Word: birth
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...decade after the Second Vatican Council and two years before the death of Pope Paul VI, the ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH in the U.S. was struggling. Membership was in decline, and debates had broken out over papal authority and the church's ban on birth control...
There are seven ages in a man's life, the poet says, and you can see at least three of them already in George W. Bush's presidency. First came his strange, complicated birth, his narrow escape from a Florida swamp, a President uncertain from the start. Next came the innocent clarity of September and the burst of national unity. The attacks and their aftermath seemed to end all the confusion about who was in charge and showed us what Bush was capable of after all: strength, leadership, even vision...
That's because just two years earlier Pam and her husband Chris, operations manager of a software-design company, had learned that Tommy's twin brothers Jason and Danny were profoundly autistic. Seemingly normal at birth, the twins learned to say a few words before they spiraled into their secret world, quickly losing the abilities they had just started to gain. Instead of playing with toys, they broke them; instead of speaking, they emitted an eerie, high-pitched keening...
Several months ago, Courchesne unveiled results from a brain-imaging study that led him to propose a provocative new hypothesis. At birth, he notes, the brain of an autistic child is normal in size. But by the time these children reach 2 to 3 years of age, their brains are much larger than normal. This abnormal growth is not uniformly distributed. Using MRI-imaging technology, Courchesne and his colleagues were able to identify two types of tissue where this mushrooming in size is most pronounced...
Drugs taken by some pregnant women are also coming under scrutiny. At the University of Rochester, embryologist Patricia Rodier and her colleagues are exploring how certain teratogens (substances that cause birth defects) could lead to autism. They are focusing on the teratogens' impact on a gene called hoxa1, which is supposed to flick on very briefly in the first trimester of pregnancy and remain silent ever after. Embryonic mice in which the rodent equivalent of this gene has been knocked out go on to develop brainstems that are missing an entire layer of cells...