Word: thingness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...thing has become clear to scientists: memory is absolutely crucial to our consciousness. Says Janellen Huttenlocher, a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago: "There's almost nothing you do, from perception to thinking, that doesn't draw continuously on your memory...
...otherwise, since there's really no such thing as the present. As you read this sentence, the sentence that went before is already a second or two in the past; the first line of this story went by minutes ago. Yet without a memory of what's been said, none of what you are now reading makes the slightest sense. The same is true for our lives as a whole. Memory provides personal context, a sense of self and a sense of familiarity with people and surroundings, a past and present and a frame for the future...
...precisely to say that Tsien & Co. have created a smarter mouse. "What is it that is being tested?" asks Gerald Fischbach, director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. "That's the problem with mouse behavior. It's not clear that we're talking about the same thing when we talk about learning in a rodent and learning in a human...
What makes the conversation tricky is that we're already on the slippery slope. Doctors can screen fetuses for genetic diseases like cystic fibrosis and Duchenne muscular dystrophy; one day they may be able to treat them in utero. But correcting is one thing, perfecting is another. If doctors can someday tinker with a gene to help children with autism, what's to prevent them from tinkering with other genes to make "normal" children smarter? Technology always adapts to demand; prenatal sex-selection tests designed to weed out inherited diseases that strike one gender or the other--hemophilia, for instance...
...turned out that by enhancing intellectual ability, some other personality trait changed as well? "Everything comes at a price," argues UCLA neurobiologist Alcino Silva. "Very often when there's a genetic change where we improve something, something else gets hit by it, so it's never a clean thing." The alarmists, like longtime biotech critic Jeremy Rifkin, go further. "How do you know you're not going to create a mental monster?" he asks. "We may be on the road to programming our own extinction...