Word: iq
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Page Seven trial comes at a moment of extraordinary soul-searching for the Illinois justice system. Earlier this month Anthony Porter, who has an IQ of 51, was freed from death row after serving 16 years for a double murder he did not commit. At the time of his trial, Porter could not afford an investigator to work on his case, and his lawyer called a grand total of three defense witnesses. Porter was freed when a Northwestern University journalism class investigated his case and obtained a confession from another man. A key prosecution witness, who later recanted, now says...
...electronics industry and accepted an appointment at Stanford. There he became interested in the origins of human intelligence. Although he had no formal training in genetics or psychology, he began to formulate a theory of what he called dysgenics. Using data from the U.S. Army's crude pre-induction IQ tests, he concluded that African Americans were inherently less intelligent than Caucasians--an analysis that stirred wide controversy among laymen and experts in the field alike...
...human intelligence in 1905. But it was an American, Lewis Terman, a psychology professor at Stanford, who thought to divide a test taker's "mental age," as revealed by that score, by his or her chronological age to derive a number that he called the "intelligence quotient," or IQ. It would be hard to think of a pop-scientific coinage that has had a greater impact on the way people think about themselves and others...
Even thornier is the question of what kinds of genetic tinkering parents might be willing to elect to enhance already healthy children. What about using gene therapy to add genes for HIV resistance or longevity or a high IQ? What about enhancements that simply stave off psychological pain--giving a child an attractive face or a pleasing personality? No one is certain when these techniques will be available--and many professionals protest that they're not interested in perfecting them. "Yes, theoretically you could do such things," says Baylor University human-reproduction specialist Larry Lipshultz. "It's doable...
...Bishop of Edinburgh tried. After overseeing a British Medical Association study on bioethics, he embraced genetic tinkering for "medical reasons," while denouncing the "Frankenstein idea" of making "designer babies" with good looks and a high IQ. But what is the difference? Therapists consider learning disabilities to be medical problems, and if we find a way to diagnose and remedy them before birth, we'll be raising scores on IQ tests. Should we tell parents they can't do that, that the state has decided they must have a child with dyslexia? Minor memory flaws? Below-average verbal skills? At some...