Word: actually
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...keep track--he retained a kind of adamant adolescence, fearful and aggressive at once. In bed he preferred kissing, snuggling and cuddling to getting down to the serious business of physical intimacy; or, in the indelible words of one of his girlfriends, Sheila Ryan, "he preferred pumping to actual sex." If the affair progressed, Ryan observed, "all of a sudden you graduated into Mother. You were expected to take care of him... He needed water, he needed pills, he needed Jell-O, he needed to be read to." But however long they lasted, these women never passed caretaker status...
Meanwhile, the threat of being upstaged by Venter has put enormous pressure on the Human Genome Project. During a previously scheduled project review last summer, the directors did a thorough re-evaluation of their procedures, soliciting advice from the scientists doing the actual mapping. In the end, the message was clear. Says Collins: "We heard from the users that our current degree of accuracy wasn't needed for many of their strategies...
...involves sampling the mother's blood--so-called serum-alpha-fetoprotein testing to seek out telltale proteins that may indicate spina bifida, neural-tube defects or Down syndrome--or looking directly at the fetus with ultrasound scans. For women over 35, doctors usually recommend more invasive procedures in which actual fetal cells are gathered from the womb's amniotic fluid (amniocentesis) or placenta (chorionic villus sampling...
...genes--every A, C, G and T of the hereditary alphabet--into a computer. Then, still using the computer, you figure out what the mirror image of each sequence would be. (DNA can mirror itself as well as RNA.) The aim is to transform the mirror-sequence data into actual strands of DNA that are planted like rows of corn on the glass bed of a chip. Each strand is built up, letter by letter, in much the same way the layers in a silicon chip are created...
...things" runs the constant refrain of the novel, and while Glamorama's 482 pages of vacuous characters provoke a desire to surface, to break out of the trap of celebrity, it also points out the pervasive nature of glamor. Ellis is often more interested in being cool than actual meaning (the novel opens with a Hitler quote); with Glamorama, he seems to be saying that this is the only truth we all share