Remember Edward R. Murrow? No? Me neither. How about Walter Cronkite? I met him once in an elevator in 1980 (if by “met” you mean that I mistook him for the elevator man and ordered the most famous news anchor of the day to take me to the fifth floor. I recognized him by the [...]
Entries Tagged as ‘Laura Hercher’
September 4, 2009
DC Takes on DTC: The “T” Doesn’t Stand For Tomorrow Anymore
On the first day of a two-day workshop on direct-to-consumer genetic testing co-sponsored by the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Science, Muin Khoury of the CDC raised the following question: if we speak out against the current crop of micro-array based genome-wide screens. are we allowing the perfect to be the enemy [...]
July 20, 2009
Perils of Language: Why Sonia Sotomayor Won’t Call Herself “Pro-Choice”
As Sonia Sotomayor faces the Senate Judiciary Committee this week, two things are certain:
1. Much of the questioning will be about abortion.
2. You will almost never hear the word abortion.
When we talk about this subject – in speeches, in newspapers, and on our NSGC list serve – the dialogue is shaped by the words that [...]
June 1, 2009
About that Paternity Test… (Part 2)
(Find Part 1 here)
Okay, so Ms. Washington’s twins have two daddies. It’s just tabloid-fodder, right?. But reading it (hey, it’s my job!) I saw a kind of grandeur in this tale: a window into our evolutionary past. After all, routine gestation of a single child is a late development; most mammals carry [...]
May 29, 2009
About that paternity test…I’ve got good news and I’ve got bad news
PART 1 of 2
When Mia Washington and her boyfriend James Harrison ran a paternity test on her eleven-month-old twins, they got a result that made news at home and abroad. Harrison was the father – of only one twin. The other dad? His identity has not been released. Washington told Fox [...]
