Our blood knows our secrets and foretells our health. Sometimes we’re told the now of the being of our bloodstream — high cholesterol, bad thyroid, liver complications — but what if our blood could tell us today, how we’ll end up in the future? Would you want your blood to tell your longevity status? Or would you prefer to live only in the now?
When I taught Public Health at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, I remember one day when the school was having a “Bone Marrow Drive” to help an employee stricken with cancer. You could sign up for a free bone marrow screening to see if you were a match and, if you were not, your bone marrow would be placed in a database for future reference. Bone marrow transplants are expensive, and painful, for both donor and recipient, but in many ways, that marrow is the manna of life.
Continue reading → The Manna of Life: Bone Marrow and Supermodels
First, we thought we only had six Founding Mothers for Native Americans. Today, we know we have at least 15 Founding Mothers — and that only helps to enhance the ideal of the original Founding Fathers.
Do we want to regulate artificial life? Or should we simply let new lifeforms evolve as they must and come into being as they want to join us, destroy us, or find their end with us?
We know babies are born selfish and power-seeking — and we’ve met the Kindergarten Contract Killers. Now we turn our frightened, Panopticonic, eye to the scientific notion that babies are embedded with a moral code: They are born knowing the difference between good and evil.
Continue reading → The Moral Code of Babies: Hardwiring Good and Evil
In a strange, and somewhat unsettling, want to welcome Freshman and transfer students — while also, it seems, starting their own private human genome database of admitted genius thinkers — UC Berkeley is requiring the collection of DNA samples.
Continue reading → UC Berkeley Requires Freshman DNA Samples
Are we able to stand up and dance for joy yet that primate DNA might eradicate illness while inoperable cancer might be a thing of the past?
Continue reading → Primate DNA and the End of Inoperable Cancer
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