Tuesday, March 04, 2003

Tooth Decay is a Disease, too!
So the trick is good habits and don’t feed the pesky strep mutans bug.
A lot of stupidity is that way.........just keep it rolling with bad habits and feed it with a culture of crap.

As far as the genetically predisposed to low intelligence......I think everyone is entitled to live up to their potential. But it’s appalling to think of parents sceening for low intelligence. (Don’t let me get started, it goes far beyond the rights of the unborn. It’s about parents thinking they can make a list of what will be a problem and then eliminating it. Speaking in my 25th year of parenthood, you have no idea what the real pitfalls are going to be.........and if you knew, would you kill the child in question to avoid the trouble?)

I’m no math genius. but if Watson is concerned with eliminating the bottom 10% of the intelligence pool (out of purely humanitarian reasons, of course), wouldn’t that leave you with a new 10% vaulted into the position of shame?

IFifty years to the day from the discovery of the structure of DNA, one of its co-discoverers has caused a storm by suggesting that stupidity is a genetic disease that should be cured.

On 28 February 1953 biologists James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA - the chemical code for all life. The breakthrough revealed how genetic information is passed from one generation to the next and revolutionised biology and medicine.

But in a documentary series to be screened in the UK on Channel 4, Watson says that low intelligence is an inherited disorder and that molecular biologists have a duty to devise gene therapies or screening tests (my emphasis) to tackle stupidity.

"If you are really stupid, I would call that a disease," says Watson, now president of the Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory, New York. "The lower 10 per cent who really have difficulty, even in elementary school, what's the cause of it? A lot of people would like to say, 'Well, poverty, things like that.' It probably isn't. So I'd like to get rid of that, to help the lower 10 per cent."

Watson, no stranger to controversy, also suggests that genes influencing beauty could also be engineered. "People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great."


And I suppose Watson gets to define what is pretty?

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