Genetic Testing of Galileo’s Eyes?
Genetic testing has been a great boon to genealogists who want to trace their family history. Now Italian and British scientists want to use it to potentially rewrite history. Galileo Galilei, the famous philosopher and father of modern astronomy, incurred the wraith of the Vatican in the seventeenth century by arguing the Earth revolved around the sun. His sun-centric arguments were based largely on telescope observations he had personally made of Jupiter. The problem was Galileo was known to have very poor eyesight, not a good trait for an astronomer.
Scientists have become very good at extracting DNA from ancient remains (see The Human Tree Has Many Branches) and even from remains stored in less-than-ideal conditions (see Genealogist Helps Solve Mystery of 60-Year Old Plane Crash). Now, as reported by Reuters, scientists have proposed extracting DNA from the remains of Galileo to try to determine the extent of his eye problems. If their attempt is successful, this could lead to debates as to how many of Galileo’s telescope observations were based on fact and how much (if any) was based on conjecture.
This leads to an interesting issue for genealogists. To date, it has been rare to use genetic testing on remains to solve long-standing family mysteries (validating the Russian royal family’s remains from the Bolshevik revolution is one famous exception). However, the proposed genetic testing methods on Galileo could potentially be used in the future to help resolve family mysteries going back possibly hundreds of years.
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