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 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 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...
By Justin McCurry, The Guardian | 04.01.2024
A Chinese scientist who was imprisoned for his role in creating the world’s first genetically edited babies says he has returned to his laboratory to work on the treatment of Alzheimer’s and other genetic diseases.
In an interview with a...