Word: multicellular
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...