Word: accessible
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...completed their work in one day. Emboldened by the new technology, Venter announced his plans to sequence the human genome rapidly. He founded Celera with Perkin-Elmer and promised to publish results freely on a quarterly basis. From now on, Venter said, he was in the information business, selling access to the genomic data he was gathering at breakneck speed...
...large a population as they can, calculating that the healthy will pay for the sick--and then some. Unless state law prohibits, they can discriminate--legally--by raising premiums for someone who, for example, has suffered a heart attack and is renewing an individual or small-group policy. Access to a growing body of predictive genetic information would permit insurers to weed out further the riskiest, hence costliest clients or at least make them pay more for their coverage even before illness strikes. Little wonder that insurers would like to know, as Rosen puts it, "as much about your medical...
...couldn't speak, however, the blood of her daughter could. Shortly after the baby's birth, the police drew a sample of the infant's blood, then took voluntary samples from male relatives of the woman as well as from nursing-home personnel and others who might have had access to her. Comparing the men's DNA with the baby's, they figured, could lead them to the rapist...
Until just a few years ago, making a baby boy or a baby girl was pretty much a hit-or-miss affair. Not anymore. Parents who have access to the latest genetic testing techniques can now predetermine their baby's sex with great accuracy--as Monique and Scott Collins learned to their delight two years ago, when their long-wished-for daughter Jessica was born after genetic prescreening at a fertility clinic in Fairfax...
This unequal access won't bring a rigid caste system a la Brave New World. The interplay between genes and environment is too complex to permit the easy fine-tuning of mind and spirit. Besides, in vitro fertilization is nobody's idea of a good time; even many affluent parents will forgo painful invasive procedures unless horrible hereditary defects are at stake. But the technology will become more powerful and user friendly. Sooner or later, as the most glaring genetic liabilities drift toward the bottom of the socioeconomic scale, we will see a biological stratification vivid enough to mock American...