Unnatural Selection
By Ralph Brave,
Baltimore City Paper
| 06. 21. 2000
Any day now, the Rockville-based Celera Genomics Group and
the National Institutes of Health will announce that they have achieved a feat
unique in all of history, one that will alter the destiny of all humanity for
all time to come: the decoding of the entire human genome, the 3 billion or so
units of DNA in every cell in the human body--the code of human life in all its
variety.
The effort of thousands of people and the expenditure of billions of dollars
have gone into the making of this epochal moment, but when it occurs it will
belong above all others to James Watson--first director of the federal
government’s Human Genome Project, the pioneering biochemist whose work
uncovering the double-helix structure of DNA made the project possible. Thus it
is only fitting that Watson provide the invocation for any effort to understand
the meaning of this miracle. Here, then, is James Watson on the awesome
responsibility of assuming stewardship over the sacred stuff of life itself:
“Evolution can be just damn cruel, and to say that we’ve got...
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