Word: geneticists
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...however, the promise of gene therapy appears to outweigh any potential pitfalls. And the acceptance of the new techniques is particularly sweet for longtime advocates. "Twenty years ago, you couldn't utter the phrase gene therapy without being told you were talking nonsense," says Dr. Theodore Friedmann, a molecular geneticist at the University of California, San Diego. "Now it's taken for granted that it's coming." He sees the day when doctors will be able to treat not only the thousands of diseases caused by a single faulty gene but even complex disorders like Parkinson's and Alzheimer...
Earlier in this century, Soviet geneticist Trofim Lysenko severely damaged Soviet agriculture by forcing on his colleagues a pseudoscientific theory of heredity that was ideologically pleasing to the ruling Stalinists. Dissenters were dismissed, disgraced and even sent to the Gulags...
...wonderful performance, but in the sour view of many scientists, it is largely flimflam. To them, Rifkin is a Luddite, whose opposition to DNA research is based on skewed science and misplaced mystical zeal. Geneticist Norton Zinder of New York City's Rockefeller University calls him a "fool" and a "demagogue." In a scathing 1984 review of Algeny, one of Rifkin's nine books, Harvard's Stephen Jay Gould wrote that it was "a cleverly constructed tract of anti-intellectual propaganda masquerading as scholarship . . . I don't think I have ever read a shoddier work...
...fighting bacteria, developed into a commercial product called Frostban, was sprayed on a test field in 1987. As they predicted, it proved harmless.) Typically, Rifkin would plunge into a scientific setting, armed with papers from dissident researchers, and warn about the potentially catastrophic consequences of inadequately regulated research. Says geneticist Zinder: "The accusations are made simply, with simple words. But the proof is very sophisticated and often difficult to grasp." Rifkin acknowledges that he occasionally uses scare tactics. But he claims that the scientific establishment is equally guilty, both of excessive rhetoric and of usurping policy decisions that need more...
...team of medical researchers has devised a technique that may eventually help parents sidestep this predicament. Scientists at the Illinois Masonic Medical Center and Northwestern University, led by geneticist Yury Verlinsky, say they can test for genetic defects in the human egg even before it has been fertilized. The technique could enable thousands of mothers with a family history of genetic disorders to avoid giving birth to an afflicted child without having to undergo abortion. Dr. C. Thomas Caskey, president of the American Society of Human Genetics, calls the new method "promising" but stresses that more testing is needed...