“Breach of integrity,” I muttered on Sunday night, when yet another mosquito bit me awake. Three bumps on my left arm, one on my neck, two on my lower back. For years I had sided with the mosquitoes – never killing them, neatly capturing and releasing each specimen, but no tacit pact was reached. “You shall not covet your neighbor’s blood” proved to be a step too far for the mosquito.
Tossing and turning restlessly from the itch, I thought about the recent bloodlust within the PvdD. After the turbulent early years, in which writer Maarten ‘t Hart came to blows with then party leader Marianne Thieme because she had converted to the Seventh-day Adventists, calm seemed to have returned in recent years. Increasing seat numbers, almost 25,000 members. But now the party board focused on Esther Ouwehand, and vice versa. Dramatic plot twist, just before the elections.
The PvdD soap was reminiscent of an interview with artist Anne Hofstra last week NRC. She will perform the performance at the Fringe Festival Chicken, for an audience of people and poultry: “Whether they find something beautiful or ugly or whether they don’t care is extremely difficult to distinguish. But there is a chance that they will appreciate what I do.” Performing arts for the animals.
‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s blood’ proved to be a step too far for the mosquito
The day after the waking night I read that Ian Wilmut, the scientist who cloned Dolly the sheep, had died. During his lifetime, like Ouwehand now, he was accused of violating integrity. By his former colleague, Keith Campbell, who felt that Wilmut had taken all the credit for Dolly’s birth, but also by ethicists who proclaimed that cloning is a danger to the genetic integrity of an organism. In their view, DNA should not be experimented with.
Others stood up for Wilmut. After all, in nature it is not so strange to have two individuals with the same DNA. It occurs in identical twins, but also in ‘natural clones’: animals or plants that originated from one parent through asexual reproduction, and have exactly the same genetic material as that parent. Even the bananas you buy in the supermarket are clones of one variety, whether they have a Chiquita or Dole sticker.
In this sense, ‘integrity violation’ is a difficult concept to explain, especially if there is uncertainty about exactly which values have been violated. For the time being, it seems that the PvdD board is getting the short end of the stick with the vague accusations, and is getting its own distrust back like a boomerang. But if the chaos continues until November 22, there is a good chance that the animals will also suffer. Hofstra’s theater performance has a happy endingbut does this also apply to the PvdD tragedy?
From a chicken perspective, the squabble is probably somewhere between an exciting thriller and an absurdist drama.
Gemma Venhuizen is a biology editor at NRC and writes a column here every Wednesday.