Tortured Shark

I had a strange dream of a shark being subject to terrible laboratory tests in which they had electrodes attached to it and were zapping it for some reason. The shark was making crying sound almost like a human. It really horrified me in the dream.

It happens that the day before, I did have an e-mail exchange with someone and we were talking about telomeres. Telomeres are genetic "end-caps" on your genes that tell the replicating machinery stop here. In normal somatic cells, each replication shortens the telomeres and thus normal somatic cells have a finite number of replications before they stop replicating.

This is thought to be a mixed blessing and curse for human beings. It is theorized that the genetic limit on cell generations prevents cells that have a mutation that causes their reproduction to be improperly regulated to replicate only a fixed number of time thus preventing cancers. The argument supporting this is that all cancer cells have a mutation which enables the expression of the gene coding for telomerese, an enzyme which restores the length of telomeres.

Sharks have telomerese active in all of their cells and they rarely get cancer. They are in fact exceptionally genetically stable having changed little in hundreds of millions of years.

Sharks also have special sense organs that are sensitive to tiny electrical currents in the water created by the muscle and nervous system activity of potential prey. This I would think would make electrical stimulation exceptionally troublesome for a shark.

So I can kind of see some things from the previous day that this dream was connected to though the horrible cry the shark made, I don't know where that came from but it was gut wrenching.