This research examines the similarities and differences between relationships developed through interpersonal interactions within online fandom communities and those relationships developed through traditional in-person interactions such as those found within education or the workplace. Beyond the similarities and differences between the two forms of relationships, I discover phenomenologically what happens in the moment that two online friends meet in-person. To be precise, I analyze how individuals within fandoms categorize their relationships in terms of their willingness to confide in each other, their perceived honesty of themselves, and their mental image of one another and how it may have changed over the course of their relationship. We might expect that individuals maintaining a relationship through interactions within online fandom may maintain idealized images of their respective partners due to the aspect of self-censorship that is derived from asynchronous communication. Additionally, we might expect that while trust may be built upon this exaggerated image of one’s partner, a disruption in this image formed through an in-person interaction could potentially result in said trust crumbling. Using a qualitative analysis of three individuals participating within various fandom communities. Thus, we predict that individuals within online relationships take steps to build an idealized version of oneself that might not fully reflect an individual’s actual physical or mental character.

Friedrich Tiedemann studied the anatomy of humans and animals in the nineteenth century in Germany. He published on zoological subjects, on the heart of fish, the anatomy of amphibians and echinoderms, and the lymphatic and respiratory system in birds. In addition to his zoological anatomy, Tiedemann, working with the chemist Leopold Gmelin, published about how the digestive system functioned. Towards the end of his career Tiedemann published a comparative anatomy of the brains of white Europeans, black Africans, and Orangutans, in which he argued that there were no appreciable differences between the structure of the brains of blacks, women, and white European men that would suggest they were intellectually different. Tiedemann also researched the embryonic development of the brain and circulatory systems of human fetuses.

Leonard Hayflick studied the processes by which cells age during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the United States. In 1961 at the Wistar Institute in the US, Hayflick researched a phenomenon later called the Hayflick Limit, or the claim that normal human cells can only divide forty to sixty times before they cannot divide any further. Researchers later found that the cause of the Hayflick Limit is the shortening of telomeres, or portions of DNA at the ends of chromosomes that slowly degrade as cells replicate. Hayflick used his research on normal embryonic cells to develop a vaccine for polio, and from HayflickÕs published directions, scientists developed vaccines for rubella, rabies, adenovirus, measles, chickenpox and shingles.

Jacques Loeb experimented on embryos in Europe and the United States at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. Among the first to study embryos through experimentation, Loeb helped found the new field of experimental embryology. Notably, Loeb showed scientists how to create artificial parthenogenesis, thus refuting the idea that spermatozoa alone were necessary to develop eggs into embryos and confirming the idea that the chemical constitution of embryos environment affected their development. Furthermore, Loeb' s work showed that scientists could manipulate materials in a laboratory to create, as he called the process, the beginning stages of life.

Jacques Loeb published "Mechanistic Science and Metaphysical Romance" in 1915. His goal for the article was to outline his conception of mechanistic science and its relation to other methods of inquiry. Loeb argued that mechanistic science was the foundation of knowledge and humanity's progress depended on it. Loeb's argument altered the account of science he offered in The Mechanistic Conception of Life insofar as scientists no longer aimed merely to control nature, but also to understand nature s underlying elements and their mechanical relations. Loeb relied on the results of his research into fish embryos and tropisms to bolster his argument.

Jacques Loeb developed procedures to make embryos from unfertilized sea urchin eggs in 1899. Loeb called the procedures "artificial parthenogenesis," and he introduced them and his results in "On the Nature of the Process of Fertilization and the Artificial Production of Norma Larvae (Plutei) from the Unfertilized Eggs of the Sea Urchin" in an 1899 issue of The American Journal of Physiology. In 1900 Loeb elaborated on his experiments. Following those publications, however, he discovered he had used inaccurately labeled salts and redid his experiments to determine the correct amount of salts needed for artificial parthenogenesis.

Jacques Loeb published The Organism as a Whole: From a Physicochemical Viewpoint in 1916. Loeb's goal for the book was to refute the claim that physics and chemistry were powerless to completely explain whole organisms and their seemingly goal-oriented component processes. Loeb used his new account of science and scientific explanation, marshaling evidence from his embryological researches, to show that physicochemical biology completely and correctly explained whole organisms and their component processes.