Grossology
Isn’t a word with an exact definition in Webster’s Dictionary. It doesn’t work for my Scrabble game…
But it is a traveling exhibition coming to Liberty Science Center, here in New Jersey.
I think our members could have designed the whole exhibition. We spend so much time learning about and discussing bodily functions and materials. We have learned to notice even the tiniest differences in all our “gross” gunk. This is how we have learned to see what’s working, how the differences matter, when to be alerted, what’s normal, what’s not, and even how we can change them.
Many of our emoticons were designed by our own beloved Mockingbird help us smile at “gross”.(BLOW)
We’ve come to find out this “gunk” contains an important part of our definition…our DNA. For CFers, the CFTR gene on the 7[SUP]th[/SUP] chromosome, contains two of the over 2000 or more mutations that may occur for CF.
These are materials…who owns them?
Do we own our own materials? Do we sign them away when we undergo medical treatments or participate in studies? They are now being patented. Is this legal? Are genes a “product of nature” that cannot be patented or “human made inventions” that can be.
These are questions the Supreme Court of the US will undertake soon, when they struggle with a case based specifically on the mutations for breast cancer: Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics.
To be continued…
Isn’t a word with an exact definition in Webster’s Dictionary. It doesn’t work for my Scrabble game…
But it is a traveling exhibition coming to Liberty Science Center, here in New Jersey.
I think our members could have designed the whole exhibition. We spend so much time learning about and discussing bodily functions and materials. We have learned to notice even the tiniest differences in all our “gross” gunk. This is how we have learned to see what’s working, how the differences matter, when to be alerted, what’s normal, what’s not, and even how we can change them.
Many of our emoticons were designed by our own beloved Mockingbird help us smile at “gross”.(BLOW)
We’ve come to find out this “gunk” contains an important part of our definition…our DNA. For CFers, the CFTR gene on the 7[SUP]th[/SUP] chromosome, contains two of the over 2000 or more mutations that may occur for CF.
These are materials…who owns them?
Do we own our own materials? Do we sign them away when we undergo medical treatments or participate in studies? They are now being patented. Is this legal? Are genes a “product of nature” that cannot be patented or “human made inventions” that can be.
These are questions the Supreme Court of the US will undertake soon, when they struggle with a case based specifically on the mutations for breast cancer: Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics.
To be continued…