Word: dyslexia
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...dance club. It was there that Winchell met Cal ("Calpernia") Addams, an ex-Navy medic and female impersonator. Winchell's regular trips to the club led soldiers in his unit to whisper about the "drag queen" he was dating. The talk depressed Winchell. He had struggled in school with dyslexia, and he was succeeding at something for the first time in the Army. He wanted to make it his career. "He was really worried about people talking about him being gay," said Specialist Lewis Ruiz, a friend. "That was a big deal, because he really wanted to stay...
Floyd Nichols was indomitable. He was only 19 when he was found to have a rare, lethal form of cancer that required the removal of his colon. But the young Chicagoan finished college, in spite of the additional burden of dyslexia, and became a successful computer salesman before starting his own mainframe business. By his mid-30s, he sold it off to begin what his family and friends thought would be a leisurely early retirement. When he told them he would cure cancer instead, they just laughed. How could a layman--even a wealthy one--do what had stumped even...
...from his partner's legal troubles, preferring to stick to his own pretty remarkable success story. "I was the one who wasn't going to be someone," says Blanks, 43. He was the fourth of 15 children born to a poor black family in Pennsylvania. He had bad hips, dyslexia and (can you hear the Rocky theme music yet?) was nearly kicked out of his first martial-arts class at age 11. Using a mirror to learn the moves and correct for his impairment, he remade himself. He won scores of karate titles, appeared in a string of B movies...
...Therapists consider learning disabilities to be medical problems, and if we find a way to diagnose and remedy them before birth, we'll be raising scores on IQ tests. Should we tell parents they can't do that, that the state has decided they must have a child with dyslexia? Minor memory flaws? Below-average verbal skills? At some point you cross the line between handicap and inconvenience, but people will disagree about where...
State involvement will create a vast bioethical quagmire. Even if everyone magically agrees that improving a child's memory is as valid as avoiding dyslexia, there will still be things taxpayers aren't ready to pay for--genes of unproven benefit, say, or alterations whose downsides may exceed the upside. (The tendency of genes to have more than one effect--pleiotropy-- seems to be the rule, not the exception.) The question will be which techniques are beyond the pale. The answers will change as knowledge advances, but the arguments will never...