Word: hamer
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Molecular biologist Dean Hamer has blue eyes, light brown hair and the goofy sense of humor of a stand-up comic. He smokes cigarettes, spends long hours in a cluttered laboratory at the National Institutes of Health, and in his free time clambers up cliffs and points his skis down steep, avalanche-prone slopes. He also happens to be openly, matter-of-factly...
Besides, the American civil rights movement wasn't just Martin Luther King Jr.; it was also Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks. As for nonviolent social activists and leaders--What about Jane Addams, Petra Kelly, Dorothy Day, Aung San Suu Kyi? And why flatter Lenin by leaving out two of his staunchest ideological opponents, the Polish-German socialist Rosa Luxemburg and the American anarchist Emma Goldman...
...what really made the prospects of manipulating human sexuality seem more immediate and threatening is recent molecular genetic research by Dean Hamer and his colleagues at the National Cancer Institute. In 1993 Hamer's group reported evidence that genes on the X chromosome predispose boys to become either gay or straight...
...genes haven't actually been identified yet, but if Hamer's findings are right, it won't be more than a few years until they are identified. And then it will be a simple matter to develop a blood test that could be applied to adults, to children and even to fetuses. Perhaps it will eventually be possible to change an embryo's "gay genes" into straight ones...
...Dean Hamer is concerned enough about these dangers that he wants to restrict the use of genetic tests for homosexuality. "We believe that it would be fundamentally unethical," he and his colleagues wrote in their 1993 paper, "to use such information to try to assess or alter a person's current or future sexual orientation." Hamer has talked of patenting the relevant DNA sequences, thus preventing the commercial development of blood tests...