Lessons Learned from Jurassic Park
Bingo! Dino DNA!
I love the movie Jurassic Park. A big plot point in the movie is that nature, uh uh, finds a way, and that the dinosaurs found a way to reproduce. What happened was the geneticists in the movie filled in the holes in the dino DNA with the “DNA of a frog…and now we can make a baby dinosaur.”
So how did using frog DNA give an all female population of dinosaurs able to reproduce? Frogs like the common reed frog are called sequential hermaphrodites because they switch sex during different phases in their life (source). My best guess is that they used the DNA of frogs that could change sex which allowed the dinosaurs to reproduce.
Now, I’m going to say something that’s perhaps radical. People are not frogs. People are not dinosaurs either. We haven’t had our DNA spliced with sequential hermaphrodites, nor do humans have the ability to switch between having male and female sex organs. So why, then, are there terms like pseudohermaphroditism used with androgen insensitivity syndrome?
Pseudohermaphroditism is an outdated medical term used to describe androgen insensitivity syndrome in some of the earliest medical studies. Let’s break down that word and see what it means.
pseudo - false, pretending, or unauthentic
hermaphrodite - of or denoting a person, animal, or plant having both male and female sex organs or other sexual characteristics.
ism - doctrine, system, manner, condition, act, characteristic
When you put it all together, Pseudohermaphroditism means the false condition of having both sex organs. That’s a bit confusing, don’t you think? Wouldn’t the false condition of having both sex organs be a person having typical sex organs?
In androgen insensitivity syndrome, as the name implies, there is a mutation on the androgen receptor on the X chromosome which allows for varying degrees of insensitivity of androgen to express themselves, resulting in complete, partial or mild androgen insensitivity syndrome.
I am personally very thankful for the lessons I’ve learned from Jurassic park about frogs, to know that terms like Pseudohermaphroditism are just weird and outdated when describing us with androgen insensitivity syndrome. If you hear or read that term, kindly remind that person that we are people, not frogs in Jurassic Park.