Word: sheep
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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VEINS AND ARTERIES. Blood vessels present a special challenge: they must be strong yet flexible enough to expand and contract with each heartbeat. Joseph Vacanti's group has grown a tube of sheep-muscle cells around a polymer, added closely packed lining cells to the inside and stitched it into a sheep's pulmonary-artery circuit. Blood pulsing against the walls gradually strengthens the muscle cells, just as weight training builds biceps. To make smaller vessels, Laval's Auger bends a sheet of muscle cells around a plastic tube and reinforces it with an outer layer of stiffer cells. Then...
Harvard's place names attest to this once bucolic setting: the Yard used to actually be a "yard," Cambridge Common a shared pasture where sheep and cattle were grazed. As Harvard matured, red brick replaced the briars, and asphalt smothered up the asphodels. But in spite of the modernization, a modest ecosystem still survives. It cycles away out of sight, invisible, until a hawk swoops down and jolts us from our reverie...
...they gave birth. Today, of course, that attitude seems quaintly outmoded. What's more, we have become sensitized to the rights of adoptees, who as they grow up want to know what everyone else already knows: who they are. "We are besieged by ghosts," says Helen Hill, a sculptor, sheep farmer and newborn political impresario, who wrote Oregon's Measure 58 in her basement and has spent part of her inheritance getting it approved. "We are haunted by questions...
...hazards that the dead "hunt for jobs /whisper the numbers of lottery tickets," thensomberly notes that we imagine them "snug as theburrow of a mouse." Surely that comparison makesthe daily grind of errands and ambition seem likedeath. In one of his most priceless prose poems,"The Wolf and the Sheep," Herbert has the wolfexplain to the sheep that he is about to devourthat, "You have no idea how silly it is to be abad wolf. Were it not for Aesop, we would sit onour hind legs and gaze at the sunset. I like to dothis very much." After this irony...
...immediate response to the birth of Dolly the sheep was a revulsion against the idea of using the same technique to clone human beings. But the news had just the opposite effect on an eccentric scientist named Richard Seed, who declared with an eerie bravado that he was going to produce "half-a-dozen bouncing-baby, happy, smiling clones" before the end of the decade...