Word: idea
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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First out of the blocks (it debuts this Sunday before settling in on Tuesday night following King of the Hill) is The PJs (shorthand for "the projects"), the brainchild of Eddie Murphy and perhaps the riskiest of Fox's new cartoon ventures. Murphy sold Imagine on his idea two years ago. The result is a visual tour de force. The puppeteers of the Will Vinton Studios, best known for the California Raisins, have created a colorful 3-D universe of intricately animated clay figures expressive enough to almost pop off the screen. Making sure they land in viewers' hearts...
Accept your limitations. A lot of us get hung up on the idea that we have to reform perfectly or not at all. We floss our teeth twice a day every day for a week, then we forget one morning and give up trying for the rest of the year. Let's face it. You're going to suffer setbacks. Be honest with yourself about why they happened, then pick up the pieces and move...
Human-rights advocates around the world rightly rejoice at the idea that Chile's ex-President Augusto Pinochet Ugarte might be extradited to Spain [WORLD, Dec. 14]. If this occurs, Pinochet will be judged for past crimes. Heads of government should never get away with torture and murder. But unless an impartial international criminal tribunal is established with very clear rules and procedures, going after only certain dictators will be an arbitrary process. Also, if a nation approves a general amnesty for atrocities committed by one of its regimes, should a foreign judge be allowed to disrupt that nation...
...biggest problem with patenting genes is that while scientists have at least a general idea of what specific strands of genetic coding do, often it's just that--general. Investigators do sometimes succeed in isolating a single, crisp gene with a single known function. Often, however, researchers trying to map genes get no further than marking off fragmentary stretches of DNA that may be thousands of bases in length. These so-called expressed sequence tags may have real genetic information embedded in them, but determining where those nuggets are and what their structure is takes more digging...
Stickier than the economic question is the ethical one. Most of us reflexively shrink from the idea of anyone's owning the rights to any part of the human form. Besides, if the first anatomist to spot, say, the pancreas was not granted title to it, why should modern genome-mapping scientists be able to claim even a single gene? As Kahn points out, "You could patent a system for mining gold from ore. We don't let people patent the gold." That kind of argument is grounded not in law but in the very idea of what it means...