Word: normalization
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...vague awareness of our genetic endowment, fretting perhaps over a familial tendency toward heart disease or beaky noses. But families affected by fragile X can discuss their genome with startling specificity. Their key concern is a small strip of DNA on the long arm of the X chromosome. Normally, humans have five to 55 repetitions of the nucleotides CGG (cytosine, guanine, guanine) in this region. But for unknown reasons, the number of CGG repeats can expand beyond normal as the DNA is copied from mother to child...
Cari, for instance, has one normal X chromosome (with 24 repeats), inherited from her mother, and another with an abnormal 85 repeats, inherited from her father, who has 89 repeats. Cari's son Max has 363. Any number greater than 200 causes full-blown fragile X syndrome (so named because, under a microscope, the expanded X chromosome may look bent to the point of breaking). The reason boys are more likely than girls to develop major symptoms is that girls carry a pair of X chromosomes, which means that if one is defective, the other can compensate. Boys, however, carry...
...week around an enormous park in her hometown of Memphis, Tenn.; she likes playing Frisbee and loves swimming. But one day last November, Blue started limping - which was odd because the German shepherd seemed fit and was only 3 1/2 years old. "She wasn't recovering as quickly as normal from a trek in the park. I thought that was just a sign of aging," says her owner Twila Waters, 43, with a wry chuckle...
...said the same thing: these kids lack coping skills because they've not been allowed to fully function. They are the products of parental anxiety and all the lumps and bumps have been taken out of life for them, so they have no idea how to manage the normal vicissitudes of life...
...Emotional content] does not necessarily mean that events are remembered more accurately, and that's an important distinction. In fact, there's a lot of evidence that all memories can be altered. It's a normal process - we're constantly taking our experience and revising it, even twisting it to our own benefit. We might be able to take control of that process in some ways, which would be particularly useful in cases of abnormal, pathological memory processing - for instance, traumatic memory processing. There have been efforts to find ways of undoing that emotional bias. We don't know...