Word: rostand
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Every Wednesday night, a chubby French biologist named Jean Rostand* sips a glass of cognac in a railroad cafe at Ville-d'Avray and plunges bravely but vainly into a village chess tournament. The rest of his week is spent in lonelier fun: a lifelong love affair with a house full of frogs and toads...
Another frightening possibility that occurs to Dr. Rostand: human parthenogenesis (virgin birth). It has already happened in the laboratory-even with rabbits. "Why not tomorrow from women...
...scientist, Dr. Rostand naturally holds aloof from moral implications-but as a Frenchman, he is sure that, once parthenogenesis is possible, some women will want to try it. And that really scares him: "It is thus inevitable that a new kind of human being (according to our present knowledge they will all be girls) -will appear in society, and will be aware of their extraordinary origin . . . Realization of the fact that the male has ceased to be necessary for propagation will not fail to exercise a profound effect on the relations between man and woman...
...cause anxiety only in "traditionalist minds . . . All increase in human capabilities complicates the moral life . . . Let us beware, however, of ever reproaching science for the difficulties it has created for us. It is not recent news that living is more arduous for an adult than for a child." Dr. Rostand is no child, and his frogs are no tadpoles...
...happy result of the script shortage, desperate TVmen have dipped gingerly into the classics and come up with productions-of Ibsen, and Rostand, Pirandello, Chekhov and Shakespeare. Studio One pioneered with adaptations of Turgenev's Smoke, Henry James's The Ambassadors, Sholom Ansky's The Dybbuk, and has also done a modern-dress Julius Caesar and a Grand Guignol version of Macbeth. Other shows dramatize news stories, historical anecdotes, biographies...