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jseah
2012-07-12, 04:43 PM
he/she met a person with wings. Proper powered flight wings.

Basically, I would like to ask for possible first questions, what things would catch the eye of a biologist or medical scientist and what stuff will be done.

Other people may also wish to post their own set of supernatural phenomena. Some extremely surprising and hard to explain thing happens. What would a good scientist do?
We will assume that standard lab tools exist and aren't wiped out by said phenomena. We can also assume that any subjects are cooperative and won't eat you.

Scenario:
A local police officer made an unusual call to the hospital saying that an apparently ~12 year old girl was lost at the police post.
Oh, and she can fly. She has a pair of wings growing out her back and it's 10 meters across, going up to about a meter in breadth. She only fits inside the police post because she folded them around her.

Background information revealable by tests:
Wings
- 10 meters wing span for 80kg (20lb to 10ft ratio)
- Wing load ~8 kg per m2
- Wing + feathers is average 1 m wide (aspect ratio: 10)
- Skin permeable to oxygen / CO2 as lung breathing alone is insufficient for flight
- Mounted on extra "arms" extending from back shoulder blades
- Beating wings powered by muscles bridging the wing bones to the shoulder blades
- Muscles also help move blood through the wings by constricting/relaxing
- Wing bones have an extra joint to the lower outside of the shoulder blades and come upwards over the shoulder
- Makes the back shoulder blades nearly three times thicker for muscle mass
- Many joints along the wing, foldable to form a 4 layered shell to the sides and back of the person (folds over arms)
- Packed up wings are still about a meter in height
- Skin is spread between the bones
- Feathers are streamlined for flight and extends wing area
- No vestigial "fingers"

Body plan
- Child-like in weight and size (12 to 14 years old human)
- lower than usual muscle and bone mass
- Development stops at this size
- 140cm height, body weight: 30kg, wing + wing muscle weight: 50 kg

Ear
- Balance sensor modified to detect balance issues in flight

Bones
- Hollow with struts and trusses
- Some are fused but all joints are normal (feet, hands, neck, collarbone, ribs, jaw)
- All thinner and more fragile than normal

Blood
- Binds O2 better (larger concentration, same affinity)
- Binds CO2 better (larger concentration, same affinity)
- pH buffer is stronger to prevent CO2 buildup from acidifying the blood
- Net concentration of O2 and CO2 is higher than humans.

Genetics
- Chromosome replaces Y or 2nd X (always female)
- Codes development process for the wing bits and elevated hemoglobin levels
- hemoglobin affinities are tweaked
- Feather generation similar to birds

Notes:
While I have done my best to answer obvious biology questions, do feel free to point out any holes you think I may have forgotten about.

This thought experiment came about when I was thinking about how big a pair of wings would have to be in order to make a person fly.
Did some wiki-ing and turns out, ridiculously big. Even with a tiny and massively underweight 12 year old, any reasonable wing design is still ridiculously huge (and this girl's wing load and aspect ratios aren't that great either). And it only gets worse very fast compared to size as wings have weight as well.
Plus, this girl needs a running start to take off, as well as jumping off a building (can't beat 5 meter wings when you're only a bit more than a meter high)

Then I went through and thought up various biology questions about how to support that extra mass and filled out the spoilered part.


So... you're a medical scientist at a sleepy town hospital, and you get this call from a doctor. Everyone is going hopping mad and getting excited. What tests do you run? How long before all those information can be found?

CET
2012-07-12, 05:18 PM
Biomechanically, I'd say you've done a good job of covering the bases. Some of those things might be hard to figure out non-invasively though. While an unscrupulous practitioner might opt for 'exploratory surgery' or even straight up vivisection, I think anyone with a shred of humanity would have to stick with X-rays and small tissue/blood samples.

Things I'd want to do/figure out:

- Detailed oral history. On video. For that matter, I would take as much high-quality footage as possible to overcome charges of forgery.

- To what extent is the flying girl even human? Gene sequencing is non-trivial, so you'd probably have to send samples out to a large research university or the like. If I could get samples from her parents, some basic DNA comparisons might be in order (using PCR, which is trivial) to make sure that they are actually her parents.

- It sounds like the wings are an organic part of the girl, like she was born with them, but this probably bears closer scrutiny. See tests above.

- Given the appropriate equipment, it might be worth testing biomolecules from the girl against avian (or other) analogues. This is a little outside my field, but I imagine you could test metal binding curves for the heme proteins in her blood. X-ray crystallography would give you a direct picture, but good luck getting that in a hurry.

Ravens_cry
2012-07-12, 05:45 PM
Well, a winged human-massed, or greater, creature is not inconceivable. In fact, they have existed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quetzalcoatlus_northropi). Still, the humanoid form is singularly unsuited to the task, so it certainly would require a thorough investigation, though hopefully in as non-invasive means as possible.

Analytica
2012-07-12, 06:02 PM
Speaking as an evolutionary researcher, there is no way ever that this could be a crossbreed or mutation of known life forms. The only conceivable explanation is that this is the work of ridiculously complex genetic engineering. By someone who has quantum computers or some other equally hi-tech way of determining just what to put in that second X-chromosome (speaking of which, the girl should display signs of Turner's Syndrome from having only one X - I would check for this).

Given that, I would search the new chromosome for insert sequences or anything that can tell me whether existing genetic engineering techniques had been used. I would also look at which haplotypes she had to determine whether she is related to any existing human population, and if so, which. I would in fact search all of it against all existing databases and see if there are any freak matches. Are the bird-like proteins similar to any existing bird sequences?

If I had a really big budget - and given the scope of this, I might get it - sequencing could in theory be done in like a week or so (just send blood samples to that big lab in China and pay them to use several sequencers at once ahead of regular schedule).

How does she balance when walking, given the weight of the wings? Wouldn't she fall backwards? Are the muscle proteins possibly optimized in some way?

Also... do EEG when she makes wing motions. What brain centers show activity for this?

EDIT: Oh yeah. Verify that wing DNA matches body DNA.

Also, are there other signs of genetic engineering? Like her being homozygous for everything, no mobile genetic elements, no recessive disease alleles carried?

If she doesn't have Turner's Syndrome symptoms, someone must have tampered with dosage of X-linked genes, maybe with chromatin patterns. This could either be seen in differences in X-gene promotor sequences, or seen through ChIP-tests or whatever it is called. That would take longer, though, but could be tested first on genes known to be involved in the Turner phenotype. Again most interesting as a sign of engineering.

If I would build a superhuman, I would want them to be protected from aging. Is there somehow less variability between cellular genomes, implying greater protection from DNA damage? Is anything strange with the telomeric regions?

Ultimately, finding this out - and concluding that someone has super-technology that could equally well be used to make the world a better place and me live longer - finding out more of what she came from just became the most important thing ever, basically.

jseah
2012-07-12, 06:40 PM
Ah fair enough, I hadn't approached it from the thought that this might be a fake.

I might like to state that the time frame is a short step into the future. About 20-30 years or so. No real game changing developments, just our stuff got slightly better, in particular medical science.

So, additional missing info:
Lots of signs of genetic engineering.
- While most of her genetic makeup is caucasian, there are large stretches of other races in there, and the distribution lies along logical lines (blocks of genes + control elements) instead of expected random shifts in the middle you would get from splicing.
- Primary difference is in the Hox genes, which are now divided into rather more exons than usual. There's also more of them, some of the variants coming from many other organisms, and apparently chosen to have distinct binding/recognition from the human ones.
- There are traces of inactive mobile genetic elements or inactive reporter genes / recombination sites around some functional genetic sequences (control elements, exons, blah blah). The distribution of this seems to concentrate mostly in the additional introns of the Hox genes.

==The actual reason in the story I had planned to write this with, is that she's the product of a genetic manipulation demonstration on humans. Genetics spliced from wherever was most convenient, with later corrections applied. By whom... well, let's leave that particular plot hole for later. =P

==Actually working out the developmental programme isn't *too* difficult if you're just willing to try it and see, instead of trying to predict the effect of your changes.
===Hm, of course, that implies there's a few hundred or thousand sisters running around in a lab somewhere (or more likely, about thirty, the rest being dead or never born due to defects)



The way the wings fold isn't the same way as in birds. Starting from the part nearest her shoulder blades, it goes forwards around her sides, then back and forwards again and back again. It is literally a 4 jointed limb that sections the wings into four foldable bits, with no finger bones.
The wings can wrap around her, and when folded, their center of gravity is somewhere in her body -> just heavy, no balance problems. Unfolded, they do get rather unwieldy, but there's no way around that.

huttj509
2012-07-12, 07:03 PM
Ah fair enough, I hadn't approached it from the thought that this might be a fake.

I might like to state that the time frame is a short step into the future. About 20-30 years or so. No real game changing developments, just our stuff got slightly better, in particular medical science.

So, additional missing info:
Lots of signs of genetic engineering.
- While most of her genetic makeup is caucasian, there are large stretches of other races in there, and the distribution lies along logical lines (blocks of genes + control elements) instead of expected random shifts in the middle you would get from splicing.
- Primary difference is in the Hox genes, which are now divided into rather more exons than usual. There's also more of them, some of the variants coming from many other organisms, and apparently chosen to have distinct binding/recognition from the human ones.
- There are traces of inactive mobile genetic elements or inactive reporter genes / recombination sites around some functional genetic sequences (control elements, exons, blah blah). The distribution of this seems to concentrate mostly in the additional introns of the Hox genes.

==The actual reason in the story I had planned to write this with, is that she's the product of a genetic manipulation demonstration on humans. Genetics spliced from wherever was most convenient, with later corrections applied. By whom... well, let's leave that particular plot hole for later. =P

==Actually working out the developmental programme isn't *too* difficult if you're just willing to try it and see, instead of trying to predict the effect of your changes.
===Hm, of course, that implies there's a few hundred or thousand sisters running around in a lab somewhere (or more likely, about thirty, the rest being dead or never born due to defects)



The way the wings fold isn't the same way as in birds. Starting from the part nearest her shoulder blades, it goes forwards around her sides, then back and forwards again and back again. It is literally a 4 jointed limb that sections the wings into four foldable bits, with no finger bones.
The wings can wrap around her, and when folded, their center of gravity is somewhere in her body -> just heavy, no balance problems. Unfolded, they do get rather unwieldy, but there's no way around that.

Yeah, the first question would definitely need to be "is this real? Is there an intentional or unintentional trick happening here."

Now, the proposed scenario would be fairly easy to check if the wings were actually attached, but a similar outlook has provided explanations for things like some famous haunted locations (very low sound frequencies can cause feelings of unease in some people while being below hearing range, after discovery some famous 'haunted' locations were found to be resonant chambers at these frequencies, leading to very real unease and fear in many visitors. Also, the upper end of the frequencies is near the resonant frequency of the human eye, which can cause impressions of movement when nothing's there).

Anytime there's an encounter with the unusual the questions should be:

a) is it currently trying to eat me? (If yes, run now, study later, don't stand there stating it's impossible).
b) Can it be explained with stuff we know about?
c) can it be explained with stuff we don't really know, but is within our realm and doesn't require a whole set of different 'rules'? (Infrasound was realized when the scientist was working on his fencing blade and saw it vibrating while clamped in the lab many people felt uneasy in, leading to the sound wave investigation).


Definitely looks like you're on a good track with this, I just find the infrasound stuff interesting and it was tangentially pertinent in a "what does a scientist do when confronted with the 'impossible'" way.

Analytica
2012-07-12, 07:05 PM
Ah, OK - moving time forward and evidence of conventional manipulations change things. I thought you were going with angels or aliens. :smallsmile:

In that time into the future, the sleepy country hospital can get her genome in a few hours at worst and my desktop computer can do the bioinformatics. We might be able to determine relatives, depending on what direction personalized genomics took.

Experimenting to make her would still be a major affair, I think. The problem with humans is that generation time is so high, each try would require at least a year to see what the development will cause. Then again... in that time, we might actually understand regulatory and developmental programs enough. So OK. Someone could have made her. That someone has shaky research ethics and a weird sense of how to sell human genetic engineering to the public. Might need to expose them, if possible to do safely, to make sure science's reputation isn't tarnished. Probably by documenting and publishing this as a discovery of what someone else did, how, why it shouldn't be done like that and how instead it could and should be used responsibly, such as by making smarter and healthier humans now that we know even something this drastic can in fact be done semi-safely.

It should make for a nice series of Nature papers. Write up and publish before anyone catches on to hush it down. :smallbiggrin:

jackattack
2012-07-12, 07:16 PM
Full x-ray suite and full-body MRI (real time, since it's the future?).

If the kid will cooperate, they'll want to see how much she can lift in flight. They might also have her grab something and beat her wings so they can measure the force of the downdraft and air displacement. And they would probably want to draw blood when she's rested, and after flying for a while, to measure differences in O2, electrolytes, blood sugar, "fatigue toxins", and so on.

Is she adapted for cold temperatures? Is her vision enhanced?

jseah
2012-07-12, 07:21 PM
Someone could have made her. That someone has shaky research ethics and a weird sense of how to sell human genetic engineering to the public.

Someone? Eh, I admit the biggest plot hole in this entire thing is that there's just about NO way a single someone or even a large research group could do something like this if it wasn't already routine.

Even with your proposed advancements and a much better understanding of human genetics (which btw, I don't think we're going to get in 20 years, not without allowing human genetic manipulation; mouse models kinda suck for that), there is your stated problem that it takes at least a few months for gestation to reach a stage where one could check development in the embryo.
And it will take hundreds to thousands of tries at a minimum to do something like this. Just making a wing plan alone will be incredible.

This sort of project would take something like a crash research program ala Manhattan project or similar government backed thing. And it'll have to -secret-, since I don't think many people will be very happy about this.

EDIT:
The implied amount of resources required to pull something like this off is quite insane. Explaining it away will take rather more handwaving than even most conspiracy theorists are willing to do. =)

Still, a prospective writer can always say "some billionaire decided to buy an island somewhere and..."


Full x-ray suite and full-body MRI (real time, since it's the future?).

X-Ray in pieces yes. We can take multiple images and piece it together.

She probably won't fit into an MRI machine. =P
Although you can bet they'll probably build one just for her.

Analytica
2012-07-12, 07:37 PM
Even with your proposed advancements and a much better understanding of human genetics (which btw, I don't think we're going to get in 20 years, not without allowing human genetic manipulation; mouse models kinda suck for that), there is your stated problem that it takes at least a few months for gestation to reach a stage where one could check development in the embryo.
And it will take hundreds to thousands of tries at a minimum to do something like this. Just making a wing plan alone will be incredible.

This sort of project would take something like a crash research program ala Manhattan project or similar government backed thing. And it'll have to -secret-, since I don't think many people will be very happy about this.

True, from our present horizons you would need something on a ridiculous scale. Still, since it seems to have used existing technology (rather than simulating/predicting by quantum computing or magical divination, and rather than nanoteching things in) it still points to human agency more than anything. Somehow I am thinking of reclusive dictatorships experimenting on entire populations.

All the more reason to get everything out before anyone can come to hush it up. Once all the details are in open access journals, it should only hurt the MiBs cause more if they come. Similarly, making her visibly public might be the best way to help her get a semi-normal life.

jackattack
2012-07-12, 07:50 PM
X-Ray in pieces yes. We can take multiple images and piece it together.

She probably won't fit into an MRI machine. =P
Although you can bet they'll probably build one just for her.

Thus, x-ray "suite".

And they make MRIs that spin around a standing subject, for claustrophobes and people too large to fit in a standard MRI. With wings furled, or extended above her head, it ought to work.

NichG
2012-07-12, 08:11 PM
On the issue of the computing implications, I think thats a very interesting aside here. I wouldn't expect quantum computers to help at all, because you still need to put meaningful stuff in and getting that initial data set isn't necessarily feasible. So that'd suggest to me the possibility that something like Causality Computing had been developed, using the success of the gene sequence as a stop condition for a causal loop. Someone with a Causality Computer and the ability to insert an arbitrary genetic sequence into a test subject could derive the subject in one go.

The signs would be in the gene sequence. If the sequence looked like something a human would make, namely that the interactions were all very compartmentalized with minimal borrowing or interlocking with other functions, it'd negate that hypothesis. If it looked like the result of an evolutionary process (in the sense of having some remnant fragments from previous generations attempts that might not be useful, which you'd get if you used a simulation to try to evolve the sequence), that'd also negate the hypothesis. It'd only be if the code looked both evolved and history-less that something like that would be confirmed (basically, the equivalent of accidentally initializing a genetic algorithm with a random guess that just happened to work).

Differentiating those three cases statistically is kind of hard though, since evolutionary residue doesn't look like much independent of a population.

Spamotron
2012-07-12, 08:48 PM
I also second making her as public as possible as quickly as possible. Someone with huge resources and little ethics obviously made her. I'd wonder if they'd have any compunctions against a "mysterious accident" wiping out the whole hospital. Only way to really prevent it is have a whole lot of cameras pointed at said hospital.

The hard part would be quietly contacting enough national and international news organizations without being laughed off as kook while also not alerting her creators at the same time.

Yukitsu
2012-07-12, 11:18 PM
I've read enough Marvel based stuff to blame Canada reflexively for this kind of thing.

Analytica
2012-07-13, 04:47 AM
On the issue of the computing implications, I think thats a very interesting aside here. I wouldn't expect quantum computers to help at all, because you still need to put meaningful stuff in and getting that initial data set isn't necessarily feasible. So that'd suggest to me the possibility that something like Causality Computing had been developed, using the success of the gene sequence as a stop condition for a causal loop. Someone with a Causality Computer and the ability to insert an arbitrary genetic sequence into a test subject could derive the subject in one go.

The signs would be in the gene sequence. If the sequence looked like something a human would make, namely that the interactions were all very compartmentalized with minimal borrowing or interlocking with other functions, it'd negate that hypothesis. If it looked like the result of an evolutionary process (in the sense of having some remnant fragments from previous generations attempts that might not be useful, which you'd get if you used a simulation to try to evolve the sequence), that'd also negate the hypothesis. It'd only be if the code looked both evolved and history-less that something like that would be confirmed (basically, the equivalent of accidentally initializing a genetic algorithm with a random guess that just happened to work).

Differentiating those three cases statistically is kind of hard though, since evolutionary residue doesn't look like much independent of a population.

Causality Computing is a new concept to me. Is it something like time loops? If so I agree with you on what outcome it would give. I should also say I know very little about actual quantum computing. I just naively expect that if you can define some objective function to minimize, you could use quantum computing to optimize it by setting an energy function based on divergence from desired outcome, and you would get the actual global optimum, with no signs of discarded previous solutions. But this might fail anyway, I guess, unless you have a large enough computer model to accommodate the system you are looking for. The ideal case I was thinking of would be finding which protein structure interacts best with another, then which sequence encodes it, and so on. But even if quantum computing means you don't have to search the solution space, representing something like development of an embryo from a genome would still have a stupidly large instance size (solve the Schrodinger equation for a potted plant under periodic boundary conditions...). :smalleek:

NichG
2012-07-13, 05:09 AM
Causality Computing is a new concept to me. Is it something like time loops? If so I agree with you on what outcome it would give. I should also say I know very little about actual quantum computing. I just naively expect that if you can define some objective function to minimize, you could use quantum computing to optimize it by setting an energy function based on divergence from desired outcome, and you would get the actual global optimum, with no signs of discarded previous solutions. But this might fail anyway, I guess, unless you have a large enough computer model to accommodate the system you are looking for. The ideal case I was thinking of would be finding which protein structure interacts best with another, then which sequence encodes it, and so on. But even if quantum computing means you don't have to search the solution space, representing something like development of an embryo from a genome would still have a stupidly large instance size (solve the Schrodinger equation for a potted plant under periodic boundary conditions...). :smalleek:

My point was that even with Quantum Computing, you need to know how to specify a problem that would be useful to solve. As far as mapping between 'this gene sequence' and 'that organism produced', the needed factor isn't computing power necessarily (though it would be important), its knowing how to specify that mapping at all. Doing a 'whole person' simulation isn't hard because its NP complete, its hard because it just has 10^28 degrees of freedom or so (and because you also have to specify a reasonable initial condition with a 'mere' 10^10 degrees of freedom).

The time loop thing would have the advantage that you only need some way to perform that mapping even if you don't understand it. You use the world itself as a black box to do your simulation work, in effect.

Analytica
2012-07-13, 06:36 AM
My point was that even with Quantum Computing, you need to know how to specify a problem that would be useful to solve. As far as mapping between 'this gene sequence' and 'that organism produced', the needed factor isn't computing power necessarily (though it would be important), its knowing how to specify that mapping at all. Doing a 'whole person' simulation isn't hard because its NP complete, its hard because it just has 10^28 degrees of freedom or so (and because you also have to specify a reasonable initial condition with a 'mere' 10^10 degrees of freedom).

The time loop thing would have the advantage that you only need some way to perform that mapping even if you don't understand it. You use the world itself as a black box to do your simulation work, in effect.

I now realize you are right. I was thinking from a perspective of protein folding (or reverse protein folding) where the system is well specified, but fully perfect organismal development more or less would mean simulating a universe as a molecular dynamics problem, and somehow being able to tell if something inside is in fact the desired outcome.

It could potentially be that there is some way to simplify the problem which would make it approximately solvable, some sort of systems biology representation. In which case you would need a lot of biological information, experimentation and people working on subproblems for a long time, so still not quite good enough...

Adam...?
2012-07-13, 03:43 PM
Incoming wall o' rambling. You've been warned.

What experiments I'd do would depend on the questions you want to ask. Personally, I'd be interested in "what is this, and how is it possible?"

As others have mentioned, I'd think getting her entire genome sequenced and annotated would be the first order of business. Depending on whether or not your sleepy-town hospital has access to a high-throughput sequencers (which might actually be conceivable 20-30 years in the future?), you'd probably have to send that to a lab somewhere. And even if you do have a sequencer, I'd imagine the software is probably optimized for mapping to a referenced human genome, and that could cause problems if you're trying to sequence that mystery chromosome; you might have to send it out anyways. On the other hand, there's sort of a move for bioinformatics tools to be open source, so maybe you could just download a decent program for de novo full genome assembly.

I'd definitely want to send in samples from both the wings and from the "normal" human body. If money is too tight for getting both sequenced, you could do basic karyotyping and/or PCR amplify common genetic markers to roughly see whether the wings have the same DNA as the rest of the body. If yes, you really only need to send in one sample.

Once you get the annotated genome, you could really just BLAST everything. 99% of her ORFs should have a nearly identical human homologue, which should make life pretty easy. You can probably safely discard anything that you'd expect to find in a normal human. Anything left is likely the interesting bits (and most likely confined mostly to the mystery chromosome). I'd expect to see some avian homologues* here, especially for proteins related to feather growth. Here, it'd also be interesting to look at the amino acid sequence of the hemoglobin subunits. You could easily see if it's related to another species, or if it's a unique mutant or what (although I think the OP is saying that the girl has normal human hemoglobin, but just in a higher concentration, probably akin to the higher RBC count of people living at high altitudes).


*yes, homologue implies common ancestry, and that probably isn't the case here. I guess the term gets weird when you start artificially messing with genomes.

After that, genetic analysis gets more difficult. If the mystery chromosome is the one responsible for wing growth, it probably mostly contains genes already found in the normal human genome. I'd expect to see basic chordate limb development proteins like FGFs, Wnt, Shh, etc.. The real interesting thing to look for here would be changes in the regulatory regions, and regulatory sequences aren't nearly as well characterized as ORFs. Maybe in this future, we'll have a better database for such things? Also keep an eye out for non-human regulatory proteins too. If I were trying to bioengineer this, that would be how I'd try to stimulate wing growth without messing with the arms or legs.

Other people have already given great suggestion on the more physiological side of things, so I'll ignore that.

It's pretty obvious that this girl isn't a product of natural evolution. The other interesting question here is "who has the knowledge and resources to create a girl like this?" and really the only "experiment" you could run to test that would be to ask the girl what she remembers.

Tyndmyr
2012-07-13, 03:49 PM
The *absolute* first thing I do is request a DNA sample. After that, I'm going to want medical history, both her's and her family's.

Togath
2012-07-13, 07:51 PM
The *absolute* first thing I do is request a DNA sample. After that, I'm going to want medical history, both her's and her family's.

not everyone has had their DNA recorded, so it probably wouldn't work, as she not only was probably a secret, but also likely does not have a biological mother, as someone with enough tech to make her probably has the technology required to create the experiments without needing mothers for them.
edit; or did you mean to check for the various genes that were used to add the wings?

Ravens_cry
2012-07-13, 08:11 PM
I've read enough Marvel based stuff to blame Canada reflexively for this kind of thing.
Heh, yeah, Marvel-verse Canada is pretty twisted on a governmental level.
Must be from over exposure to flannel and maple syrup.

jseah
2012-07-14, 09:13 AM
The other interesting question here is "who has the knowledge and resources to create a girl like this?" and really the only "experiment" you could run to test that would be to ask the girl what she remembers.
Yeah. You can also hunt for the lab. It's going to be a pretty substantial operation after all.

Once you manage to convince the world that she is real, the media and police are going to descend on every biological research institute sniffing around for shady business.

Brother Oni
2012-07-14, 11:56 AM
A lot of very interesting responses here.

Taking Analysis' approach and looking at it from the perspective of a potential fake, rather than immediately delving in to her genome and checking how she might have been born with wings, I'd first check for surgical scars and the like to see if the wings had been implanted and she learnt how to use them much like a paraplegic learns how to use their replacement limb.

All those additional muscles will also significantly alter her frame compared to a normal human's, something which can be used to determine whether she's evolved naturally or not - if the arrangment is such to look more aestheically pleasing rather than efficient, it would point to her as more constructed organism rather than a naturally developed one.

I'd also start with the obvious approach and just talk to her. Aside from confirming her well being and personal history, ask questions about how she flies; what muscles she flexes to do so. It's one thing to see a static image of something, it's entirely something else to see it moving as that gives you a sense of how everything works.
The OP's scenario posits her at approximately 12 - more than old enough to help or absolutely stymie your enquiries. Actually this leads me to a question - does the girl act like a normal 12 year old or not, adjusting for the understandably alien (to her) environment she's found herself in?

This leads to the very obvious and cliched first question to ask: "What's your name?" or if you're not sure it's human (a reasonable judgement to make, but still a judgement), "Who are you?"

Analytica
2012-07-14, 05:38 PM
In principle, if you are lucky, and can get access to the order records of companies who make synthetic DNA sequences for manipulation, maybe you could find out who ordered synthesis for some of the sequences she's got. Assuming they do not do everything like that in-house, which would be safer but more cumbersome.

Cary Oakey
2012-07-16, 08:08 AM
What would a Medical Scientist do if they found a girl like that?

Freak out.

So would the Police.

No seriously. We all watch a lot of movies, but if you were actually confronted by someone looking like they just walked off the set of one of the X-Men movies, you would either not believe what you saw, think it was just a costume, or freak out every time she moved a muscle. She would fall into the Uncanny Valley area of psychological responses. If she looked like a dog, we might be ok with that, but a girl that looks like a giant bird...

That would also probably put the girl in a lot of danger from unsavory or ignorant elements that either want to steal her and sell her to the highest bidder or kill her outright.

Someone would probably immediately get on the phone to the FBI, NASA, or the Westchester School for Gifted Students. And get orders from 'The Government' not to touch her.

Once at a secure and undocumented (read: Secret) Government facility, the testing would probably be:

First test - Geiger counter.
Second test - grind up worms in a meat grinder and see if she eats them. (saw that one on Grimm)
Third test - after realizing the girl can actually talk and doesn't like ground up worms, an exhaustive set of interviews ranging from 'who are your parents' to 'what planet are you really from'.
Fourth test - wind tunnel
Then to the Infirmary to fix up the bumps, bruises, and most likely broken bones from the wind tunnel test.

Also, if her wings have the strength to keep her airborne, and your arms don't, nobody would be 'forcing' her to do anything except at gunpoint.

Tyndmyr
2012-07-16, 10:06 AM
not everyone has had their DNA recorded, so it probably wouldn't work, as she not only was probably a secret, but also likely does not have a biological mother, as someone with enough tech to make her probably has the technology required to create the experiments without needing mothers for them.
edit; or did you mean to check for the various genes that were used to add the wings?

Oh, it's not primarily for identification, it's for figuring out the why. I would imagine that at least some gene tampering would be necessary for that, and getting the sample I need to get sequencing started is priority 1.

That said, a certain amount of identification is possible, regardless. Wherever her original DNA is from would almost certainly have markers, and you could massively narrow down the pool of possible candidates for the original DNA. Probably wouldn't be enough to find an individual by itself, but it gives you something to go on.

Brother Oni
2012-07-16, 12:03 PM
No seriously. We all watch a lot of movies, but if you were actually confronted by someone looking like they just walked off the set of one of the X-Men movies, you would either not believe what you saw, think it was just a costume, or freak out every time she moved a muscle. She would fall into the Uncanny Valley area of psychological responses. If she looked like a dog, we might be ok with that, but a girl that looks like a giant bird...


Except the only part of her that apparently looks avian is her wings, so I doubt she'd trigger the Uncanny Valley response.
This is not to mention she appears about the size and age of a 12 year old girl, making her appear less threatening.

Also I wouldn't underestimate the human tendency to fall back into fixed routines as a coping mechanism - the police may initially freak out, then they'd probably take her into protective custody and process her like any other individual.

In the UK, the probable chain would be the first arriving officer - custody sergeant - Chief Constable - Home Office, at which point the government properly gets involved.



Once at a secure and undocumented (read: Secret) Government facility, the testing would probably be:

First test - Geiger counter.


Actually the first thing to do would be to quarantine the building she's being held in and any person that's come in contact with her and run tests for possible pathogens or biohazards.

After that, then they'd get her moved to a government facility, by which point, enough information may have leaked out to the media that making her vanish wouldn't be possible.

jseah
2012-07-16, 01:13 PM
Perhaps I give people too much benefit of doubt (or perhaps I have been working with biology for some time, so seeing weird animals doesn't get much response; seriously, after you've spent 6 hours pulling heads off squirmy maggots, your sense of 'weird' is pretty much non-existent)

In any case, since the 'you' in this thought experiment is the medical scientist, the likely point you come in is when the police bring the girl to you and say "is this real?".

Then it's your job to find out if it's real (it is) and how she got to have wings (and how it was done).

EDIT:
good point on the disease quarantine. Might be worthwhile to check (although by the time 'you' get to see her, it's too late to stop the spread if she carries some horrible disease)

Icewraith
2012-07-16, 07:17 PM
Everyone skipped right past the easy biometrics.

Height, weight, normal body temerature over time, known allergies, blood sample.

Photos, either front/back side or more detailed depending on availabiltiy of equitpment. Then photos of the unique wing structure, more detailed mesurements, as much examination of the musculature as the subject will allow.

Follow up with examination of the more "normal" human structures for comparison, to make sure there aren't lower level effects that we're missing because of the wings.

Behavioral observations- note bowel movements, amount and type of food consumed, sleeping patterns. Have a behavioral/developmental psychologist available immediately with 24 hour monitoring and access, document everything.

Tests: field of vision, hearing, sense of smell, reflexes, tactile senses, proprioception, balance. Movement tests- how does the subject lie down, sit, stand, walk, run, take flight, minimum speed, maximum speed, maximum comfortable altitude, agility. See if she'll wear a heart monitor during movement tests.

Before throwing the subject in an MRI, expose her to less powerful magnetic fields. She probably has the ability to detect magnetic north, and the presence of a strong local field might damage whatever apparatus that does that for her. Be very, very careful about X-ray exposure. Keep her monitored, but don't confine her, make sure she can always fly if she wants to.

While we do need to document this unique specimen, we need to make sure that we don't drive her off or drive her crazy, since we only get one specimen until further evidence proves otherwise. It's important to preserve her natural mental state, since that might provide clues as to differing brain structures. We need baselines so we can tell if she's getting sick, and we need to be able to tell if she's getting unhappy or depressed.

crazyhedgewizrd
2012-07-16, 09:09 PM
I got a question, how big is this Hospital, what equipment do they have and can they afford to run these tests?

Analytica
2012-07-17, 03:45 PM
I got a question, how big is this Hospital, what equipment do they have and can they afford to run these tests?

In the US, this would probably be done at NIH, I assume.

jseah
2012-07-18, 03:35 PM
The kind of attention she would generate would likely cause not just major research hospitals, but entire research councils and universities will throw huge amounts of grant funding at any effort to understand her.
IMO, international treaties about access to the research gain are likely to happen too.

We're not talking about one large hospital and their doctors. Specialists the world over will fly in just to see her and run tests.

And once she is determined to be a product to genetic modification, reverse engineering the process will become top priority and likely greatly advance biology in general.
By reading her genome and looking for traces of modification; since the organization of control elements and proteins are going to be rather more logical compared to normal evolved organisms, understanding them will be comparatively easier.

You also have a person with a pair of working, big wings, so you can ask her to flap in a smoke chamber to assess the biophysics of wings. Which I might like to add that we do not fully understand yet.

Frankly, what she represents to a slightly-more-advanced-than-today biology field is something like what a working alien spaceship landing on earth would do to physics.
The amount of understanding of developmental biology she represents is incredible.


Funding and access to research resources are... probably not going to be a major factor. XD