_**Feedback** is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more_ Feedback is not young. We have been here on the back pages for many years, endlessly pushing a boulder up a hill and trying to take joy in the effort. This means, every so often, we are forced to repeat ourselves – because the world repeats itself.
With a due sense of ennui, we turn our world-weary eyes to the cover of the new 50th anniversary edition of Richard Dawkins’s popular science classic _The Selfish Gene_. The title, written in all-caps, takes up most of the cover. The “I” in “SELFISH” has been replaced by a colourful little drawing of a DNA double helix.
Geneticist Simon Fisher pointed it out on Bluesky: “You know a gene is selfish when its DNA twists the wrong way, as demonstrated by the left-handed double-helix proudly adorning the 50th Anniversary Edition of the multimillion copy bestseller on this topic.” Yes, once again we have an example of a DNA molecule being drawn, essentially, backwards. In reality, it is a right-handed double helix, but the one on the book cover is left-handed. It’s twisting the wrong way.
Feedback’s mind’s eye immediately cast itself back to March 2025, when we covered a Lego model that included many scientific and technological objects, including a sadly left-handed DNA. It turns out that _The Selfish Gene_‘s art has been wrong for at least a decade. Patrick Goymer, an editor at _PLOS One_, shared the cover of the 40th anniversary edition on Bluesky, and it has the same left-handed DNA in place of the “I”.
Feedback notes that our own copy is the 30th anniversary edition, and the DNA is correct. At some point since 2006, the DNA on the cover has flipped into a mirror universe. This little mistake would be doubly embarrassing if, say, the Nobel prize in chemistry had recently been awarded for research into these sorts of mirror molecules.
Sometimes a scientific paper has a title so vivid, so immediate, that Feedback just has to write about it. Such is the case with a paper published in _Cureus_, titled: “Massive fecaloma dissolved by Coca-Cola: A case report”. It was sent to us by Australia reporter Alice Klein, who either has a truly terrible browser history or makes extensive use of a VPN.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
