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.