Word: twinning
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Completeness and accuracy were the Human Genome Project's twin mantras from its formal start in 1990. At that point, researchers had already painstakingly identified more than 4,000 of the 100,000 genes that serve as the blueprint for a functioning human being--each gene carrying instructions that tell cells how to produce a specific protein. Scientists had located about 1,500 genes, in a rough way, on the 46 chromosomes--the long, twisted strands of DNA cradled in protein at the heart of every human cell. But they had deciphered, or sequenced, only a handful of the many...
...cloned child would be a genetically identical twin of the original, and thus physically very similar--far more similar than a natural parent and child. Human personality, however, emerges from both the effects of the genes we inherit (nature) and environmental factors (nurture). The two clones would develop distinct personalities, just as twins develop unique identities. And because the copy would often be born in a different family, cloned twins would be less alike in personality than natural identical twins...
...Lewis Schiliro was Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the Trade Center attack, who had just been nabbed in Pakistan. During the transatlantic leg of the flight back to the U.S., Yousef had bragged that his original plan had been to plant enough explosives in one of the 110-story twin buildings to topple it, killing maybe 250,000 people in the tower and on the ground. But his shoestring operation couldn't afford enough dynamite, and settled for a much smaller blast...
...century, as many filmmakers take a darkened view of love and togetherness, there are comforts attached to entering the world of a Nora Ephron romantic comedy--and these comforts extend beyond the knowledge that, at some point or another, Meg Ryan will appear on screen in a twin set. When Ephron pairs the actress with Tom Hanks, the viewer can rest assured that certain unsettling events will not occur: we know, for example, that our hero won't ever suffer financially (and thus won't turn to a life of bank robbery or kidnapping); our heroine won't be left...
When we keep this in mind, writer Mark O'Donnell emerges as a true gift. A humorist and playwright, O'Donnell has mastered the art of conveying the bittersweet. In his first novel, Getting Over Homer, O'Donnell wryly traced a twin's failing quest to find a bond similar to the one he shared with his sibling. In his second novel, Let Nothing You Dismay (Knopf; 193 pages; $22), O'Donnell is once again obsessed with a young man's search for wholeness, and here too the author's witticisms flow felicitously...