Word: defect
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Gage's tale is dramatic, but given the physical presence of a moral faculty in the brain, it need not take an iron projectile to reshape one's ethics. How about a virus? A birth injury? A genetic defect? It is quite possible that some of history's greatest villains harbored an unseen wound much like Gage's in the prefrontal cortex. Such may be the condition of all psychopaths. This is not to say that experience has no relevance to character. Abuse during childhood, experience of all sorts is inscribed on the brain. But childhood traumas have never fully...
...thanks to Phineas Gage, scientists will know where to search for that hole. It is surely where they will look when studying the brain -- donated to science -- of serial killer John Wayne Gacy, executed last May in Illinois. Suppose a Gage-like defect is found? Will it seem fair to have executed the man if he was physically incapable of moral judgment? As science begins to unravel bits of personality, accountability unravels with it. The person becomes his parts -- some working, some defective through no fault of his own. Will it become incumbent upon society to submit all killers...
...Nearsightedness appears to be genetic, and may someday be preventable with drug therapy. The possible culprit: a defect in the gene that determines the shape of the eyeball...
Keys says there is no disagreement about first principles: "Jobs. If we can't run an economy capable of creating jobs, then we will be thrown out. And so will every other government that suffers from that defect." But differences have already cropped up on how job growth is to be achieved. The A.N.C., says Keys, is unable "to perceive what a growing economy could really do." Its leaders tend to "feel they have to take away things from certain sectors in order to give things to other sectors." He insists that if the economy is going to grow...
...medical article in Pediatrics. Fitzpatrick first read the paper eight years ago while preparing an infanticide case in order to familiarize himself with possible causes of SIDS. In the report, Dr. Alfred Steinschneider, now president of the Sudden Infant Death Syndrome Institute in Atlanta, proposed that a genetic defect could cause prolonged apnea, or breaks in breathing during a baby's sleep, and lead to SIDS. He bolstered his thesis with detailed accounts of the death of five babies in one unidentified family. Medical examiner Linda Norton, who passed the paper along to Fitzpatrick, ! offered an intriguing remark: "She said...