteristics. This also shows us that being “human” isn’t necessarily biological, but psychological (nurture, not nature). Although in the end it was painful for the Temerlins, I feel that this experiment was worth the sacrifice in order to better understand the psychological similarities between humans and chimpanzees. Lucy's end was very tragic but couldn't have ben helped. All her life she was taught that all humans are kind and nice, so she wasn't even aware that something like poachers even existed.

Article Reading: "Thinking Like a Mountain" by Aldo Leopold

Everything has a purpose. Nature is a balance that can't be broken.

Aldo Leopold comments on how it is the wolf's job to keep the deer in proper number (maintained). Without the wolf, the deer become over-abundant  This leads to more plants being eaten by the deer due to the fact that there are more deer. Then, because more plants are being eaten, there is not enough plant-life to maintain the increase in deer. So the deer begin to die or move on because there is not enough food for them to eat. Leopold notices that from the perspective of a human, the wolf is just a threat. But from the perspective of the mountain, the wolf is a necessary part to keep everything in balance and to keep everything alive. Leopold's last paragraph spoke to me as a reader as he explained that in our lives we all think about what will better and secure ourselves but those who look for a little temporary safety instead of wildlife deserve neither.

In conclusion, we should look to help secure the cycle of wildlife before we secure the safety of ourselves because "wildness is the salvation of the world."

TED TALKS David Gallo: Life in the deep oceans

Generally humans as a culture are obsessed about space exploration and aliens. This assumption is based on the fact that we have countless television / movie programs developed around the concept of alien life on other planets, however the one place that we have never considered looking for new life is right here in our very own oceans.

The oceanographer David Gallo has spent numerous years diving into the very depths of our planet's oceans in a submarine with special video equipment in order to film never-before scene organisms. Gallo takes his footage and turns it over to biologists for further study. Is is Gallo's belief that we as humans believe that we know everything about the oceans due to popular videos and moves about the upper layer of the ocean (the part that receives light) when in reality there is also a deeper darker part of the ocean which never receives sunlight and we are only just starting to explore it. This "dark abyss" is home to mountain ranges that are equal to, or greater than, the mountains on the surface of the planet. Around these mountains resides a jellyfish that grows up to 150 ft and is the longest known organism in the ocean. Every time Gallo does a dive he finds and records up to 198 new, never-before seen species. This area of the ocean is also home to volcanoes that release tiny bacteria from inside the planet when they erupt. Gallo speculates that these bacteria are the simplest form of life and that the human species may have evolved from these tiny organisms.

Personally I will walk away from this TED Talk with a new mindset concerning that whenever we as a people think that there is nothing more to learn about a particular subject, there will always be something new awaiting to be discovered upon a deeper look.

“Welcome to my Bio-Blog! I am a student at Animas High School in Durango, CO.  Throughout the
year, I will post my thoughts on articles and videos that I work with in my sophomore biology class.
Check back soon to hear my thoughts on underwater exploration.