Word: sexuality
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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This welcome boom in cancer drugs owes its beginnings to one of this century's greatest scientific insights: that cancer is caused not by depression or miasmas or sexual repression, as people at various times have believed, but by faulty genes. Every tumor begins with just one errant cell that has been unlucky enough to suffer at least two, but sometimes several, genetic mutations. Those mutations prod the cell into replicating wildly, allowing it to escape the control that genes normally maintain over the growth of new tissue...
...female chimpanzee, copulation is confined to the times when she has a pink swelling on her rump. Outside those lusty periods, she would never think of trying to seduce a male, and he'd be horrified at the thought. But humans have taken a much more persistent view of sexual possibilities, probably since they first evolved as a species...
...possible answers have been suggested. One is that males are necessary to combat disease: without sexual reproduction, a clonal species is vulnerable to increasing parasitic attack. The other theory holds that sex helps purge the species of genetic mutations by shuffling the genes in each generation...
...after all, that we owe most of the things we consider aesthetically appealing in nature. If it were not for sex, there would be no blossoms and no birdsong. A flower-filled meadow resounding with the dawn chorus of songbirds is actually a scene of frenzied sexual competition. Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at University College London, has pointed out that everything extravagant about human life, from poetry to fast cars, is rooted in sexual one-upmanship...
TODAY: Penile implants and medication to maintain erection. Surgery to reattach a severed penis; skin grafts to recover urinary, but not sexual, function if penis is not recovered...