Word: flesh
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Best not to think about it. Television has taken so much of the physicality--the sheer touch--out of politics that we should cherish the vestigial handshake, the last, fleeting, primitive human contact, flesh to flesh, sweat to sweat, pulse to pulse. A true politician loves shaking hands...
Study Bill Clinton working a rope line. Greedily, avidly, his long, curiously angled fingers reach deep into the crowd to make the touch, an image that in my mind has some cartoonist's kinship to Michelangelo's Adam on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Lyndon Johnson pressed flesh with the same gluttonous physicality, wading into the human surf, clawing and pawing into the democratic mass with an appetite amazing, alarming...
...fighting one of the innumerable syndromes that elderly flesh is heir to. For reasons that no neurologist can explain, many of her brain cells are filling with debris called Lewy bodies. Her symptoms resemble those of Alzheimer's, and like Alzheimer's, the condition is sometimes genetic...
...from now, but you can be sure that at molecular biology's current pace, it will be something like that. By then scientists will have decoded the entire human genome--all 140,000 or so genes that largely say who we are and which of 4,000 diseases our flesh is heir to. They will also have found exactly where common disease-causing errors lie along the genome's long, interlocked chains...
...will robots be taking over for doctors? Probably not. Computers that today can describe every disease known to man still can't navigate a hospital corridor. And even artificial intelligence, or AI, diagnosis has its limitations. You're probably going to want a flesh-and-blood practitioner--not just a computer--to diagnose your aches and pains for at least another decade...