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COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES 3 earlier and that he does not address anywhere else in his corpus, she notes. “What’s missing in this new definition is what most people associate with justice—namely, how you act toward other people; yet, with this new definition, Socrates brings it internally,” Weiss says. “It’s now a matter of how the parts of your soul interact with one another rather than how you treat other people. It’s a matter of how the classes in the city interact with one another rather than how the city treats other cities or its own people. Because of how striking and innovative this new definition is, readers assume it must be, despite its short shelf life, Plato’s true definition.” Republic contains many unsavory proposals regarding the supposedly “ideal” city it designs—repression and censorship—and Weiss is skeptical about how strongly Plato meant to be advocating the society that Socrates envisions. Weiss sees in Book One a different approach to justice, something we are much more familiar with, one that speaks to how you treat other people. “What Socrates says about justice in the first book of the Republic is supposed to forewarn us against the novel definition in Book Four. Book One is important because, without it, you are drawn into believing that Book Four’s definition is the right one, but, forearmed with Book One, you are prepared to say, ‘That can’t be right,’ Weiss says. “And once you toss out one thing in the Republic —namely, the new definition of justice—you’re more inclined to question other things. Of course, the fascinating question is, if Plato didn’t mean for Socrates’ proposals to be taken as serious recommendations, why did he have Socrates propose them?” BIOLOGY GENETIC DIVERSITY, IMPORTANT (DIETARY) TRAITS Evolutionary biologists have long looked for answers to questions surrounding when and how species diverged and tried to understand the genetic origin of specific adaptations. Geneticist Wynn Meyer uses variations in genomes to understand the evolutionary histories of mammals and how they adapt to their environments. One area of focus for Meyer, assistant professor of biological sciences, is mammalian diets and their underlying genetic contributors. As some mammals evolved, their diets altered. Meyer and her team look for repeated signatures that a particular gene might be important for the same diet across several different species. This combination of genetic variation and repeated trait evolution means that dietary traits represent great case studies for exploring how natural selection influences genes, she says. Meyer is presently analyzing genes that might be important and helpful in the evolution of herbivores. She does this by looking at genetic sequences from every mammal that has an available genome to study. There is a large pool of mammals to study, and the number is growing quickly. Currently, 120 mammal genomes are available to scientists to analyze, and efforts are underway to create a 200-mammal set. With such a vast amount of data to assess, her work employs a combination of traditional laboratory work and a network of computers. “If you were to read out a genome, it’s three billion letters long,” Meyer says. “It’s difficult to compare our three billion letters with the three billion letters in a rhinoceros, for example, without a computer. Much of the computer work involves us writing scripts to analyze and compare this data and look for patterns across many genes and genomes at once. Once I find a pattern, I can say this particular gene looks interesting because it evolves very differently in mammals that eat plants versus those that don’t eat plants. I can then follow up on that experimentally.” Some analyses require access to high-performance computing systems, letting her break large tasks into smaller parts to run computations faster. Computers in her lab and in Lehigh’s high-performance computing cluster help her run sequences of several mammals concurrently, speeding up the analysis of data for her and her team. Meyer collaborates nationally with other researchers to obtain tissue samples from mammals whose genetic variations are of interest to her, including some that are not in the set of species with already available genomes. In her wet lab, she and her team then extract DNA and RNA from those samples and sequence it to confirm the patterns they find using their computer analyses and follow up on what might be causing these patterns. Work in the Meyer lab will help advance our knowledge of genetic variation and its influences on important dietary traits. These studies ultimately may also contribute to laying a foundation for a better understanding into susceptibility to metabolic disease. COURTESY OF BILL WARFIELD, VASILIKI / GETTY IMAGES, DAVID PLUNKERT / THEISPOT.COM Wynn Meyer explores the evolutionary histories of mammals and how they adapt to their environments.