Word: variants
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...lavish press and fantastic accolades, two groups of scientists independently reported that, in the words of a New York Times article on the first of this month, "people with an unshakable thirst for new sensations, who are impulsive, hot-blooded, fickle, excitable and extravagant, tend to have a distinctive variant of a gene that allows the brain to respond to dopamine, an essential communication signal...
...alas!), social engineering of the genetic variety was not meant to be. Researchers from the United States and Finland announced recently that, despite attempts to replicate the results in two groups of Finnish men, they did not detect any connection between novelty-seeking and the longer gene variant of the so-called dopamine D4 receptor gene that was purported to correlate with it. The conclusion of these researchers: "These data suggest that D4DR may require re-evaluation as a candidate gene for personality variation...
There is another, perhaps more fundamental problem: if the very moments of seeming unpredictability can, in fact, be predicted by a long or short gene variant, if people can be reduced to their genetics, where does that leave any conception of human autonomy...
...Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. In a matter of days, highly trained specialists--essentially a public-health swat team from the premier U.S. government lab's Epidemic Intelligence Service--were on the scene. Within two weeks, their meticulous detective work had identified the deadly microbe: a lethal variant of a germ known as hantavirus, carried by rodents but never known to be deadly in humans. Armed with that knowledge, health officials launched a multistate public-awareness campaign, and before long the number of deaths plummeted--from 20 in the first few months to just 23 since...
...imagines, for very long. Much as we all enjoy a sloppy wallow in cheap sentiment, it is hard to imagine anyone wanting to watch Robin Williams further degrade in Jack what was one of the movies' most valuable gifts. The film is a Big variant--a kid inhabiting a grownup's body and getting into all sorts of trouble as a result. But we're not talking about an ill-considered wish going merrily awry here. We're talking about a tragic illness. For Jack doesn't just get older and hairier, he keeps aging at four times the normal...