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Dumpshock Forums _ Shadowrun _ Magical Genetics
Posted by: Adarael Feb 2 2006, 12:10 AM
So here's the preface to why I'm asking this question.
I'm currently running a Shadowrun game I've dubbed Black Monday, following a shadow-war between the remnants of Grid Overwatch Division, Pax and her followers, and interested corporations. Essentially: during the crash and singularity, a ton of GOD and Pax's people were fried, corrupted, or died... but many of them (including Pax herself) got slapped with a JackBNimbling, because the program was fairly indescriminate about who it converted to a ROM construct. With the systems crashing shortly after this happened, these personalities were 'backed up' to drives and off-line storage systems which were later stored and left unused due to the havok to Jorgunmundr (or however you spell it) worm wreaked on the system.
Well, in the process of play, the players have inadvertantly let the Paxites and GOD members who'd been ROM'd out into the new wireless matrix - and since they were booted in pretty much the state they'd been ROM'd in, both sides are quite eager to continue their war. JackBNimble is also out in the open once again, with certain interested parties (re: governments and the AAAs) knowing exactly what it does.
Now, in every game I've ran, I've chucked out the notion that whole-person clones are 'inviable'. It just seems ass-backwards to me that people can clone individual parts, but whole animals aren't going to work. I mean, current science suggests very strongly that this is untrue IRL. With the advent of JackBNimble, this essentially grants those with the money and reliable personality backups a sort of 'eternal' life, especially if the genetic sample the clone is built from is from their youth, and is kept non-replicating until a clone is needed.
But my wonder is... if someone is a magician, and they undergo this kind of revival... What happens to their magic?
So what do you all think? Where does the magic come from? Where should it go?
Posted by: warrior_allanon Feb 2 2006, 12:20 AM
the way we have always played is that its inherant to the DNA as a recessive gene. that means that according to mendelian genetics it has the odds of cropping up 1 out of every 4 in parrents that each have the recessive and one in 8 of where one parent has the recessive
Posted by: FrankTrollman Feb 2 2006, 12:28 AM
OK, a force grown clone is made up entirely of viable parts, and thus the whole should be viable as well, right?
Actually, that's wrong. Force-grown clones have viable limbs and internal organs, but there's been explicit mention of their brains not being up to snuff. The force-growing process apparently does not get around the whole problem where it takes the better part of a year for the eyes to attach to the brain.
But in any case, while you can ertainly swap someone's failing organs with new ones, full brain transplants haven't yet been successful in Shadowrun. That's not to say that they haven't come really damn close, it's just that so far it hasn't been done yet (maybe the next generation of Halberstam's Babies in Unwired will be actual brains in jars). Regardless however, swapping the brain out into a new healthy body does not immortality grant. The brain itself is quite mortal, and that mortality would doubtless be accelerated by popping it out of its skull enclosure and juggling it around.
But that's not your question. Your question was whether a new body would share a character's penchant for Magic. The answer is "maybe".
According to Smiling Bandit and KAM's ruminations on the subject, your magical potential is like a multidimensional shadow of the 3 dimensional object that is your DNA as a whole. That means the coding part as well as the non-coding portions. A twin or clone is going to have extremely similar DNA, but there will be differences. he telomeres will be different lengths, there will be a different number of repeats, etc. And while this won't have any effect on the person's genes, it very well might cut one off from the Magic.
A clone is very likely to be magical if the original was magical. Further, a clone is very unlikely to be magical if the original was mundane. But the 1000 Miguel Army is economically unviable because not every Miguel Clone has magical talent.
-Frank
Posted by: Adarael Feb 2 2006, 12:54 AM
Yes, Frank, that's true. But for purposes of this exercise, assume that the brain is viable, as I mentioned in my preface. I'm ignoring the parts of SR canon that say it's not, because without that, a large portion of the story I want to tell is null and void.
The issue also isn't a 'brain transplant' per se - it's a download of a ROM constructed personality into wetware - another technology that isn't available, per canon. Much like copying information from a hard drive to another hard drive over a network, the idea is not to phyiscally connect hard drive A into the rack drive B is in, but instead to just copy the information wholesale to drive B.
Posted by: mfb Feb 2 2006, 01:12 AM
that's fine, but the explicative reasoning behind your decision is slightly off--there's no reason a force-grown brain should necessarily be viable. but that's not really pertinent to your question.
SOTA:63 indicates strongly that magical ability (as well as metaspecies and other post-Awakening traits) is linked to astral genetic structures--a sort of third strand of DNA that exists only in the astral, but interacts with the other two strands to produce certain traits. or something crazy like that.
Posted by: Adarael Feb 2 2006, 01:14 AM
Well, lacking an intimate knowledge of SR genetics (as, last I recall, cloned animals' brains are viable) I just found it much more likely that a whole clone's brain would be viable rather than not.
Also, yes - that was the thing in a SR book I was trying to allude to with "other" but couldn't figure out how to phrase.
Posted by: mfb Feb 2 2006, 01:19 AM
yes, cloned animal brains are viable--but as we don't currently have any technology that speeds up the process of growing a clone to maturity faster than they would naturally, we can't say whether or not a forced-growth brain is viable.
Posted by: hyzmarca Feb 2 2006, 01:20 AM
The expression of magic potential has as much to do with the local mana levels as much as anything. If you take someone who has the magus factor, put them in a mana ebb shortly before puberty, and then keep them there for a few years, chances are they they'll never manifest magical talent.
Now, take someone who spent his entire life in a normal mana level and never manifested magical talent and put him in a mana spike there is about a 1/100 chance that he will awaken.
Posted by: mfb Feb 2 2006, 01:21 AM
eh? where'd you get that from?
Posted by: hyzmarca Feb 2 2006, 01:32 AM
The Limited Awakening SURGE effect, among other things.
Posted by: mfb Feb 2 2006, 01:40 AM
that's not really conclusive. sure, Halley upped the mana level--but just because there's more mana doesn't mean that it's all the same. if you have a cup of apple juice, and you add a half-cup of prune juice, you don't end up with a cup and a half of apple juice. given that Halley is a ball of lifeless rock that spends all of its time in a rating 10 mana warp, i'd say there's at least even odds that it's laden with prune juice.
Posted by: Churl Beck Feb 2 2006, 01:47 AM
| QUOTE (Adarael) |
| So here's the preface to why I'm asking this question. [...] But my wonder is... if someone is a magician, and they undergo this kind of revival... What happens to their magic? So what do you all think? Where does the magic come from? Where should it go? |
I'm just wondering what the 250-word preface has to do with the question.
At any rate, this is discussed somewhat in the first chapter of SOTA:63. The discussion presupposes (perhaps incorrectly) that there is such a thing as a "magic gene" or genes, however it has so far eluded discovery. The discussion also includes speculation that "secondary structural elements" are necessary to activate the magic gene(s). I guess it's up to you. Perhaps you could stipulate that magic requires an incubation period (of 13 years or so), which would explain why magical expression so often coincides with puberty.
FWIW, the same chapter also discusses age rejuvinating genetic engineering. (It costs 2 million
and is limited in effectiveness.) Perhaps that is good enough for your characters' needs.
Posted by: Eyeless Blond Feb 2 2006, 04:04 AM
One thing that we're all kind of assuming here is that a clone must be genetically identical to it's "parent". This is not, as is currently being discovered, necessarily true at all.
Have a listen to http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5175062 of Evolutionary Development, or "Evo-devo" as the media is currently labelling it. One interesting bit I caught from that article is that biologists have found that DNA may actually change during the process of development, that the DNA you have as an adult is not necessarily the same as that you had while a fetus. Empirical evidence for this is especially prominent in the current batch of animal "clones", whom very often have many phenotypical differences from their genetic parent. These differences, ranging from minor issues of coloration and facial structure to serious issues of longevity, are the main reason the legitimate scientific community is at the moment very much against human cloning: the human will not be the same as the parent and may very likely be sick, brain-damaged and suffering for the whole of its short life.
The implication is clear: in order to create a viable clone--even a partial one--it will be necessary to "roll back" the DNA of the adult human to its corresponding fetal form. This will likely be much more well-researched for the rest of the body--after all, our physical bodies don't differ all that much from sheep or monkeys, who will likely undergo this research first--but the brain will be a rather different story. Magic will be even worse, as the genetic roots of Awakening are not even understood, let alone how those roots themselves change as an adult develops.
Posted by: Adarael Feb 2 2006, 04:20 AM
Churl:
| QUOTE |
| I'm just wondering what the 250-word preface has to do with the question... FWIW, the same chapter also discusses age rejuvinating genetic engineering. (It costs 2 million and is limited in effectiveness.) Perhaps that is good enough for your characters' needs. |
The preface exists to show why the question is important for the game I'm running, in the hopes that it will explain some more of what I'm asking. Specifically why it's not about a character, but about a conceptual thing.
Eyeless:
Yeah, that's part of why I'm a little uncomfortable with suggesting that all clones of a magical individual would have the same magical ability. I like the idea of magic as a wild card... but not SO much of a wild card as to be totally random.
Posted by: fistandantilus3.0 Feb 2 2006, 01:28 PM
| QUOTE (mfb) |
| eh? where'd you get that from? |
| QUOTE (hyzmarca) |
| The expression of magic potential has as much to do with the local mana levels as much as anything |
well, as another example to support that theory (which I find to be an intersting one), how about before the awakening? The 'magic-genes' would have still been there, but they did not activate, because the mana level was too low. We now that there was mana during the down cycle, because the IE's were still able to use some low level magics (and exist for that matter). Also, it states in a few books that exposure to high levels of magic can trigger an awakening in a person, such as SURGE, very powerful power sites, and the like.
Which at least suggests that the opposite would be true, that repressing that expression by keeping the person in a lower mana level, such as an ebb, would repress that expression. Perhaps they would awaken just after stepping out of the ebb, or perhaps it would require a very powerful spell or power site.
Also remember that in ED, about 5% of the worlds population is magically active (according to Lou P in a interview I read somewhere). Now you can't chalk that up to the magically active breeding, since this would be as of post-Scourge, when the world's population would be much smaller than in circa 2070. So the logcial conclusion would be that the higher mana levels (near peak) was able to trigger more awakenings. Which, once again, suggests that the ambient mana level plays a major part in the expression of magical ability. That there were still people with no maigcal ability ,even in highly magical locales like Thera, certainly suggests that the mana level isn't the only factor, which strengthens the theory of the 'magic gene'.
This has been my rant. Hope you enjoyed, leave tips in the jar on your way out please.
Posted by: MK Ultra Feb 2 2006, 04:01 PM
A thing often overlooked when talking about genetics is, that it interacts heavily with the environment, especially during childhood. Bombard a person with 24/7 media frenzy and it will be more capable of filtering out uninteresting information and picking up intel from a short mediaclip, while being less capable to extract info out of a widely spread text, than the same person when exposed to extensive reading during childhood instead. Same goes for physical features.
It is allso alluded to, that magic, like many talents, may be a combination of many traits, and some of these wonīt express under different conditions (like 6 months of childhood and puberty submerged in a glass jar).
Think of it like a charakter with aptitude computer, never picking upthat skill.
For all we know, magicians may not awaken when having the wrong cheese to sausage ratio in thair childhood dietry.
So, even IF a clone-body would be identical to itīs dna-donator (by high speed simsense stimulation and electrically induced musclecontractions or what ever) even after being forcegrown. And than has the Personality implanted into itīs brain with exactly the same memories, the chances are good, that the resulting person will not have the magical talent of itīs tamplate. Maybe higher then the 0.1% chance of genaral population, maybe even lower. Quiet possibly higher then the clone of a non-awakened tamplate, but in the end itīs totaly up to the whims of the gm!
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