Word: colorfulness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Assembling the right group is a delicate business; as with any ritualized art form, from Kabuki to slasher films, one must follow rules but with a whiff of originality. Pearlman and his staff look at everything--the proportionate size of group members, their height, their weight, their hair color, their personalities onstage and off. Who will be the prankster, like 'N Sync's Chris Patrick? Who will be the lead sex symbol, like Backstreet's Nick Carter? Who can make a credible dangerous guy, the one who dresses more "urban" and maybe even has tattoos...
...last week, after I checked out Encarta Africana, a two-disc, multimedia reference work by Microsoft on the history and culture of Africa and people of African descent, I wanted to kiss the FedEx guy. This remarkable new work blends old-fashioned scholarship and storytelling with color videos and stereo sound to bring its subject alive, starting with a video lecture by poet Maya Angelou, who notes that "it takes more than a horrifying transatlantic voyage chained in the filthy hold of a slave ship to erase someone's culture...
...children may be able (I hope, I fear) to choose their kids' traits: to select their gender and eye color; perhaps to tinker with their IQs, personalities and athletic abilities. They could clone themselves, or one of their kids, or a celebrity they admire, or maybe even us after we've died...
...baby Jessica is just the beginning. Within a decade or two, it may be possible to screen kids almost before conception for an enormous range of attributes, such as how tall they're likely to be, what body type they will have, their hair and eye color, what sorts of illnesses they will be naturally resistant to, and even, conceivably, their IQ and personality type...
Much of this public fervor looks comically ill informed in hindsight. In the U.S. and Britain, fairs and exhibitions regularly featured exhibits illustrating Mendelian laws of inheritance, often in the form of black-and-white guinea pigs stuffed and mounted to demonstrate the heritability of fur color. Kevles quotes from a chart accompanying such a display: "Unfit human traits such as feeblemindedness, epilepsy, criminality, insanity, alcoholism, pauperism and many others run in families and are inherited in exactly the same way as color in guinea pigs...