Word: frankenstein
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...dramas, all about artists in extremis, are traditional in another sense. They locate the not so divine decadence--all that is theatrical, naughty, self-destructive--in gay sex. Bill Condon's Gods and Monsters stars Ian McKellen in a parable about '30s Hollywood director James Whale (Frankenstein, Show Boat). Like Billy, he is consumed with sexual longing, but here it is the ultimate form of masochism: a desire to be killed. The erotic charge sizzles in Lisa Cholodenko's High Art, a pensive throwback to the drug-and-sex angst of the '70s. It tosses Ally Sheedy into heavy, fraught...
Today the new creation involved in cloning is no doubt visionary (Frankenstein goes partners with Henry Ford in the mass production of life) and also plunges forth into mystery, though of a different sort from that approached by astronauts. Think of the 50 Hawaiian mice and then extrapolate, taking your metaphysics as far as your imagination will carry you. What, exactly, are the implications of unsouled reduplication...
...human DNA. But over the next hundred years, we will be able and tempted to tinker. No doubt we'll make some improvements and some mistakes. We'll encode our dreams and vanities and hubris. We'll clone ourselves, we'll custom-design our kids. By playing Dr. Frankenstein, we'll have the chance to make miracles or monsters. The challenges will be not scientific but moral...
...virus beside another, and the two may trade genes, a process called reassortment. If this reassortment produces a virus that closely resembles one of its parents, it is said to have undergone antigenic drift. On rare occasions, this scrambling can be dramatic. The virus becomes a kind of Frankenstein virus so different from existing strains that the human population has no immunity...
...claims to have discovered the hidden agenda of scientists who want to pursue cloning technology: the creation of headless human bodies [ESSAY, Jan. 19]. This, he alleges in mock excitement, would be "cloning's crowning achievement." I was the main scientist that Krauthammer cast in the role of Dr. Frankenstein. As he reported, I opined that it would be "possible" to produce human bodies without a forebrain and that it would be "legal" to keep such individuals alive. What Krauthammer failed to report was what I also said in a phone conversation with him: the purposeful creation of human bodies...