Word: patterning
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...dividing and both lines of chromosomes are supposed to make duplicates of themselves, nature slips up. Instead of splitting them into two neat rows of 23 each, it leaves an extra X or Y in one row. If the supernumerary is an X, the baby has an XXY pattern and will grow into a sterile, asthenic "male," usually with some breast enlargement and mental retardation-a condition that physicians call Klinefelter's syndrome...
This has been recognized since 1959. Despite the factor of low intelligence, it has not been linked with criminality. If the extra chromosome is a Y, the baby gets an XYY pattern and is unquestionably male. Or, as evidence gathered by an all-woman team of researchers in Scotland now suggests, he may be a supermale, overaggressive and potentially criminal. Dr. Patricia A. Jacobs and her colleagues working at Western General Hospital in Edinburgh knew that a number of mentally defective men with a double dose of both sex chromosomes, or XXYY, had been found in Swedish and English institutions...
...below-average intelligence, tall stature and severe acne-traits that might result from the hormone-stimulating effects of the duplicated chromosome. But little more is known about the Y chromosome's effects. Dr. Wil liam Price, who works with the research group in Edinburgh, doubts that the XYY pattern can be linked with crimes of violence or sex. Among the XYY men studied at Carstairs, he points out, the proportion whose offenses were against property-such as petty theft and housebreaking-was greater than that among convicts generally...
...than the average (about 18). But among their siblings there was an unusually low incidence of criminality. And in the only case so far reported of an XYY with several children, the abnormality was not transmitted: an Oregon XYY has had six sons, but all have a normal XY pattern...
Instead, setting a life pattern, he drifted between such random diversions as studying Serbo-Croatian and founding a record company to preserve the music of early New Orleans jazzmen. Inevitably, as the son of the late syndicated columnist Heywood Broun, he became a sportswriter "with a crust of adjectives as thick as barnacles on a pearling lugger."* Then, at 30, bored with the "non-Aristotelian inevitability of August doubleheaders," he decided to take a fling at acting. "I brought to the stage," he recalls, "a keen sense of Thackeray, Dickens and Trollope-and none of Stanislavski...