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...
Related Articles
By Jason Kehe, Wired | 04.11.2024
God help the babies! Or, absent God, a fertility startup called Orchid. It offers prospective parents a fantastical choice: Have a regular baby or have an Orchid baby. A regular baby might grow up and get cancer. Or be born...
By Neel Shah, The PrePrint | 04.11.2024
Years ago, I interviewed for a residency position at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Standing before the domed Victorian building at the campus entrance, I couldn’t help but be in awe of the history of the place, the great...
By Eleanor Hayward and Joanna Crawford, The Times | 03.29.2024
Gazing out at the Mediterranean from an idyllic rocky mountaintop, Sophie Hermann announced to her half a million Instagram followers that she had decided to freeze her eggs. Since that post in August, the 37-year-old former Made in Chelsea star...
By Judith Levine, The Intercept | 04.04.2024
WHEN THE ALABAMA Supreme Court ruled that fertilized embryos were “extrauterine children,” it did more than imperil the future of in vitro fertilization in Alabama and, potentially, the U.S. The ruling, on the claimed “wrongful death” of frozen embryos...