Word: multicellular
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...terms with those soulquakes. How will the new technology be regulated? What does the sudden ability to make genetic stencils of ourselves say about the concept of individuality? Do the ants and bees and Maoist Chinese have it right? Is a species simply an uberorganism, a collection of multicellular parts to be die-cast as needed? Or is there something about the individual that is lost when the mystical act of conceiving a person becomes standardized into a mere act of photocopying...
Cancer is not a modern disease. Some of our apelike ancestors undoubtedly suffered from it; so did the dinosaurs. In fact, says Robert Weinberg, a molecular biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "it is a risk all multicellular organisms run." Each time a human cell divides, it must replicate its DNA, a biochemical manuscript some 3 billion characters long. In the course of transcribing such a lengthy document, even a skilled typist could be expected to make mistakes, and cells, like typists, occasionally err. More often than not, the mistakes they make are minor and quickly repaired by proteins...
...Patent and Trademark Office has taken what seems to be the next logical step. It announced this month that it "considers non-naturally occurring nonhuman multicellular living organisms, including animals, to be patentable subject matter...
...belabors it. Instead of preaching about interdependence, Janovy celebrates the simple delights of a naturalist: discovering a creek full of snails or a marsh full of flies, observing a colony of birds and musing that "the individual cliff swallow is the philosophical equivalent of a single cell of the multicellular colony-organism," realizing that every good biologist must also be a philosopher. "The biologist," he concludes, "approaches nature in the form of a plant or animal and immediately begins asking questions about the innermost soul, the innermost characteristics, the true spectrum as well as the immediate traits, of the living...
Keeley's skillful organization of the material enhances his thesis, for the essay progresses much as Keeley would have Cavafy's myth evolve--from the first tentative attempts to circumscribe a subject to the buildup of a multicellular organism in which each part functions to the betterment of the whole. Keeley first discusses the interplay between the literal city of Alexandria and Cavafy's mythical counterpart. He then treats each plane--the sensual (contemporary) and historical--separately, and finally unifies the two in a brief discussion of the poet's latest work, and the beginnings of a "universal mode," which...