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...
Related Articles
By Jeffrey Gettleman and Maya Tekeli, The New York Times | 09.24.2025
For some Greenlanders, sorry isn’t enough.
The prime minister of Denmark, Mette Frederiksen, made a special visit Wednesday to Greenland’s capital, Nuuk, to apologize in person for a traumatic chapter in Greenlandic history, when Danish doctors forced birth control on...
By Emma McDonald Kennedy
| 09.25.2025
In the leadup to the 2024 election, Donald Trump repeatedly promised to make IVF more accessible. He made the commitment central to his campaign, even referring to himself as the “father of IVF.” In his first month in office, Trump issued an executive order promising to expand IVF access. The order set a 90-day deadline for policy recommendations for “lowering costs and reducing barriers to IVF,” although it didn’t make any substantive reproductive healthcare policy changes.
The response to the...
By Marianne Lamers, NEMO Kennislink [cites CGS' Katie Hasson] | 09.23.2025
Een rijtje gespreide vulva’s gaapt de bezoeker aan. Zó ziet een bevalling eruit, en zó een baarmoeder met foetus. Een zwangerschap, maar dan zonder zwangere vrouw, gestript van zorgen, gêne en pijn. De zwangerschapsmodellen en oefenbekkens, te zien in de...
By Johana Bhuiyan, The Guardian | 09.23.2025
In March 2021, a 25-year-old US citizen was traveling through Chicago’s Midway airport when they were stopped by US border patrol agents. Though charged with no crime, the 25-year-old was subjected to a cheek swab to collect their DNA, which...