Designer Genes
By Bill McKibben,
Orion
| 04. 30. 2003
I GREW UP IN A HOUSEHOLD where we were very suspicious of dented
cans. Dented cans were, according to my mother, a well-established
gateway to botulism, and botulism was a bad thing, worse than
swimming immediately after lunch. It was one of those bad things
measured in extinctions, as in "three tablespoons of botulism
toxin could theoretically kill every human on Earth." Or
something like that.
So I refused to believe the early reports, a few years back,
that socialites had begun injecting dilute strains of the toxin
into their brows in an effort to temporarily remove the vertical
furrow that appears between one's eyes as one ages. It sounded
like a Monty Python routine, some clinic where they daubed your
soles with plague germs to combat athlete's foot. But I was
wrong to doubt. As the world now knows, Botox has become, in
a few short years, a staple weapon in the cosmetic arsenal --
so prevalent that, in the words of one writer, "it is now
rare in certain social enclaves to see a woman over the age...
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