Word: dna
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When you apply the question to entire societies, you enter into a conundrum that may be approached as a sort of cultural genome project. What's our social and economic DNA? A fascinating new book, "Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress" (Basic Books, 348 pages, $35) proclaims the secret in its title and, in a series of 22 essays by scholars, journalists and global business experts, studies the record of societies' successes and failures in the light of their cultural inheritances and internalized mental models...
Turns out, and this really does come as a shock to many French, that all of them were pretenders. The boy who died in Temple prison and whose body was dumped in a mass grave really was Louis Charles, DNA tests have revealed. Scientists Jean-Jacques Cassiman and Bernd Brinkmann compared the mitochondrial DNA of the boy's mummified heart with samples from locks of hair taken from his mother, two of her sisters and two living maternal relatives. The sequences were all identical. Cassiman pronounced the results definitive, while conceding that "the heart was not ideally preserved for this...
...first attempt to solve the 205-year-old mystery. The prince's mass grave was exhumed twice in the 19th century, and both times its only tubercular remains were declared to belong to an older boy. Still, Philippe Delorme, a French historian who had pressed for the DNA tests, is convinced by Cassiman and Brinkmann's work. "Clearly, the finding spells the end of this example of the eternal myth--that of the little prince and the hidden king," says Delorme. "Perhaps we should undertake, as I do, the spiritual and philosophic venture of looking for the little prince that...
...descendants of the Prussian clockmaker, Karl-Willhelm Naundorff, aren't prepared to do that; they have rejected the DNA analysis. After all, the claim of this pretender was supported by a former Versailles maid, who swore he was the same boy she'd seen at the palace, by some French royals, and by his tombstone, which reads HERE LIES LOUIS XVII, DUKE OF NORMANDY, KING OF FRANCE AND NAVARRE. May they both rest in peace...
...featured in a 1970 Time cover story, Brooklyn-born biologist Barry Commoner was one of the first scientists to worry about a deteriorating environment; he established a pioneering ecological center at Washington University in St. Louis in 1966. A maverick in his science--he didn't initially accept DNA as heredity's master molecule--and a polemical writer (Science and Survival, The Closing Circle), he won 200,000 votes in the 1980 presidential race on the eco-based Citizens' Party ticket. At 82, he remains an active warrior for the environment...