Word: tinkered
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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DIED. IAN BANNEN, 71, Oscar nominee who played an affable con man in 1998's hit Waking Ned Devine; in a car crash near Loch Ness, Scotland. In a 50-year career, Bannen appeared in Braveheart, Gandhi and the 1980 TV mini-series Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; and on the London stage in The Iceman Cometh and Long Day's Journey into Night...
...already doing better at preventive medicine and at repairing old bodies--dealing with abdominal fat, atherosclerosis, blood pressure, blood sugar, cataracts and so on. U.S. pharmaceutical companies have nearly two dozen Alzheimer's drugs in the works. In the next century, molecular biologists are likely to tinker with more and more of our genetic machinery, in what may be either mankind's worst folly or the most significant software upgrade of the 21st century. (Caveat emptor, users of version 1.0!) Just last month, biologists announced the discovery of mutations that accumulate in aging mitochondria, which are our cells' batteries; maybe...
...stop, but religious convictions aside, it will be more for recreation than procreation. Many human beings, especially those who are rich, vain and ambitious, will be using test tubes--not just to get around infertility and the lack of suitable partners, but to clone themselves and tinker with their genes...
Once cloning loses its stigma, the urge to tinker with the genes of offspring may not be far behind. As Cambridge molecular biologist Graeme Mitchison says, "We can all be beautiful--no baldness, no wimps with glasses, no knobby knees." Olivia Judson, author of a forthcoming book called Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice for All Creation, begs to differ: "If there is such hostility to genetically modified soya, it doesn't bode well for genetically modified people...
...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--are being used...