*laughs... now that was truly different...

Might I suggest giving  hauke a visit, as he is 'sort of' a chicken if only in body. Welcome to the TP.

Vix

Funnily enough, I went to a lecture some weeks ago and shared this little piece about DNA sequencing with him. So, darn, I might have only been the world's second genetically modified chicken?

And thank you; I really appreciate the watch! This is my second entry to the prompt. I submitted one a few months ago but I got scared and scurried away.

no need to be scared at all... writers need writers... we are here for the practice and for each other...

Vix

Roosters are very underappreciated! I always found them to be very martial and fierce, which I suppose parts of Belgium agree with me on, considering the flag. I also appreciate any furry story that gives real life figures a furrification! Teddy Roosevelt as a bear for instance, something he would probably hate.

I appreciate the density of the text where it concerns the technical, though despite being very much a layman, I never found myself getting confused or lost. Preserving the gravity of a topic without getting lost in the details.

The dialogue moves very smoothly, and I appreciate the last line most. With a lot of writing I can put into words what I like and don't like, but when it comes to dialogue, I struggle. Sometimes it comes down to more how a sentence is constructed rather than what's specifically said, for instance: "Never the matter; get some wing gloves." is to me, very slick and good, if that makes sense.

Also, can transposons actually do that? Why is molecular biology so scary? First prions, now this!

And France too, along with Belgium! After all, it was once called Gaul (from which we get Gallus, the scientific name for domestic chicken).

Voyur, my fellow avian, this was very kind of you! I appreciate the feedback, though please do not feel pressured to reciprocate my rambles about style—I just get easily excited. I'm not sure about the density and the dialogue; I struggle to write coherently and I'm not certain I succeeded. Nonetheless, thank you for your thoughts—now I don't feel as embarrassed about uploading this.

Our dear Theodore is, without doubt, a bear. I was also thinking that Darwin has to be a finch, or a tortoise. But I think I'm getting ahead of myself...

Yes! At least, I believe. The NIH has all sorts of protocols around handling any modified genetic material because they can (not necessarily will; it takes some effort to get cells to accepting foreign genetic material) leave lasting effects. Molecular biology, in my nascent understanding of it, is full of beauty and horror. Transposons, prions, viruses... they're all just molecules obeying the laws of physics, somehow, yet they seem so malevolent to us macro beings!

I just had to look these up. Very interesting. Also funny that Dr M was having a student who barely knew anything about transposons working with them. Poor student knew not the gravity of what they're working with.

Skyewriter! Wonderful to hear from you again; thank you! That student was me... but to be fair, I'm an undergrad, and she was like second year Ph.D student. Surely my ignorance is forgivable... right?

Surely!

You might have meant Richard Bawkins.

Very nice story. I had thought about trying to create a metric for “how hard is it to change one string into another” with the goal of looking at likelihood of mutations but found out this was old news by the time I thought of it.