Popular Culture

28 July 2003


Test Tube Baby Turns 25
Louise Brown, a postwoman in Bristol, England, turned 25 last Friday. That's no real news; lots of people had a birthday then, statistically about 1 in 365.25 of all people did. Except that Louise Brown was the first human ever conceived in vitro. Test-tube baby technology is a quarter of a century old, and some 114,000 Americans have been born this way. All of the ethical hand-wringing and the heated debates have faded into irrelevance as Ms. Brown went from embryo to fetus to baby to child to teen-ager to young woman. It seems that its hard to argue against the existence of real people, only against hypothetical ones. Cloning and other such issues will go the same way. For more, click here.

Italian Research Claims Pizza Fights Cancer
Pizza is the latest food to be tipped as a cancer fighter thanks to a recent study by Dr. Silvano Gallus, of the Mario Negri Institute for Pharmaceutical Research in Milan. Since the claims of all the studies done should be taken with some salt (but not so much as to cause hypertension), it is at least good to know that something better tasting than wheat grass juice is on the list. Click here to read on.

James Hewitt Lowers TV Bar
Britain's Channel Four TV network hit a new low last Thursday with the broadcast of "Confessions of a Cad." Normally, a title like this offers a look-back-in-anger, dark comedy sort of evening's entertainment, but regrettably, this program brought only indigestion. James Hewitt, who committed serial adultery with the late Princess of Wales, tried to squeeze an extra fifteen minutes of fame from the world by having her lover letters to him read aloud for broadcast. “I’m a complete shit,” Hewitt said in the documentary. One admires his understatement. Click here to read more.