Xin’s Blog

  How can we decide the punishment for a newly created medical procedure? Gene editing, although widely known, is not as sought after as I thought it would be. The most notable case I can think of is of the guy in China who got arrested for editing the genomes of twin babies and even that happened almost seven years ago. From an outside standpoint, what he did probably seemed world- altering (in a good way), I mean, he successfully made it so those twins were resistant to HIV infections and the cells responsible for that could be passed down through further generations. If you think a little harder on it though, you’ll realize you’ve probably never heard of anyone middle aged or old with edited genomes. This is (obviously) because of how new this technology is but (with a little more thought) you’ll get to the fact that we have no idea how this will affect the babies in the future. Could the unaltered version of the altered gene be suppressing something we haven’t studied before?...

  “Sometimes we forget that nature also means us. Termites build mounds; we build cities. All of our being — juices, flesh and spirit — is nature.” — Diane Ackerman   At the core of it all, our innate goal in life is simply to survive and reproduce. We grow to have features desirable to the opposite sex in hopes of mating and develop certain characteristics to better suit our ancestors' environments. To understand nature is to understand that we, as humans, despite having a “higher conscious”, are not only reflected in it but a direct result of it. As humans, we are at the top of the food chain. Our grotesque needs to attain exotic fabrics and eat unique delicacies are fueled by the environment around us. We are responsible for the extinction of hundreds of species and eventually will be responsible for our own. Despite this however, our unnatural desire for greed and power overrides any empathy for the issues at hand. In the end, we fully understand the consequences attac...

  Thinking back to when I moved from Australia to America I must’ve had some sort of accent. Environment dictates the way we talk after all. But I never realized I had lost it until my freshman year, when I met someone who followed a similar timeline as I did except she could switch between accents easily. To me, losing the accent wasn’t a big deal, but it got me wondering how much of the things I said or did were relearned. I realized most of the Australian terms or way of nature I thought I had experienced myself were simply things fed to me by my parents or social media overtime after I had moved. Legally, I was Australian but I had spent far more of my defining years in America. Like Sedaris said, understanding the language is only the first step, becoming a true citizen of another country, to be able to say you are American (or French), means to celebrate holidays that mean nothing to you culturally, to understand the underlying meanings of certain words or phrases. Doing a...

It was a Saturday; I was just coming home from a swim meet looking forward to eating the best meal I could think of at the time – a twenty piece of McDonald’s chicken nuggets. Starving, I walked into the kitchen eager to start eating when all of a sudden, I turn the corner and I see him, my dog, on his hind legs, front paws on the table slobbering his way through my chicken nuggets. At the time it was heartbreaking (I cried), but after reading “Heroic Dog Saves Family Of Five From Herb-Roasted Chicken,” by The Onion, I can’t even stop to think about what could’ve happened if I had eaten those chicken nuggets. Jokes aside (my dog actually ate my chicken nuggets that one time though), most of us with pets are familiar with them eating things they shouldn’t whether that be as extreme as 20 chicken nuggets all at once or as small as somehow sneaking into their kibble. This article by The Onion satirizes this humorous act by painting it as if the dog had actually done a service for the ow...

There has always been an expectation from my family for me to be above average. Mostly, at school obviously, but also in every other aspect of life. In elementary school this was easy, being the first to complete all spelling levels in my class, reading books in the teen section of the library, etc. Going into sixth grade, I felt extraordinary. I was in advanced classes and juggled three different extracurriculars with my (very busy) elementary school life and yet, middle school  was probably my unofficial downfall. assignments started piling up, the expectation to already have known how to study for a class, and a global pandemic. All of these combined led to a pretty late realization, that I had to put in actual work to do well and that everyone was better than me at something. The thing is, at some point in your life (hopefully early on) you realize that once you get to the point where you consider yourself to be “above average” everyone around you also becomes “above average”...

 “Everyone else is ‘there’…You’re ‘not there.’ And if not there, nowhere.” (Mairs, 1987) As human beings, we unconsciously place ourselves into social binaries. Social constructs composed only of two parts absolute and never changing. The idea that we, as people, are destined to be of one of two categories completely disregards those who are mixed, intersex, anyone who identifies with anything outside of our undisclosed binary. Categories confine us to only believe certain beliefs that mostly are untrue but the history and backing on these comparisons continue to push people into thinking these ideals are true. For example, the idea that women are too emotional leads to the assumption that women are weak and the opposing idea that men are strong leads to the assumption that men should therefore lead in our society. Today, the overturning of Roe v. Wade proves this point to still be true for many individuals. Men view women as overly emotional and because of that unable to dictate w...