Word: birth
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That was the question on the table last week with news of the birth of the first baby ever bred to avoid the risk of early-onset Alzheimer's disease. There may be only a dozen families in the world that carry this particular gene mutation, which causes dementia and death, often by age 45. One 33-year-old woman knew all too well what the disease does to a brain--and a family. Her father died at 42; her sister began declining at 38 and within five years needed full-time care; and her brother's memory began...
...scientific landmark. There was the familiar slippery-slope question that arises with all genetic tinkering: Today we screen for deadly genes, tomorrow for baldness and tone deafness? But last week's case had a whole other layer of tragedy and quandary. Is it fair for a woman to give birth who will probably "not be able to care for or even recognize her child in a few years?" asked an editorial in J.A.M.A. In the arguments over life and choice, the right to have a baby is implicitly absolute. Saul Bellow's virility is celebrated when he becomes a father...
...whole gamut: Greenhorn-in-Wonderland, hyper critic, "Excuse-me-but-you're-standing-in-my-Japan," culture-intoxicatee. I am returning to the U.K. at the end of March, but, paradoxically, my tie with Japan is due to grow much stronger in mid-May when my wife gives birth and I become the father of an infant Japanese-Briton...
...More than 30 years later, Ngoc thinks of those shriveled trees as he watches his two-year-old daughter crying on a straw mat, waving her crippled limbs. Unable to sit up by herself, Trang is one of dozens of malformed babies born in Bien Hoa, where birth defects occur three to four times more often than in other parts of the country, according to a leading Vietnamese researcher. The prime suspect is Agent Orange, the chemical defoliant sprayed for nine years by U.S. warplanes over southern Vietnam. Nicknamed for the orange stripes on its storage barrels, Agent Orange contains...
...official collaboration between the U.S. and Vietnam is a first. Until now, the debate has been defined more by politics than by science. Vietnam estimates Agent Orange is to blame for more than 150,000 cases of birth defects and about 1 million cases of other maladies. Washington flatly denies there's any conclusive link between the herbicide and illness; officials have accused Hanoi of inflating the statistics...