Word: rostand
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Last week the dispute came to open warfare. The first barrage was laid down by Biologist Jean Rostand, 65, who reputedly knows more about frogs than any man alive, and who had been elected to Herriot's vacant seat in the Académie Française. Wearing the academy's braided uniform and cocked hat and with a sword dangling awkwardly at his side, Rostand, as custom requires, used his acceptance speech to eulogize the academician whose place he took. Herriot's last moments, according "to certain witnesses," said Rostand, were not "in harmony with...
Auto-Adultery. Women can play this game too, says Rostand. Parthenogenesis -self fertilization, by techniques such as supplying an additional nucleus from the mother, would permit a woman to have a child that is not the child of any male. She would accomplish a sort of "auto-adultery...
Whither Maternity? Biological science has changed this traditional concept of the human species, says Rostand. Artificial insemination raises the possibility that husbands separated from their wives for long periods may arrange to have them inseminated during their absence. This requires a change in laws that now permit a husband to disown a child that he could not have begotten in the usual manner...
...test-tube babies are only the beginning. "What would become of the notion of maternity," Rostand asks, "if surgeons transplanted a fertilized ovum or a young embryo from one woman to another? If a woman bore a child that was not genetically hers, who would be the real mother? Would it be she who carried the child or she who furnished the germ cell...
...chemical adultery." Bacteria can already be subjected to "directed mutation" by means of a chemical, DNA (desoxyribosenucleic acid), extracted from the chromosomes. When this practice is extended to humans, certain hereditary characteristics of one person can be transferred to the reproductive cells of another person. Looking far ahead, Rostand anticipates a time "when each human infant could receive a standard DNA that would confer the most desirable physical and intellectual characteristics. Such children will not be the offspring of a particular couple, but of the entire species...