Of course, limb transplants are still a very tricky operation to perform. But, let’s suppose for an instant that the procedure can be perfected.
I have always been curious to know what would happen, for example, if a Black person’s hand were to be transplanted onto a White person’s arm (or any other sort of combination). Would the skin color of that transplanted hand, over time, begin to change color over to resemble that of the White person’s arm? Would the fact that the hand now attached to a different colored arm affect its color because of the flow of new blood, nutrients, etc.? Or is the skin color of the hand permanently etched into its own DNA, never to change, even if it is fully attached and integrated to a different-colored arm for decades?
It would provide an interesting reinterpretation of the phrase “excuse me while I whip this out”. :dubious:
Somewhat, if rather bizarrely, apropos to this, TCM is inaugurating their series of vintage Dick Cavett shows tonight. First up is his hour-long interview of Mel Brooks.
Skin color is based on the production of melanin in cells in the lower layers of the skin. These cells would retain their original DNA, and would produce melanin at the same level as before. The transplanted hand would remain the same color it had originally.
I recall an ancient Saturday Night Live skit on face transplants in which a black NFL player (played by Garett Morris) received the face of an 11-year old white girl. Pretty hilarious.
Ignoring environmental factors like exposure to the sun, human skin color is determined by the amount of melanin in the skin cells, which is determined by the DNA in those same cells. So, no, the hand would not change color. The transplanted hand would, however, have more rhythm than the other hand.
The white person would have to have intensive physical therapy. They would need training in how to deal with the “black power” fist that would most certainly erupt in response to any immunological activities from the host body.
Seriously, though, I’m pretty sure that transplanted limbs are chosen to be of a similar size and color than the person’s original limb, to help ease psychological trauma.
What would happen with a white person’s hand on a black person’s arm?
The only difference would be if the hand donor was a convicted murderer, in which case there’s approximately a 72% chance of the hand having a mind of its own and driving the new host to murder all of the donor’s old enemies. There was a paper in Lancet about it.
Transplantation of any body part, is determined by tissue matching (HLA tissue typing)
To obtain a perfect match, the donor and recipient need to be from a common gene pool. The farther outside that gene pool, the less likely the transplant will survive.
This is why it’s so important for all races to be educated on organ donation.
Are you implying race is a random, environmental or a learned factor and not hereditary via genetics?
Your close relatives, i.e. the closest to your gene pool, tend to be of similar race to you on average, so the statement makes sense regardless of any genetic bases for race however.
Some people on this board hold that “race” is an artificial social construct, and consequently the concept is totally meaningless. They’ll probably wander into this thread before long.
Really? From what I’ve heard, the argument isn’t that race as a concept is “totally meaningless”, but rather that it’s not necessarily or reliably related to actual genetic kinship.
That is, we all agree that there exist in the human species various populations, whose members are more closely related to one another than to members of other groups. And similarity of morphological traits like height, skin color, hair color, etc., does often correlate with closeness of genetic relationships. E.g., you probably look more like your parent(s) than like your great-grandparent(s), and more like your great-grandparent(s) than like the average member of a different ethnic group from yours, and so on.
The trouble is that physical appearance or morphology doesn’t reliably correlate with genetic relationship. So when we define different “races” based on similarity of morphological traits, we can’t assume that people assigned to the same “race” are necessarily more closely related to each other than to people of a different “race”. Some examples:
Certain dark-skinned, dark-eyed curly-haired West African populations are more closely related genetically to pale-skinned, green-eyed, blond Swedish people than they are to dark-skinned, dark-eyed curly-haired Australian populations. So assigning the West Africans and the Australians to one “race” and the Swedes to a different one is actually mischaracterizing their genetic relationship.
There’s more genetic diversity within dark-skinned African populations than there is between some of those Africans and the rest of the human species. (Apparently this is because existing non-African populations are all descended from a relatively small group of people that left Africa some tens of thousands of years ago, and developed morphological diversity—different skin colors and eye shapes and so on—in response to varied climates.) So assigning all dark-skinned Africans to one race, while breaking out non-African populations into a variety of different races, is also misleading about genetic relationship.
So yes, “race” (i.e., morphological similarity) can be an indicator of genetic closeness, but it ain’t necessarily so. To use the transplant example, if a West African needed a hand transplant, it might well turn out that the light-skinned Swedish donor is a closer genetic match for him than the dark-skinned Australian donor. (Of course, he’d probably be a lot better off with a transplant from someone much more closely related to him than either of those; but the point is simply that superficial physical resemblance is not necessarily a reliable guide to genetic kinship.)
I was talking about gene pools. The more closely related the donor to the recipient the more genes they will have in common. Here another comment from NPR
Look, you’ve been around long enough not to make comments like this. There have been dozens of threads on the subject. If you have read any significant number of them, you would know that “race” can be used in various senses. The classical “races,” in the sense of Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongloid, don’t have any real scientific or genetic basis. However, “race” can also be used in a social sense. It is in this sense that the black population of the United States (defined as anyone with some apparent Sub-Saharan African ancestry) can be referred to as a “race”. Because this population is descended mainly (but not entirely) from a relatively restricted area of West Africa, some genetic traits are correlated with it, most obviously the amount of melanin in the skin. This population may not have much else in common genetically with other populations included in the traditional “Negroid” race.
I would further mention that although some genetic traits may be correlated with the “black” population of the US, those traits cannot be used to define it. Many people socially defined as “black” have more European than Sub-Saharan African ancestry. Some people socially defined as “white” have some Sub-Saharan ancestry. Some people in the US, for example those from southern India (classically considered to be Causasiod), have skin colors as dark as “blacks” but are not socially defined as “black” (although they may be considered “non-white”).
