What’s So Bad About Editing DNA?

We cannot alter a person’s DNA without disrespecting the intentions of the Author and Creator of human life, Matthew Hennessey recently argued. To support this claim, he offered an account of what it means to be an editor: “When I edit, I attempt, to the extent possible, to conform my work to the author’s original intent. I know I must resist the temptation to rewrite every piece to suit my own ear.” For Hennessey, editing is about improving someone else’s writing, not about the editor exerting his or her own preferences. Continue Reading »

Editing Each Other

I am an editor. My job is to improve manuscripts submitted by authors and prepare them for publication. I approach every new piece sceptically. I probe. I attack. I play devil’s advocate. I search for error and dispose of it. Often I rely on instinct. Even when I can’t initially diagnose a problem within a text, I can sense when something’s wrong. In such cases I have to work backward to find the answer. This process can be tricky. Writers have egos. Everyone has preferences. There is no right or perfect way to compose a sentence or structure an argument. Continue Reading »

Doubts about Brain Death

Gary Greenberg raises doubts about “brain death” as a definition of death. The standard was introduced largely to facilitate organ donation and transplant, and it has become a fixture of bioethics. Greenberg points out that “brain death is not quite as certain as these bioethicists . . . . Continue Reading »

Be the bee

Bacon compared different sorts of scientists to varieties of insect: “those who have handled sciencehave either been men of experiment or of theory. The men of experiment are like the ant; they only collect and use. Thetheorists are like the spiders who make cobwebs out of their own substance. . . . . Continue Reading »

Mice Memory

Virginian Hughes reports at National Geographic that researchers at Emory have discovered that mice inherit the memory of certain smells from parents: They recognize smells “even when the offspring have never experienced that smell before,andeven when theyve never met their father. Whats . . . . Continue Reading »

Modern World Picture

The great change in the modern world picture was not the abandonment of the Aristotelian and Ptolmaic cosmology. That, argues David Hart (The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss, 58-9) was only a ripple on the surface. The really big change came in the idea of causation:“The loss of . . . . Continue Reading »

Future Sex

Turkle (Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other) was shocked when a Scientific American reporter accused her of standing in the way of same-sex marriage. She doesn’t oppose gay marriage, but the reporter was unhappy that Turkle objected to “mating and . . . . Continue Reading »