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September 21, 2006
Fever.
Too much work and too many nights make one incredibly sick. Who'd a thought? Unfortunately I'm going to have to work through this as I have too much work to do to take a break from work. Did I mention all the work I have to do?
I think I can sleep, hmm, Oct. 14.
I'll tell you one thing, it would help if Yie-hyeon stopped ending text messages with, "Just don't die."
Posted by b-applegate at 6:07 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
September 17, 2006
The Slippery Slope
Welcome to Gattaca, boys and girls.
Encouraged by Britain's ruling on colon cancer, a London hospital is proposing to prevent autism by eliminating male embryos, which are more likely than females to get the disease. Two weeks ago, the New York Times described an American patient who plans to screen her embryos for an arthritis gene. The probability that the gene will cause the disease is only 20 percent, and if it does, the disease is highly manageable. ... A PGD technique unveiled three months ago can find genes that won't harm your child but might, if combined with other genes, cause disease in a later generation. British patients are already asking clinics to filter out embryos carrying such genes.
It gets worse. Embryos are being genetically tested to see if they are suitable to donate cord blood or other body parts, then they're carved up. Insane. But what really gets me is this quote:
Another patient, described in the same article, set out to scan his embryos for colon cancer and ended up chucking two more for Down syndrome. "You kind of feel like you shouldn't be doing it," his wife confessed. "But then why would we go through all of this and not take those extra precautions?"
That's true. If you're going through IVF anyway you might as well screen for these things, because these embryos are either going to be killed or die frozen anyway. But I can't help thinking about the German doctors who "kind of felt like" they shouldn't be conducting experiments on live subjects. Eliminating genetic diseases is a good thing. But that so much time, money and lives are spent on IVF when there are so many children around the world who need adoptive parents seems vain and decadent.
I mean, aren't these parents concerned about passing on whatever gene made them not fertile enough to conceive naturally? Hmm?
Posted by b-applegate at 11:47 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Six.
I like six too, Bert. I like six too.
Posted by b-applegate at 3:38 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
September 3, 2006
Shingle Bungle
Yie-hyeon taught me the greatest phrase the other day: "singgeul beonggeul," pronounced like "shingle bungle" in English. It means "an ear-to-ear smile." I heard it on a radio commercial and asked about it.
It think I have stumbled on the perfect word. Just saying it over and over makes you do what it is. Go on, try!
Posted by b-applegate at 5:49 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack