Word: defectiveness
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James F. Gusella, professor of genetics at the Medical School, reports in an article in today's issue of Nature Genetics, a British scientific journal, that he and co-workers at the Massachusetts General Hospital have discovered a gene coding for a defect which may be responsible for the disease...
Other contentious issues will arise. Doctors will be able to detect many serious genetic diseases at the fetal stage, which will lead some parents to opt for abortion. But there will also be preventive measures for people who want to avoid passing their defective genes on to their children. When one parent carries the deadly and dominant gene for Huntington's chorea, for example, there is a 50% chance that any offspring will have it too. To reduce those odds to zero, doctors of the future will extract several eggs from the prospective mother and fertilize them in a test...
PARENTS USED TO HAVE TO WAIT until babies were born to find out if they had tragic birth defects. Then came two breakthrough fetal tests: amniocentesis, which can identify abnormalities in the 15th week of pregnancy; and chorionic villus sampling, which can be performed as early as the tenth week. Neither procedure is without risk, however, and when either succeeds in pinpointing a genetic defect, it forces would-be parents to make a terrible choice: Do they raise a child who might have a serious congenital affliction? Or do they suffer the torment and pain that accompanies an abortion...
...Alan Handyside and Robert Winston, perfected a technique for drawing cells into hair-thin pipettes one at a time. Then they teamed up with a group from Houston's Baylor College of Medicine and Methodist Hospital who had developed a procedure for rapidly spotting the cystic fibrosis defect in a single strand of DNA, using the gene- cloning technique called polymerase chain reaction. "It's like finding one typographical error in a book 180 times the size of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in about six hours," says Dr. Mark Hughes, director of Baylor's Prenatal Genetics Center...
Responding to the backlash he received from his earlier comments regarding the "immorality" of a television show which he had admittedly never watched, Quayle searched for the most "authentic" representations of this particular so-called "defect" in the nations's family values--single mothers. And just as African-Americans in this country have been always coded as the most "primitive" and the most "free" (among many other things), in today's discussions of "family values," African-American are also coded as the most "deviant...